Greetings from LinuxCon North America in Toronto, where I am representing Microsoft as a keynote speaker for the first time! I'm excited to share exciting new open source developments from Microsoft and things we&039;ve learned from our journey with Linux and open source. Of course, I also look forward to catching up with old friends and meeting up with some customers and partners.

Over the past few months I’ve been asked more times than I can count, “Wim, why did you join Microsoft?” As a Linux guy who has watched the company from afar, I am the first to admit that Microsoft hasn’t always been the most open company. After talking to some of the executives at the company, I found that the days of a closed Microsoft are over.

The reality is customers use more than one tool and more than one platform to operate their businesses. They need tools that support Linux and Windows, and they need a cloud that allows them to run any application. One of the things I shared with linux.com recently was how blown away I was to see how large Microsoft&039;s investment in Linux already is. We brought .NET Core, PowerShell, and SQL Server to Linux. We also open sourced Visual Studio Code and just recently PowerShell. And, we are contributing to and participating in numerous community projects. It’s incredible to be a part of it.

Our latest open source and Linux advancements

One of the areas we are focused on is delivering open management solutions. In today’s multi-cloud, multi-OS world, customers need simple, unified tools to reduce complexity. That’s why just last week, we announced that we’re open sourcing PowerShell and making it available on Linux. Now PowerShell users across Windows and Linux can use our popular command-line shell and scripting language to manage almost everything from almost anywhere. My colleague Jeffrey Snover wrote a fantastic story about the journey to open source PowerShell and how customer-centricity brought us here – go check it out!

We’re also investing in making Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which gives you visibility and control of your applications and workloads across Azure and other clouds, a first-class tool for managing Linux environments. Last week, we announced that the OMS Monitoring Agent for Linux is generally available, delivering rich insights and real-time visibility into customers’ Linux workloads to quickly remediate issues. A lot of the tools we use and integrate with are open source-based, such as fluentd and integration with auditd and the like.

Today, I’m also excited to share that OMS Docker Container monitoring is available in preview. By nature, containers are lightweight and easily provisioned, so without a centralized approach to monitoring, customers may find it difficult to manage and respond to critical issues quickly. With OMS Docker Container monitoring, you get visibility into your container inventory, performance, and logs from one place, get a simplified view of containers’ usage, and can diagnose issues whether your containers are running in the cloud or on-premises. You may have seen Mark Russinovich demo this live at DockerCon in June, and we’re thrilled you can try it for yourself.

What we’ve learned on our journey and what’s next

These are all important milestones for Microsoft that reflect our journey of learning and the thoroughness of our open source approach across infrastructure investments; new governance processes that work with and for the community; new ways to incorporate customer and partner feedback; and the deepening of partnerships to make great experiences possible for organizations of all types. In my keynote tomorrow, I will talk about how we are applying our learnings into the Linux ecosystem, what our approach to open source is, what it means for Linux users, and how me and my team are working to take this to the next level.

Our experiences with Linux in Azure, where nearly 1 in #3 VMs today are Linux, have brought us closer to our customers and what they need to succeed in a rapidly advancing world. We have made significant investments in making Microsoft&039;s platform a great place to run open source software, and I will be working with my team to accelerate this effort over the coming months.

Choice and flexibility are important tenets of our platform. Also critical are our efforts to contribute to open source projects, integrate open source technologies in our platform, and forge commercial and community partnerships with the ecosystem. It’s not just about what we’re open sourcing or making available on Linux. Microsoft is committed to contributing and participating in open source projects, like our investments in OMI and fluentd, our focus on Chakra and TypeScript, and many other projects including the fantastic work from our Microsoft Research organization. To take it a step further, one of the things my team and I have learned is how to partner with the community to make our contributions viable and sustainable, in ways that work for the community. I will be sharing many of those examples in my keynote.

It’s now been a few months since I joined Microsoft. It’s an exciting time to be at this company. I have to say that Linux and open source have become a normal part of our day-to-day business at Microsoft – from our people, our products, our vision, and our investments. I’m excited at what the future will bring with more first- and third-party projects, technologies, and partnerships that will bring great experiences to our customers using Linux and open source technologies.

If you’re at LinuxCon, please join me and the open source team in booth 3 at LinuxCon this week, and follow us on Twitter for more details about my keynote. If you’re not attending, make sure you visit the Azure.com website on Linux to learn more about our work with Linux and open source technologies.
Quelle: Azure

22. August 201622. August 2016

da Agency

Is This An Ad? Beyoncé And Her Super Bowl Airbnb

Welcome to our weekly column, “Is This an Ad?”, in which we strap on our reportin' hat and aim to figure out what the heck is going on in the confusing world of celebrity social media endorsements. Because even though the FTC recently came out with rules on this, sometimes when celebrities post about a product or brand on social media, it&039;s not immediately clear if they were being paid to post about it, got a freebie, or just love it, or what.

