For MFS, cloudy future
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What does the stock price of Canadian insurance giant Sun Life Financial Inc. say about the future of big Boston mutual fund manager MFS Investment Management ?
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Itâs funny how circumstances can change your perception of whatâs possible. A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
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In late afternoon, the wispy clouds part. For the first time I discern the distant domes, tiny and white, on the peak of blue-grey Mauna Kea, but a heavy cloud hovers above. Dr. Hammel tells me that once the sun sets, this cloud will cool, sink and wrap the telescopes in its fog, unless &#150; there&#39;s a small possibility &#150; the cloud sinks all the way beneath the summit, down below the telescopes. Despite the bleak predictions in all the weather forecasts for tonight, I begin to hope that we&#39;ll finally get some data.
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Microsoft's decision to cut WinFS from its Longhorn release means another delay for the Microsoft Business Framework, which promises to make it easier for developers to write business applications for the Windows platform.
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It&#39;s a market that could use a shake-up. Backup and recovery still can be too expensive and complex for many small and midsize companies that rely on Windows, but the software is vital to their businesses.
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The fragmented  software business is growing up.
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Looking for a cloud in Symantec&#39;s latest silver lining, competitors are hoping the company&#39;s acquisition of storage software maker Veritas will be a stumbling block for the security firm.
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Nielsen Media Research's vice president of technology discusses key issues storage managers are facing: the lack of robust storage resource management tools, and the lack of in-depth interoperability created by SMI-S.
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The out-of-town owners of both Putnam Investments and MFS Investment Management are mulling whether to sell the big asset-management companies, spin them off, or take other steps that could put at risk several thousand jobs at each.
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What will the future hold for AMD?
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NEW YORK  Big may be beautiful again. For about two years, many market analysts have been predicting the return of large, growth-oriented companies. But smaller-company shares have persistently outrun the big boys. Now, with a fog of uncertainty clouding stocks, money managers are renewing their ...
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âBento,â says Stephen H. Wildstrom  âtakes the essence of FileMaker Pro, a database-management program aimed at small- and midsize businesses, and marries it to Macâs new Leopard operating system. The result is a powerful organizing tool anyone can use.â
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Microsoft is in a throw-it-off-the-train state of mind these days in regard to its Windows operating system features. It&#39;s announced that Longhorn will ship by 2006 -- but without its much-ballyhooed WinFS subsystem.
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Comings and goings in the financial industry.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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With the price of disk storage plummeting, the storage capacity administrators find themselves managing is set to explode. But, the simple introduction of network block virtualization permits the use of underutilized storage management technologies such as mirroring, snapshots and replication on a much broader scale.
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Will the competing next-generation optical disc standards ever meet in the same device? Not for now, it seems.