Top Dawg - Episode #15 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 15th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last week of October 2010. This episode is titled Top Dog. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud computing experts. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me today is the top dog, their co-host, my co-host, Justin Edelstein. Hi Justin, how are you doing? I am feeling like the top dog. We have a big agenda today. We do? Yes we do. So, uh, Talk about your blog post on students and cloud computing. College students. College students and cloud computing. How they go together. Two tastes that taste great together. Talk about Ray Ozzie leaving Microsoft. It's pretty big news. Huge. WordPress and Salesforce. Again, two more things that taste great together. And why don't we start off with the first thing, since it's the title and people are going, why you named the title of the podcast Top Dog? You won the winter 11 community top contributor. I didn't win anything. Oh, so every

Justin Edelstein: every Release cycle I guess the the people who release of sales release of Salesforce Thank you release cycle of Salesforce all the community managers, or I guess there's two or three of them That run the the communities like the ideas community the answers community they choose some of the top contributors to the communities for specific things like ideas voted on or comments or answers answered and I was one of the top 20 contributors for the last release cycle and was able to get a badge on my profile page within the Salesforce community. So if you go in there and you you search for me and you find me, you'll see a little Winter 11 top contributor badge because I answered a bunch of questions in the answers community.

Jason Atwood: It is an interesting thing that Salesforce does. For those of you who don't know, and I don't know what the breakdown of our audience is between cloud competing people.

Justin Edelstein: I have to imagine that people who listen to this podcast listen because they are cloud computing people and for the most part, Salesforce people. That's what we tend to focus on. We have to put up a poll. I think that's what we have to do. Let's do a poll. Let's put a poll on the blog.

Jason Atwood: So the idea is that Salesforce does three releases a year. It has done for many, many years of their platform. The whole thing gets done over one or two weekends. And they get their ideas from their online community and customers, enterprise customers as well. But they allow you to go in and vote on the ideas. It's called the Idea Exchange and we've probably talked a little bit about it. They also have something newer called Answers, which is sort of great questions that kind of like a discussion board, I guess, where then you can vote to have the best answers populated and go to the top as well.

03:14 Justin Edelstein: It's a discussion board that's predicated on people asking questions and other people answering them, and then the discussion board turns into a knowledge base of sorts. Right. You can search through it.

Jason Atwood: then they have tools that you can pull that into their knowledge products, which then they can publish out. And in the demos, they show you publishing out to things like Facebook. So the idea that somebody could start as an answer. I have a question about, I'm going to use their example, a Nokia Bluetooth headset, and then someone answers it through the answer community, then that can be pulled into a knowledge article or a solution, which then can be published out to your FAQ, your frequently asked questions or something for support. So you don't have to, the idea being you don't have to reproduce content, you have the community members helping you build the content to help support the rest of your user base.

Justin Edelstein: And I'm one of those top community members. So you are top dog. Well, congratulations. Thank you. I have a badge to show for it.

Jason Atwood: I just wonder how many you had to do to get the badge.

Justin Edelstein: I could look up my statistics. Maybe you would. But I'm not going to.

Jason Atwood: Because then I would be able to go and I don't want to see you. You're so competitive. I really am.

Justin Edelstein: try it for next, but I'll just email the community managers. Their name is Marilyn, and I'll just be like, no, don't. Jason Atwood, no.

Jason Atwood: Speaking of you. Speaking of me. You published a blog post this week.

Justin Edelstein: I was a busy fellow this week. You were.

Jason Atwood: So why don't you tell us a little about what it is, and what it's about.

