A week after Google announced its Cloud Datastore, a managed NoSQL database, it’s cutting its price.

That means a 25 percent lower prices in some cases for both Cloud Datastore per se and Google App Engine’s High Replication Datastore (HRD), according to a Google blog post.

So that’s the latest cloud price cut, but it won’t be the last. Next up: Amazon? Microsoft?

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While Microsoft Windows 8 tablets have generally been sized at 10.1-inches or larger, the company is rumored to be working on a smaller Surface tablet. That would mean it relaxed the hardware requirements an allow for a device such as the W3, which will offer an optional keyboard to help with text input. Will the market support these smaller slates?

I’m not sold on the full Windows 8 Pro experience on such a small device. Yes, the formerly-known-as-Metro touch interface should be fine — quite good, in fact — on the Iconia W3; after all, the same design is great on smaller screens using Windows Phone 8. The bigger challenge is the Windows desktop and legacy app support, which is one of the three major points Acer calls attention to: “The Iconia W3 comes with Microsoft Office so you can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs on the go,” for example.

With the 1280 x 768 resolution, running Office and other apps designed for Windows will present a challenge to most. The smaller screen and relatively lower resolution means smaller touch points, for starters. For maximum productivity in the desktop environment, a mouse will be the better option because the Windows 8 Desktop environment is similar to the Windows desktops of yesterday. Simply put, while Metro has evolved for touch and smaller screens, the Windows desktop hasn’t.

I could be wrong about this, but I do have a few years of experience that tells me it’s not likely. I used 7-inch touchscreen tablets running Windows XP and 7 on several UMPCs, often as a full-time computing device.

It took a ton of patience to make the systems work because apps weren’t designed to fit and run on them. These were the precursors to netbooks, and to a degree that’s what the Iconia W3 reminds me of: A cross between a modern UMPC and a netbook. Like those devices, Acer is using an Intel Atom to power the W3.

I’m sure to hear contrary opinions on this, but what would make the W3 more appealing would be for the tablet to run only the Metro interface and apps. (Ironically, none of the W3 product images even show the desktop, which I think is telling.) Of course, Microsoft doesn’t offer a Windows 8 license with just that part of the platform. I wish it did and did so at a reduced price since one would give up access to legacy Windows apps. In that case, and at the right price, I’d be far more interested in the W3.

Sure, one could buy the device and simply ignore the desktop completely. But you’re paying for it in the product price, which includes the cost of a Windows 8 Pro license. If Microsoft wants to allow partners to make small tablets, a better strategy would be to go Metro only at a lower license cost and truly embrace the touchscreen tablet market.

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“Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.” Page said Google struggles “with people like Microsoft,” he said. As for Oracle, which is suing Google over Android’s use of Java, Google has “a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court … Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

In comments emailed to CIO.com, Microsoft responded:

“It’s ironic that Larry is lending his voice to the discussion of interoperability considering his company’s decision — today — to file a cease and desist order to remove the YouTube app from Windows Phone, let alone the recent decision to make it more difficult for our customers to connect their Gmail accounts to their Windows experience.”

Page’s words came a few days after Microsoft announced interoperability between its Outlook.com email service and Gmail and just after word came out that Google demanded that Microsoft rip its home-built YouTube app from the Windows store (and remove the app off the Windows Phones that were already running it.) So, who’s the winner in this melee? Neither vendor comes out looking good. For Microsoft to complain about Google’s business practices is laughable given its own track record. But for Google to claim it’s not evil while restricting consumer choice is also awful. Consumers might just say a pox on both their houses.

IBM spreads Watson around …

Watson, the natural-language-understanding software that played (and won) at Jeopardy, will be made more broadly available to third-party software makers, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said last week. Thus Watson technology could be used perhaps even by IBM competitors, to build self-teaching computer systems, according to Bloomberg News. IBM has made the most possible PR use of Watson capabilities, working to embed that intelligence in medical and other applications. Last week, IBM took its show on the road to Washington D.C. last week to show Congress the progress Watson has made in healthcare applications.

… as SAP doubles down on HANA

German enterprise software giant SAP, in a move you could see coming miles away, said this week that HANA, it’s in-memory analytical database, will be the brains of its ERP software going forward, according to InformationWeek and other  outlets. Running do-or-die ERP and CRM applications on HANA is a big step up from data warehouses because ERP and CRM cannot go down for hours or a day without severe blowback. And yet at the annual SAPPHIRE conference last week SAP announced general availability of its core Business Suite applications on HANA. Or, as CRN put it, it “bet the farm” on HANA.

