Graham Chastney

Microsoft’s press team have had a busy couple of days.

The first two announcements that caught my eye were virtualisation announcements:

• Microsoft and XenSource to Develop Interoperability for Windows Server “Longhorn” Virtualization
• Microsoft Completes Acquisition of Softricity

The softricity one is old news, coming as it does on the same day as the XenSource one though it shows a definite shift in the market. While many people are focusing on virtualisation at the server as a way of reducing server footprint and cost, many people are missing the ability of virtualisation to all IT organisation to loosen control without loosing control. This loosening effect will be especially true for the softricity technologies.

Then there were a couple of hosting announcements:

• Microsoft Sees Strong Demand for Hosting Solutions as Software as a Service Increases in Popularity
• Microsoft Enhances Solution for Windows-Based Hosting

From the first one:

Intergenia, a leading Web hosting company based in Germany, has deployed a wide array of Microsoft hosting solutions to deliver applications and services to its broad customer base. With more than 2.2 million active sites hosted and more than 20,000 dedicated servers in data centers in and the U.S., the company has recently been declared the second-largest Web hosting provider in the world by the British market research firm Netcraft Ltd. More than 95 percent of Intergenia’s active sites are hosted on the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 3.5. In 2005 Intergenia was one of the first German hosting providers to launch Hosted Exchange and has since deployed the solution to a growing number of customers.

“We are seeing a significant upswing in the software-as-a-service market in Germany, and Microsoft solutions for Windows-based Hosting and Hosted Messaging and Collaboration are helping us to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Thomas Strohe, founder, Intergenia AG. “Our customers expect a high level of security and service availability, and because of the ease of deployment and the tools and management capabilities in Microsoft’s solutions, we are able to provide both. As companies become more familiar with the software-as-a-service model, we expect to see demand grow even stronger for more sophisticated services and applications.”

I never really saw hosting and SaaS as the same thing, or perhaps I’m wrong and hosting is a form of SaaS. Michael Platt’s been trying to get his head around the different definitions too. Scoble wrote a number of times about how Microsoft should purchase Web 2.0 companies, perhaps they have a more subtle plan which we are seeing working itself out – perhaps the plan is not to own the applications, but to own the delivery of the applications.

Another interesting announcement was the purchase of wininternals. A very interesting move, particularly the thought of Microsoft trying to integrate another set of talented individuals.

Tags: SaaS, Microsoft, Hosting, Softricity

Gartner’s High-Performance Workplace Blog highlights a voice I am seeing grow around IT: IT Must Loosen Control Without Loosing Control:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.

We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

I love the phrase “The Abominable No Man”.

So many IT environments are stuck between major refresh and transformation programmes. No change can occur without the large scale testing and control of a large programme, but the environment has to be in a real mess before the pain of a large programme outweighs the pain of keeping things as they are.

When the large programmes does get initiated is does a good job of delivering generic capabilities. Anything that is innovative or complicated will be squeezed out by the needs of the generic.

However hard the corporate IT environment runs it can never deliver the same breadth of capabilities as the Internet. One of the major drivers for adoption of Web 2.0 type services is not that they are better than what the corporate IT organisation could provide, it’s simply that they are available.

The problem for IT organisations is that they are stuck between reducing costs and be innovative. in my experience it never works when conflicting requirements are placed on an organisation – one will always win. In my experience it’s always cost reduction that wins. That why I think that the really smart organisations will not place the conflicting requirements into one organisation, they will run an IT organisation and an innovation organisation (that may well also deliver IT). I’ve written about this previously in the context of CIO’s delivering value rather than just reducing cost. I just don’t see it myself. Engineering organisations don’t have the operation organisation design the new product. The operational organisation are involved but they aren’t setting the agenda that’s the job of the product development organisation.

The problem with loosening control is that IT organisations are generally not good at dealing with grey, they like things to be black and white. They have to deal with grey every day, but they are never comfortable with it. Loosening control requires the addition of a whole load more grey. Perhaps that’s where the versatilists come in .

ComputerWorld has an article on the changing skill requirements for ‘IT’ people:

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with “versatilists” — those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

I’m assuming that the newly invented word – “versatilists” – is trying to overcome some of the negative connotations of the more commonly used word – “generalist”. At least that’s my assumption, because the word is never really defined. To be honest I think it’s a terrible word, but I do think that they have a point.

As IT becomes more grown-up it is bound to become more business focussed and less technology focussed. As the technology starts to get out of the way, the purpose for the technology will come to the fore.

The only issue I think I do have is with the time-scales – 2010. From where I am sitting the tide has already turned and people with business understanding are the ones most sought after already. Perhaps I’ve just built a perception because my job is already a “versatilist” job, I have no statistical evidence to support my theory.

Another interesting element from the article was the pronouncement that many of this set of IT people will come from education backgrounds other than IT. In my experience this is, again, already the case. Even though I work in an IT services organisation I know very few people who have an IT educational background. The dominant group are people with old school engineering backgrounds (mechanical, civil, etc.).

