Outside the Lines

Icahn and Ballmer plot Yahoo overthrow

Dan Farber — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:44:00 GMT

On June 27, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said he didn't think that his company and Yahoo would make a deal, adding that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will find "plenty of other opportunities.

Not so fast. As Yahoo's quarterly earnings come up on July 22 (see Kara Swisher's take on the upcoming financial results) and the shareholder meeting on August 1, Carl Icahn and Steve Ballmer are teaming up to remake Yahoo's board of directors and shelve Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. In a letter to Yahoo shareholders, Icahn said:

Steve (Ballmer) made it clear to me that if a new board were elected, he would be interested in discussing a major transaction with Yahoo, such as either a transaction to purchase the 'Search' function, with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, purchasing the whole company."

Microsoft issued a letter today confirming Icahn's remarks about Microsoft's renewed interest in a transaction with Yahoo:

While, of course, there can be no assurance of a future transaction, we will be prepared to enter into discussions immediately after Yahoo's shareholder meeting, if a new board is elected.

Now the fate of Yahoo is clearly in the hands of shareholders. They can give Icahn a few seats on the board but not enough control to force massive changes or they can hand over the company to him and Microsoft, knowing that a transaction for $33 to $35 per share for the search business or the entire company will be consummated over the next six months.

As I have said before, Microhoo has always been about the money, and less about a shared strategy and cultural fit. Yahoo's board thought that Yahoo was worth $37 per share, and Microsoft wasn't going to negotiate against itself, with no other buyers in sight.

During an interview at the D6 conference, Yang said:

I understand the situation people are feeling, but at the same time we did not walk away from that proposal, Microsoft did. We are willing to do a deal under the right terms. It wasn't clear to me they wanted to finish the deal. I can't go revisit and take or not take it. I understand our obligation to stockholders from conversations with a number of them. The focus for us is how do we recognize more value for the company soon and position Yahoo to be much more successful in the long term. If there is a way to do it, we'll talk about other alternatives, but we aren't going to do something short term.

Yang has some regrets that Microsoft walked away from negotiations in May. He may prefer an independent Yahoo, but reality is setting in, and now he is probably wishing he and his board had played less difficult to get.

Update: Yahoo issued a testy statement regarding the Icahn-Ballmer "apparent effort to force Yahoo! into selling to Microsoft its Search business at a price to be determined in a future 'negotiation' between Mr. Icahn's directors and Microsoft's management."

In the statement, Yahoo invited Microsoft to make a proposal immediately and for Icahn to reveal his plan for Yahoo beyond teeing up Microsoft to make a deal. I doubt Jerry Yang and company are going to receive any kind of proposal until the shuffle at the upcoming shareholder meeting takes place.

EIC Squared: Indexing Flash; Powerset; and Viacom vs. Google

Dan Farber — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:34:00 GMT

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss this week's big stories. It was a busy week on the search front. Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with Flash Player technology that allows their search engine crawlers to find and index SWF content, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites. It's good to make more information accessible via search engines. However, Microsoft has been silent on whether Live Search would index Flash content.

In addition, Microsoft bought Powerset for about $100 million to enhance its search platforms. It's not a substitute for acquiring market share via Yahoo Search, but it provides a foundation for making the search experience far more compelling and precise in fewer clicks.

Of course, the Microhoo drama continues this week with the latest rumors. Larry is ready for this opera to be finished.

Finally, we discuss a judge's ruling in Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google and YouTube.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that records of every video watched by YouTube users, including login names and IP addresses, should be given to Viacom's lawyers. Larry said it was like combining the worst aspects of a fishing expedition and a witch hunt. Viacom is maintaining that it won't look at personal data and Google is asking for time to anonymize the information. If Judge Stanton's ruling stands, the last shreds of personal privacy on the Web could be thrown out the window.

It's official: Microsoft acquires Powerset

Dan Farber — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:55:00 GMT

As expected (see previous reports), Microsoft scooped up Powerset to buttress its search efforts.