From around the interwebs:

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Tableau, Marketo software IPOs soar to cloud from Business Recorder.

Windows 8 is an enterprise non-starter because IT sees no value in changes from ComputerWorld.

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The Microsoft that produced the Windows-Office monopoly let its products get fat, dumb and happy. The Microsoft that must contend with the Oracle database juggernaut puts out a pretty good database. That’s why the sudden influx of new public cloud riches exemplified by this week’s official launch of the Google Compute Engine, coming a few weeks after Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS options, may be tough on the competitors but could be very good for smart IT consumers.

Look for price cuts to continue, along with a flow of new services, and better APIs to access those services.

While I haven’t parsed the instance-by-instance price comparison between GCE and AWS, Google’s decision to sell compute instances in sub-hour increments could lead to cost savings vs. Amazon, which prices by the full hour. Don’t be surprised if Amazon responds, however.

We’ve already seen several price skirmishes in cloud including five or six price cuts in cloud storage in the span of a few weeks late last year between Google, AWS and Microsoft. Heck, even Rackspace, which touts its fanatical support rather than low prices, got into the act a little bit later.

Look for this sort of one-upsmanship (one-downsmanship?) to continue as these extremely well-funded and highly motivated competitors angle to get your workloads on their respective clouds. For the discerning IT buyer, whether she’s at a startup or a Fortune 100 company, that is only good news.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery

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The theory behind tools like these is basically this: sure, public cloud computing is billed as cheap, but too often it turns into a wasteland of dormant instances and other fallow resources. So as inexpensive as it can be, it’s not necessarily efficient or as cheap as it could be. Companies like Newvem, Cloudability, Cloudyn, CloudVertical et al say they can help you optimize all that and save more.

Newvem for Windows Azure covers many of the same core usage and cost metrics as the AWS version. A “heat map” helps users visualize their workloads as they move from on-premise implementations to the cloud, according to Newvem VP of marketing Cameron Peron. The free beta is available now to all Azure users. Newvem’s AWS version started out free as well, and a base level of capabilities remain free, but as of late last year, the company started charging for higher-level services.

Newvem said it sees Azure — which launched its AWS-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service  capabilities last month — gaining traction.

“The size of the Azure installed base is probably one of [Microsoft's] best-kept secrets,” Peron noted. Well, not that secret since Microsoft recently said Azure is a $1 billion-a-year business – a claim that some find difficult to swallow. Newvem would not comment when asked if Microsoft helped fund its Azure tool, but given that Microsoft wants to build the Azure ecosystem and compete better with AWS (as well as the spanking new Google Compute Engine), I’d say it’s a safe bet.

It’s also true that companies like Newvem, which built services around AWS, have been perplexed to see AWS adding richer and deeper monitoring and management services like Trusted Advisor. Given that, it makes sense that these companies offer multi-cloud capabilities.

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Tami Reller, Microsoft CMO.

Reller did not provide much more detail around when customers can get the OS upgrade, but said Microsoft is “very aware” of the holidays and would like to have the OS preloaded on hardware for that selling season. But that desire notwithstanding, buyers can get any Windows 8 device and be assured that 8.1 will be an easy update from the start button  screen, Reller told attendees of the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.

She also characterized 8.1 as an update, more than the usual product tweaks deliverable online, but less than a full new release.

Earlier remarks by Reller in the Financial Times seemed to indicate that Microsoft was rethinking Windows 8 broadly, in response to user feedback, but today 8.1 was positioned as an easy, seamless update. No new interface perks were mentioned.

Windows 8 and RT, which Microsoft launched last fall to put Windows on new form-factor and touch devices, have met mixed reviews. But Reller said it’s met its objectives — running lots of innovative devices including “detachables” where the keyboard can be snapped off to leave a touch-device; convertibles which can shape-shift from laptop to touch device; and plain old traditional laptops and PCs.

Reller also said that Microsoft’s ability to sell into enterprise accounts remains strong and is actually getting stronger. And, for all the angst around Windows 8, the company on its last earnings call said it expects to reap nearly $4 billion in Windows-related licensing revenue this fiscal year. That’s a big number even Windows bashers would have to respect.

