Ning CEO on how start-ups can hit the ground running

>> From the point of view of start-ups and companies that want to build on top of the Cloud especially in this economic environment it seems like there is an opportunity to gain competitive vantage by offering services that are at lower costs and maybe with more functionality and features than people who are doing it the old way. And also I'd just like to note for everyone in the audience there this thing is being streamed and I have been watching the numbers and there's been about really consistently about 1,500 people watching the live stream on the web so, you know, I don't know how many people are in that audience but it's multiples of that are online. But anyway to the question can you get to the competitive vantage issue?

>> Well I certainly think just in terms of speed to market the fact that you're spending the first 6 months of your new start-up actually working on your prototype or even better working on your actual application instead of actually, you know, creating a PowerPoint presentation and spending a lot of time on Sandhill Road. I just think it's obvious and I think, you know, it's very clear that, you know, start-ups today versus start-ups even 2 or 3 years ago they're using a combination of all of these things depending on what their goals are, depending on what the application or the problem that they're trying to solve. And that, you know, on some level if you're not actually taking advantage of the leading edge of what is available just getting a company off the ground you're getting in your own way.

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>> The start-up scenario is one of the key scenarios that we designed Windows Azure for and the key thing is that when if you have 2 guys in a dorm trying to build the next start-up you want to take away from them all the headache of buying the hardware and that has been achieved by commoditizing, compute and storage. But in addition we also provide free management of those services because that's just half of the battle the other half of the battle comes out as what about the headache of, you know, upgrading the OS, the batching of the OS, the upgrading of the software, how do you make sure that how many instances that you have on your front-end aren't exactly your inaudible goes down, how do you automatically go manage those things out and in Windows Azure we try to solve, take all those headaches away and try to manage that. So the key goal is to really allow the software developers to focus the majority of their effort on the application itself and which results into, you know, how fast they can go to market and they don't require as much capital expenditure and things like that to enter the market forum.

>> Actually one more thing, to state the obvious the other thing about what's happening in the Cloud today is distribution. So, I mean when you create, to Mike's point, when you create a Facebook app you actually are getting distribution for that in a way that, again, wasn't possible without the Cloud and without the different applications as well as infrastructure that you're seeing here. So, you know, and that's gonna just continue to get both, on some level, easier and on some level harder as the Cloud continues to mature because more people can create applications and that the idea actually becomes the most important thing. Is it something that connects with people in a way that they want to consume it and they want to use it. And getting all of these different pieces whether it's the infrastructure as well as distribution getting it right up front. The great news is that it's gonna be a lot cheaper and a lot faster but it's also going to require a company and a start-up to navigate a more crowded market space.

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