 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Tuesday, October 16, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Microsoft is exposing its Xbox branding to more media. The consumer cloud was huge in the first half of 2012, and Marissa Mayer gets her first big hire at Yahoo. Join us now with his breaking analysis on these headlines as SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier. Welcome to the show, John. Hello. Microsoft is opening up its Xbox branding to a larger world of media. Xbox is actually going from thinking about gaming in a device to being the entertainment face for all of Microsoft. Can you elaborate on this? Yeah. I mean, Mark Hopkins at SiliconANGLE, and I have talked about this many times. Xbox is a hot brand. Windows is not. Windows is a old legacy brand from the old desktop days, and that's the old first generation computer industry. This represents an emerging loyal brand, and it's very certainly sticky, and people mostly associate it with gaming, but clearly, Xbox is a strong brand vis-a-vis Windows. Windows has great mind share for corporations who buy Windows, but the average consumer has moved away from being loyal to any one particular operating system per se. It's now its platform Mac PC. Yesterday we spoke with Mark Hopkins about Xbox launching their new Xbox Music. How is Xbox Music different from when they had the Zoom marketplace? Do you think this is going to be confusing for consumers? No, not at all. I mean, I don't know what Mark talked about, but I can probably only imagine you talked about how successful Zoom was behind the cover because of Xbox. Zoom was a disaster because of their Apple envy, and they rushed the product to the market to compete with the iPod, really didn't think much about the branding side of it, and it was a total flop. However, because of the Xbox marketplace, Zoom marketplace was successful because of the Xbox franchise. So this is why Microsoft's moving to broader marketing of Xbox. It gives them so much more landscape in the marketplace to build on top of. With Windows 8 owning the enterprise, Xbox now creating a beach head for essentially this consumer 2.0, which is cloud mobile and social. Everything we cover on siliconangle.com. So with this new strategy, Microsoft trying to get consumers to think of Xbox as overall entertainment, whether it's gaming, music, television, movies. It's not just the video game council sitting by the TV anymore. Do you think that they're going to be successful with that concept or will people continue to associate Xbox with video games? I think they're going to be very successful, that's my prediction, but they're going to have the classic challenges of building off their existing franchise, which is gaming. Now gaming is not going away to talk to anyone under the age of 25. Casual games and console based games are hugely popular. So having them co-op the casual game market with the Xbox brand will be good because there's a range of positioning in the gaming market. However, that being said, you're seeing a much more consumerization of the home in the sense of it's not about cable anymore. It's about what services are you going to get and they're all internet based. So I believe Xbox has a really, really strong chance of competing and winning because of their positioning of the Xbox and their existing franchise is very, very strong and they could build upon that base and redefine the brand, which is still early for them to relative to their success. So I think with different demographics, certainly older than gamers, they're going to have an opportunity to reposition the Xbox brand. In other news, the consumer cloud performed strongly in the first half of 2012 with the numbers of personal subscriptions to online storage services at the end of June already at 75% of the markets projected some for the year. What kind of numbers are we talking about here? Well, this is a classic. I saw a report from isupply.com and it was basically trying to size the consumer cloud market and the numbers seem low to me and they talked about I think was the number was first six months of the year, 375 million and then doubling to 1.3 billion by 2017. In terms of subscriptions, that's either free or paid cloud services. It's a weird market and there's a nuance here and I'll tell you what it is. One consumer cloud is anything where you're storing files. So they did not include in the leadership here any box.net. Box.net wasn't even mentioned in this survey as a leader. They mentioned Dropbox and some other services, but not not that. Also, Google and Apple have to be factored to this. So it's really kind of a blurry market. That's much different than say the enterprise cloud market, which you see leaders like Nervonix, a startup. We've been covering very, very hot startup and others like Oxygen Cloud. This is very hard problem. This is why box.net and Dropbox and these consumer services are having a hard time moving over to the enterprise because it's a little bit more complicated than sharing files for your PTA or your soccer club. So consumer cloud is a lot different than storing music, soccer club and PTA. It's really more about multi-tenancy and data security. So this cloud sizing business is going to be up in the air for the next at least a year or two. So how much growth do you anticipate we'll see in subscriptions to either free or paid cloud? I think you're going to see massive growth because one, that's the preferred user experience. Everyone that you talk to wants to put their calendar in the cloud. Google Calendar and iCalNow are fully cloud-based. And so collaboration amongst individuals is really kind of key. However, there are some privacy issues. Apple had some snappos there with their photos being shared publicly and Facebook's recent examples of someone being outed because they were lesbian and they were gay and someone was posting on their timeline. So these kinds of promiscuous sharing will cause some some fun and that will slow down growth a bit. But still, that's the preferred model for the consumers, put everything in the cloud. So we're going to continue to see hot growth there. How costly is it to go into the cloud storage business? It really depends on what you're offering. If you're going to do like box.net, it doesn't cost very much because you essentially get a couple data centers and you throw some file sharing software or the UI on it and you're essentially storing files in the cloud. That's very trivial to do technically. And box.net just until this past year only had one data center and now they only have two data centers. So they're worth a billion dollars and only have two data centers. And so that gives you a perspective of the complexity there. Now, again, the complexity really is going to be in the edge of the network, the device is some of the software and coordination. So infrastructure wise, it's not that costly. It's easy to do hard parts in the software. So where box.net and Dropbox are going to try to compete heavily is to recreate the software platform. So it's easier to use as well as putting in security and other replication type functionality in the software. And that's completely different than the business side. So kind of like Nervonix, for example, competes in the enterprise cloud storage. That's very difficult to do. So you talk to Oxygen Cloud and Nervonix at startups and they'll tell you it's extremely hard. And then you go to Verizon and you go to IBM and EMC. They'll tell you it's even harder. Overall, what do you think it'll take for a mobile provider to rise above their competitor? I think it's going to be ease of use and security and data privacy as the number one issues. Yahoo announced yesterday that it has hired one of Google's top sales execs, Henrique DeCastro, as its COO. A lot of attention is focused on DeCastro's paycheck. He's getting a pile of money for taking the job. How much is he going to be making? The reports are at $56 million a year. He's got all kinds of compensation, $15 million stock grant, $600,000 salary, compensation for what he left on the table at Google. Essentially a huge pile of money. This is basically a co-CEO like hire in terms of compensation from Marissa Mayer. And again, she's right back from her two-week leave from having a baby. So she is awesome. She's not stopping. She's her running shoes are on. And with the newborn baby, she's making these moves. So this is a really good move for Yahoo and the guy commanded some serious dollars and has been trying to get poached by Yahoo for a long time. This is a clean, nice move for Yahoo and they're paying up for this talent. Both Marissa Mayer and former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson have made previous attempts to lure DeCastro away from Google. He finally bit this time. What do you think was that thing that made him accept the deal? I think it was the freedom. I think my opinion on this and my analysis is this is Google taking over Yahoo. If you look at what the relationship between Yahoo and Google goes back to Stanford University when Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo, gave Google their first deal. And if it wasn't for them, Google would not be in business. Google struggled for the first three years of their operations before they found their ad model. And if it wasn't for Yahoo and a couple other partners in company, I worked for a real name, wrote them a check for a million dollars. It was like their first big payout. Google was struggling at the time. Search was dying. So Yahoo really kind of helped them stay alive during that pre-bubble bursting. And so, but Microsoft has a huge stake with the search. So Google is basically acquiring Yahoo through the infestation of talent. So Marissa Mayer came from Google. My conspiracy theory is she's pulling all the ex-Googlers over, which is something that Facebook has done. So you have talent coming over and from Google. So it's kind of a quasi takeover in my opinion. But more importantly, Marissa Mayer just had a baby. She's very product-focused, not very salesy, not very operational. So this hire is absolutely a good move for her for someone to mind the store, as they say, in the operation side. Hold down the street, keep the advertisers happy and really regenerate that team. So it's really a chief operating role. It's essentially co-CDO in my mind. So that's why the pay is so high. SiliconANGLE TVs, The Cube will be in New York City for the Hadoop World and Stratoconference where you'll be covering the big data