Definitive Guide to Windows Home Server & Pursuit of Happiness

This post is the pinnacle of all my technical expertise. It is also an exercise in seeing how quickly Kevin Beares can cancel MVP WHS shipments. I am feeling a little better today, here is some humor for your Friday.

As mentioned earlier today, Windows Home Server is finally a reality, at a much lower price point than anyone expected. The excitement behind this technology is quite clear, it is bringing a lot more intelligence to the home NAS.

It is an interesting time we live in as well. Everyone is trying to conquer the digital convergence, speculation is everywhere. Robert Cringely is thinking that Google’s latest buildup of portable data center containers for which it was just awarded a patent, is nothing less than Google’s all out assault at bringing digital media to the last mile. Microsoft has been trying for years to convince users to use the media functionality in Zune and Xbox, but has struggled compared to the Internet-multimedia king at 1 Infinite Loop, Apple Computer. Add to that the mobile carriers, the Web 2.0 renaissance via Facebook and in the end you come to realize that the true winner of the digital media convergence will be the first one that embraces and acknowledges the core reason for the success of the Internet. What makes Facebook possible, what makes MySpace irresistable, what makes Google the top search engine in the world and the reason why no matter how fast the broadband gets it will never satisfy the endless pursuit of hapiness, one of the unalienable rights of man.

And along with those unaliable rights of a man, as I am sure both John Locke, Jenna Jameson and Thomas Jefferson would agree, are the unalianable needs of a man: The endless pursuit of quazi-legal pornography. If Windows Home Server can serve those needs and gurantee those rights, it will be the biggest product in Microsoft’s history.

Understanding The Needs

We live in a society that is driven by instant gratification. By variety. By flexibility. Ladies and gentleman, I am here to tell you that the porn watching trends on the Internet have changed since the 90’s. Even from the early 2000’s. The reality porn distribution networks, such as Bang Bros (Wikipedia) have delivered two important changes to the landscape of Internet pornography.

The first concept pioneered by Bang Bros, as mentioned in the recent movie Superbad, is that of a reality-TV-like production. By sacrificing production quality and editorial work such as audio postproduction, Bang Bros has been able to establish one of the largest libraries of content on the Internet spanning multiple genres of pornography serving nearly every legal niche porn category in Florida. To say that Bang Bros has a library of targeted content that can appeal to anyone is an understatement. Further testiment to this comes from the many sites or rather, studios (Wikipedia) that have embraced the same methadology and focus on the audiences immediate needs and desires, not on the artistic or post-production quality.

This is a far cry from the pornography distribution of even a decade ago, created in an artistic yet taboo process. Instead of full featured films with a lose plot, the next generation of pornography producers focuses on the deliverable, the core value that its audience hopes to achieve.

Profiting from Needs

Microsoft, and specifically the Windows Home Server, have the remarkable opportunity for the dominance of the digital convergence marketplace. If they embrace those unalienable rights and needs of their customer base.

I am here to tell you that the key to digital convergence is the synergy that Microsoft and adult entertainment businesses can realize to save their customers time and increase convenience. To understand this better we need to understand the core business models behind the two industries:

Microsoft primarily generates revenue from sales of software licensing to businesses, governments and home users. It has a significant investment in the arena of digital entertainment, while doing so at a loss of $126 per Xbox and at least $50 per Zune, makes a significant margin off the sale of content that is loaded onto those devices. Not only does Microsoft get revenue from the desktops that those devices are connected to, desktops and servers that the developers use to develop the games and media, that the distributors use to drive ecommerce, that the shipping companies use to deliver the goods but right down to the online stores that distribute the conet. Microsoft makes money both on licensing the software and licensing the media.

Adult entertainment industry primarily generates revenue through subscriptions sold to the end consumers. Be it pay-per-view TV subscriptions, magazine subscriptions – both on the decline – or through the direct online clubs ran by the adult entertainment actresses or studios themselves. The primary cost in the adult entertainment is not the talent, set, production or bandwidth as you may imagine – it is the advertising spent to get the next customer to sign up. In order to do so many studios create trailers, short and usually less explicit cuts of the feature scene to entice the customer to sign up even for a limited trial. (footnote: freeones.com)

Digital Synergies

Microsoft’s stated goal for years has been to drive the sales of top end flagship products. Microsoft makes more profit off Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate than Home Basic. Adult entertainment industry goal is to grow the subscriber base and establish healthy addictions among its audience, something that is becoming more prevalent as social interaction has gone from face-to-face to Facebook, at least among the younger-yet-lucrative 18–35 generation.

Adult entertainment industry retains its customer base by providing excellent service. Beyond content, that means providing a very fast connection to the Internet so streaming video content never buffers extensively and ruins the experience. Adult entertainment industry could bolster its subscription rate and reduce the bandwidth expenses by going to lower-tier Internet providers such as Cogent.

Enter Windows Home Server. Specifically, Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS, Wikipedia). Microsoft can empower the adult entertainment industry content distribution by allowing a “subscription feed” direct from the studio to the Windows Home Server and by using BITS it can be done more economically because BITS throttles its own transfer rate depending on network availability. Through its use of Jobs and Scheduling, BITS can allow adult entertainment network updates to be downloaded at a specific time, prioritized, paused and resumed in the background of other network activity.

The Possibilities

The convergence possibilities are endless. By enabling customers to stream trusted porn content there will be less exploits and users going to dangerous web sites. Likewise, the storage demands will explode meaning higher and higher demand for Microsoft tools. Network availability can enable other services, previously throttled down because of poor porn QoS prioritization, to flourish. VoIP, SaaS, etc. They all have a future when the porn traffic can be prioritized.

I would urge the more ethical of the parties, the adult entertainment industry, to take a first giant leap in creating this partnership. Work with Microsoft to establish an RFC, an open standards protocol for synchronizing the episode ratings back and forth across the digital media. No matter where I watch porn, I want the ability to tag it, rate it, and comment on it. The two networks mentioned previously already support the community rankings, comments and tags. As does Microsoft XBox Live.

Microsoft, keep an open mind. Call it what it really is, the Windows Porn Server.

It is a great time to be alive, a great time to finally fulfill what our great nations founders must have menat: Life, liberty, and pursuit of porn.

Hope you enjoyed this humorous essay. Six years of college, ten years of IT experience and decades of fanatic porn following have produced this. It is a proud day for the Gator Nation. Susan Bradley is going to kill me.