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The formula was an instant success in a valley full of impatient Internet start-ups waiting to show what they could do. And all that changed when the dot-com bubble burst, and the names of many of the companies that had been hosted by Loudcloud started appearing in the pages of F***edCompany.com.

Those who remember the emergence of the Internet era as a mainstream venue (circa 1995 to 2000) may also recall a company called Loudcloud, founded by Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen. It is my opinion that you can trace the road that led to the current cloud-computing era back to Loudcloud’s founding.

Loudcloud thus started with the vision of various “clouds”–mail, database, network, application server clouds, etc.–so that any enterprise could fractionally rent out what it needed. Customers would pay based on what they rented and for how long.

In 2002, Loudcloud’s founders decided that it was in the best interest of the shareholders and the company’s longevity to jettison the managed-services business (fixed equipment costs played a huge part in this) and to move toward producing a data center automation software platform that would help enterprise customers run their own data centers efficiently. So they spun out a separate software company, Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard bought in 2007 for about $1.6 billion.

Every time that I see an article touting how great cloud computing is, I always chuckle and think to myself, “been there, done that.”

Finally, cloud-computing companies have one thing that is going for them that Loudcloud didn’t have nine years ago: enterprises are now more “comfortable” with the concept of the Internet and the maturity of Web-enabled technologies, and that has made them more open and receptive to taking advantage of the flexibility, speed, and agility that cloud computing offers. So much so that the newly anointed federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has embarked on a cloud-computing strategy for the federal government.

Convincing an enterprise customer to let you host its crown jewels (business data) is going to be the last thing you should attempt. Instead, focus on applications that are important to an enterprise but not in their “critical” path–as the first wave of cloud-computing adoption has shown us (such as with Salesforce.com and NetSuite).

It started in 1999, when four visionaries who met while at Netscape–Marc Andreessen, Ben Horwitz, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee–saw a pressing problem facing Web-based start-ups. If these emerging companies wanted to establish a presence on the Internet, they were forced to buy a lot of expensive hardware, diverting precious resources that they otherwise might have been able to invest in their core businesses.

Cloud computing is getting its due these days, but let’s remember that Loudcloud first proved the viability of the concept.

Other cloud-computing companies can learn a couple of valuable lessons from Loudcloud’s example.

Being an employee at Loudcloud at that time gave me a ringside view of the company, as we tried to aggressively reinvent ourselves toward selling the concept of managed infrastructure to the bigger enterprises when the Internet economy collapsed. However, the idea met quite a bit of resistance from companies questioning the effectiveness of security controls in a managed infrastructure environment.

This was not a valid reason then and is not the valid reason now. These enterprises resisted moving to a cloud environment out of fear that they would lose control over the data that was sacrosanct to them. Interestingly, many of these same customers were more interested in learning about the automation platform that ran our multiple data centers across Europe and North America.

Editors’ note: This is a guest post.

Be prepared to adapt and adopt. Loudcloud survived–and then thrived–as Opsware because it was able to refine its message to enterprise customers when the bubble burst.

Oh, of course, these bastions of sexitude might say they’re not willing to sell. But what if Microsoft put enough Splenda (and that might not be so very much Splenda just at the moment) into the deal that even Messrs. Williams and Rose could not avoid the rush?

(Credit: CC Zappowbang)

They all sit, apparently happily, next to slightly more mundane names such as Thomas Pink and Sephora. No one seems to mind. Perhaps few even know. Even though there was a time when Louis Vuitton, the LV of LVMH, really wasn’t so cool at all. Now, strangely, not only is LVMH daddy to many cool schools, but its own Louis Vuitton brand has enjoyed quite the renaissance.

Which leads me to thinking of Microsoft. A fine company that still sometimes endures the image vestiges of an accountant in, um, an office building. So very PC. Yet, like so many accountants, Microsoft knows how (and where) to stash a little cash, which, in times of recession, can prove to be very seductive.

Yes, Twitter and Digg.

Yes, Microsoft’s ideal future cloud-filled mesh platform could ultimately see many Twitters and Diggs come and go like NBC pilots. But in the short term, with
Mac’s market share crawling up Windows’ trouser leg like a highly skilled ferret, perhaps a little financially reckless splurge on two brands with some Web cool might have a strangely emotionally positive effect on the Microsoft entity.

This is a poor analogy, of course, because there is no such thing as trendiness in tech, right?

You see, recessions do have a tendency of creating the strangest of occurrences. Strangest of bedfellows, too.

But they once said men would never wear Spanx. Now look at this. Yes, “helix-mapping body-response technology” to hide your every manboob.

