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Microsoft has a blog post on its latest green data center efforts here.
The document is pretty long.
Reading the document it has elements of what Google has done with its data centers and what Apple has done in its supply chain.
It was good to see that Axios picked up on the blog feed and wrote their own piece to spread the news.
Microsoft pledges to run global data centers on zero-carbon energy by 2030
Yesterday I had a video call with a construction executive. When interacting with construction people it is a safe bet to use Microsoft Teams as they standardize on the Microsoft platform and teams is part of their IT environment.
Here are a few problems that we had and the choices we decided to make to resolve the issues.
First problem is I had sent the meeting link and he was driving in the car so wanted to join with an audio bridge. He could not find the audio bridge, and that is when I realized I had not added the audio bridge service to the Microsoft Teams environment. This gives you the toll free number and meeting id, etc. to join. Digging through the documentation and how to add the audio conferencing service. But, chatting with one of our other team members who is also a system administrator, we decide not to add the audio bridge.
Eventually the executive got to his home office and was able to join the Microsoft Teams meeting. All was good. And in discussions he wanted to share pictures of construction work that he had on his phone. He has an iPhone and Windows PC so he has does not the ease of sharing pictures on his phone to a Teams call. so he was holding up his phone to the PC camera. The next day realized what is much better is to have his iPhone join the Microsoft Teams call and he can share directly from his phone and use the camera on the phone to show other things. And this is how he can use the audio only feature when he is in the car.
Microsoft Research had developed the phone device joining a Teams call feature 3 years ago and here is their Youtube Video
When I was chatting about this feature to a Microsoft employee they said oh most of us cannot use that feature because only managed devices can join the internal Microsoft Teams environment. No personal devices can join, iPads, iPhones, Androids.
Luckily my construction friend should not have this problem. So If he has Microsoft Teams on his iPhone he can click on the link and join audio only or add screen sharing and camera sharing. This makes so much more sense to young people who would be puzzled why would you try to dial in a number to get in a meeting. Just get the app on your phone and click on the link.
Gen Z looks at phone calls and email as old school. And an audio bridge seems a strange way to join a call.
It was fun writing the post on Mike Manos joining D&B and thinking of a creative way to share the news and make a point on how great Mike is.
One of the things I remember well from our discussion is Mike saying I could talk about any particular piece of technology or equipment that they had used, but the thing that that is carefully guarded is how they integrate things. The integration is the IP. The decisions made on what is important, The trade offs made.
I made point by showing a Whack-a-mole image. One of my construction friends he recalls many times Mike using that analogy of what not to do on Microsoft projects. Do things right in the big picture.
In the post there are 85 likes and 9 comments.
The most traffic comes from the combination of Fiserv (440) and First data (120).h
Next is Microsoft with 109 views.
D&B had 60.
Then this is where it got interesting for the tech companies. Next was AWS with 43 views. Google 38. Oracle 34.
The views from the West Coast tech firms was a bit lower overall than I expected, but part of that is Mike is now an East Coast executive and most of the views were in Atlanta, NYC, DC, Boston. Seattle and SF Area are next. Then Chicago, Dallas, Denver.
D&B has a press release announcing their new CTO, Mike Manos.
Manos brings more than 25 years of industry experience and deep technological insight to Dun & Bradstreet. He has a proven track record of modernizing and scaling existing platforms for companies such as AOL Services, Nokia and most recently Fiserv, while simultaneously working with product teams to leverage the industry’s latest technologies to develop new solutions. Manos’ passion for solving the most complex problems for clients of all sizes will deliver immediate value to Dun & Bradstreet as he leads the company through the next chapter of technological innovation to enable the rapid growth and delivery of products, services and data-driven insights.
What was kind of surprising is D&B did not mention Mike’s work at Microsoft as he was the person who built the original data center team for Azure. Mike left Microsoft in Apr 2009 and I remember that time well as Mike asked me to drop by his office to have a chat and he shared that he was going to leave Microsoft and he wanted to know what I thought. Given the situation I agreed the best move was for Mike to leave Microsoft. Reflecting back on that time, there was a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft. Within a short period of time Mike’s manager left the company and the VP above as well. If Mike had stayed and moved up the chain he would continue with building a great team.
Mike’s ability to build a great team is what has made him a success and what enables his skills as CTO. The data center group thinks of Mike as a data center person with skills in electrical, mechanical, and sites, but what few know is Mike has a computer science background. Which is why Mike had so much fun in our discussions over the years. I was so lucky to get introduced to Mike by friends at OSIsoft who knew Mike and said I should have breakfast with Mike. We hit it off immediately and have been friends since.
