Nothing signals that a technology has arrived better than a fight over standards.  The slug-fest that recently broke out over the “Open Cloud Manifesto” shows that the cloud computing concept is no longer simply hazy vapour-ware.

Cloud computing refers to the trend where computing power is becoming a utility that is generated remotely in the in the Internet’s vast backbone infrastructure (”the cloud”) and delivered as a service through the web.  The so-called Open Cloud Manifesto essentially calls on the major IT vendors to avoid erecting proprietary fences for the cloud platforms they are developing.  The hope is that with open standards, customers can easily port data, applications and services between different cloud platforms.

While few would argue against the benefits of such open standards, there is certainly going to be a bitter fight over exactly whose standards and conventions to adopt before the dust settles.  This a par for the course for any emerging technology.

Currently, IBM, SAP and Cisco appear to be driving forces behind the manifesto – these are services and commodity hardware providers who stand to benefit greatly when cloud computing really does take off.  At this stage however, the real pioneers behind cloud technology are absent from the list.  The likes of Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft are, not surprisingly, more cautious about potentially giving up any competitive advantage they have built up for the sake of altruistic openness.

The current flap is just a minor skirmish.  As cloud computing grows at its current pace, a full-scale standards war could well be on the horizon.

Download the Open Cloud Manifesto Draft 1.0.9 as pdf here.

Over the past few days, a couple of our clients have been struggling with a range of niggling PC-related issues. Both clients have a mix of PCs running Windows XP and Vista operating systems. Their problems ranged from general instability in the Vista machines to insidious malware on the XP systems.

Having switched to an exclusively Mac OS environment some time ago, I had quite forgotten the constant struggle it took to maintain system security and stability in the Windows world. This is not to say that Mac users are completely immune to such problems, but modular operating systems like Apple’s OS X, as well as Linux and Solaris, are inherently more stable than any of the current Windows flavours.

A recent Economist article reports on Microsoft’s attempts to cure the ills of its flagship OS product. Microsoft is already paving the way for Vista’s replacement – Windows 7 – expected to be released in 18 months time. However, the more ambitious goal of a “total rethink of the whole Windows metaphor” will apparently have to wait for a project code-named “Midori.” Unfortunately, this Windows core is unlikely to be ready for action until four or five years down the road.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is reporting that New South Wales Department of Education in Australia has accepted a bid to switch over the email accounts of 1.5 million students over from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail (via Google Apps).

NSW DoE was unahppy because their 2004 MS Exchange installation cost 33million and took 3 years. It’s unclear why the system took so long to setup. The Gmail roll-out will increase current email storage allocated for each student from 35MB to 6GB.

The move represents a big win for Google – which is breaking into Microsoft’s mail and office collaboration market, at every scale. Last year Macquarie University elected to shift the email accounts of its 68,000 students and recent graduates onto Gmail. This new instillation will create what’s being reported as the single largest private deployment of Gmail. On the other end of the scale small and medium business are also increasingly switching away from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, to SaaS services like Google Apps, and Yahoo’s Zimbra.

According to Frank Gens – IDC’s VP of research – IT majors like IBM, Microsoft and HP are beginning to take Web 2.0 and on-demand technologies seriously. He expects these vendors to aggressively target the collaboration and business-oreitnted social networking space this year. Not surprising, given that more than 40% of enterprises are expected to have a social network deployed internally by year end.

IBM in January unveiled its revamped Lotus Web 2.0 platform – a suit of collaborative services that tap into the online content & social networking trend. Gens predicts that the company will soon crash the Software-as-a-Service party with Salesforce.com-style “cloud-based” solutions.

Microsoft has been aggressively promoting on-demand versions of its key enterprise solutions. Keen to have its cake and eat it too, Microsoft is adopting a “software-plus-service” strategy which adds collaborative online functionality to its traditional software products so as not to cannibalize its cash cow.

Of course, the Web 2.0 incumbents will not take this challenge lying down. Google and its ilk have been busy “corporatizing” their services and solutions.

Let the competition begin!