I’m not suggesting that Microsoft, instead of the discreet manner in which it has involved itself with Facebook, would create an ad campaign around its new acquisitions. On the other hand, what if it went along the marketing path of General Electric and slipped the magic words “a Microsoft company” under, say, the Digg logo?

Naturally, there would be massive aversion, and riots both online and in the streets. Just as there were when News Corp. bought MySpace. You don’t remember the riots?

I know that Microsoft wants to reduce its reliance on the desktop and head for the clouds. But wouldn’t that be a far more enjoyable and, dare one suggest it, image-friendly trip, with Digg and Twitter safely tucked under its perspiring armpit?

Once, for perhaps four minutes, Boy George was cool. Yet today he appears to be somewhat over the weight limit for the dohyo, and he was in court apparently admitting to handcuffing a male escort. Against, in this case, the escort’s will.

See, I wondered about this as I was wandering around Ross Dress For Less on Black Friday. I found myself counting all the coolness that is actually owned by one company, LVMH: Kenzo, DeBeers, Donna Karan, Tag Heuer, Fendi, and Marc Jacobs. Oh, and let’s not forget Dom Perignon.

So what if Seattle’s finest decided to spend a little of that money on buying itself some cool? You know, the tech equivalents of a Viktor & Rolf shirt and a Comme Des Garcons jacket.

Let Windows, Vista and future operating systems carry on as a jiggly infrastructure somewhere below the human eyeline, and allow a variety of “Microsoft-powered” cool brands blossom. In our faces, just where we get seduced the quickest.

Cool is a slippery customer. One minute, you have it, and the next, it seems to desert you like a bon mot on a date.

Would the cool techy kids head for the hills? Or are they already so wedded to brands like Twitter and Digg that they’d roll with it? Especially if the Twitter and Digg offerings actually improved with Microsoft’s munificence?

Blandford updated his blog post to say that the two skiers worked for a start-up called Dolphin Music, and that a number of other tech entrepreneurs were in the same British ski group.

Tavaria was found alive after he was located with GPS on his iPhone, but Williams was found dead, and according to the Evening Standard, had fallen about 66 feet and landed on rocks.

The Swiss news source Le Nouvelliste reported on Tuesday that, unfortunately, the second skier had been found deceased.

Blogger Robin Blandford of ByteSurgery.com rounded up some of the messages: one member of the ski trip Twittered that two members of the group were missing, and another posted a tweet requesting the cell phone numbers of the missing skiers to attempt to contact them. From what it looks like, the GPS coordinates of their iPhones were used to pinpoint their location, but when one of them was found alive, he had become separated from his companion.

UPDATE at 8:53 a.m. PST: We have more information, and in English now, thanks to the U.K.-based Evening Standard. The two missing skiers were actually on snowboards, and have been identified as Jason Tavaria and Rob Williams, the 29-year-old co-founders of Dolphin Music.

Tracking Twitter search for the term “verbier” (the region of the Alps where the two went missing) has brought much of the news together.

In a bittersweet conclusion, a missing skier in the Swiss Alps was rescued with the help of Twitter and an
iPhone, but it appears that his fellow skiing companion was found deceased after the two were separated from the rest of their group.

Blizzard conditions at Verbier had made the search and rescue process difficult.

The newly formed company expects to begin making upgrades to its mobile WiMax network early next year.

He added the new Clearwire also aims to offer greater spectrum and an all IP-network to bolster its network capacity and improve performance.

“We are the underdog,” Wolff said, but noted the steps Clearwire is taking will prompt other companies to hold similar aspirations.

The transaction, announced in May, creates a new company valued at $14.5 billion, formed with the WiMax assets of both Sprint-Nextel and Clearwire. The new company aims to create a nationwide broadband wireless network to rival AT&T.

Clearwire, as it has previously laid out, will receive a $3.2 billion investment from Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Google, and Bright House Networks, as well as an additional investment from Trilogy Equity Partners in the coming months.

As part of that plan, the new company will retain the Clearwire name and offer mobile WiMax under the Clear brand. Over the coming months, Sprint Nextel’s XOHM service will undergo a name change.

The new company is also working on launching a nationwide 4G wireless broadband network using WiMax, which aims to run five times faster than 3G technology. The combined spectrum holdings of the new company provide it with 100 MHz, or more of potential 4G spectrum in most U.S. markets.

Clearwire and Sprint-Nextel announced Monday they have completed their joint-venture transaction and will offer mobile WiMax service under the “Clear” brand.

