Explorations

Electricity as Strategic Advantage?

The Wall Street Journal is running an article today about how Internet firms are increasingly locating their facilities with electricity cost as a prime consideration ("Surge in Energy Use, Energy Costs Has Big Tech Firms Seeking Power" -- $$ Registration Required).  It's no surprise that the rising cost of energy is affecting firms that run tens and hundreds of thousands of machines.  What I found interesting is just how big this demand has gotten: the article mentions that Austin Energy attributes 8.5% of its total demand to data centers.  This, from an industry that was essentially nonexistent 10 years ago.  As the physical footprint of the Internet gets bigger, the incentive to fundamentally improve the power consumption of the machines will only grow.  Perhaps Sun is onto something with their "eco-friendly" campaign to increase power/watt using their CoolThreads technology.

MSN adCenter Reviewed: F-

Microsoft claims the Web is important to them, but they still don't understand that the Web is not a PC.  For instance, here's how their new Google competitor looks to Firefox users:

(click to enlarge)

adCenter is the place where you go if you want to spend money advertising with MSN.  MSN is an also-ran in contextual advertising, so it's sort of a joke that they try to deny usage by anyone at all.  But I'm guessing that excluding Mac users in particular (IE for Mac is no longer being shipped) is a really bad decision, as it seems that Macs are more prevalent in the media/advertising circles than in most areas. 

But all of this is beside the point, which is that if Web standards are good enough for applications like Zimbra and Google Maps and Google AdWords, it's certainly good enough for adCenter.  There's really no point in choosing to use sites that don't play nice.

Totally Off Topic: Dubai

Great insight into the growth of Dubai in this photoset.

Schneier on Vista Security

Bruce Schneier has posted a good meta-review of some of the problems in the Vista security model.  Vista sales are going to skew toward upgrade purchases due to the slowing growth in the PC market as it matures.  With reports like this coming out at an increasing clip, I'm not sure how Microsoft is going to get the upgrade sales it needs to justify the 6-year development cycle on Vista.  Then again, given the hardware requirements, maybe they don't expect many users to upgrade.  My take is that No compelling new features + high cost + won't run on your PC = failure.  This is going to be an HBS case study once the shareholders find out how much this boondoggle cost them.