What can explain the speed of media articles on Ballmer's exit from Microsoft, pre written Obituaries

The rate of articles and tweets on Steve Ballmer leaving Microsoft is amazing.

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    Beyond Ballmer: Who will be Microsoft's next CEO?

     
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    This week in tech stock: Microsoft scales Ballmer peak one last time

     
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  3. 2h

    How Ballmer Missed the Tidal Shifts in Tech, via

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  4. 18h

    Inside Ballmer's Exit And Who Definitely Won't Be Microsoft's Next CEO by

     Top news story
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    Who thinks that this Steve Ballmer resignation is a euphemism for him being canned by the board which has had enough?

     Retweeted 22 times
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  2. 3h

    Better Late Than Never? Ballmer Product Pipeline Shows a Very Mixed Record for Microsoft -by

     
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  3. 4h

    With Ballmer ceding Microsoft's top job, let the handicapping begin via

     
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  4. 4h

    ICYMI: and I taped a special live episode on TWiT about Steve Ballmer's retirement:

     
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    We talked to Microsoft employees. The reaction to Steve Ballmer leaving is universal: They're totally stunned.

     
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One of the interesting posts is from the infamous mini-microsoft blog post which has been quiet for a long time.


A well prepared blogger, even a crusty spider-web covered 99.9%-retired one like me, would have at least had a post ready to go for this glorious circumstance, like how most news organizations have obituaries written up and ready to publish. I had no such optimism that this would be happening before 2017.

The point made on how media companies have pre written obituaries is one that gets you thinking.  How many media people were ready to fire an article on Steve Ballmer retiring?  There are some who said SteveB should have retired 10 years ago.  

The tweets are at a rate of many per minute for the past 24 hours.

Here is a stream for the last minute and the news is 24 hours old and it is Saturday.

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    Por qué la retirada de Ballmer es la mejor noticia para Microsoft

     
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    Artículo Web: Las razones por las que Steve Ballmer se apea del trono de Microsoft

     
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    Artículo Web: Lo mejor de Steve Ballmer, CEO de Microsoft - A Steve Ballmer, CEO de Microsoft, le quedan lo...

     
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    New iPods - Steve Ballmer says goodbye - Crosscut: Wall Street JournalSteve Ballmer says goodbyeCrosscutBut th...

     
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  6. 22s

    Steve Ballmer, Meet Ibn Khaldun: The barbarians always take over in the end. '(by Paul Krugman)'

     
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    Steve Ballmer, Meet Ibn Khaldun: The barbarians always take over in the end.

     
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    Por qué la sucesión de Ballmer debería comportar un cambio generacional

     
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    Por qué la sucesión de Ballmer debería comportar un cambio generacional: Después de leer los artículos publica...

     
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    Por qué la sucesión de Ballmer debería comportar un cambio generacional

     
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    Por qué la sucesión de Ballmer debería comportar un cambio generacional

     
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    's on his biggest regret, the next and more | ZDNet

     
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    Ballmer’s Departure From Microsoft Comes 10 Years Too Late

     
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    Five reasons Ballmer had to go

     
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    Steve Ballmer names Windows Vista as biggest regret while CEO: submitted by samipk1234 [link…

     

What is the PUE of your cloud data center? Google's is 1.10, Microsoft's is 1.13 - 1.2, Amazon is ?

It is a pretty safe assumption that a Cloud Data Center has a low PUE.  The Cloud business is so competitive that the cost to run the power and cooling systems takes a direct hit out of profit margins so almost everyone should be driving more efficient systems.

How efficient are the cloud companies?  

Google is easy to figure out as they quote PUE quarterly here.

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GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham had a post on efficient data centers quoting PUE.

Microsoft gave Stacey a bunch of data, but not an exact number.

Microsoft sent me a bunch of information on its PUE figures for its newest data centers which range from 1.13 to 1.2. It doesn’t disclose the PUE for all of its data centers, however.

For Amazon, there is no clear answer.  Note: James Hamilton does not claim the PUE is representative of Amazon.  Given Amazon will let temperatures rise in warehouses for workers, it is hard to believe they wouldn't do the same for voiceless servers.

Amazon’s data center guru James Hamilton published a presentation on Amazon last year that assumed a PUE of 1.45 for the online retailer’s data centers.

Is Bill Gates paying more attention to the data center world?

In all the news about Microsoft's latest reorganization I haven't seen any reference to Bill Gates.  Being a relatively old Microsoftee (1992 - 2006), I could see Bill's imprint on things and guess what he is thinking of.  I had a few small meetings with Bill, worked on some of his keynotes, and had plenty of friends who had way more interaction with Bill.