This story was updated at 8:31 a.m. PDT with more information about Microsoft enterprise sales and again at 11:34 a.m. PDT to correct the record — Reller talked about updates being easy from the Windows start screen, not the start button.

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Here in Europe, people don’t like their phones too thick and plasticky, and that’s been a consistent criticism levelled at the Lumia 920, Nokia’s previous flagship, and for that matter the very similar-looking 928. The 925 makes things sleek and metallic (I like metal; I used to be a proud owner of the Nokia E71) and is, at 139g, significantly lighter than the 920 (185g) and 928 (163g).

The 8.7-megapixel camera has 6 elements, rather than the 5 found in the 920 and 928, and wireless charging comes courtesy of a snap-on cover rather than being built in, but otherwise it’s really, really similar to the 928: 1GB RAM; 1,280 x 768-pixel, 4.5-inch OLED screen; dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor; and so on.

Here’s how IHS Screen Digest mobile chief Ian Fogg reacted as the unveiling happened:

Strong hardware similarities of #Lumia 925 to 7 month old 920 shows how much #Nokia is held back by Windows Phone’s sparse hardware support—
Ian Fogg (@ianfogg42) May 14, 2013

And there’s the thing. You can tell Nokia didn’t have that much to shout about in hardware terms, because its main message around the 925 is the around the photo-centric apps it’s pre-installing, namely Hipstamatic’s Oggl and Nokia’s own Smart Camera software, which clearly seeks to rival Samsung’s recent efforts in the Galaxy S4. This is all good and fine, but exciting? Not so much.

Look lower

But even if the limitations of the Windows Phone platform don’t allow Nokia to truly exercise its innovation muscles, that doesn’t mean the Finnish handset maker is taking it easy. Just look at what it’s doing at the low end of its range, once we’re out of Microsoft territory.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the QWERTY-enabled Asha 210 offers an incredible amount of social functionality for its $72 price tag (the Lumia 925 costs just north of $600). And just last Thursday, Nokia revealed the Asha 501, a touchscreen device that runs the new version of Nokia’s S40-derived operating system and also comes in at under $100.

The new version of Asha comes with features such as Fastlane, a second homescreen option that provides direct access to recently accessed contacts and apps, rather than showing a conventional grid of apps. This is all a result of Nokia’s purchase in early 2012 of Smarterphone, a Norwegian company that tries to make so-called featurephones seem, well, smarter.

Nokia has come in for a lot of flak for calling its all-touch Ashas “smartphones”, with many seeing this as a trick to inflate its real smartphone shipment figures. That may be one motivation, but I honestly think Nokia has every right to call these devices smart. When the 501 came out, Nokia also made a major push for developers to address the revamped Asha platform, releasing a new SDK and new in-app payment tools. Apps that are already on or in development for the platform include Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, and also games from the likes of EA and Gameloft.

Sure, heavier apps are lacking, but frankly the kinds of apps we’re talking about there might be better executed on a tablet than a smartphone anyway – particularly given the excellent battery life promised by Asha phones, Asha-plus-tablet is starting to look like a pretty tempting combo.

Who’s smart now?

Of course, the big promise with Windows Phone these days is that it will hit lower and lower price points, perhaps becoming a viable rival to low-mid-range Android devices at some stage (right now Nokia has only managed to cross the $200 threshold with Windows Phone products, namely the Lumia 520). These Ashas are already targeting the same rivals, though, and they are more optimized for the price point than efforts based on Google’s OS.

Nokia is clearly putting a large amount of effort into industrial design and user experience for both the Windows Phone and Asha ranges. However, it has way more freedom to tinker with its own platform. There’s also the small matter of price — the Lumia 925 costs 6 times as much as the Asha 501 so, if customers respond well to the new version of the Asha platform, the potential impact of the 501 will be greater than that of the Lumia 925. (That is admittedly a big “if”, though, as last quarter’s results showed roughly even sales for Lumia and full-touch Asha phones, with Lumia heading up and Asha down.)

The Lumia 925 sure does look fine, and if I was in the market for a high-end smartphone I’d give it strong consideration. However, in terms of making a real splash, the innovations Nokia is making at the low end come through more starkly than the tweaks made to its Lumia range.