Justin Edelstein: So I wrote a blog post about college students using cloud computing products. And in this particular example, I did talk about Salesforce, to do their work in college. I wrote about things that we know about college students. They all have mobile devices and they've had them for years. They've grown up on the internet these days and they use social networks to communicate with each other as opposed to, when I was in college, we used chat quite a bit and email was kind of big, but chat was really the big thing. These days social networks have far surpassed chat. And I hypothesized a little bit borrowing from Ed Schlesinger, who is a big proponent of doing things like this with his product called Student Force, to talk about what potential there might be for students at a university to use a chatter-enabled application a lot like the Dreamforce portal that we've talked about over the last couple of weeks to manage their day at school. Not just their day, but their life. Their activities that they have to do in a given day, when assignments are due, what classes they're attending, who their teachers are, who their classmates are, who their roommates are, who their friends are, and be able to talk to them and collaborate around different assignments and products or projects. Also being able to tap into some of the other things we've written about with entertainment moving to the cloud, well why couldn't lectures be in the cloud and this portal be sort of a clearinghouse for those types of things like video. I remember when I was in college I took a, it was like a half and half class, it was every other week you'd go to class and then the other week you'd watch a video and the video was at the time at which the

06:40 Justin Edelstein: class was on a channel on the campus television network. So you just tuned in from your room. Had to just tune in from my room and watch this like really it was not good. It wasn't live. It was like a video of either a guy talking or it was like a PBS documentary type of thing. It was not good and I can only imagine that it

Jason Atwood: could be a whole lot better. Not only better but then distributed in a way that's not a time channel thing. Yeah, watch it when you're ready. Right, watch it whenever you want to watch it. It's interesting, I did go to college. Did you? I did not have, I had productivity apps. Did you have the internet? I did have the internet. We were back with when I wanted to connect from, I lived off campus, when I wanted to connect from, I dialed up through and then, yes, I did that, and then connected up through Elm We connected up through Elm and command line based email tools where we had command line based chats and sort of discussion groups, message boards, but they were all based in like green screen, whatever, terminal applications. And we loved them. I mean, it was great. And I moved away to Africa where I then had email. It was my only way of communicating with people. The whole point is that while I was probably ahead of the time in terms of having a computer a laptop and all that and was certainly into that. I can only imagine, you know, if I could take some of the tools that I use today, some cloud-based, some not, and use those to help me in preparing at college, I think that'd be an incredibly powerful tool. I like where Ed is going where it's saying that these are the type of tools that you're going to need to use after college, right? Salesforce being one. A lot of people use Salesforce. The company you go to after college might be a big user of Salesforce. If we have anything to do about it, they would be. Wouldn't it be nice if you were already familiar with the type of tool before you left? Just like they make you write Word documents, and if you're a business major, they make you fill out Excel documents. And when I was there, they just got into doing PowerPoint presentations. So we learned PowerPoint. As did I. Right. And now that's important because that's what you need to use. I also learned chat and email in college. Which then for one of your jobs, you didn't even have No, they didn't. They removed chat altogether. So very interesting. For everybody out there, go to blog.archisync.com and you can read that and more blog posts.

Jason Atwood: So let's talk about Ray Yazzie leaving Microsoft. Yeah. You really want to post this? I did. Yeah, I thought it was interesting.

Justin Edelstein: The chief software architect for Microsoft for the last four or five years or so, he was a big collaboration guru. I think he brought Groove into Microsoft, or that's how they got Ray Ozzie. They purchased Groove. Groove was a sort of a work group type of technology for collaboration where you would, and I remember playing with Groove in our previous life at a job in a sandbox, where you would sort of have a folder and this folder would be shared and there'd be a document in the folder and you can have the document open and editing it and I can have the document opening and editing it and we can both save it back to the folder and groove would sort of put the pieces together with the differences of the document sort of way before like a Google Wave or Google Docs now that sort of shows

10:08 Jason Atwood: typing in real time. Or if it's something like not one box the one that's Dropbox but doesn't do the understanding of the different pieces of the document. Oh yeah that's

