Structure News: Does AWS set the pace for tech?

Where A Cloudy Forecast Is Welcome April 29, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the surprising gap between security and tech pros, the continuing sentiment that AI is the future of computing, and the evolving nature of Amazon Web Services as a tech weathervane. STRUCTURE NEWS BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN INFOSEC AND TECH AT STRUCTURE SECURITY As we put together the agenda for Structure Security, scheduled for September 26th and 27th in San Francisco, I’ve been having so many great conversations about the present -- and future -- of security with our council of advisors. I’ve been surprised by how many of those folks have bemoaned the gap between information security professionals and technology professionals when it comes to product development, and explored that topic in a post this week. INDUSTRY NEWS U.S. CYBERATTACKS TARGET ISIS IN A NEW LINE OF COMBAT Cyberwarfare is going to be an interesting part of the 21st century. The New York Times confirmed this week that the National Security Agency has targeted ISIS networks with what one official called “cyberbombs,” hoping to learn enough about how ISIS communicates to impersonate its leaders and direct its troops into, presumably, drone-friendly areas. BOX AND DROPBOX VIE FOR MORE CREDIBILITY WITH BUSINESSES File-sharing companies Box and Dropbox will be forever compared because of the similarities in their names, products, and timing, and they’re both keen on breaking into big businesses, too. Fortune looks at product releases from both companies this week that they think will be attractive to business customers still skeptical about the benefits of cloud file storage. JEFF BEZOS, ASHTON KUTCHER, AND GEN. PETRAEUS BACK CRIMEFIGHTING TECH MARK43 Most local police departments around the country tend to be woefully behind when it comes to tech adoption, thanks to budget constraints and public wariness. But some big names are backing startup Mark43, which is building software that promises to be a state-of-the-art information-dashboard-of-sorts to police departments, according to New York Business Journal. INSIDE OPENAI, ELON MUSK’S WILD PLAN TO SET ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FREE We’ve been following OpenAI for a few months now, and Wired has a more detailed look at how the organization that promises to bring AI technology to the masses is faring. It released its first piece of software this week, and is managing to hold onto some world-class AI talent amid a market for AI talent that makes Bay Area real estate look tame. OPENSTACK: THE TELECOM’S CLOUD OF CHOICE The headline will strike some as a back-handed compliment, but ZDNet reports from the OpenStack Summit in Austin that telecom companies are turning to the software to build their own clouds. There are still more traditional IT users of OpenStack than in telecommunications, according to the report, but all the growth is coming from telecom companies. IN ANNUAL LETTER, SUNDAR PICHAI SAYS COMPUTING, AND GOOGLE, WILL BE DRIVEN BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Google is determined to make its work in artificial intelligence the selling point of its cloud challenge to Amazon Web Services (more on that in a bit), and it used this year’s annual letter to shareholders (which used to be called the Founders’ Letter until Alphabet came along) to reinforce that point. “We will move from mobile first to an AI first world,” Pichai wrote, and as Forbes noted, much of the letter focused on this AI-led future. BIG PICTURE If you were looking for a sign regarding the health of the tech industry from first-quarter earnings reports this week, you likely walked away confused. Apple reported earnings that weren’t a company record for that particular quarter for the first time in what seems like forever; Facebook destroyed its earnings estimates and chose the occasion to announce that founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking further control of the company; and Twitter, well, actually, nobody was surprised by Twitter’s earnings. I’m starting to wonder if a new tech bellwether is emerging in Amazon Web Services. Amazon reported Thursday that its cloud division recorded quarterly revenue of $2.57 billion, up 64 percent from last year, and operating income of $604 million, up almost threefold from last year’s $195 million, as reported by Techcrunch. To be fair, AWS earnings are probably more a measure of the health of the startup/venture capital world than the tech industry in general, which is so complex these days as to be influenced by many different global factors. But an amazing number of modern consumer web startups -- including several in the rarefied and suddenly dangerous “unicorn” group -- rely on AWS for their very existence. What happens when these high-growth no-profit startups start running out of money, which is keeping lots of folks in tech up nights in 2016? If the funding environment dries up, and these companies start folding or submitting to fire sales to larger tech players, AWS results could be a leading indicator of that strife. I doubt Amazon itself is that worried: as we discussed during Structure 2015, AWS revenue is coming from way more places these days than the Valley startup community. And 64-percent year-over-year growth would indicate that demand for AWS is still strong across the board, from multinationals dipping their toe in its clouds to massive web businesses like Netflix and Pinterest continuing to add users at a healthy clip, as Fortune notes. But the tech startup community remains the heart of its business. I’ll be watching Amazon’s second and third-quarter results for evidence of the startup winter.        DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Structure News: The end of the easy money in tech

Where Life Is Just A Party And Parties Weren't Meant 2 Last April 22, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Mesosphere's new open-source project, the death of a tech industry legend, and perhaps the strongest warning yet that winter is coming for Silicon Valley. STRUCTURE NEWS THE STRUCTURE SHOW: IBM'S SLOW DECLINE, MESOSPHERE'S OPEN-SOURCE FUTURE, MAGIC LEAP'S PROMISE Stacey Higginbotham joined me this week on the Structure Show to discuss the most eclectic group of topics we've yet tackled on the show. We cover IBM's earnings, Mesosphere's big open-source announcement of DC/OS (more on that in a bit), and the drip-drop of information that is being carefully parsed out by Magic Leap, a company which appears to be on to some interesting advancements in virtual reality -- assuming it ships. Check out Wired's big profile of Magic Leap -- which is extremely interesting but short on details -- for a look inside the company.   INDUSTRY NEWS HACKING TEAM'S "ILLEGAL" LATIN AMERICAN EMPIRE The Hacking Team is quite controversial within security circles for its business model: finding exploits to sell to surveillance-minded governments around the world. Motherboard has a great look at how the company operates in Latin America, which while it might be "legal" in some countries certainly is raising a lot of eyebrows. IBM'S PAINFUL TRANSITION IS FAR FROM OVER IBM kicked off tech report card season with a typical performance of late: overall revenue was down slightly as the company sought to emphasize that revenue from "new" business lines was healthy. Quartz highlights the fact that while the hundred-year-old company is certainly not facing its first technology transition, this one could be difficult to execute. REMEMBERING BILL CAMPBELL Silicon Valley adores its technology visionaries, yet the death this week of Bill Campbell, former Intuit CEO and consigliore to some of the most significant tech entrepreneurs of the last two decades, made it clear how much the Valley knows it needs a human touch. Fortune's Adam Lashinsky had perhaps my favorite look back at the impact Campbell had on the tech industry (with props to one of his best accomplishments, saving the Old Pro sports bar in Palo Alto). INTEL TO CUT 12,000 JOBS AS PC DEMAND PLUMMETS Intel has figured out how to survive in the cloud era, as its datacenter group continues to grow, but the mobile era continues to be a huge problem for the venerable chip maker. The New York Times reports that 12,000 people (11 percent of Intel's workforce) will lose their jobs as Intel tries to make the same painful transition IBM is going through to a new era of computing in which it doesn't hold all the cards. THE INEVITABLE: MESOSPHERE OPEN SOURCES THE MESOS-BASED DATA CENTER OPERATING SYSTEM The rise of containers has created a ton of flexibility for application developers, but at the cost of increased complexity across data centers. Mesosphere believes it can help companies better address those complexities by open-sourcing its DC/OS product and giving developers one more reason to use it over other open-source container management products, according to The New Stack. WHAT MY THREE YEARS AT NETFLIX TAUGHT ME ABOUT SCALING A STARTUP We've often looked at Netflix's growth -- entirely on Amazon Web Services -- as a prime example of how to scale a modern consumer web startup. Writing in Fast Company, former Netflix engineer Ariel Tseitlin explains how Netflix made the transition to the cloud and some tips for success should you find yourself in a similar place.   BIG PICTURE Earlier this year, rumblings began that the tech sector was headed for a bit of a cooling-off period, as several cloud startups and public companies alike stumbled and venture capitalists put their wallets away for the first time in several years. Since then, the market has rebounded a bit and good companies have continued to get funded, but veteran Silicon Valley investor Bill Gurley fired a warning shot across the bow of any so-called "unicorns" who haven't figured out that business cycles have both an up and a down. It's a must-read for any founders, employees, investors, or observers of tech startups created in the last eight years. Gurley lays out a case for how a growth-at-all-costs mentality has hurt founders and investors alike, because now that the funding environment has changed, it's harder to justify burning cash without a real plan for profits. Those of us without a direct stake in many of these companies have been pointing this out for years, and I had to chuckle at the speed with which this post became gospel in just 24 hours; although to be fair, Gurley has been sounding this alarm for a long time. At some point in a business cycle, it no longer becomes cool to lose money while chasing growth: there are only so many companies that can win that race before running out of cash. And when big tech companies are scuffling a bit -- Intel's layoffs aside, both Google and Microsoft reported disappointing earnings results this week that hit both their stocks -- the exit path becomes a little trickier for startups that don't have the business model to go public. The easy money in this cycle appears to have come and gone, replaced by what Gurley calls "dirty" deals that protect late investors at the expense of founders and (especially) startup employees. Most startups in the Structure universe, by virtue of their enterprise computing bent, haven't been quite as susceptible to this grow-grow-grow culture because their customers demand stable suppliers. But Gurley's post is another reminder that 2016 might be the most difficult year for fund raising since 2008 or 2009, and if you're not getting busy preparing for that fact, get busy dying. Image courtesy Flickr user Philippe Teuwen       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Structure News: Stop me before I legislate again

Where Our Back Doors Lead To The Cocktail Party April 15th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the return of the tech IPO, a rough day for Google's cloud, and why sometimes it's a really good thing that Congress is so dysfunctional when it comes to passing laws. STRUCTURE NEWS THE STRUCTURE SHOW: SECUREWORKS GOES PUBLIC, BOX GOES OVERSEAS, FACEBOOK GOES BOT-CRAZY We cranked out another edition of The Structure Show this week, with Barb Darrow of Fortune joining me for a delightful conversation on how SecureWorks going public is another step on the long road to the Dell-EMC merger. We also ponder how Box will expand overseas without a ton of cash (spoiler: partnerships) and how bots are taking over the news cycles, this time led by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. STRUCTURE DATA 2016 EVENT COVERAGE The Structure Data 2016 archives are complete, with all 34 sessions available here, along with videos of each session. Thanks once again to all the speakers, sponsors, attendees, and moderators that made Structure Data 2016 such a great event for fans of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.   INDUSTRY NEWS SECUREWORKS COULD RAISE UP TO $181 MILLION IN IPO Just in case you were wondering if there was actually going to be a tech IPO in 2016, SecureWorks stepped up to the plate this week with plans to go public, as reported by Fortune. The IPO is a substantial milestone for the epic Dell-EMC deal, as it will get SecureWorks off Dell's books while (assuming the IPO goes well) giving it a nice stock asset to offset the mountain of debt it is using to buy EMC. BOX TEAMS UP WITH AMAZON, IBM TO OFFER LOCAL STORAGE WORLDWIDE One of the consequences of the post-Snowden era is the growing reluctance of companies based outside the U.S. to store their data inside the country. That means setting up datacenters around the world, or, if you're a company like Box that doesn't have the cash to finance that kind of expansion, partnering with the big guys like Amazon Web Services and IBM, as Recode notes. GOOGLE HAS GIVEN ITS OPEN-SOURCE MACHINE LEARNING SOFTWARE A BIG UPGRADE Google open-sourced TensorFlow, its machine-learning software, last year right before Structure 2015, and The Verge reports that Google has improved the software by making it possible to run it across distributed machines. Improving access to AI technology was a big theme of Structure Data 2016, and it sounds like TensorFlow (which The Verge says is the most popular machine-learning project on Github) is making an impact. DIGITALOCEAN GETS $130 MILLION CREDIT LINE BECAUSE SERVERS ARE REALLY EXPENSIVE Remember when every internet company had to spend big money building out servers? While most of us are thankful those days are done, DigitalOcean has taken out a credit line to fund expansion of its datacenters in hopes of attracting bigger cloud clients, according to Techcrunch.  