Barney Pell, Powerset co-founder and CTO

(Credit: Dan Farber)

It's not a replacement for increasing market share by acquiring Yahoo Search, but it gives Microsoft some differentiated search technology and top engineers for less than $100 million. Ramez Naam, group program manager of Live Search, said the Powersoft negotiations happened in parallel with the Yahoo talks over the last few months. Google and Yahoo may also have been interested in Powerset, but no one is talking.

Whether Microsoft can leapfrog Google over the long term with this semantic engine remains to be seen.

Powerset had done a good job of creating a rich semantic layer on top of Wikipedia, but bringing natural language and slick semantic-based interfaces to the entire Web is a long-term and very costly endeavor.

"With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale," Powerset's Mark Johnson said in a blog post about the acquisition.

Powerset can provide direct answers to queries from its Wikipedia and Freebase index and highlight the most relevant search results based on the meaning of the query.

According to a blog post from Satya Nadella, Microsoft's senior vice president of Search, Portal, and Advertising, Powerset's engineers will join the Search Relevance team and remain in San Francisco.

Back to the leapfrogging Google question. Much of what Powerset has enabled with its technology is a superior user experience for searching. Powerset's Wikipedia search, which surfaces concepts, meanings, and relationships (like subject, verbs, and objects in a language), is the very small tip of the iceberg.

If Microsoft can succeed in extending Powerset's technology to key parts of the Web corpus, Google will have to figure out a way to match the quality and user experience. And, there is little doubt that if Google decided that what Powerset and Microsoft are doing as one is important, the company dedicated to dominating search through its engineering prowess will circle the wagons.

A few months ago, Powerset co-founder and CTO Barney Pell told me that his start-up company's software was a first step in changing the way users search and consume Web content. "It's a complete shift. You see this and you want to experience all content in this way. And, as an introduction, it will drive huge investment in semantic and linguistic technology, just as investments were made in information retrieval and scalable databases in the past," he said.

During a conversation after the announcement, Pell told me, "Natural language search will be the center of innovation for the next 20 years." It will likely take 20 years to engineer the semantic, natural language Web that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned in his 2001 essay in Scientific American.

How Facebook stays afloat adding 250,000 users per day

Dan Farber — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:14:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I talked with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, about the challenge of innovating quickly and building stable infrastructure while 250,000 new members are added to the social network every day. Check out the video on ZDNet.

Jonathan Heiliger

(Credit: CNET News)

Q: You've been at Facebook, I think, for about a year and it's been quite a ride I guess, scaling up from zero in 2004 to over 80 million today. How do you keep up with that hyper growth?
Heiliger: You're absolutely right--we've had a lot of growth. We add over 250,000 users every day, and that means a lot of infrastructure, a lot of servers, and constantly looking at new processes and looking at how we're doing things and ensuring that we're doing things the most efficient way possible, not just for delivering all the content to our users but to stay on top of what it costs to run the site.

How do you stay on top of the cost in terms of the kind of equipment you buy and how you work with the vendors? How do you prioritize those things?
Heiliger: One of the things we recently did was we ran an RFP process for the servers we buy from vendors and essentially did a bake-off with a number of different people looking at building servers on our own. What we concluded from that process was to continue to buy servers from a couple of major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), but through that process we were able to lock in prices today and carry those prices forward as all the commodity components costs drop.

When you're buying those servers, and I assume you're doing just a huge scale out of commodity servers, what do they look like? How are they configured?
Heiliger: We're pretty lucky in that we run a wide variety of applications, literally tens of applications on our own and hundreds of applications for our platform developers that use Facebook as a distribution mechanism, as a way of interacting with their users. But one of the reasons we're very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power.

You're different from Google in the kinds of applications that you run. They are mostly running search queries, and you're running all kinds of queries and bringing back all kinds of data from the social graph. How is it different in terms of the way you build out your data center from the inside?
Heiliger: Google has a tremendous amount of information that they index and archive and present to users, but fundamentally if you go to Google and type in a search for a "tiger" and I go to Google and type in a search for a "tiger" we're going to see generally the same results, so they're presenting that same information to both of us. Facebook is a little different in that the context for our data is all social. When you look at your friends and their status updates and their photos and the notes they may have written, you're going to see one set of data versus if I look at my friends and their photos and their notes and status updates, and those tend to be non-intersecting sets of data.

