Mark Cohen is a CIO at Australia's largest online retailer and is a hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up, code-cutting geek. He lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and boys and can sometimes be spotted puffing and panting as he runs at Maroubra Beach
Archive for November, 2008
The Pointy-Haired Boss
This Dilbert cartoon caught me off-guard in the morning yesterday, and I spent the whole day chuckling at it for so many reasons.
Ballmer takes to the Stage for Liberation Day
What a cool totally marketing-driven theme for the day. Following the first African-American president’s election, Ballmer has come to town to Liberate us 
Ballmer blew the roof off the Sydney Convention Centre with his keynote / opening address at the MS “Power to The Developers” event. The vibe was great, although some truly impressive next-gen platform demos really managed to go awry 
It was very impressive to see how the Azure cloud is going to tie in to our desktops for development, and how we’ll effectively have cloud-emulation on our desktops.
Something I’d like to find out more about is how Azure will handle load-balancing across multi-instance apps, and how things like viewstate and session state would be managed.
Microsoft also announced BizSpark, which is a strategic no-brainer. It’s opening up access to the MS Platform to startups, which means at least a few less startups will be driven straight to the LAMP stack for cost management. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;)
SQL Services is interesting in the pared-back nature of the data services. it’s that much more of an object database and it looks like it will be necessary to build for the cloud rather than just port apps to the cloud.
The Windows 7 demo showed off some good features added to the operating system and best of all they’ve taken Vista and removed the Inner Nazi. It’s simpler for a user to adjust the Inner Nazi or UAC, and the default settings have been relaxed somewhat.
Find out more about The Cloud and Windows Azure at www.azure.com and find out more about the next generation Live Essentials and Live Services at www.lsjumpstart.com
Today’s event and related info is here.
Sensis concedes geographic defeat
This article on the SMH says Sensis will be throwing in the towel and providing Yellow listings to Google to run on Google Maps from next quarter. Quoting:
Telstra’s Sensis has given up on competing with Google in online search and mapping, announcing today it would provide its Yellow business listings to Google Maps and abandon its own search engine for one powered by Google.
This is the end of the road for Whereis, which has in my opinion been unable to keep up with Google Maps – as well as the end of Sensis’ own search which is currently 
powered by Yahoo. Sensis are claiming that this is a partnership move, and that this is not the first step in a Google take-over (according to the article quoting Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst.