Category: Collaboration

The FT has an interesting article about the challenges of email management which features Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.

The line I really like is this one:

“No one is giving me more heartbeats per day or more minutes; there is no Moore’s Law for humans. I am not becoming twice as intelligent and half as cheap; if anything the cost is going up and I’m slowing down. Given the real limits of human cognition, the machines – who have, after all, gotten us into this mess – are going to have to get us out of it.”

Sounds like he is describing me.

Microsoft announces its marketing strategy to business for the 2006/2007 wave of products and it all comes under the banner of “People-Ready”.

Lots of comment on it today from others: Beta News, Microsoft Watch, Clive Watson. It’s been reasonably popular on technorati too.

For some time Microsoft have been using the phrase “People-Driven Process” in the collaboration space. So what is being a “People-Ready” Business about. Well apparently it’s about:

“The company’s [Microsoft’s] People-Ready vision is based on the belief that people are the ultimate drivers of a business’ success. A business that is People-Ready gives its people software tools that enable them to collaborate and work together globally, to contact and serve customers instantly, and to streamline and reinvent processes intuitively.”

From: Microsoft Announces “People-Ready” Business Vision

And Microsoft is aiming to “apply its product portfolio and provide differentiated offerings to a much broader set of customer needs in the following categories”:

• Unified communications and collaboration. 
• Enterprise search. 
• The mobile work force.
• Business intelligence.
• Customer relationship management (CRM).
• Infrastructure.

Which seems to me to be a list of business issues that people are constantly talking about. Whether they are all relevant to every business, I doubt.

I’ve not had chance to read all of the stuff that’s out there so I’m not in a position to talk about the technology but the marketing strikes me as both interesting and puzzling.

What does the tag line of “Inside your company is a powerful force – your people. Are they ready?” actually mean. Yes, I know these people spend millions on creating these things and that they don’t always want to answer their own question, but this one strikes me as particularly obtuse. “Are they ready?” Ready for what? Ready to go home? Ready to join a competitor? Or perhaps they really mean: Ready to do their job? Ready to work smarter?

I think the problem I have is the word “Ready”, “Ready” implies “prepared and available” and “willing”; technology can help with the “prepared and available” bit but has little at all to do with the “willing” bit. Being “willing” needs a business culture the fosters a willingness to go into action. I suppose all I am saying is everything I have said before about business process, but this time I’m going further than that into business culture.

Tags: “People-Ready”,Microsoft

(I’m still calling the Origami in the vain hope that sense will prevail and we won’t be calling these think UMPC’s in the future)

The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog has a great story about Goldilocks and the three devices today.

Just right .

Tags: Origami,Microsoft,UMPC

JK has written an article on the way that he uses FolderShare to synchronise a number of devices giving him the flexibility to pickup the device that he thinks will be appropriate and still have access to all of the data.

FolderShare has become so much a part of the Chastney family working process that I had forgotten about it – which is a great thing for a piece of software.

In the Chastney’s family household there are three family devices. There are other devices, but the family is limited to three. We don’t use FolderShare in the same way as JK though. Each device has its own FolderShare account because it’s used primarily by a different person. Having different accounts allows us to have different data go to different places, in a kind of matrix.

• Sue primarily uses the PC in the study downstairs. She stores nearly everything in here ‘My Documents’ directory, with a few things going into ‘Shared’. Her ‘My Documents’ is backed-up to the Family Media Center (which I primarily use). Her ‘My Documents’ is stored in a sub-directory of a directory called ‘backup’ on one of the drives.
• Jonathan has his own laptop. He puts everything into ‘My Documents’ except his music which goes into ‘Shared’. All of his music is ripped from CD, so we don’t back that up at all. His ‘My Documents’ goes into another sub-directory of ‘backup’ on the Media Center PC.
• My ‘My Documents’ on the the Family Media Center is replicated to Sue’s PC in the study downstairs.
• Family stuff, such as pictures are replicated between the ‘Shared Documents’ folders on the Media Center PC and the PC in the Study Downstairs.

Because Foldershare also has a ‘trash’ concept nothing that is deleted actually gets deleted from everywhere and we could recover it if we wanted to. I don’t use FolderShare as the only backup, but it does mean that I don’t do back-up that often. It all just happens and none of us think anything about it.

Actually, I say I had forgotten FolderShare but that was until this Sunday when I realised that I had got to church and forgotten to copy the Sermon presentation for the day onto my memory stick. What to do, well actually it’s really, really simple. Log-on to FolderShare access the files on my computer, download them. Worked a treat. Actually it worked so well I’m not sure I will copy stuff onto my memory stick ever again (actually I will because I’m paranoid about such things but I will at least do so knowing there is a back-up plan).

Tags: Microsoft,FolderShare

I’ve been a little intrigued by the reaction to the Origami or Ultra-Mobile Personal Computer.

I rather liked the Joy of Tech cartoon, even if they are getting way too Apple biased.

My first observation was the naming one – why on earth change from Origami to UMPC. I know that one is a development name and the other is the true grown-up business marketing name but come on.

My first point leads into my second point. The Origami needs a consumer name because I see it primarily as a consumer device. But I don’t think I see it as a consumer device in quite the same context as Microsoft Monitor. I know its new grown-up name is Ultra-Portable Personal Computer, but I don’t see me spending much time carrying this thing around.

The place I primarily see my Origami is in my lounge as an Internet and media access device.

As an example. I am getting increasingly fed-up with the way that news is reported (for instance) and would much rather cut the news the way I want to see it. Why should I get the mediocre news piped to me down the television, or even use the rather kludgey television interfaces when I can get onto numerous news sites and get just as rich a media experience with the level of detail I choose.

Another example. I would love to be able to get any of my media to any of the audio or video equipment in the house. The Origami could do the streaming, or just be a remote control, I don’t mind but it would be a much richer experience than the television interfaces we have today.

The other place I see my Origami is in my luggage, not in my work-bag, in my luggage. I regularly take a laptop on holiday because I want to capture memories by keeping a diary or by uploading my camera pictures for safe keeping. It’s also a nice way of carrying some of your own media with you for the evenings in the holiday accommodation. If, as they increasingly do, the accommodation has a reasonable Internet connection then, again, it would be nice to catch up on world events or even family and local events.

I’m not bothered by a keyboard for any of these contexts because I don’t see myself actually inputting very much.

For me it doesn’t help in any of my business contexts because my business context requires me to respond and response still requires a keyboard. Being someone in the middle order of things, my responses are rarely short commands to people. If I wanted something ultra-mobile in this context it would need a keyboard and the Sony VAIO TX would probably do just fine, but I tend to need the screen real-estate of a larger laptop.

The point that The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog makes about keyboard-less computing and voice commands is interesting but voice recognition software has still not broken out of its current context which is very small. I have a friend who has a voice activated control system in his car, he hardly ever uses it to initiate a phone call with someone, it’s easier to press the buttons. I have voice activation on my phone, it’s all set-up, it’s still easier to press the buttons.

That brings me back to the Joy of Tech cartoon, does the current devices look enough like a ‘gadget’ for people to rush out and buy them? Would Sue pick one up and see ‘technology’ or see ‘useful’? Clearly the name UMPC doesn’t help one bit, but perhaps the partners will be a little more creative.