GOOGLE APOLOGIZES FOR CLOUD OUTAGE THAT ONE PERSON DESCRIBES AS A 'COMEDY OF ERRORS' Of course, back in the day when you had to build out your own infrastructure, you couldn't blame someone else when your systems crashed. Google Compute Engine went down for 18 minutes (the computing equivalent of an eon) on Monday, and Google, coming off a big marketing push for its cloud services over the past month, apologized profusely to clients like Zulily and Evite, as reported by Business Insider. MICROSOFT SUES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OVER DATA GAG ORDERS It's been a testy year so far between the tech industry and Washington (more on that in a bit), and relations don't appear to be warming after Microsoft sued the DOJ Thursday demanding the right to notify its customers when data they have stored in Microsoft's cloud services is accessed by the government. "It’s very important for businesses to know when the government is accessing their file room, whether the file room is down the hall or in the cloud," said Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith, as noted by Bloomberg.   BIG PICTURE The only thing more dangerous than a member of Congress who knows what they are doing is a member of Congress who has no clue what they are doing. The Senate Intelligence Committee released the draft of a bill on encryption this week to howls from the tech community, as can be expected these days whenever the government tries to weigh in on encryption. Co-sponsors Richard Burr of North Carolina (above, right) and Dianne Feinstein of California (above, left, and who should know better, given her constituency) want to compel tech companies "to provide 'technical assistance' to government investigators seeking locked data," as reported by The Hill. There are an amazing number of people in government circles who, out of either confusion or willful ignorance of how technology works, continue to think it's possible to believe that U.S. citizens have a right to strong encryption to protect themselves from cybercrime while believing that law enforcement should have the right to break that encryption as needed. This notion of a "magical key" that could supposedly unlock encrypted technology products only under certain circumstances causes eyes to roll across the tech industry every time that phrase is uttered. You only need to look at two other recent developments reported by Motherboard to understand why. First, the FBI quietly revealed earlier this month that a group of hackers has had access to its servers and networks since at least 2011, and have "stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks." Then we learned that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has had "a single, global encryption key" to consumer BlackBerry handsets that it could use at will to monitor messages sent from those phones (businesses that use BlackBerry's enterprise software create their own encryption keys that the company -- and, presumably, the RCMP -- can't access). If a government orders tech companies to create ways for law enforcement to access their products, those methods will be discovered and used by others for criminal purposes: it's just a matter of time. Fortunately or unfortunately for BlackBerry, there is little commercial incentive to hack into its handsets at this point, given how consumers have deserted them by the millions (even in Canada). But swap the RCMP for the FBI (which just admitted that its systems have been unsecure), and BlackBerry for Apple, and suddenly things change. Burr and Feinstein want to freeze the development of encryption technology right as cybercrime becomes extremely lucrative: for all the frenzy around smartphones, only 68 percent of U.S. adults had one in late 2015 while 92 percent had some form of mobile phone, according to Pew Research Center. That number is going to grow, and the commercial incentives to hack those phones will grow alongside. And for all their concerns about terrorism, Fast Company notes that if the U.S. enacts such a bill, tech-savvy terrorists (which is quite a few of them these days) will simply use technology created outside the U.S. that isn't subject to those laws. This bill has little chance of passing. But at some point, the aging generation of Congresspeople that make our laws need to truly understand how the technology works, or at least hire a group of advisers that can prevent them from doing more harm than good.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Structure News: The rise of the freelance hacker

Where Opening Day Brings Bots Instead Of Bats April 8th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the how bots are the talk of the web in early 2016, Nvidia's new blockbuster deep-learning chip, and a fast-growing and scary portion of the gig economy. STRUCTURE NEWS THE STRUCTURE SHOW: THE RISE OF THE BOTS? After a brief hiatus due to Structure Data and my relocation north, The Structure Show is back for your listening pleasure this week. Stacey Higginbotham and I talk about Microsoft and open source, a shakeup at Intel, and whether the hype behind bots is justified. INTEL'S GROBMAN: YOU CAN'T LEGISLATE MATH Steve Grobman of Intel got off one of the best lines at Structure Data 2016, at least in my opinion, in discussing the (at the time) pending Apple-FBI case. "Encryption is math. You can’t legislate or prevent the use of math any more than you can legislate the use of gravity,” he said, something we'll likely discuss this November at Structure Security (more on that in a bit).   