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.