So it's much more dynamic?
Heiliger: Much more dynamic data set--and what that means is it's caused us to do a bunch of different things relative to caching and relative to federating all of that data up amongst thousands of different databases so that as a user requests all of that information we're not using one particular server every time for different data.

You recently introduced a chat application on Facebook, and it seems like it took a lot of time to test it to make sure it could scale having all those simultaneous conversations going on. Could you give us a little background and color on how that came to be?
Heiliger: Chat is actually one of our most recent launches. It started as a hack-a-thon project, which is one of the things we do about every other month. People get together and work all night and pick a project they don't have time to do necessarily during the day. From the time it really germinated as an idea to the time it launched and was available for our entire user base, it became a more formal development project. One of the things we did as part of that was actually built a new back-end service to be able to deal with all of the millions of simultaneous connections that we persist for users.

One other thing I was reading up on some of the work you've been doing--you say that clouds don't solve single points of failure in your stack. What are those single points of failure?
Heiliger: Interesting question, and the notion you are referring to there was part of the talk I give in regards to cloud computing is just a panacea, and for a start-up or even a more mature start-up like Facebook, isn't the answer to solving failure points in an application. By that I mean the underlining infrastructure that powers an application is typically the result of, or the outcome of, how the application is originally designed and how users interact with that application. If an application is poorly designed or designed to constantly reference a single set of data, the underlining infrastructure is going to be the victim of that. Guys like myself in the infrastructure world have to figure out how to best make that work.

As someone who is in operations how much impact do you have on the application development to make sure that once it gets into the data center that it can work properly and scale and not have the kind of failures we're seeing with some of the new applications?
Heiliger: I think it's a constant challenge in any organization, particularly a fast-moving one like Facebook, where we want to iterate quickly and get product out in our customers' hands so we can get feedback on that product and continue to tweak and enhance it over time. We have one force that's moving in that direction, and we have another force that says we want to keep the site up, we want the site to be reliable, and we want the site to be fast.

So there's a fine balancing act, where everyone in management and everyone in both the engineering and operations department constantly just sort of works, interacts, and goes back and forth, figures out just how to make those trade-offs. Sometimes we err too aggressively on the side of innovation and iteration, and put things out on the site in perhaps a small quantity that may break the site or cause the site to slow temporarily. Other times we air on the side of conservatism, of not releasing new functionality or new features, and that then delays the sort of user gratification of having that feature or fixing that bug.

What are the challenges that you see--let's say you're at 80 million unique users per month, 250,000 being added per day and 50,000 transactions per second. What happens when you get to 500 million or a billion if you ever get there?
Heiliger: Hopefully, tremendous things. I think we can only look forward to those days.

But what are some of the bottlenecks or barriers you have to overcome to get to that kind of scale?
Heiliger: Some of the bottlenecks we're facing are how we scale this extremely distributed set of data. One of the challenges we have is figuring out how to make that replicated such that it can exist in multiple places around the world and we don't also have to bring users back to the U.S. or back to one of our data centers. I think it's a challenge that most Web sites tend to face as they scale, which is you start in one location with a single database and then you have to figure out how to grow from there, primarily driven by the amount of latency or the amount of time it takes to reach the site and interact with the site. Being able to replicate the data across multiple data centers and across multiple geographies allows users to not just read their data from a local version but write that data as well. That is one of our key challenges over the next 12 months.

As you learn more about building up this very large scale infrastructure do you ever see the possibility that a Facebook could be a service provider?
Heiliger: What do you mean by service provider?

In the sense that right now you're just running the Facebook application but what if a developer or user wanted to do something similar to what Amazon is doing, using your infrastructure to run their applications in the cloud?
Heiliger: Gotcha. So one of the values of Facebook is the Facebook platform. We have over 100,000 developers and several hundred applications that have over a million users using them. We've talked about perhaps opening up or further opening up the platform by offering compute power for those application developers. One of the steps we've already taken to improve that development environment and improve the experience for our developers is just to open-source our platform, which we announced just a couple of weeks ago as well.

