Microsoft

Two earlier blogs and now this: Microsoft is serious about your home

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The Wall street Journal reports that Microsoft quietly bought id8 Group R2 Studios to boost its Xbox business.

I already wrote about Domotica before and I mentioned Microsofts work in this area already in my blog about the HomeMaestro project.

If they pull this off I would love it. Beats DLNA imho (which is crap really…unless somebody can explain to me how to get it working properly) and the Apple proprietary stuff (full disclosure: I bought a Sonos P3 recently).

Much more information can be found at CNet.

 

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Steve Ballmer on Microsoft Cloud Strategy includes 1 surprise

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My blog would not be complete without a reference to the speech of Mr. Steve Ballmer on the strategy of cloud computing for Microsoft. The presentation was given at Washington University on March 4, 2010.

In general I is a very generic view on Cloud and SaaS with some references to Bing, Mapping, Xbox Live and Azure.

The surprise (to me) came in the Q&A: If I listened correctly Steve suggested that Azure would become available for 3rd parties. At 1:20h a question is asked about private clouds, the next question was about privacy and regulatory aspects. The answer that Steve gave indicated that somebody could obtain an "Windows Azure-Cloud" (in a container) and create his own private cloud.

Steve made it absolutely clear that "the cloud" will not be owned by 4 to 5 companies worldwide. Steve ends his speech by saying that there will be a 'customer version' available.