Microsoft has formally jumped on the hosted services bandwagon – it recently announced plans to provide online versions of its corporate email and collaboration solutions.

Microsoft has been offering subscription-based versions of its Exchange email and Sharepoint collaboration solutions running on remote hardware for some time now, but this was limited to companies with more than 5000 employees. It is now ready to offer this service to businesses of any size.

This is certainly good news for small businesses. The trend toward hosted services makes it feasible for small companies to affordably deploy powerful tools and applications previously limited to larger enterprises with deeper pockets.

Microsoft has clearly been feeling the heat from the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. It is now responding with a hybrid “Software Plus Service” strategy. It remains to be seen if this is enough to head off the inroads that the likes of Google and Salesforce.com have been making into Microsoft’s corporate hinterland.

Social web king, facebook.com, has seen it’s first ever drop in monthly users according to analytics firm Nielsen Online.

Almost half a million users who visited the site in January 2008 didn’t bother to return in February. Competing sites like Bebo.com and Newscorp’s MySpace have reported similar drops in traffic.

So far Facebook has been able to find investors, and justify their massive spending (In the coming year Facebook plans to spend US$ 200 million on servers alone) with their rapid growth. The end of the growth cycle will increase the pressure on facebook to find a way to turn their popularity into a viable revenue stream.  Facebook’s advertising platform, which allows advertisers to target extremely specific customers, has so far met with a tepid response.

At the peak of the excitement, Facebook was collecting almost 200 thousand new users a day, and Microsoft spent US$ 250 million buying 1.6% of the company – a deal that valued Facebook at $15 billion.

Todays news suggests that those frothy days may be over.

Reports are circulating that Microsoft has offered $44.6bn to purchase Yahoo.

The news follows Yahoo’s announcement on Tuesday that they would be lowering their revenue forecasts, that they intend to lay of 1000 employees, and that chairman Terry Semel would be leaving. The share price of yahoo stock has fallen 46% since October.

Microsoft is offering, what some analysts are calling an exorbitant, 62% more per share, than todays closing price of $19.18. The premarket trading price has already jumped to $29.

According to Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson, the move is targeted squarely at facing competition from Google. In recent years, the growth of SaaS, and enterprise web applications has put pressure on Microsoft’s position. At the same time, Yahoo, poster child of the early dot-com-revolution, has found it harder and harder to compete with Google’s growing dominance on the web.

It’s hard to predict how such a merger would affect Yahoo’s open source efforts, some of which compete directly with Microsoft products (the Zimbra groupware suite, for example).

Anyway you look at it, if the deal does go ahead, it’s likely to change the internet landscape significantly.

Following is the letter sent to Yahoo’s board.

In a move bound to excite the open source community, today, AOL (operator of both the popular AIM, and ICQ Instant Messenger networks), seems to have begun the process of moving their systems from their proprietary protocols, to open source solutions.

ICQ, developed in 1996 by Mirabilis and sold two years later to AOL for US$407M was one of the early stars of the Social Web. Developed at a time when instant messaging was a new concept, it’s creators were forced to develop their own language to allow their new application to communicate with their server. In the years since, dozens of other protocols and clients have been developed by competing companies. Internet giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and even AOL before their purchase of ICQ, developed their own IM networks.

Because each of these networks relied on their own protocol, clients were incompatible with each other and there was no interoperability. To communicate with each other many users were forced to join, and use multiple networks simultaneously.

In 2005, when Google launched it’s own IM network, gTalk, it took a different approach. Rather than developing their own proprietary protocol, google chose to use an open protocol called XMPP (developed by the Jabber Open Source Community). This allowed google to focus on providing network support, integration with their own software (in-browser messaging in gmail for example), and the general user experience. Users can choose can choose from the many XMPP compatible IM clients, and share contacts between gTalk, and other XMPP compatible networks.

In 2006, Yahoo and MSN seemd to be experementing with the idea of combining their networks. The latest versions of each of their client programs allow users to add friends from the other network. The move by AIM to XMPP will put pressure on Yahoo and MSN to go all the way, and adopt an open protocol too.

For information on connecting to AOL’s XMPP test server, read on here.