The newly company aims to offer an open all-IP network that features mobile WiMax technology with download speeds of 2 to 4 megabits per second. The open IP (Internet protocol) will be designed to allow any WiMax device to connect to the network, said Clearwire CEO Benjamin Wolff during a conference call to announce the closing of the transaction.

With any luck, my electricity bill will go back down to where it was before the snowflakes started falling. So far, it looks like the panels produced 25 percent more electricity in January than in December, when the snow blockage was at its worst. (Other factors like number of sunny days, of course, come into play.)

Yeah, it’s one more chore that I need to do after I shovel the front walk. But free sun power is a terrible thing to waste.

The deluxe roof rake. When modified, good for snowy solar panels, ice dams, and all manner of debris.

A blanket of snow on solar panels–clearing the surface gets the juice flowing again.

In December, the production of my panels hit a low point. They made less than a third of the juice than they did in August when the panels covered a large chunk of my household’s monthly electricity use.

When I mentioned what the rake was for, the guy at the hardware store cleverly recommended I attach a squeegee-like strip on the bottom so I didn’t risk damaging the expensive panels.

On Wednesday morning, I was prepared. A week earlier, I had bought a snow rake. (These are hot items this year given all the snow and problems with ice dams.) A snow rake–the one I bought was about $75–is just a flat aluminum plate with a long handle. Run it down your roof and the snow comes off.

The good news is that I think I’ve figured out a system for keeping my rooftop panels humming at full bore even during the snowy season. It adds to my to-do list, but that’s the cost of being an aggressive technology adopter, I guess.

Sparkly snowy morning

Tuesday night it snowed and Wednesday was a gorgeous sunny morning. Distracted by the thought of my covered panels, I took a quick look at my inverter (the machine that converts direct current from your panels to household alternating current) and my heart sunk.

I confess, I was a little preoccupied with this situation Wednesday morning; I made a few trips outside to quickly clear away the snow after it melted and slid down the panels. By midday, the panels were more or less clear and fully operational.

Earlier this winter, I just waited for the snow to melt from my slanted roof. This works (I suspect most sane people do this) but I was intent on fixing what I saw as a suboptimal situation. After previous storms, snow ended up piling up, frozen hard, on the bottom third of my array, which did a number on the whole system’s output.

As anybody who lives in New England knows all too well by now, we’ve had a snowy winter. I like snow so, overall, that’s just fine with me. But the white stuff delivered an unexpected hit to the electric output of the solar panels I had installed last spring. It’s hard to calculate a precise impact, but my December electric bill offers a clue: it’s more than twice the previous month.

The output was a measly 140 watts–about one tenth of what they would be producing on a sunny winter morning. All those perfectly good photons blocked by 5 inches of fluffy powder!

So I had expected fewer kilowatt-hours this winter but I was still irked by the performance hit. After all, I shelled out good money for these panels–depending on the size, installation for solar electric panels ranges from $20,000 to $35,000 before state and federal rebates–and I want to maximize the electricity they produce to get a return on my investment.

(Credit:
Garelick Roof Rake)

But snow is a completely different story. A thick blanket of snow–and we’ve seen many of those this winter–can all but eliminate electricity production. Sure, some light can penetrate through but the panels produce just a fraction compared to their potential.

Now, I’m not blaming snow alone for the lost productivity. Solar panels operate perfectly well in northern climates–assuming you have good exposure and many sunny days a year. But days are shorter in the dead of winter, which means fewer hours of daylight when the panels can do their thing.

In general, solar photovoltaic panels don’t need a whole lot of maintenance as there are no moving parts. They usually have warranties good for 20 or 25 years. Cleaning off built-up dust and pollen in the spring or summer is a good idea because that film cuts out a little bit of light from hitting panels, reducing the amount of electricity they make.

Here’s another thing I learned: because of the way solar panels are wired together, a little bit of snow–or bird droppings or leaves–blocking just a portion of an array can dramatically cut the output.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET News)

Here’s a chore I didn’t expect to have this winter: removing snow from my solar panels.

Winter weather actually offers some advantages. Photovoltaic panels, like other electronics, work best in the cold. The output of silicon solar panels, the most common solar cell material, starts to go down in very hot weather. Snow also reflects light which, in theory, could end up on the surface of panels.

If Wednesday’s experiment is any indication, clearing off just a little on a sunny day is a lot better than doing nothing. With some of the panels exposed, the current starts to flow, creating some heat on the panels’ surface and melting the snow. So within a few hours, much of the snow melted, apparently from the heat of the sun and the panels themselves.

One phone call to my solar installer and a trip to my local hardware store have me and my panels back at full steam. It turns out that a thing I never heard of before–a roof rake–is a clutch piece of equipment for folks like me.