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Just in time for Google I/O, Google will support the Debian Linux distribution in its Google Compute Engine, which is still in preview mode. From now on, Debian will be the “default image mode” for GCE, according to the Google AppEngine Blog. Google cited Debian’s improved handling of 32/64 bit compatibility as one reason for the move

According to the Thursday blog post:

“Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine.  Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 “wheezy” and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 “squeeze.”   This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine.”

A Google spokesperson told eWeek  that “customers will get a great experience having a Linux distribution that is maintained by the Debian community. Debian and derivatives thereof (such as Mint and Ubuntu) are among the most popular on the Internet, and Google itself is a heavy contributor to the Debian code base. We will also continue to offer CentOS, and are actively exploring other operating system options based on feedback from our customers.”

Google has a complicated relationship with the open source world. Most of its underpinnings are built on open source software and it does contribute a lot of technology to the community. But its own infrastructure is seen as a black box to many in that community. It’s interesting that there were a grand total of two comments as of Sunday on this blog post — one was removed and the other offered good wishes but added “the thing I’d like to see in future is how community members could be part of this project.”

While Google isn’t saying, folks expect the company will announce general availability of Google Compute Engine, which will compete with Amazon Web Services this week at the big show. GCE was announced last June and the preview was expanded to anyone paying for Gold support last month. Many cloud watchers say GCE, once fully available, will be the second-largest IaaS in terms of capacity after Amazon Web Services or AWS. Microsoft launched its Windows Azure IaaS capabilities in April.

In other words, buckle up, the cloud wars we’ve seen so far, are going to get rougher.

New tool allows AWS management from Microsoft consoles

Speaking of AWS and Microsoft, the new AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center means that a Windows admin at a company — at least one running System Center 2012 — can now use one console to monitor on-premises Windows resources as well as EC2 Linux or Windows instances, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk running on AWS.

As GigaOM PRO analyst Janakiram MSV pointed out in his report Thursday, this move is just one more example of Amazon’s push into the enterprise where  Windows reigns.  He points out that Tom Rizzo, a Microsoft vet, headed up this project at Amazon. Janakiram wrote:

“In 2010, Microsoft launched the Management Pack for Windows Azure deployments making it easier to manage on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Customers running Windows-based workloads on Amazon EC2 had to use a different set of tools based on Amazon CloudWatch, Nagios, OpsView, Nimsoft or other third-party software to monitor their deployments.  Through the AWS Management Pack, Amazon made it easy for enterprise IT teams to manage the servers running within on-premise, Windows Azure and AWS. Microsoft enterprise customers will welcome this.”

Interestingly Rizzo’s AWS blog post does not mention that the console was part of a joint effort with Microsoft, something that Microsoft rectified in it’s post about the news a day later.

Adobe tests the market for all-cloud delivery

Well, my  post on Adobe’s plan to move all updates of Creative Suite to a subscription service characterized it as a low-risk gamble. For Adobe anyway. Well, gauging by reader response,I should have talked to more graphic designers and artists who are fighting mad. Many vowed to stick with their old version as long as possible and then seek other non-Adobe options. Their beef? That even $50 per month per user will end up costing them way more than the current pay-once-use-forever model.

A Change.org petition asking Adobe to rethink its plan had more than 8,500 signatories as of Sunday morning

At any rate, Microsoft ,which has more at stake here than anyone with its zillions of Office users, was quick to weigh in. In short, it says subscription SaaS is the way of the future because it ensures users are always on the latest-and-greatest versions and can use their subscriptions across devices.  But:

” … unlike Adobe, we think people’s shift from packaged software to subscription services will take time. Within a decade, we think everyone will choose to subscribe because the benefits are undeniable. In the meantime, we are committed to offering choice–premier software sold as a package and powerful services sold as a subscription.”

News from around the web:

From Data Center Knowledge: Equinix unveils new crown jewel Ashburn Campus

From GigaOM: Box acquires Crocadoc to make document previews richer

From CITEworld: Office web apps: Not bad for free, but on demand is way better

From TechCrunch:  Microsoft to fold Yammer sales team into Office 365, identity surfaces as a core focus

From GigaOM:  Laggard Rackspace growth sparks concerns: is there enough cloud growth to go around?

From Fox Business News; U.S. judge orders Hewlett-Packard to face shareholder lawsuit

From InformationWeek: Google I/O preview

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