Twitter's weakening pulse

Dan Farber — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:09:00 GMT

It's somewhat incomprehensible that Twitter has been unable to keep the service up and running. More than 10 years into the age of the Internet, with a huge amount of R&D publicly available about scaling Web applications, you would think that Twitter's engineers could figure it out.

A recent blog post from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said help is on the way in the form of about $15 million in funding:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

But the natives who love Twitter are getting restless, and they're losing faith. Twitter is chronically up and down, and key features, such as track and replies, disappear as company engineers try to save their patient from flatlining.

The father of RSS Dave Winer recently said, "Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live."

"It's very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially."

Check out Winer's Twitter "spewage" report to get an idea of Twitter's scaling challenge.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks likes Twitter's simplicity and is willing to bet that Twitter can be stabilized.

"I don't believe Twitter is going to die, be killed or go for a suicide. Twitter is easy to understand and use. It's perfect for the mainstream. FriendFeed isn't. FriendFeed will do very well also for the set of users currently using it. I am not sold that there's mainstream appeal coming for FriendFeed."

The weekend conversation is pivoting on whether FriendFeed will replace Twitter as the new conversation hub among the digerati. Winer, who has a high authority rank on this topic, doesn't think that FriendFeed is the answer.

... before we all move to FriendFeed and think we've solved anything, this underscores the problem with putting all our eggs in one basket. We just move the problem into the future. FriendFeed may be able to scale where Twitter can't, but there are other problems with centralization, putting all your trust in a corporation, esp. one so young and unformed. Instead, we should start bootstrapping a decentralized Twitter-like thing immediately, building off the base of clients that connect to Twitter. It can connect to any service we want to connect to, and if one should go away, we do the thing the Internet does so well, route around the outage. I wrote about this, extensively, in early May.

As Winer predicts, Twitter, as a concept, is not going to die. An open platform for microblogging and broadcasting with followers has clearly taken hold. Just as instant messaging spawned numerous silos and a kind of standard in XMPP, Twitter's twist on messaging will go through an evolution that eventually leads to a common standard and stable infrastructure. The Twitter concept has been cloned (Pownce and Plurk), and it won't be long before Facebook, MySpace, or other big players figure out how to make following, followers, tracking, and summizing part of their services.

See also:

Steve Gillmor: Saving the FailWhale

TechCrunch: Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed

FriendFeed and Twitter: Let it Be

Some perspective on Twitter and its brethren

What Twitter brings to the party

Bill Gates bows out (mostly) at Microsoft

Dan Farber — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:48:00 GMT

Today is Bill Gates' last day in the office as a regular employee of the company he co-founded in 1975. But as non-executive chairman and someone who is deeply married to Microsoft, Gates is not disappearing from the company.

Chairman Bill Gates

(Credit: Dan Farber)

The transition has been well orchestrated, and he will still spend about 20 percent of his time working on Microsoft issues, such as the next-generation Office, natural interfaces, and search. And, he will still obsess and strategize about how to defeat Google.

Bill Gates field questions from this reporter.

(Credit: Michael Arrington)

I have been covering Microsoft and Bill Gates for the last 25 years, and I've had a few memorable run-ins with the him over that time. I remember asking him about upstart programming language Java's write once/run anywhere capability in an interview I did with him in the early 1990s. He sat forward in his chair and said with conviction that Java was a stupid idea. Behind that answer, the hyper-competitive Gates was thinking about how to slay the Java dragon. Several years later Microsoft C# appeared.

And who can forget his duel with David Boies in the U.S. Justice Department vs. Microsoft antitrust case. Gates believed that the government was out to destroy Microsoft, and went on the offensive. To this day, he chafes at being called a "convicted monopolist."

In many ways Gates is very much the same as when I met him a few decades ago. His tenacity, intellectual intensity, passion for technology, and competitiveness have remained intact. Now he will be applying those character traits more fully to eradicating polio, malaria, AIDS, and other diseases at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

I can imagine one of his chief rivals, Steve Jobs, giving him a gold-plated iPhone 3G for his retirement with the inscription: "To Bill Gates: Look who's ahead now. Best of luck, Steve Jobs."