One of the key things Mike pointed out is the IP of the DC group was in the integration work. The individual technologies and components is what almost everyone focuses on in a technical tour. Picking gear is not the hard part. It is figuring out how to make the system work. How do the components work together. This big picture thinking is what makes Mike a great CTO and Microsoft missed out not having Mike stay at the company for the last 12 years and work in system engineering issues of Azure infrastructure. Mike would be looking at AI, ML, IOT, Modeling, Graph Theory, Network Theory in the data center.
Mike is a system thinker. He looks at the big picture and gets the hardware, software, networking, and anything else that involves solving the problem in the big picture. Examples of Mike’s work can be seen in the patents he has been awarded that you can find here. Here is one patent that is solely awarded to Mike.
Data center programming and application distribution interface
Publication number: 20090307094
Abstract: An exemplary data center interface for distributing and monitoring Web applications includes a specification that specifies a call statement to distribute one or more components of a Web application to one or more data centers and a call statement to report metrics associated with performance of the Web application. An exemplary data center interface for associating advertisements with distributed Web applications includes a specification that specifies a call statement and one or more call statement parameters to associate an advertisement with one or more distributed Web applications based on at least one criterion. Various other devices, systems and methods are also described.
Type: Application
Filed: June 4, 2008
Publication date: December 10, 2009
Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
Inventor: Michael J. Manos
I think if Mike was still at Microsoft and had the equivalent of CTO role for Azure infrastructure he could have easily saved the company over a billion dollars. There has been hundreds of people of focused on cost savings in Azure, but all too often the work is like whack a mole as cost savings all too often just trigger another cost overage somewhere else. And finance keeps wondering when they add it all up the overall costs are not coming down the way they thought.
The other day chatting with a data center executive and we were discussing who the really smart good people are in the industry and we shared our short list. The one we both completely forgot to list is Mike Manos as he has moved on to more than the data center industry, but that does not mean he forgot what a good team looks like to run data center infrastructure. Mike is one of rare data center people who has grown his knowledge to be bigger than the data center building.
I miss my conversations with Gary Starkweather and helping others remember him is one of the things that reinforces what I got out of knowing Gary. The WSJ, WaPo, NYTimes, LATimes and many other publications wrote about Gary’s passing in Dec 2019. Gary’s wife texted me a day after Gary had passed and that started me thinking about my relationship with Gary.
When we met, Gary lived in Saratoga, CA which is same city I grew up in. Gary had moved to the Bay Area to work at Xerox PARC which is one of the places I thought of working with I was in college, but went to HP which also has its roots in Palo Alto. Gary and I met at Apple. Chatting with Joyce, Gary’s wife she told a funny story how Gary ended up at Apple. Joyce had been working as an admin and one day while someone said they were looking for a person with imaging background and Joyce put Gary’s resume on a person’s desk. Upon reading the resume the executive quickly went to Joyce and asked this is your husband? Yes. We want him at Apple. Gary joined Apple and worked in the research group which is the same building that had the Cray super computer in it.
So how did I meet Gary. The first meeting I had with Gary was in the research building and we were discussing imaging and Gary showed me a beta version of Photoshop which had not been bought yet by Adobe. Thinking back to 1988 why did I want to talk to Gary. What was I doing in 1988. Oh I was project leader for the 8 bit monochrome scanner and was investigating a 24 bit color scanner project. From then on I would have regular chats with Gary about color, imaging, printing, fonts. When I left Apple I had just finished Japanese TrueType fonts for the Mac and in 1992 went to be project leader on all the Far East fonts for Win3.1.
When I went to Microsoft in Redmond I would come back to Saratoga regularly to see my family and visit a few Apple friends. And Gary would be one of those people who I would see regularly to talk about color, imaging, printing, and fonts. At one point chatting with David Weise who was also a super smart physicists like Gary we were discussing color management in Windows and I said let’s call Gary Starkweather and chat about Apple ColorSync to see if we can come up with a way to use color profiles in the same way.
Five years later in 1997 talking to Gary he said he had had it with Apple after 10 years and needed to get out. I suggested why not come to Microsoft. Gary immediately said it rains too much in Seattle. And I said if you have not been there how do you know? Gary could not argue with that point. I passed Gary’s resume to Microsoft HR who of course took all the credit for bringing Gary to Microsoft. Nice thing is Gary always credits our friendship is why he went to Microsoft.
Here is how I helped Gary. Gary invented the laser printer for Xerox and his financial reward for the patents was enough to buy 2 Toyota Corollas. Working at Apple for 10 years 1987-1997 was not a big stock windfall. Working at Microsoft as a senior architect from 1997-2005 gave Gary the financial security he deserved for being the inventor of the laser printer.
To this day I can remember so many things Gary pointed out and hear his laugh. Nice thing there is a person in Microsoft Research who worked closely with Gary and we can continue to discuss how Gary would do things. Friends help friends.