Justin Edelstein: what grooves secret sauce was sort of understanding the diffs and putting it back together. So, but Ray Azzi was also one of the chief strategy guys where he was able to start this cloud computing thing at Microsoft and and get people's head around it and try to get people's head around it at least, but it looks as if in the end the old guard at Microsoft won because they're all about selling things and their biggest selling ticket is Windows and when you talk about the cloud you talk about the cloud sort of being the operating system if you continue to postulate out into the future you say well in five years we'll do everything in the browser and well it doesn't matter what operating system your computer is running because you'll be on a mobile device and you'll be working in the cloud and doesn't really matter right so I think there's a lot of of politics that go on when you work at Microsoft and the cash cow is Windows and Office and definitely office you know you got a lot to work with there and a lot to deal with as far as trying to think strategically and think of where the future of technology is going but if your money's made somewhere else well maybe you're the odd man out even though probably shouldn't have been and

Jason Atwood: and Ray's real big kind of fame wasn't Microsoft as much as it was Lotus he

Justin Edelstein: Right, it started there and then did Groove and then went to Microsoft.

Jason Atwood: So, and Lotus I think had some great ideas way before the time we saw demos eight, nine years ago about intranets and portals and Facebook-like things that was, you know, way ahead of its time as part of the Lotus sort of IBM development. Interesting, you know, in the same light, talking about Microsoft, Microsoft just released the new office, talking about their cash cow, Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. Yes. to after Apple released there, which we talked a little bit about, which is the iLife Suite, sort of their set of apps that they, you know, iPhoto and GarageBand and things like that. They're different though. They're different, but it's the same, I'm amazed and I'm thinking this is the blog that I will be writing, that while we are moving down this path towards cloud computing, there There are still some applications in my arsenal that need to be based on my computer, are better based on my computer, and so far no one has even taken even a little chink at trying to make better, or every time they try to do something online they do like three of the 17,000 features and it's slow and it crashes and it doesn't work. There's definitely some things. I think Excel, I'm not a big Word guy because Word to me is just a bunch of literally words. But things like iPhoto, things like Excel, Google Docs is great, but it's not Excel and it's not close to Excel. And the gap I think was getting closer, Google's getting closer and with this new release, Microsoft just went boop and took another three steps ahead. So it's an interesting conversation about software and installable software versus not. Where's the hybrid? Is the hybrid something like Mac, Mac app, the Mac shop that while the software is installed on your system, it's all coming from the cloud and it just updates from the cloud. And you're not really worrying about downloading and installing stuff. You just say, give me this and it's there instantly on your desktop.

13:50 Jason Atwood: I think we're getting that hybrid model. So what else we got on the agenda today?

Justin Edelstein: Well while we were talking about Microsoft, I thought it would be interesting to mention their new commercial. Have you seen their new commercial? I have not. Oh, they have a new commercial that my mom actually asked me about on Facebook, because that's how my mom and I collaborate and communicate with each other. Sorry, I did see it. You did see it.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, because on football, I'll sign that.

Justin Edelstein: So my mom asked me, I saw this new Microsoft commercial, is that what you do? I didn't know how to answer, I haven't answered her yet, I'm not even sure how to answer.

Jason Atwood: Did you tell her that yes, I'm a mother at home trying to make my kids look good by pictures? Yeah, exactly.

Justin Edelstein: I just didn't understand like, oh, to the clouds, snap, whiz, bang, and then everything just becomes better. Like, it just, it was just a weird commercial.

Jason Atwood: Well, what I didn't understand is what she was doing, which was image manipulation, which was taking basically a bunch of different images and she had taken of her family and and they're texting or looking away. And so you just morph them together to say, oh, take the best one of this and take the best one of this and make them so I get one great picture. That is, A, not a very cloud computing thing. You take those pictures with your camera. You then load them onto your computer, which all the software you need, you don't need to be connected to the internet. It's all on your computer. iPhoto, Photoshop.

Justin Edelstein: Maybe the photos were in some internet folder somewhere. I didn't really get it, but it's one of those things that Microsoft and some of the old school type of companies, when it comes to cloud computing and folks that rail against new school thinking and moving forward, will do. They'll put out a commercial like that and say, to the cloud, and we'll muddy the waters and confuse people like my mom, who won't know any better or don't know any better, doesn't really matter, she doesn't make huge decisions around cloud computing, but it's something that they do where they take to the cloud and make it their own when really they're just showing editing of photos.