I was in the USA last week with a group of colleagues. One of the issue we were talking about was service levels of collaborative and communication solutions. We had quite a good discussion on the difference on reliability and availability requirements. The interesting part of the discussions being on the difference between the actual availability requirements and the perceived availability requirements.

One of my arguments was that we all have so many different communication mechanisms available to us, does it matter if one of them is unavailable for a period of time. We perceive that we need all of them all of the time, but is that really true.

Unfortunately my sub-conscience decided that it would undertake an experiment on this thesis and caused me leave my mobile phone in the taxi that took us to the airport .

I am now one of those “mobile phone left in taxi” statistics .

Thankfully the taxi driver was an honest sole and phone my home to tell my wife of this fact. Unfortunately, know that I had no mobile phone, she was unable to contact me. As it was the early hours of the morning I didn’t contact her until I was back in the UK the next day. Hopefully one of my colleagues who is based in the USA will be able to collect it this week, and he is over in the UK next week.

I wonder how crucial to my work having a mobile phone is? I have four days to find out before the joys of holiday.

One of my flickr pictures has passed 1000 views (1128 to be precise for the moment). I noticed that it was popular near the end of last week and then it only had 990 (ish) view. That’s right, nearly 150 view since over the weekend.

This is a complete mystery to me. I have absolutely no idea why this picture get so many views. It’s not a bad picture, but it isn’t that interesting either. There are lots of pictures which I personally prefer.

Ever since I took it, it has gained lots of views. It’s sister picture has nearly 1000 (901 actually). In Flickr pictures tend to get noticed because they are members of all sorts of groups, but that’s not true for this picture either, it’s not been posted into any groups. It’s not like it has any comments associated with it either. There’s only one comment and that’s mine, asking if anyone knows why it’s popular .

The most popular Jimmy and Grandad picture has only gained 172 views by comparison .

I suppose it could be related to the blog that it’s posted on. I’d like to think that this was the reason and that lots of people where reading this particular post because I regard it as one of my best. I have done some tests, and I don’t think that these remote loads actually count, the statistics on the blog don’t add credence to this thesis either .

Boggle? Sounds fitting for such a mystery .

Tags: flickr, views, blogs

Things might be a bit quiet on this sight this week – I’m off to the delights of the USA for a few days, and with travelling I might not get to post anything.

Alternatively, I will be cooped up on a plane for hours on end, so you never know what might come flooding out.

Please, don’t any of you describe this as a ‘jolly’ it is definitely not that.

Jimmy and Grandad are coming (on Stu’s suggestion) so there might be some interesting pictures.

I did something a little scary today – I used System Restore on my Vista Tablet.

Del.icio.us have created proper button for IE (rather than using favourites) so I thought I’d try it out.

Click on download, click on install, click on ‘I accept’ (or something like that) and the install starts, the progress bar moves across the screen and then it stalls, and stalls, and stalls.

After a good long while I check the processes in the Task Manager and IE is no longer responding, but nicely using up 100% of the CPU. I realise that this is never going to finish so I kill the install, but IE is still not responding and is still running at 100%, so I kill IE too .

Unfortunately when I restart IE it hangs, I’m now getting a bit annoyed with myself for having to try something new all the time .

Restart Vista – no effect .

Remove the del.icio.us application via the control panel – no effect .

Restarting Vista again – still had no effect .

My options are no looking very limited. So it’s off to try out the scary option to resolve the problem – System Restore.

I’ve used System Restore a few times on XP devices and had mixed results. In one instance the device had to be rebuilt because it way just not the same again. So I was a bit wary of using System Restore on Beta software.

Undertaking a System Restore on Vista is very similar to the way it’s done on XP. You select your restore point based on date, Vista restores the data and then reboots.

Well it’s come back and everything seems to be fine, and IE is now working again .

(The picture isn’t meant to imply that I felt like I was going down a stream without a paddle, but I suppose it’s appropriate )

Tags: Vista, System Restore, IE

Microsoft has today announced (information here, here) that it will indeed support the Open Document Format (ODF).

Will it be a big deal, or just another feature that will have very little impact on most users?

What seems to be clear from the information currently available is that users of Microsoft Office will need to think about using ODF, rather than using ODF as the standard format. For starters they will need to download an additional component, and even then it’s not clear that they can make ODF the default format.

Even if users could make ODF the default format what would make them choose it as the day-to-day format that they use?

People tend not to make decisions of principle if it adds to their workload, or the workload of others. In the short term ODF capabilities will not be ubiquitous so sending an ODF file to anyone will be to take a risk that you are adding to your workload because you’ll need to re-send the file if the person at the other end can’t read it. If you do need to re-send the file you obviously gives the person receiving the file a problem.

Large organisations can make a principle decision and then enforce that on the people who need to collaborate with them, but they need to be large enough to be dominant. If large organisations do make a principle decision they just give the little guy (who is collaborating) the problem of working in two worlds; the current file format world and the new ODF file format world. Both worlds will exist for some time because I don’t see any sign that all of the large organisations making a principle decision all at the same time, all in the same direction.