That would like dangling meat in front of a hungry lion. Gates would accept the gift with a wry smile and at the same time think about what it would take to trump the iPhone. Even though Vista didn't leapfrog the Mac OS, and Microsoft has rarely been able to out-innovate Apple, the fire is still burning and Gates will be firing off a flurry of e-mails to Steve Ballmer and others he's left in charge.

Chairman Bill Gates and three top execs: Craig Mundie, Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer

(Credit: Microsoft)

In an interview this week, Tom Brokaw of NBC asked Gates if he had an iPod. He responded, "No," and added, "The Zune is a better way to carry your music around." Vintage Bill Gates competitiveness.

(Credit: NBC)

The planet will be better off with Gates focused on technologies and strategies for saving lives rather than defeating Steve Jobs.

Anil Dash: Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever

Cloud computing hangover

Dan Farber — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:35:00 GMT

After attending GigaOM's Structure 08, I came away with a cloud-computing hangover. Just trying to define cloud computing is daunting given all the hype and companies thunderclapping.

Today the research firm Gartner has jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon, proclaiming that it "heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business," and defining it as massively scalable IT-related capabilities provided as a service using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.

Yahoo just announced a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which will develop computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. What was Yahoo doing before it created this group?

I prefer the way Sun Chairman Scott McNealy talks about cloud computing. Ten years ago he was calling it the "big freakin' Webtone switch." Following is how he described it in December 2001:

That is the server, the storage, the operating system, the monitoring software, the clustering, the alternate pathing, multiple domaining, dynamic reconfiguration--and then it has a mail tone, a calendar tone, a news tone, an app server tone, and a directory tone. It has all of the different features of a big freaking WebTone switch and allows you to create this big jukebox. You can buy that all complete. Or you have one throat to choke and you can buy it all through a service provider that is SunTone certified. Or you can do what many IT directors do and they go out and buy the telephone switch by buying the chip from Intel, the operating system from Microsoft, the disk drive from EMC, the Compaq power supply, the Oracle database, the Novell directory, the BEA app server, the SAP, ERP, and CRM from here, blah-blah-blah, this, that, and the other thing, a SoundBlaster card from somebody else, the anti-virus uninstaller from Norton, and then go bring in IBM Global Services to try to make the whole thing work. Buy the big freaking WebTone switch.

At that time McNealy was talking about how enterprises provision their data centers and user services. Now we are seeing Amazon, Google and others take their data center expertise and make it available to developers and companies. Enterprises will be slower to move to the cloud, but they will eventually get there. Software-as-a-service providers are flourishing, and increasingly enterprises are considering off-premises, hosted solutions.

In essence, we are at the beginning of the age of planetary computing. Billions of people will be wirelessly interconnected, and the only way to achieve that kind of massive scale usage is by massive scale, brutally efficient cloud-based infrastructure.

More on cloud computing and Structure 08

Cloud computing on the horizon

Dan Farber — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:07:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO--Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. "We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way," he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.

Papadopoulos acknowledged that the nirvana of every customer or user in charge of their own data that lives in the cloud has challenges. Today, users cede control of their data to service providers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. It's not as easy for users to manage and move their data as it should be, which means users are generally stuck with the user experience and monetization schemes of the host sites. "It's proprietary systems all over again," Papadopoulos said. Over the last several years Sun has differentiated itself proprietary vendors, focusing on free open-source software and open standards.

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Further out into the future, Papadopoulos expects that the technology infrastructure industry will be similar to the energy industry. In past presentations, he has called this transition the Red Shift.

Papadopoulos has predicted a "neutron star collapse of data centers," meaning at some juncture it won't make sense for businesses to build their own data centers. Instead they will contract for computing resources from hosting providers who bring "brutal efficiency" for utilization, power, security, service levels, and idea-to-deploy time.

There will be a grid of a half dozen very large cloud infrastructure providers and a hundred or so regional providers, Papadopoulos said. It will also look more like the banking world, he continued, with customers willing to trust the service providers with their private data as they do banks with their money. It's a question of when, not if, this scenario will occur.

