More maintenance work is planned Saturday night at Fisher Plaza East, which was hit by a fire and electrical outage earlier this month. Adhost Internet LLC, one of the colocation providers at Fisher Plaza, writes in a blog post that the eight-hour window is the second phase of a three-part process of "restoring normal power" to the internet hub.

Given the heat wave hitting Seattle right now, cooling is likely to be a major concern for data center tenants. Michael Smith, chief technical officer at Adhost, blogs that "there will be periods during which Adhost’s East data center cooling infrastructure is running in a degraded mode" but says there are procedures in place to ensure "the data center temperature will remain well within tolerances throughout the maintenance window."

Smith writes that Adhost doesn’t anticipate any loss of service during the maintenance but invites tenants to be present, just as he did during previous round of work last weekend.

Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s post:

This maintenance window is Phase 2 of 3 in the process of restoring normal power to Fisher Plaza East, delivered from Seattle City Light and backed up by generators within the facility. During this phase, Fisher engineers will install a temporary connection to Seattle City Light. This means Adhost’s East data center will be receiving power from the City with redundant backup generators outside of the building until Phase 3 is completed and permanent power is restored to the facility.

During this event, there will be periods during which Adhost’s East data center cooling infrastructure is running in a degraded mode. Specifically, Adhost has 4 separate Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units in our East facility. Two have power fed from one riser and two are fed from a different riser. During the maintenance window, power will be interrupted several times to each of the risers that feed the CRAC units for approximately 30 minutes each.

The Method of Procedure for this event requires that a cool down period be observed between each of the riser outages. So, Adhost’s East facility will be pre-cooled to 65 degrees before the event and then re-cooled to 65 degrees between each riser outage. This ensures that the data center temperature will remain well within tolerances throughout the maintenance window.

We do not anticipate any loss of service during the window. However, if you would like to be here during the event, please arrive at Fisher Plaza no later than 9:00 PM on 08/01. During the maintenance window access to the building will be restricted, so anyone arriving after 9:00 PM may not be granted access into the facility until the end of the maintenance window.

Adhost’s Plaza West facility will not be affected by this event, as it has been unaffected throughout the recent power issues localized to the Fisher Plaza East building.

The Fisher Plaza fire in early July knocked several major websites offline, including Bing Travel and Authorize.net.

See previous coverage:
How the Seattle data center fire caught companies unprepared
Photos: Inside the Fisher fire
Swedish Medical Center mulls data stragey after Fisher fire

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and Covance takes control of Merck’s Gene Expression Lab in Seattle  

Covance said today that it plans to acquire Merck’s Gene Expression Laboratory in Seattle, a move that Covance CEO Joe Herring said "brings world-class talent and technologies to Covance and further expands our capabilities in genomics testing and personalized medicine."

The division is part of Merck’s Rosetta Inpharmatics group, a 300-person unit which is in the process of being dismantled. In June, Microsoft purchased the assets of Rosetta Biosoftware, and said it planned to keep some employees on board.

In a press release today, Princeton, New Jersey-based Covance said it planned to offer employment to most of the employees of the Gene Expression Lab and take over occupancy of the facility next month.

As part of today’s deal, Merck also has agreed to pay $145 million over the next five years to purchase genomic analysis services from Covance.

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and Sony reaches into Google library in e-book battle with Amazon  

Sony is tapping into Google’s massive book-scanning project as it battles with Amazon.com over the emerging digital book market. Sony, which has an electronic reader that competes with Amazon’s Kindle, said today it’s now offering more than a million free public domain books from Google. Barnes & Noble has also teamed with Google on e-books. Will Amazon join forces with the search giant? For now, at least, it doesn’t seem likely.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a recent event pointedly criticized Google’s book settlement with authors and publishers, saying "it doesn’t seem right that you should get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights." And Google has made noises about letting publishers sell new-release books through its website, which would be a big threat to Amazon’s Kindle business.

But Amazon isn’t entirely averse to cooperating with Google, at least indirectly. Amazon is now doing on-demand reprints of out-of-copyright books from the University of Michigan library — and some of 400,000 titles were digitized by Google as part of its book-scanning project (The fact that Amazon is only working with out-of-copyright books is significant, given Bezos’ comments and continuing controversy over Google’s work with so-called "orphan books" whose rights holders can’t be found).

