Structure News: Apple's new cloud strategy: Let everybody sit together!

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where The Only Clouds We Hate Surround Hurricane Matthew October 7th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Apple's plan to jumpstart its cloud computing group (again), another tough week for Yahoo, and another case of strange bedfellows in the cloud. BIG PICTURE For all its amazing accomplishments across the tech landscape, Apple remains somewhat of a running joke in cloud computing circles. iTunes remains a relic of another era, iMessage outages are far too common, and the default amount of iCloud storage is laughable compared to competitive products. So, eight years after Steve Jobs threw a fit at Apple's web teams following the disastrous launch of MobileMe, why are we still having this conversation? Apple is probably the best organization on the planet when it comes to hardware and software design, but it's missing an enormous opportunity to be a public cloud services player: just think how many iOS developers would consider running their applications on Apple services instead of Amazon Web Services or Azure if Apple had a competitive product, optimized for iOS workloads, maybe running on servers with customized ARM processors designed by Apple? Apple has the resources to make that happen. But first things first. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple plans to move all of its cloud-facing teams (iTunes, Maps, Siri, for example) into a single division that will reside in the same building. The report also indicates that Apple has a new infrastructure strategy called "Pie, "in which it is running several important workloads on its own Apple-made infrastructure. If Apple can get its cloud infrastructure story right, it could offer its developers the holy trinity of cloud services (software, infrastructure, and platform) at aggressive prices, backed by the growing revenue it gets from the consumer-facing cloud services it already operates, such as iTunes and Apple Music. Maybe it's not at AWS or Google scale just yet, but Apple is building datacenters and snapping up talent. Bloomberg's report indicated that employee collaboration and bug fixes were hampered by the old strategy of siloing these cloud groups, so maybe this is just the step Apple needs as it looks for new sources of growth after saturating the planet with iPhones. Apple doesn't need to be the best cloud computing company on the planet, but if it wants its iPhone customers and developers to spend more of their money with Apple on web services, instead of Google or AWS, it needs to get better. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE TICKETS GO UP IN PRICE MIDNIGHT FRIDAY We're getting all the pieces in place for the ninth annual Structure event, scheduled for November 8th and 9th in San Francisco, and if you're ready to buy a ticket, today is a good day. Early-bird prices will increase on Structure tickets as of midnight Pacific Time Friday evening, and since you're already planning to attend, you might as well save you (or your company) a little extra cash by getting your tickets here. Some great speakers are on tap for Structure 2016, including Urs Holzle of Google, Jay Parikh of Facebook, and Jason Forrester of Snaproute (pictured). A preliminary list of speakers is here, but we'll be adding more speakers and topics soon, so stay tuned. EXCLUSIVE: YAHOO CISO BOB LORD DISCUSSES HISTORIC BREACH, SECURITY CULTURE AT STRUCTURE SECURITY 2016 It can't have been easy for Yahoo CISO Bob Lord to appear at Structure Security last week and answer questions about the causes and timing of the massive security breach suffered by his company, but showing up is an important part of life. Lord doesn't break a lot of new ground in this video interview, which we believe is the first interview Yahoo has done about the breach since disclosing it, but I was struck by his determination to contribute something back to the security community once he's freed from legal constraints to discuss exactly what happened. INDUSTRY NEWS AT SALESFORCE'S BIG SHOW, THE PITCH IS MORE DREAM THAN REALITY SoMa traffic will start returning to normal this weekend after Salesforce.com's big annual show moves on, and The Information (subscription required, but you should really get it) takes a look back at Dreamforce announcements from past years and how they've panned out. Spoiler: results have been mixed, but if Marc Benioff buys Twitter next week that's all anybody will remember about Salesforce.com in 2016. SAMSUNG ACQUIRES VIV, A NEXT-GEN AI ASSISTANT BUILT BY THE CREATORS OF APPLES SIRI Android partners that rely on Google Android development are once again being forced to consider how they'd fare with Google as a direct competitor, and Samsung isn't taking any chances. Amid a big Google event this week to introduce new consumer products, Samsung announced that it had acquired some AI smarts in Viv, a younger sibling of Apple's Siri, according to Techcrunch. VMWARE WILL TEAM WITH FORMER NEMESIS AMAZON IN CLOUD PACT Changing tech cycles always make for fun pairings between companies that used to fight tooth and nail. VMware once considered AWS "a mortal enemy," but Fortune reports the two companies will soon share a stage to announce a partnership allowing VMware software to run better on AWS cloud services. YAHOO SAID TO HAVE AIDED U.S. EMAIL SERVICE BY ADAPTING SPAM FILTER The details of this one are still a little sketchy, but it's likely another black eye for Yahoo. The U.S. government seems to have convinced Yahoo to help it search for criminals using existing spam filters to scan incoming email traffic for certain data, according to the New York Times, and privacy advocates are up in arms. VENTURE CAPITALIST MARC ANDREESSEN EXPLAINS HOW AI WILL CHANGE THE WORLD Check out this Vox interview with Marc Andreessen about the rise of AI and how it will impact the future of tech product development. He thinks AI is the next big platform differentiator, the way iOS changed the world in 2007 or the web browser did so back in the 1990s. SAM ALTMAN'S MANIFEST DESTINY This piece is a little broader than I usually highlight, but this profile of Y Combinator President Sam Altman in The New Yorker is a must-read for its vivid description of modern Silicon Valley. No matter your outlook, you'll find something in here that resonates, from the awesome power of startups to reinvent the world for the better to the growing notion that a lot of these tech leaders are, um, different. QUOTE OF THE WEEK If you talk to the automakers, they all think that autonomy is a feature they're going to add to their cars. The Silicon Valley companies think it's a brand new architecture. It's a bottom-up reinvention of the fundamental assumptions about how these things work." -- Marc Andreessen, on the coming of AI, in Vox Click here to unsubscribe from this list. 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