What I do see happening is an ODF based ecosystem being built and potential growing in parallel to the current Microsoft Office file format ecosystem. Building an ecosystem doesn’t happen in weeks or months, building an ecosystem takes years.

I’m not convinced that the ODF ecosystem will succeed though, decision based on principle rarely win when it comes to IT. The simplest and easiest things tends to win.

Is this a big deal? It might be, but it isn’t going to be a big deal for a long time.

Tags: Office, ODF, Microsoft

Often it’s the little things in life that annoy. My Tablet currently has one very annoying defect. If it was software I’m sure I could work with it, but it’s not. It’s a small piece of rubberised plastic on the pen.

This rubberised material makes it feel nice and squishy in my hand, but the problem comes when I try to put the pen back into it’s nice little hole at the top of my TC1100.

Because there is a little cut in the material it bows out and won’t go in unless I perform some fancy wiggle manoeuvre to make the cut fit in. If I don’t do the special wiggle the cut just gets bigger, and over time that is exactly what it is doing.

I can’t decide how to fix it.

I considered buying a new pen but they are a silly price because they aren’t just a simple bit of plastic, there’s electronics in their too.

I am currently trying to work a cunning DIY plan for sticking the material back onto the pen in such a way as it will no longer protrude from the edge of the pen.

I know it’s only a little thing, but it’s still really annoying .

Tags: Tablet, Pen, TC1100

That Coyote bloke got me thinking again this morning:

“you need time to see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The brain finds it hard to hang on to disconnected pieces of information. Unlike a computer disc, it doesn’t cope well with large amounts of more or less random data. What it does best is to see connections, linking information together and remembering the patterns, not single pieces of data. Remembering a principle and applying it is far easier to do that recalling some individual “rule” or procedure for handling a situation. Do we see those links instantly? Usually not. It takes time to register them fully and understand them well enough to recall them whenever we want.”

So why do so many of our enterprise information systems do such a poor job of reflecting the links that we have built in our minds between things, and do an even worse job of allowing us to see the links that other individuals have created.

Let’s look at a few example. In the file system I can group a load of files into a folder so that they are all together, but this doesn’t reflect the links that exist between the document. I regularly open a number of files to find the information that I am looking for. I know it’s in one of them because that’s why they are there but there really isn’t any visible linkage. Someone else looking at the set of documents would need to read them all to get a handle on the information contained within.

Document management systems are rarely any better they allow the person who has posted the document to give it a set of key words and to build the taxonomy. Anything information that follows on from this document isn’t reflected and the likely value of each document that has been tagged with a certain keyword isn’t shown either.

Take documents as an entity, particularly technical documents. They are usually a huge blob of data with thousands of internal logical links. The data in this section relates to the data in that section, but we rarely do anything to flag those links. As the links aren’t explicitly shown we need to take in a huge amount of data before we can understand where the links are. It’s rarely possible to structure a technical document in a way that actually makes these links obvious. Lots of people have started making documents out of PowerPoint presentations, it’s something I encouraged initially but now I’m not so sure. The problem with a document is the huge blob problem, the nice thing about a PowerPoint structure is that each page makes a point or a small number of points in this way the huge blob is broken down into a set of smaller blobs. These ‘presentations’ are never going to be presented, they are meant to be read as a set of small chunks which allow people to form their own links.

Blogs are slightly better, assuming people follow the etiquette. Part of the etiquette of blogs is that you do someone the courtesy of referencing their ideas, and rightly so. Because blogs are normally a smaller chunk of data and the links are built in it’s possible to work backward down a subject. Services like track-back and technorati also allow you to follow the links forward.

Tagging services like del.icio.us provide a new way of reflecting the links. They allow items to be tagged by the person consuming the document. Rather than the person who created the item defining the value, the person consuming it does. This capability has taken on the rather ungainly term of folksonomy.

The ability to move beyond taxonomy into folksonomy is rarely available inside an organisation though. Some organisations are getting there – IBM, HP (PDF) (Thanks for the info Stu).

What makes someone tag inside an organisation and how many people does it take. I’m not yet clear about all of the factors that make someone tag, but I can speak from my del.icio.us experience. There are a few reasons why I tag. The main one is a really simple one, I want my voice to be heard. I have valid opinions (or so I think) and I want them to be heard. I’m sure that if I was able to tag within my organisation I would feel exactly the same. Another really important reason is that I tag for my own benefit. As the Coyote says, it take time to register the links in our brains, being able to register the links somewhere helps me to find them in the future. Registering a link also helps me to remember them, I regularly write things down so I don’t forget them, I rarely use the written record because the act of writing it down has implanted the information in my brain, tagging has a similar effect.

We have a long way to go with exposing links, and the value to us humans is in the links rather than in the actual data. The current technologies will take a while to become mainstream in most enterprises, and even longer for the process and social changes to become common practice. There is, however, a new generation who will expect these services to be available and business constrain them at their peril.

Tags: del.icio.us, taxonomy, folksonomy, learning