While Sony and Barnes & Noble presumably won’t derive any revenue from the free Google books, they can now boast a much longer list of available titles. I can’t find the total number of titles in the Sony eBook Store, but it now includes the million books from Google. Barnes & Noble offers more than 700,000 titles (500,000 from Google). By contrast, Amazon’s Kindle store is at 300,000 titles.

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Audio: Ballmer and Bartz discuss partnership, Google, and f-bombs  

TechFlash today interviewed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz about a wide range of topics related to their newly announced partnership — including competition from Google, future acquisitions and what the arrangement may mean to employees of the companies. We also asked whether Ballmer plans to adopt Bartz’s famous use of profanties as part of the deal.

As you can tell from the audio of the interview below, the two executives seem to have a good-natured, chummy relationship with one another. Read an edited transcript of the interview below.

 

Q: Steve, this is obviously, as you said in your email to employees this morning, been a long, long slog. Do you think you turned out better here, actually, than you would have had you acquired Yahoo outright?

Ballmer: I think it’s not all that constructive to "woulda been, shoulda been, coulda been." That was then … I am very pleased with where we are. I think we’re in a place that we can gain share, we can create value for consumers, we’re in a place where we can do well by Microsoft shareholders and Yahoo shareholders, which was the original principle in anything, is you gotta do well by both sides’ shareholders and by the consumer, and in this case also by the advertiser, and we’ve wound up I think in a very good place relative to those goals, and the goal of giving a little competition to the front-runner in this market.

Q: Carol, you outlined this on the conference call this morning, but given the reaction so far in the stock market, what would you say to Yahoo investors who so far aren’t necessarily pleased with the outcome of this?

Bartz: I think two things happen. One is some people wanted upfront money. I wanted a high (traffic acquisition cost) rate, because I want a revenue line — in fact, what this deal has given me is virtually all my revenue, or 88 percent of the revenue, with no cost, and so I needed to be able to focus this company on other aspects of the business, and let Microsoft — who we know is maniacal about the search business, so they can take a run against Google. So I wanted to ride their coattails, so I think people forgot all of the money we were saving here and tried to focus just on an upfront payment — which to me, a billion dollars, I’ve got $4 billion, another billion after taxes and I get 50 basis points of interest, it doesn’t really help me from an operating standpoint.

The second thing is, you know, I think people just didn’t think about the timing. You know, everybody who was assuming the last few weeks that there was going to be a deal probably assumed by next quarter we’d be saving a boatload of money and the stock would go up, and they could jump in or out or whatever they wanted to do. So when we said, gee, six months of regulatory and two years after that, I think people went "Aaacck!"

Q: Steve, what will happen to Microsoft employees and their jobs in the areas such as the premium search ad sales?

Ballmer: We had been doing some realignment just because of the economy in our ad sales force, and I’m sure we will continue to do some alignment as Yahoo moves in to exclusively do the sales to the so-called premium advertisers. On the other hand, we got a lot of work to do, and I think we’re going to productively employee many people — perhaps not all, but many people — in that process.

Q: Obviously the combined search market share in the U.S. is close to 30 percent now. Steve, can you give me any sense for where that could potentially go once you start realizing the economies of scale and efficiencies you’re talking about here?

Ballmer: Up. … You focused in on economies of scale and efficiency. Yes. The thing I want to point out is, that means a better product. Not that means a more profitable product — which it may also — but most importantly, it means a better product. Every advertiser who advertises on Google is going to want to be in our search marketplace and available on Yahoo and Bing. Everybody. That’s important to us. … In the case of Google I think one out of every 10 pages they get a click-through on an ad. It means the most relevant thing on the page wasn’t the links that were generated algorithmically, it’s the paid link and part of our job is to make sure we see all of the keywords and all of the bids by all of the advertisers.

Give you a good example. A good friend of mine rents apartments in Paris. She owns a bunch of apartments in Paris. She and her husband rent them out to mostly American tourists. We’re friends, so she’s been buying on our site, but she said, look, she would normally buy Google. So if you type "apartment in Paris for rent" on the Google site, you’re not going to find her in the algorithmic results, you find her in the paid aid results. She wouldn’t be on Yahoo, she wouldn’t be on Microsoft. She’d be on the combined marketplace because she doesn’t want to avoid 30 percent of the market and would need to do that.

It’s a simple little personal example for me, and it turns out, if you’re looking for a vacation rental in Paris, that’s the most relevant thing on the page. So we can improve our product because of this deal.

