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Experience datacenter availability Excel That Scales offers greater resiliency and reliability over desktop-based solutions. GigaSpaces IMDG instances are replicated such that every partition has one or more backups, and these backups do not reside on the same physical server as the primary partition. If a system fails, the processing logic can be transparently routed to an identical instance on the backup partition without experiencing an interruption in service. Furthermore, the GigaSpaces technology provides a self-healing environment. When the primary partition fails, the backup becomes the primary partition, and another identical partition instance is automatically spawned, thus helping to ensure that a backup is always available. Excel That Scales is unique in that it co-locates logic and data in the same process. Excel decouples the computational logic from the presentation layer and GigaSpaces completes the solution by recoupling the logic with the associated data and executing them in the same process.

Unlike some architectures that increase in complexity as they scale, GigaSpaces, running on Sun platforms, delivers limitless scalability and low-latency performance for highly demanding applications and environments. Excel That Scales is optimized to run on the Solaris 10 OS and benefits from its innovative virtualization technology. The combination of GigaSpaces and Solaris OS helps financial firms cope with the exponential growth of market data and transaction volumes by providing the ability to run separate Excel-based applications in individual Solaris Containers. This integration of technologies enables IT managers to reap the benefits of virtualization while helping to manage growth and control complexity.

Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years: GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICEQuarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008 Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office. And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember: Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.

The "Windows monopoly+Office monopoly=Microsoft" story was absolutely true 10 years ago, but less so now. 1. It looks as if the "Office" revenue figures are coming from MSFT's reported revenues in the Business segment. That's not all Office. Based on what they've said at the last few Financial Analyst Meetings, Exchange is approaching $2B/year, SharePoint is about $1B/year, and Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) is more than $1B per year. I also know that Project has been a $1B/year business for a long time (believe it or not), and products such as Comms Server and Visio contribute around $500m/year. Margins on all these products are lower than on Office, but most (not Comms Server) are profitable. 2. In addition to all the non-Office products that compose its Business segment as mentioned above, the Server and Tools business (Windows Server, SQL Server) is profitable (30% margins) and growing revenues average of 15% for the last six years. Not monopoly, but a good business. Look at all these stats together, and seems like they should get out of search and advertising and sell off (or scale back to maintenance mode) most of the consumer online sites, focusing instead on hosted business apps--they're already doing it with Exchange and SharePoint, why not Office? If somebody's going to canniblize their "real" business, it might as well be them.

The "race to the bottom" is a familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance. In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many competing versions of HTML exist. At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor, XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML 1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions' capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions. Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in XHTML 1.1. Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top 100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in widespread use.