Jason Atwood: Right, which isn't a very cloud-based thing, and it's one of those things I don't think is done very well online. I've used the online versions of Photoshop and even other apps, and I never thought that They were even half as good as the apps that are sitting on my desktop, you know, powered by the graphics chip that can now power a small nation. That's in my laptop.

Justin Edelstein: My laptop does power small nations. Small nations. Sims nation? Sims? No.

Jason Atwood: I will say that cloud computing and cloud, even though we use it all the time, and it's becoming so overused at this point, is it losing its meaning? Like, is cloud losing its meaning anymore to anybody? Can you distinguish what it means? and since everybody just uses it as a way of, to the clouds and cloud computing, it's all good. Cloud focus. No, no, it's interesting. We'll see where it goes the next five or six years as it become like XML, which used to be everything's XML. Oh, if it's XML, XML standard. Now XML is just, you know, it's a way of transferring data. It's a way of marking up data, but it's not, we don't talk about it in the same way as we used to in terms of technology, is it XML compliant? All right, a couple of other pieces of news we'll wrap it up, get to our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. Two more. One is that Salesforce just released some free WordPress themes. We were actually talking about for our customer the other day about blogging and whether if you're going to blog, should you use a blog tool that's sort of offsite like WordPress, or should you build it into your site that already exists? Like I was

17:34 Jason Atwood: talking about maybe possibly building it into a Salesforce site since we're using Salesforce sites for the client, you know, I could build out the objects and you were saying, you know, why don't you just use WordPress? It's good, it works, it's as, you know, it has every feature you ever want and then, well and behold, the next day Salesforce released two different themes. Business type themes. Business themes.

Justin Edelstein: Because they weren't for personal blogs, they were really for businesses who want to put a professional looking blog out there and they look pretty good and they have the the already announced Salesforce lead generation plug-in which essentially takes the contact us form and plugs the web to lead on top of it which whatever it is what it is but I think it's pretty cool that they're that they're using this that they took the stance that I took which is to say WordPress is a top-class blog engine why would you build one for yourself when one already exists. Yeah, it's true. It's like email. We talk about that all the time.

Jason Atwood: Salesforce does a lot of email functionality, but it is not an email client. I think, and I've seen some of the roadmap, don't think that that's where they ... They want to build in more email functionality to help you with email when it's associated to a contact or an account, but they're not really going to say, we're going to be a full-blown email client because so many of the people have spent millions on it. Which actually brings us to the next point, which is two pieces of news out of Rackspace, both cloud-based. One is that we talked about this, I think, maybe our first episode. Might have been. I talked about OpenStack, which is Rackspace. Rackspace is a traditional hosting company. So they host servers for websites and things. And you could buy dedicated servers. I've been using them for many, many, many years. And they've gone slowly into buying a couple companies, like Jungle Disk and I forgot the other one that they turned into.

Justin Edelstein: Slice Host?

Jason Atwood: Slices is another one which says virtualization. And they started to move into the cloud because they're realizing that they got all the hardware. If we could just sort of turn this into actual clouds as opposed to renting out individual servers, turn into cloud architecture. So they announced, I think this was a big, big at the time. And now it's become real the first release of OpenStack, which is their open source cloud architecture software. So for people who wanted to go build their own cloud architecture, And again, this does not mean just putting a server, it's not just putting a server out there and saying,

Justin Edelstein: oh, I got it in the cloud.