INDUSTRY NEWS TECHNOLOGY UPGRADES GET WHITE HOUSE OUT OF THE 20TH CENTURY If you think your infrastructure is outdated, imagine having to upgrade the infrastructure at the White House, which was not exactly designed for the modern era of technology. The New York Times takes a look at the efforts by the Obama administration to upgrade some of the basic gear, including an effort to make sense of a basement full of cables that staffers were scared to touch. THE BUSINESS INSIDER INTERVIEW: SATYA NADELLA Coming off the Build conference last week, Business Insider sat down with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella for a conversation about the current state of the company and tech industry. "The thing that has fundamentally changed is the ubiquity of computing that's there for us to take advantage of," he said, and while it's taken Microsoft too long to embrace that change, it's reinventing every product it manages around that core truth. HOW CERN FIGHTS HACKERS Systems like the Large Hadron Collider make people nervous enough as is, and if you're in charge of security for CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, you're paid to be extra nervous. Motherboard examines how CERN is fighting off its attackers (a group that includes "everybody") with the help from the white-hat hacker community. NVIDIA CREATES A 15B-TRANSISTOR CHIP FOR DEEP LEARNING Nvidia has always been known as the company that makes sure you can play PC games at the highest performance levels possible. But chips for deep-learning research are now Nvidia's fastest growing business, and its new Tesla P100 chip looks like it might be one of the most powerful deep-learning oriented products on the market when it arrives, according to Venturebeat. AFTER 10 YEARS, AMAZON'S CLOUD SERVICE IS A $10 BILLION BUSINESS Amazon let Google and Microsoft have their marketing events in March to tout their clouds before waiting until April to reveal that Amazon Web Services is on pace to do $10 billion in revenue in 2016, a figure its rivals aren't close to even approaching. AWS "is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, (and) growing at a faster rate," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in revealing the milestone, as reported by Recode. HERE'S HOW GOOGLE MAKES SURE IT (ALMOST) NEVER GOES DOWN For as much traffic as the company handles across as many regions of the world and different services, a Google outage is a pretty rare thing. Wired looks at how Google's engineers make sure that's the case, and how its practices have been adopted across the tech industry.   BIG PICTURE It was a good week for the underground hacking market, which perhaps even more than nation-state and major corporation-sanctioned hacking, presents quite a danger to the chief information security officers of the world. The freelance hacking market is booming, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently you can now spend as little as 129 bucks to hire someone to break into a desired Gmail or Yahoo email account, and corporate accounts command a mere $500 for access. Sure, most of these "attacks" are probably social engineering or phishing as opposed to sophisticated breaches, but the cost to an organization can be immense either way. Additionally, Brian Krebs reports that the FBI is warning companies of new attacks centered around the impersonation of a leadership figure in a company, usually the CEO. The idea is to get someone lower down on the totem pole that doesn't usually interact with the boss to move a little quicker in transferring funds or information out of the company via a spoofed URL. For good reason, a lot of talk in the security world centers around the big scary threats posed by organized hackers, ransomware, and state-sponsored intellectual espionage. But "petty" hackers pose just as much of a threat to the average organization, given how much corporate data is available to employees and how damaging (or embarrassing) the leak of such information could be. Consider this topic -- the rise of the freelance hacker -- something that will definitely be on the agenda for Structure Security this September. It certainly pays better than the market for freelance writers, cab drivers, or delivery people.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

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Structure News: Microsoft continues to Build its cloud future