Papadopoulos also laid out a map (see below) of the current universe of cloud computing in terms of increasing virtualization and consolidation across various categories: processor, operating system, language, and application services. Over time, the categories will fill out more especially as more languages and applications services or platforms rise up. Papadopoulos pointed to two Sun projects, Dark Star and Project Caroline. Dark Star is about software infrastructure designed to simplify the creation massively scalable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Project Caroline is a hosting platform for developing and delivering Internet-based services. It's not clear why the Sun research projects are positioned at the far right on the chart, and players such as Google, Joyent, and Rackable are missing.

Higher up in stack developers have more targets and more freedom to innovate below it, Papadopoulos said.

(Credit: Sun)

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

Microsoft's big switch to server/client computing

Dan Farber — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Speaking at Structure 08, Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, shed some light on the cloud-based infrastructure supporting Microsoft's online services.

Despite characterizations that Microsoft is stuck in the client/server world, the company is spending billions to apply the cloud, or server/client, model, where most of the computing happens in the cloud and some small amount on the client (offline support for applications). But until Microsoft Office and other applications are built for the cloud, the laggard characterization will continue to stick to the company's forehead.

Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft.

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Microsoft has one of the biggest collections of Web sites, with 550 million users, 2 billion search queries, and 10 billion page views per month, as well as 8 billion messages on Microsoft Messenger per day. The company deploys 10,000 new servers per month on average to keep up with demand, Chrapaty said. She broke down Microsoft's model for building infrastructure into a three-letter acronym.

The cloud is all about GET--Growth, Efficiency, and Trust, Chrapaty said. In terms of growth, data centers are a $300 million to $500 million investment. "You have to make every kilowatt count," she said, noting that Microsoft has 35 criteria, such as network egress, power, and available staff, to determine locations for data centers.

Efficiency involves tools for manageability, operability, and sustainability, which translate into cost savings. "It's nice to go to Steve (Ballmer) and say you can save millions of billions of dollars," she said. Trust is having the security, reliability, availability, performance, and familiarity with the local languages and markets, Chrapaty explained.

Trust is also the user community feeling that privacy will be respected as people live their lives on line. That is a challenge that every large site will have to grapple with long after technology issues are resolved.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

Is Google's BigTable too private?

Dan Farber — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:13:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google
Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent
Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications
Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace
Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces
Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the subject of open platforms and Google's BigTable software for distributed data storage.

"The question is, is it about selling your soul? You can't leave," Hoffman said during the panel, referring to Google's App Engine and cloud-computing platform. "There's been a lot published on what an open, loving cloud should do. We should give people real assurances that the cloud is a good place to be."

During the panel, Bisciglia said people can build a better mouse trap and compete with what Google offers. "When we publish something on BigTable, it is not to say that it is a lock-in, but it's our attempt to say that this is something that worked for us," he said.

"If your data is in Google's BigTable, you can't pull it out. You can't install it on your own hardware or leave. You have big brother telling you everything will be OK," Hoffman told me after the panel concluded. "One solution is that Google should provide nice export tools, but that doesn't solve the problem of where you run it. If I were a big enterprise company, I might want to run BigTable on my own hardware. If Oracle had the equivalent of a Google App Engine, a customer could run it on their own or someone else's hardware. What if Facebook started on Google App Engine? They would be stuck on Google."

Joyent is a David facing at least one Goliath, and its livelihood depends on an open-infrastructure approach. It doesn't have the market power to create its own standards. The company is doing 5 billion page views on month, which includes about 25 percent of third-party Facebook application pages, according to CEO David Young.

Joyent is working on a cloud-computing standards initiative called Cloud 9.

"We want to make it easy for people to leave," Hoffman said, adding that application programming interfaces should not hard-code server provider names into APIs.

"We need to interoperate just like the electrical grid," Young said. Google's BigTable and Amazon's SimpleDB are not pushing standards, which are needed to move things forward."

See GigaOM for more coverage.

Click here to see more of CNET's stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.