Jason Atwood: This is how to do virtualization, how to connect many machines to one to make it redundant across all of them, shared architecture. They've now released the first open source version of this, which I think is big news. So that's kind of fun, check that out. And then the other thing that Rackspace announced, and I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, other than a competitor to Google in Gmail, which is they have their own email service. And they have two million paid subscribers. I don't know if Google has actually announced their numbers of how many people pay them to use Gmail. I guess it's probably a big number. But Rackspace doesn't have a non-paid version. It is only pay. And they started $1 for just regular email IMAP, POP. It's $1 per user per month. I actually use them. And so do you, because you have one of the accounts there. I use Gmail. I use Rackspace. I guess those are the only two I use. They also do hosted exchange. That's about $12 a month. So interesting stuff.

21:08 Jason Atwood: I mean, certainly showing that there's a market to be made for paying for email, which Google has turned it into, eh, email's free. Yahoo, email's free. Hotmail, email's free. So obviously no ads when you pay for it. They have very good support. And I will say, in terms of actually just working, just works just as much, if not more, than Gmail does. I've noticed that Gmail will go down or have a glitch now and again, whereas Rackspace seems to be pretty solid. So this is the big news out of Rackspace. And we already talked about you being top dog. I am the top dog. So let's go. Let's get our Cloud Focus app pick of the week, if I don't change mine. I think I might now.

Justin Edelstein: Rolls right off the tongue. And I know you're going to change it. You always change yours at the last minute. Last minute. Don't put it down or whatever. Anyway, I'm going to pick something that I'm not even exactly sure how to pronounce it properly. It's either Roamby or Roamby and it's a data visualization tool for the iPad or your iPhone or your iPod touch that connects to multiple different sources of data including salesforce.com So you can it's a freemium product. It's free to connect it to to Excel files, CSV files, HTML, and then you can then connect it to a number of different business type of services. One being Salesforce.com, another one being Google Docs, you can connect it to Crystal Reports, IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services, a bunch of different connections for the for the Pro version.

Jason Atwood: And what does it do when you connect them all?

Justin Edelstein: Well it visualizes your data. It takes your data, like report data, and turns them into really cool looking graphs and charts that are interactive. For example, it can take a report of contacts and turn it into something that looks like a flip book or a flip chart or one of those old school Rolodex type of looking things. And it does neat lines and charts and donuts and cool things with your data that you couldn't normally do with it to visualize it. I know a lot of people are into data visualization.

Jason Atwood: Does it connect the data and make a connection between them? So if I'm connecting, this is what we talked about the other week about Salesforce data contacts and some other data contacts and connect those and then...

Justin Edelstein: I don't know the answer to that. And how much is it? You said it's free? And Roambi Lite is free. Roambi Pro is $99 a user a year, which will allow you to connect to Google Docs and Salesforce. And they have another product, which is like their enterprise version, which I don't actually have a price for, which is connecting to SAP and Microsoft and IBM and all the big boys.

Jason Atwood: Roambi, R-O-A-M-B-I dot com. Sounds interesting. I won't change my pick.

24:10 Justin Edelstein: Oh, you were going to change it.

Jason Atwood: I'm not going to change it.

Justin Edelstein: I'm interested in what you were going to change it to.

Jason Atwood: Well, I'll tell you, because we already kind of talked about it. I was going to change to Rackspace email, which was. We already talked about that. We talked about it. So I'm moving on. I'll pick something that is probably known by most people out there, but we've, again, been helping clients do some of this work. So it's sort of top of mind, which is Google Analytics. I will tell you, as someone who's been running a website, my own personal websites since sometime in 1996, stats have always been something that very hard to do and hard to do well. I've always used a bunch of free products and I've worked in organizations, big enterprise companies that used big paid products like Webtrends, which never seemed to work like they're supposed to work. Never. But basically the idea is I want to be able to see who's coming to my website, my blog, my whatever, and what they're doing on there, where they're clicking. Google Analytics, I think they bought it from somebody. It's just that. You take a little piece of code that you sign up for an account, it's free, you sign up for an account, you then put that little piece of code on your website, and then that gets loaded every time someone goes to your website, and it gives you a whole bunch of really great statistics including, obviously, where people were coming from, what search key phrases they're looking from. I noticed the other day that our website, we were getting a lot of traffic from Google Maps. And I went to look and it's because I put up our office in Google Maps and so people are finding us from Google Maps, which is a big thing. I found that people were searching for you and found our website because it's searching for Justin Edelstein on the internet. So it does all that. It also does some really great, talk about visualizations, there's one where it'll show you click overlay, so it'll kind of do a take your website and then overlay hot heat maps of where people are clicking and what percentage of people click on what links. So really, if you want to make your website better and see what people are using, you think that people click on that one link on the top left, but maybe they don't. Maybe they always go down this other one so you can sort of start to do the analysis on that. It's a great product. It's free. Obviously, they're taking in the data and they're using that data for other purposes, probably to take over the world and create columns.