Q: Carol, how do you expect the cultures of the two companies to mesh behind the scenes?

Bartz: I’m actually not very worried about that. First of all, Qi (Lu) who used to be a Yahoo employee and went to Microsoft, and is leading the online effort, worked here and has many, many fans here, and is well-known and well-respected. Joanne Bradford, who ran online sales for Steve, is now here for us in North America.

Ballmer: And has a lot of friends and fans at our place.

Bartz: So, you know, I just think people want to get stuff done. You know, the good news is there’s not some long, bitter, funny relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft. Sometimes companies get together, they never like each other in the first place, and that’s hard. I mean, I don’t think, for instance — it probably wasn’t a lot of fun at the beginning for Peoplesoft and Oracle, cause they grew up, their lives, hating each other.

Ballmer: I think that’s right.

Bartz: That’s just not the case here, so there’s no need to have a funny attitude.

Q: Steve, are you going to start dropping a few f-bombs just to make Carol feel more comfortable?

Bartz: No! No! OK, this is how it’s going to work.

Ballmer: Ha! Ha! Carol’s going to jump up and down!

Bartz: I’m going to jump up and down and I CAN YELL JUST AS LOUD AS STEVE!

Q: I’m sorry, Carol, what’d you say, you cut out there.

Ballmer: (laughing) You heard her.

Q: Maybe Carol, you’ll need to jump around on stage and say, "Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft."

Bartz: I can, I can. And I can eat funny food, too.

Ballmer: We’re both chronically on diets.

Bartz: (Laughing) Chronic misfits. …

Q: Steve, just in terms of the regulatory process, I don’t know if you saw, but Google this morning said it, too, agrees that competition is good in the marketplace. I don’t know if they’re implying, through that, that they’re not going to oppose it, but can you give me a sense for what Microsoft’s case to regulators would be?

Ballmer: Well, what the antitrust law and the regulatory officials I think are interested in is, is it good or bad for consumers … should be good or bad for advertisers, and does it increase competition. And in this case, I think, sometimes when you see three competitors going to two, you say, that can’t be good for competition. I think what you really got is a market dominated by one guy. Even more so in Europe, frankly, than here in the United States. It’s not three going to two. It’s a chance to give No. 1 a much more credible competitor, who is No. 2, and that will be kind of the line of reasoning that our people will have a chance to lay out in Brussels, in D.C., and in any other capital where people want this reviewed. I think it’s compelling. Take a look at Europe. Google’s got 92 percent of paid search share in Western Europe. That ought to be interesting to somebody.

Q: Carol, how do you expect the companies to coordinate on key strategic decisions, like acquisitions and investments in the search advertising business?

Bartz: I don’t see us doing any acquisitions together, that really wouldn’t make any sense.

Q: I’m wondering for example if Microsoft is doing a search acquisition itself, would Yahoo be brought in on that to consult?

Bartz: No.

Ballmer: No, I mean, in general the way you should think about it is, we’ll drive our business, and these guys are smart guys, we value their opinions, but we’re two independent companies, and anything we would buy we would buy because it would help our search product, and if we buy it, the way the deal’s written, Yahoo has rights to our search technology. They can take and use advances and innovation, whether we have to buy something build something, all of our best work in the search area essentially under this deal is available to Yahoo.

Bartz: And simultaneously, and this is a stretch, because I can’t imagine doing it, but if we bought a distribution group someplace like, say in India that uses our in-house sales force, we might have a conversation, but we’re responsible for one, they’re responsible for another, we’re not mixing the egg up here.

Ballmer: Somebody asked us this earlier, is there a joint venture — there’s no funny structure,

Bartz: No, no, no, no, no.

Ballmer: Carol and I talked about it. We’re both pretty hard-core that those weird governance structures don’t work. They run their business, we run ours and we have a business partnership.

Bartz: That’s right, that’s right.

Q: It sounds like you guys are pretty happy and you get along, just personally. Am I right in that?

Ballmer: Yeah, we actually worked together for a long time.

Bartz: Long time.

Ballmer: I’m not sure I knew Carol when she was at Sun, we might not get along if I had.

Bartz: Remember at Autodesk, we were one of the good software partners.

Ballmer: Absolutely

Bartz: We were held up as an example of how Microsoft could get along with the industry.

Ballmer: That’s true, that’s true. No, we had a lot of experience together when Carol was running Autodesk.

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