My roof rake allows me to reach about 20 feet up. In practice, that means I can only clean off the bottom of the panels; the ones near the roof ridge remain stubbornly beyond my reach. (Be careful of mini avalanches if you try this.)

(We are) releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on Drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

Acquia is taking a page out of Red Hat’s playbook, boiling down the complexity of the deep and wide Drupal community. While I like the look of its Network service, it is the Acquia Drupal distribution that I think is most newsworthy for enterprises looking to adopt Drupal. Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s co-founder, explains:

In other words, there’s still an open world of community-supported Drupal for those that value cash over time and other resources. But for those that wouldn’t mind a shortcut to Drupal-based productivity, there’s Acquia Drupal.

On Tuesday, however, Acquia, the company behind Drupal, remedied this void, launching its commercially supported distribution of Drupal and a network service to provide updates and other services around the core Drupal distribution.

commentary

Drupal has always been a great open-source Web content management system. Forrester called it one of the two open-source content management systems to consider. Its biggest deficiency was arguably a lack of enterprise-class support and polish to support the project.

It will be interesting to see how well this service takes off, and how its community reacts. As OStatic notes, Acquia’s biggest competition will be the Drupal community or, rather, the developers and system integrators who currently make a living providing Drupal-based support. The response so far, however, has been positive from the Drupal community, and I think this will continue.

I suspect Acquia will do just fine as it learns to walk the line between commercial and community. Drupal is an excellent open-source project, and Acquia is filled with similarly excellent people. The marriage of the two should be a boon to enterprises that have adopted or are considering adopting Drupal.

Want more info? See our Chrome roundup page.

Having a hard time explaining Google’s Chrome browser to your tech-backward friends or family members? Play them this 12-minute Real Deal podcast, in which I cover just the highlights of Chrome, a few of its downsides, and why Chrome matters even if you don’t use it. Listen now:

Download the podcast

With election day fast approaching and Americans running to the polls to cast their vote for the next president of the United States, I thought it was an appropriate time to discuss when (if ever) technology will take center stage in American politics.

Maybe I have a vested interest in seeing technology take center stage in American politics. After all, I believe that it’s the most important industry in the world, thanks to the Internet and the billions of dollars it generates for the economy each year, but I know many disagree. Some say that the health care industry matters more than technology and others believe the environmental industry takes the cake. Good arguments can be made for any industry, but I think more politicians need to see the value of technology.

The Internet is the lifeblood of the world. Without it, we would be thrown back into the Stone Age. Why? The world runs on it. In just a few short years, the Web has become as important to our lives as water. Can you imagine what would happen if the Internet suddenly disappeared? Almost every single company in the world would be crippled. The entire online industry would die in one day and the stock market would crash. We would be sent into financial turmoil and start fighting over scraps as supermarkets and stores became unable to communicate with vendors.

Now, I understand that and I’m betting you do too. But when will politicians finally realize that caring about technology really does matter and they can’t just set it aside like it’s a fringe concern?

But just because that happens, it doesn’t make it right.

And yet, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama have spent considerable time talking about technology or how to help start-ups in Silicon Valley grow. Neither candidate has discussed the implications of the U.S. having some of the slowest broadband speeds among developed countries in the world. Neither candidate has said much about how their friends in Congress were instrumental in creating laws and tax codes that make it absolutely impossible for a smart CEO to launch an IPO, and in the process, ruin our ability to compete across the world.

Look, I’m the first one to say that politicians should care deeply about war and the implications of sending our troops overseas and I fully believe that we should care about the well-being of our citizens. But the economy is just as important as those issues, and technology, in my opinion, is the most important sector in our economy.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

The United States is supposed to be the world’s leader. But how can we expect to maintain that title if our own leaders don’t recognize the position they’ve put us in?

Unfortunately, I don’t believe technology will ever take center stage in American politics. It’s too difficult of an issue for politicians who need to worry about war, poverty, and health to even consider caring about in a difficult campaign. And let’s face it–more pressing issues usually come up that put technology on the back burner.

I may be talking to myself and chances are, not one politician will listen, but I’m calling on every politician who cares about this country and wants to see the U.S. succeed economically to recognize the policy mistakes that are being made and develop a real understanding for this industry so they can right those wrongs.

It’s easy to discuss the issues we face now. The economy is in trouble, there are wars being waged across the world, and more people are losing their jobs with each passing day. But what about the significant issues we face five to ten years from now when the technology industry is being hammered by draconian policies and questionable regulations? By then, it might be too late.

If they don’t, we will face an economic and political crisis that could have serious implications long into the future.