THE CASE:

Remember, if you can, back to Super Bowl 2016. It was the Denver Broncos versus the Carolina Panthers, held in San Fransisco&039;s Levi&039;s Stadium. The halftime show was Coldplay featuring Bruno Mars and Beyoncé. You will probably not remember Coldplay, but you will remember this amazing moment where Beyoncé *almost* fell, but miraculously righted herself:

NFL / Via giphy.com

Beyoncé showed up in San Fransisco a few days before the Super Bowl, presumably to rehearse the show, which involves some complicated elements (Chris Martin&039;s tight henleys, unusual set designs, lots of dancers, etc…) She clearly needed a nice place to stay while she&039;s there. Some place nicer than just an anonymous hotel room… a comfortable place for her family to stay for a while.

On her Facebook, Beyonce posted this photo with the caption, “it was a Super weekend @Airbnb”:

Beyonce’s Facebook (now deleted)

It was quickly reported that the particular Airbnb that Beyoncé was staying at was this one, which rents for $10,000 per night. The house is just outside San Fransisco in the town right next to Mountain View, and it looks super nice.

THE EVIDENCE:

Beyoncé is too classy to shill for stuff on her social media, right? She&039;s no Scott Disick, she&039;s fucking Beyoncé. She&039;s not posting crap like teeth whitening lights or hair growth gummies on Instagram. Why would she start now, with Airbnb?

Perhaps she just loved this particular rental, and wanted to shout it out. And isn&039;t the term “Airbnb” kind of almost like Kleenex at this point —a generic term to describe “rental home”? So maybe it&039;s not so weird she&039;d tag the company.

But do we think she paid for it? The place is 10 G&039;s a night – something that basically ONLY a Beyoncé can afford. That&039;s chump change to her, but it&039;s still … a lot of money!

On the other hand, does the NFL pay for her accommodations as part of her performance fee for the Super Bowl? It&039;s not unusual for travel and accommodation fees to be added onto a musician&039;s performance fee. Or sometimes a large flat fee is offered, and any travel/hotel costs are built into that.

The halftime show is sponsored by Pepsi, a company that Beyoncé has done ads for and in 2012 made a $50 million deal with. Perhaps part of the deal is that Pepsi paid for her stay.

Or do we believe that Beyoncé isn&039;t posting anything about any company for free? If she&039;s tagging them, she&039;s getting paid?

THE VERDICT:

It was a freebie&033; According to reps for Airbnb, Beyoncé was not paid to post about her stay. However, a source familiar with the situation told BuzzFeed News that her rental fee was comped by Airbnb (the host got paid).

“We’re huge fans of Beyoncé and we’re thrilled to see her Facebook post and hope she was crazy in love with her Airbnb listing,” Airbnb wrote in a statement at the time. This is, you&039;ll notice, doesn&039;t indicate whatsoever that Beyoncé wasn&039;t a paying Airbnb customer — to me, this statement implies the opposite, that she is a paying customer.

The FTC has rules – lots of rules – about how bloggers or social media stars are supposed to disclose if they&039;re getting paid to post about a product or company. But these are confusing, especially if it&039;s not a paid ad, but a free gift like a comped hotel room – something that celebs get all the time. The general rule of thumb, though, is that the average person should be able to tell if something is an ad or not.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on this kind of stuff, and I couldn&039;t really tell. Bobby Finger, host of the Who? Weekly celebrity gossip podcast, wrote in Jezebel that he wasn&039;t sure if it was an ad, either. If someone whose job is writing and podcasting about celebrity gossip can&039;t tell if this was an ad or not, then how is the average person supposed to know? Especially when Airbnb PR&039;s statement to the press at the time was so ambiguous. Airbnb did not respond to several requests for comment from BuzzFeed News, and when the Washington Post wrote about how the lack of clarity may be an FTC violation of advertising rules, Airbnb did not respond their request for comment on wither or not it was actually an ad.

Getting a comped hotel doesn&039;t obviously feel the same as, say, a $50 million contract with Pepsi to do TV ads. So it&039;s very possible Beyoncé probably didn&039;t think of her post about Airbnb the same way she does about doing a TV ad for Pepsi.

But the FTC maybe does, based on its own rules. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the agency plans on cracking down on confusing celeb ads on social media. But how it plans on actually doing this isn&039;t really clear, and Bloomberg talked to many people in the advertising industry who said that the rules themselves aren&039;t even that clear.

The FTC&039;s moves so far have been to only dole out violations to the brands or ad agencies, not the individuals. This means if the FTC decided that Beyoncé&039;s post violated the rules, then it&039;s Airbnb who is on the hook for the misdeed, not the singer. (The agency does not comment on individual cases to the press.) And even then, the FTC doesn&039;t act on this often — in only been a handful of cases so far has it gone after a company for social media violations (most recently Warner Bros. for having video game vloggers doing positive reviews without disclosure).

Would the FTC have preferred it if Beyoncé had written “I was gifted a free vacation rental by Airbnb, but not paid to post about it”? Yes, I&039;m sure they would have liked that. But are they going to go after Beyoncé or Airbnb for not doing that? Who knows&033;

EPILOGUE:

A few months later, Justin Bieber stayed at that same Airbnb. While he Instagramed photos from inside the house, he didn&039;t give an Airbnb shoutout like Beyoncé did. Did he also get it for free? Who knows&033; Stay tuned for future installment of Is This An Ad?

Quelle: <a href="Is This An Ad? Beyoncé And Her Super Bowl Airbnb“>BuzzFeed