What got my attention today to write is on Bill Gates personal web page on his reading list the following three books are listed as the top on his list.

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I have had Jared Diamond's book on my list. How Children Succeed is one I have made part way through.  The Box is about the history of the shipping container and how it changed distribution logistics.  Most of you are familiar with The Box if you were thinking of containers in the data center.  Mike Manos posted on the Container Concept.

In some ways Modularization of the data center industry is/can/will have the same effect as the shipping container did in manufacturing.   All puns intended.  If you are unaware of how the shipping container revolutionized the world, I would highly recommend the book “The Box” by Marc Levinson, it’s a quick read and very interesting if you read it through the lens of IT infrastructure and the parallels of modularization in the Data Center Industry at large.

So is Bill paying more attention to the data center world?  By looking at what he is reading you can't tell.  But here is something that makes sense.  Bill is Chairman of the Microsoft Board of Directors.  He spends one day a week working on Microsoft business.  And I have heard of people going to Bill's Kirkland office to discuss Microsoft business.

So, Bill is reviewing the new One Microsoft strategy which I mentioned says datacenter 4 times.

Given Bill is paying more attention to logistics and operations and is focused on technology he is being exposed to the world of data centers.  He is spending a lot time creating stochastic models and has a Windows Cluster to run models to evaluate ways to improve health and education.

Bill is looking at History for ways to tell stories that get people to understand a better way to do things.  Here is how Bill opened his 2013 annual letter with telling story of the steam engine and its incremental improvements.  This is the same method used by Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft  to improve data centers.  It makes sense that in the past the changes that the steam engine enabled is what data centers do now.  Being a technology guy Bill must be seeing the connection of data centers, not desktop computers are enabling the big change.

We can learn a lot about improving the world

in the 21st century from an icon of the industrial

era: the steam engine.

 

Over the holidays I read The Most Powerful Idea

in the World, a brilliant chronicle by William

Rosen of the many innovations it took to harness

steam power. Among the most important were a

new way to measure the energy output of engines

and a micrometer dubbed the “Lord Chancellor,”

able to gauge tiny distances.

 

Such measuring tools, Rosen writes, allowed

inventors to see if their incremental design changes

led to the improvements—higher-quality parts,

better performance, and less coal consumption—

needed to build better engines. Innovations in

steam power demonstrate a larger lesson: Without

feedback from precise measurement, Rosen writes,

invention is “doomed to be rare and erratic.” With

it, invention becomes “commonplace.”

Bill is studying those things that revolutionized an industry.  There are no books to read about data centers that way though.  Although I would imagine someone has pitched the idea of writing a data center book.  So much is changing though, that the book would be outdate by the time it is published.

Microsoft's new organization puts "datacenter" four times and "supply chain" three times in Steve Ballmer's memo

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer sent out a memo to the company and rest of the world on a new organization for innovation, speed, and efficiency. Which may be kind of obvious.  Who wants to enable legacy, slow, and wasteful organizations. :-)

Being an a data center guy, Industrial Engineer, and ex-Microsoft I was curious where data centers showed up and saw "supply chain" show up three times.

Datacenter shows up 4 times.  The correct way to spell data centers is datacenter, but almost no one does.

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The Microsoft data center group used to report to Qi Lu and will now report to Satya Nadella.  Qi Lu is focused on apps and services.

Applications and Services Engineering Group. Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories

Supply chain shows up three times.

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With Microsoft showing up with so much interest in supply chain I wonder if they'll start recruiting amazon.com supply chain folks.  Wal-mart people have already joined Microsoft including COO Kevin Turner.

 

Greenpeace praises Apple's Green Data Center efforts, shifting target to Amazon and Microsoft

Silicon Republic reports on Apple's latest solar project in Reno by interviewing Greenpeace's Gary Cook.

The good guys are.

"With Google, Facebook, and now Apple all announcing major new deals in recent months for new renewable energy to power their data-centre operations, the race to build an internet powered by renewable energy is clearly in full swing," he said.

The bad guys are.

"Microsoft and Amazon - both of which still power their internet using the dirty electricity that causes global warming - ought to take notice," he said.

"In the race for a clean internet, Apple is leaving both of those companies in the dust."

We'll see if Google, Facebook, and/or Apple get an advantage with a low carbon data center strategy.  They are all probably relieved that Greenpeace will focus on their competitors - Amazon and Microsoft.