Microsoft and Scudding Clouds
December 12, 2008
Update: December 12, 2008 A reader sent me a link to this Los Angeles Times’s story about Mapquest. “Mapquest Tries to Stem Flow of Users to Google Maps”. My hunch is that Google is working like a big magnet, pulling customers to them.
Original Post
A happy quack to the reader who directed my attention to Robert Scoble’s comment about his former employer’s computational performance. The Scobelizer here said:
…when I go to my wife’s blog, which is on Microsoft Spaces, it is TONS slower than WordPress. WordPress doesn’t have the huge data centers available to it that Microsoft has. Same when I use my Hotmail account. Gmail is faster. Same when I go to other things, because I’ve seen lots of people praising Microsoft’s Live.com services lately so I’ve been testing them out. Tonight ReadWrite Web, for instance, talks about the new Microsoft Labs bookmarking service.
The point I carried away is that Microsoft’s fancy new data centers aren’t the fastest hamsters in the cage. Keep in mind that I chastise the Amazon outages and I chew into the GOOG’s increasingly common glitches. But comparing WordPress with Microsoft Spaces is brutal.
The core of this story appeared on the Redfin Corporate Blog here. The Redfin wizards switched from Microsoft Virtual Earth and some Google to all Google.
Speed wins, but speed is not a data center. Speed is dependent on engineering solutions to known bottlenecks in distributed, parallelized computing system. Google has solutions, not perfect, mind you, but pragmatic. Microsoft has solutions as well but the core remains anchored to my old pal SQL Server and other Microsoft components. According to Redfin’s post, Microsoft may have to open more engineering spigots.
Stephen Arnold, December 12, 2008
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