Justin Edelstein: They always do that. Yes.

Jason Atwood: So it's free in terms of you don't pay anything for it, but you are giving up a percentage of your data that they would no longer, they wouldn't have. You connect it up with your AdSense or your AdWords account, you can actually get some really great data as it comes in from your clicks. So mine is Google Analytics by Google. It is free. There is no premium. There's no free. There's no, nothing. I don't think you can go any higher than the regular Google Analytics. So it's free. Free as free as you can be.

Justin Edelstein: Google's interesting with their products.

Jason Atwood: They have a different model and data is their model. They can give something away that's very powerful, but that gives them more data. It's worth it to them.

Justin Edelstein: Remember looking at their search box? Which one? The enterprise search, literally the box, that yellow box.

27:15 Jason Atwood: Oh yeah, their black box, but it was actually yellow. Yeah. For the search that you put in on your internet or something. It's just interesting.

Justin Edelstein: There's the product that they probably could have delivered, not in a box.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, as we know for the company that we worked at, that company would never have allowed...

Justin Edelstein: They weren't even going to allow the box. They weren't going to allow the box because... Because the box was connected back to Google.

Jason Atwood: Well, and you couldn't get into it. You couldn't see the code. You couldn't do anything. It was Google's algorithms, what they're very protective of, because it's sort of... It is what makes them Google, is that they're algorithms for page rank.

Justin Edelstein: It's just interesting that that's their one box product, isn't it?

Jason Atwood: Google TV is now coming out. Oh, yeah, I guess that's right. And Android is... You could talk about Android. I guess I think not really it's more soft. Well, it's software. I think software

Justin Edelstein: It's so funny on a heart on a piece on a device

Jason Atwood: Yes, right and they're they're getting more into more in that again Google TV Android even there just Picasso has a

Justin Edelstein: has a

Jason Atwood: Install right? Oh, well, they have tons at Google Maps. It's a Google Earth That's a this install tons for them for the iPhone now They've released you can do Google Voice now apps can be a voice on my phone. So tons of stuff like that If you looked at all their products, I think... Tentacles. Yeah, there's tentacles everywhere. They're transcribing my voicemails. Strange. So that's it. You want to follow us and hear more about what we talk about when we're not here on the podcast, you can go to blog.arkusinc.com, which is our blog. It's the Arcus blog. You can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash Arcus Inc, or twitter.com slash Jason M out, which is me, and twitter.com slash just Edelstein, which is Justin here. Also we're on Facebook. Who isn't? So facebook.com forward slash Arcus Inc. It's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. And the best way to keep up to date with this podcast, because we, although we've been recording you basically on the same time every week now, is to go to iTunes and type in Cloud Focus Weekly, hit subscribe. Every time we publish a new article, a new podcast, you'll get it. It flows down very easily. It's a great way to find out if you don't want to follow us in these other places. You can listen to it. It'll then come on to one of your many thousand devices that you have to listen to podcasts. We'd love for you to do that. If you're there, please leave us a nice review. We do like reviews. That would be great. And until next week, thank you for enjoying this week of Cloud Focus Weekly. I'm going to say week one more time. And until then, we'll see you on the clouds.