Where We're Not Foolin' April 1st, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the sudden end to the Apple-FBI fight, how Asana beat the fund-raising crunch, and Microsoft's pitch to cloud developers. STRUCTURE NEWS AT MICROSOFT RESEARCH, YOU LIVE BY THE AI BOT, YOU DIE BY THE AI BOT Just a few weeks before Microsoft found itself at the middle of a firestorm over the near-instant loss of innocence of its Tay bot, Peter Lee (picture, with Jack Clark of Bloomberg) told Structure Data 2016 attendees about a similar project in China that has over 40 million followers without controversy. Looks like the bot era will adhere to one of the oldest computing maxims: garbage in, garbage out. CAN MACHINE LEARNING KILL SURGE PRIING AT UBER? Surge pricing is Uber's attempt to deal with market inefficiencies: when there are more riders than drivers, expect to pay more for a ride. However, machine learning techniques could allow Uber to better anticipate surges in demand that seem to come out of nowhere, said Jeff Schneider, engineering lead for Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, at Structure Data 2016. INDUSTRY NEWS THE APPLE-FBI BATTLE IS OVER, BUT THE NEW CRYTO WARS HAVE JUST BEGUN After all that brinksmanship, the dispute between the FBI and Apple over security, cryptography, and back doors came an abrupt halt when the FBI figured out another way to get into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino terrorists. Wired looks at the aftermath of the FBI's decision to suspend its lawsuit, and what might come next. MARINES FORMING NEW CYBERWARRIOR UNIT From the halls of Montezuma, to the ISPs of North Korea? The U.S Marines have formed their own "cyberwarrior" unit, reports Stars and Stripes, joining the rest of its military counterparts in forming a group dedicated to "both defensive and offensive operations." THE NEXT REIGN OF CLOUD KINGS WILL NOT RULE WITH "IRON" FISTS Now that cloud computing is very much established as a computing strategy, the battleground for cloud providers will shift to the tools and services they provide on top of their basic infrastructure. The Next Platform examines how this might play out, paying special attention to Google's assertion that artificial intelligence is the next wave of must-have cloud services. TASK MANAGEMENT APP ASANA RAISES $50M AT A $600M VALUATION LED BY YC'S SAM ALTMAN Despite all the talk about money in Silicon Valley being harder to find than parking around The Battery at happy hour these days, quality companies continue to find a way. The latest is Asana, founded by early Facebook employees, which picked up another $50 million this week to continue building out its management application, according to Techcrunch. GOOGLE ADMITS ORIGINAL ENTERPRISE CLOUD STRATEGY WAS WRONG, WHY IT'S GONE IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION Left unspoken in much of Google's cloud marketing push over the last few weeks was the fact that it's actually pivoting away from its initial plans for this market. Tech Republic looks back at Google's initial cloud computing strategy, and how it got to this point. IS ALPHAGO REALLY SUCH A BIG DEAL? Spoiler alert: yes. "I see AlphaGo not as a revolutionary breakthrough in itself, but rather as the leading edge of an extremely important development: the ability to build systems that can capture intuition and learn to recognize patterns," writes Michael Nielsen in Quanta Magazine.   BIG PICTURE It was Microsoft's turn in the spotlight this week, hosting thousands in downtown San Francisco for its annual Build conference. An awful lot of the Build content focused on the Windows franchise, which despite the seismic shifts in computing over the last decade retains quite a few users. But there were still plenty of enterprise computing nuggets to talk about as Satya Nadella executes the turn of the Battleship Microsoft. -- Microsoft's commitment to embracing open-source technologies continues full steam ahead, as it committed to putting tools from recent acquisition Xamarin into the next version of Windows, so that developers can write cross-platform apps. And Linux apps will be able to run on Windows through the coming release of Ubuntu for Windows, a joint project between Microsoft and Ubuntu developer Canonical (whose founder, Mark Shuttleworth, spoke at Structure 2015). -- It sought to dent Amazon Web Services' Lambda service with a preview of Azure Function, which it is billing as a "serverless compute" service. And speaking of tweaking its much larger competitor, it announced that BMW is using Azure after a long run for the German carmaker as an AWS marketing chip. -- And it stepped in as the hero to an awful lot of developers who were frustrated and caught adrift by Facebook's decision to close down the Parse development platform. Fear not: Azure will support Parse developers and throw in some incentives to move their work over to Microsoft. Like Google, Microsoft has an uphill battle when it comes to the public cloud market, and much of its strategy this week was reflective of that competitive position. But unlike Google, Microsoft is throwing everything it has at the cloud opportunity, sending a clear signal once again that cloud computing services will be one of Microsoft's biggest priorities over the next several years. It's up to CEO Satya Nadella (above) to find the right mix of offense and defense to stay ahead of a hard-charging Google and a well-positioned AWS.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.