scene. Big data is all the rage right now. Harvard Business Review says that it's the hottest area for jobs naming data scientists as the sexiest job of the 21st century. So what do you think? Do you agree? I agree. I think data science is the sexiest opportunity right now. Anything to do with data is big. So there's a huge data tsunami, obviously, new types of data. And it's very, very disruptive. Again, we've been commenting on this all the time. And it's really hard to be a data scientist more than people think. But yes, it's definitely the hottest job because it intersects between liberal arts and technology, as Apple says, or computer science and social science as SiliconANGLE says on our masthead. So we believe that computer science and social science are intersecting. And that's where the big data world is really creating a global impact because of this technology enabling more solutions. You're seeing really society changing and business changing solutions hit the market that could never hit the market before from oil and gas to technology companies. GigaOM.com says that it's easy to be a data scientist. But on Twitter, they've got called out for oversimplifying it. What's your analysis on that? Yeah, I saw that story. GigaOM wrote a story. Oh, it's so easy to be a data scientist because Stanford offers a course on machine learning. GigaOM got this one wrong. Derek Harris is a good writer over there. Essentially, propping up the propaganda, trying to troll the water, put chum in the waters around how easy it is. Because there is a lot of interest in data science, it's a good story from the sense of feel good, get people excited, take a course, and you're an instantly a data scientist. But what GigaOM wrote was a really, really clever story to get people excited. But at the end of the day, he's treating data science like a lottery scratch ticket. He refers to the Kegel competition where you can create an algorithm and get a prize. And that to me is like a lottery scratch ticket. You get it right, boom, big prize. If you get it wrong, you're hoes. You can't do anything. What you got called out on Twitter for is by an expert in the field that says, whoa, whoa, hold on, data science isn't that easy. It's really, really hard. You got to know machine learning. You got to know about different programming languages to integrate into your company. You got to know math, there's some serious, differential equations and calculus, all kinds of other things going on. And more importantly, the visualization. So that blog post, we'll have it on siliconangle.com with a commentary on that. If you're interested, more people are interested in that. But this is a fundamental big deal because the market wants more data scientists. It's the sexiest job on the planet. It's really, really hard to do. And this is why we're covering it so heavily because it's a growth area. This is a major innovation area for disruption. Startups are coming out of the woodwork to make things easier. There's a bunch of startups that'll be launching in New York in a week. A couple of weeks we'll be there covering it to make this world easier. So although giga ohm is a blue sky pie in the sky article, he does hit on the point that that's what the market wants. They want easy views, but we're not there yet. The Hadoop World and Stratoconference and NYC. Going back to that for a second. Cube's going to be there covering it. What can we expect? I think it's going to be very, very exciting. What you're going to expect to see in New York as the third year for us covering this event from when it was a cottage little industry to now full on mainstream global economy impact. You're going to see a couple things coming out of the big data world in New York City. One, the emphasis on business value. You're going to see people moving away from height like oh social media monitoring to this and that's a driving business value. And that's going to be in three major areas. Infrastructure, which is physical machines and hardware and stuff like that cloud. You're going to see middleware. You're going to see kind of like this middleware engine kind of coming out where software solutions and cloud based solutions are going to come out around virtualization, visualization, et cetera. And then third, you're going to see vertical solutions. That's the big trend this year is the vertical markets, solutions in specific industries that are very, very disruptive. So those are the three main areas I think you can see the most actions, action in New York. The area that we're, we think it's going to be explosive is one, visualization, making data easy to consume for users, analysts, et cetera. And two, you're going to see ease of use and simplicity. We mentioned about data science being very difficult. You're going to see solutions and startups come out with solutions that make it easier to work with data, deploy data infrastructure, ingest data, and then visualize it. So those three areas I mentioned, you're going to see core messages around simplification and ease of use. Well, John, thanks so much for your time today. Great to have you on as always. See you tomorrow. For information on news of the day and the latest breaking analysis, stay tuned to News Desk right here on SiliconANGLE TV.