In the press room at the Web 2.0 Summit, News.com editor in chief Dan Farber covers Day 2 of the grand old conference, now in its fifth year. Tim O’Reilly and program chair John Battelle have steered the conference from its beginnings as the Peer to Peer and then Emerging Tech conferences to a broadened agenda that tried to subsume the emerging enterprise conversation known as cloud computing.
Battelle’s conversation with Jerry Yang was noteworthy for Yang’s physical gestures - crouched forward in his seat with barely a glance of eye contact as he defended his tenure and ducked any sense of his posture regarding the future. As Farber indicates below, the CEO job is not one that leverages Yang’s strengths. Yang’s posture underlines the unlikelihood of a revived Microsoft deal any time soon given the missed window before the election when the deal could have worked.
The muted presence of Microsoft at the conference - absent from a Day 2 cloud computing panel with execs from Salesforce, Google, Adobe, and VMWare - was mitigated somewhat by a platform panel where Live Services’ David Treadwell traded barbs with Google’s Vic Gundotra (formerly of Microsoft.) But a conference-ending talk and conversation with AL Gore brought the more pressing issues of saving the world to the front and blurred the subtle tilt toward SIlicon Valley in tone if not substance.
Battelle’s skill in asking the news-worthy questions without expecting the answers brought enough clarity to keep the conference valid as a marker of the state of the technology union. While nothing will repeat the first year of the conference or even the upscale show biz quality of the next few, the emotional impact of the Obama election could be felt as O’Reilly and Battelle kept the focus on what to do with this stuff rather than solely swimming in the stream of industry politics. Gore set the tone we will remember in his oddly improvised talk, dabbing his eyes and face and looking a lot like Jesse Jackson trying hard not to burst out crying. This year’s Web 2.0 Summit turned out to be what Gore said it needed to be: a puppy with a purpose.
Once upon a time lived an emperor who spent all his money on the latest web technology. He did not care about the cost, or if the technology was easy to use; the only thing, he thought of was it had to be known as the latest and as one would say of a king “He is in his cabinet,” so one could say of him, “The emperor is updating his home Page!”
One day two swindlers came to his city; they made people believe they could manufacture the finest web technology that can be imagined. They called it the Web 2.0! They said it had the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.
“That must be a wonderful technology,” thought the emperor. “If I were to own web 2.0 I should be able to find out which men in my empire were unfit for their places. And he gave a large sum of money to the swindlers, in advance, that they should set to work without any loss of time. They set up two work stations, and pretended to be very hard at work, but they did nothing whatsoever.
“I should very much like to know how they are getting on” thought the emperor. Personally, he was of opinion that he had nothing to fear, yet he thought it advisable to send somebody else first to see how matters stood.
“I shall send my honest old minister to the developers,” thought the emperor. “He can judge best how it looks, for he is intelligent, and nobody understands his office better than he.”
The good old minister went into the room where the swindlers sat before the empty desktops. “Heaven preserve us!” he thought, and opened his eyes wide, “I cannot see anything at all,” but he did not say so. Both swindlers asked him if he did not admire the exquisite Web 2.0 Platform and the beautiful Community Applications. The minister tried, but he could not see anything. “Oh dear,” he thought, “Can I be so stupid? No, I cannot say that I was unable to see the new technology.”
“Now, have you got nothing to say?” said one of the swindlers, while he pretended to be busily coding.
“Oh, it is exceedingly beautiful,” replied the old minister looking through his glasses. “What brilliant technology! I shall tell the emperor that I like it very much.” And so he did.
Everybody in the whole town talked about the precious technology. At last the emperor wished to see it himself, while it was still on the ‘testing phase’. He went to the two swindlers. “Is it not magnificent?” said one of the statesmen who had been there before. “Your Majesty must admire the new Web 2.0!” And then they pointed to the empty webpage.
“What is this?” thought the emperor, “I do not see anything at all. That is terrible! Am I unfit to be emperor?”
“Really,” he said, turning to the developers, “Your technology has our most gracious approval.” All his attendants looked, and though they could not see anything, they said “It is very beautiful.”
And all advised him to put up the new website on his homepage at a great procession.
The previous night on which the procession was to take place, the swindlers pretended to work about in the air, and said at last: “The emperor’s new website using Web 2.0 is ready now.”
The emperor deleted his old website, and the swindlers pretended to put the new site on.
“I am ready,” said the emperor. “Does not my website look marvelous?” Then he turned once more to look at the website, that people should think he admired the new Web 2.0 technology.
The emperor marched in the procession and all who saw him exclaimed: “Indeed, the emperor’s new website is incomparable!”
“But I don’t see anything on the screen! The screen is just a blank page!” said a little child. “Good heavens! Listen to the voice of an innocent child,” said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. “But there is nothing on the screen,” cried the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, “Now I must bear up to the end.”
According to AzureJournal - http://www.azurejournal.com/2008/11/on-premises-cloud-computing/ Microsoft is in the race for the “on premises cloud” or “internal cloud” battle! This makes total sense, considering Microsoft’s business model. By the way, Yahoo, Google, VMware - they’re all in this race. Even Salesforce is using on premises cloud computing.
Web 2.0? How about Web 2.5?