The other day myself and a colleague were in a session with a Microsoft representative talking about requirements for the desktop beyond Windows Vista. We had a long conversation about application delivery and the need to make it much, much better. We used Softricity as an example. Today Microsoft announced an intention to buy Softricity.
Perhaps I have more power than I think I do .
Tags: Microsoft,Softricity
A reasonable amount of buzz has be flowing around today about Project Orange.
Project Orange is described by the WinFS Team Blog at:
Project Orange is about the creation of an application that demonstrates the reason why WinFS is the replacement for the file system. But more than that, why it’s something that truly liberates data from the constraints of the application.
The file system has been a mainstay of the corporate and desktop infrastructure for a very long time now. If it’s going to change then the change can’t be about the technology. The change has to be about the user experience, enabling them to do things they have never done before in ways that feel more familiar than the file system today.
The WinFS iWish Video is quite interesting to watch – not a ‘file’ in sight.
Tags: WinFS, Project Orange, Microsoft
Questions – it’s becoming a bit of a theme . Perhaps I should actually write something that helps people rather than point them somewhere else? But then that would be encouraging answers rather than questions .
Adrian Savage in his Breakthrough Manifest (Part 2) highlights the important of questions with these two encouragements:
There’s more great stuff over there so go and have a look.
Steve has written a few responses to my post on the Shared File Server being dead:
There are some good comments there.
In response – my article was written about Shared File Servers specifically and much of what Steve has written relates to the File System as a much broader concept.
The one element I would challenge though is that ‘everyone knows how to navigate a file system’ recent experience has shown me how limited that statement is. People know how to post something to the place where their application has been configured to place it but actually thinking about it in terms of a structure to be navigated I’m becoming less convinced. I have recently seen directories with hundreds (and thousands) of files in a flat structure which would have been far more productive if they had been slit into directories. No-one was thinking about the file system as a structure, they were thinking it more like a set of buckets to put things into, and the buckets were defined by the applications.
Fundamentally, though, I agree with Steve in his conclusion that the alternatives have got a long, long way to go.
Flickr has been upgraded.
Did they add in loads of new features to make me happy – not really.
Did they sit back and think about how people use the service and make me smile with the way they have thought about the user experience – oh yes .
FlickBlog has the details.
Loads of thing which I used to have to do through two pages I can now do through a drop down. It’s still two clicks of the mouse, but it’s only one page load. Much, much nicer .
“Your Photos” is now dramatically cleaner and shows more of what the service is really about – photos .
They have put the number of photos and the number of views near the top of the screen which is just catering to our megalomaniac tendencies – but I’m sure I’m not the only one that spends a lot of time looking at these numbers .
Moving the product away from being a ‘beta’ product also makes me feel happy. It was only a title, but it made me feel uncomfortable especially when I’m paying for it. Who buys a beta product?
The is a myth that surrounds the technology arena. The latest time that I read it was in a Boston Globe article on Notes upgrades.
According to The Boston Globe:
Bisconti said admitted that the Lotus office software won’t have all the advanced features of Microsoft Office, but most people rarely use these tools, he added. ”Most customers tell us that 90 percent of my users use 10 percent of the functions,” Bisconti said.
I’d love to be able to say that I have managed to do the research and find out where this myth came from but I can’t. I used to know, but it’s one of those examples where search has a long way to go. If my memory serves me correctly it was some research done by the Microsoft User Interface team and started them down the road of hiding functions that people weren’t using so they could get to the ones they were using quicker.
My experience on the functions that people use is this. Users use a variable amount of the capabilities of large applications like Microsoft Word and most of them only use a small amount of the capabilities that are available to them. But the capabilities they use are different to the capabilities used by the person sat in the cubicle next to them. The way that they do something is different to the way I do it. Adding together all of the capabilities results in a set of capabilities that are all used by someone.
My other experience is that the 10% of users – the power users not in the 90% – use significantly more of the capabilities. It is these individuals who make the other 90% productive and keep encouraging them to increase their productivity.
The Microsoft Office 12/2007 team chose to change the user interface for all of the Office applications because a huge majority of the capabilities they were asked for in Office 12 already existed in Office 2003. It was just that people didn’t know where to find them.
Skype calls Out to traditional land-lines has become free – at least until the end of the year.
It had to happen sooner or later.
Wondering what this Office 2007 thing is all about and you can’t be bothered to read then you need to download the Office 2007 Partner Technical Readiness Training Presentations.
Tags: Office 2007
BetaNews is reporting some statements from Microsoft about their ‘battle with Microsoft.
Others downplayed Google’s battle with Microsoft. While saying the Redmond giant has a history of “not playing fair,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said his company was just too busy with its own products and services to watch what Microsoft was doing. Fellow co-founder Larry Page added that they wanted to focus on innovation instead.
I’ve never seen the primary battle as one between Microsoft and Google. The primary battle is the one to stay ahead of the rest of the pack. While these two companies have dominant positions the IT arena has still got so much change to go through that any dominance that they have today will only continue if they carry on running ahead of the pack. There is still a lot of disruptive technology out there and and load still to be discovered.
There is still plenty of time for them to both become fossils.
Oh, and while we are on the subject of gadgets. LiveSide is reporting on the new Microsoft Live LifeCam’s. Coming out of the Microsoft Peripherals division these are Web Cams with reasonably high definition and reasonably high prices .
What a name though Windows Live LifeCam , why Windows Live why not just LiveCam, what has a camera got to do with Life. But naming is another subject altogether. If you are interested in the subject you might find this interesting, but not much .
I have always thought it would be cool to move away from the big screen experience and move the experience up close – into my glasses.
The Kowon LCD DMB Glasses look like fun. Oh, and they will pick up a digital TV signal, so you can watch whatever rubbish it is that they are chucking out. And that for me is the problem, I don’t ever see myself wanting to be so immersed in a television program that I don’t want to see what else is going on around me. Television is way too boring to grab all of my attention.
But are they really cool? What do you think. Of course not, they just make you look like a geek, or an alien, or someone who just wants to hide from the rest of the world.
Do I ever see myself buying some? No, but they do look like fun, and it’s a lot more interesting to report than the last break-through in really big LCD screens that no-one can afford.
IBM are advertising a residency to create a Red Book for Exchange to Domino and Notes.
This intrigues me at a number of levels.
IBM complain regularly and bitterly about all of the ammunition that Microsoft throw their way on Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange migration and yet they are only now seeking to update a Red Book that deals with Exchange 5.5 migrations. Migrations from Exchange 5.5 might be their best target, but it leaves all of those users who are already on Exchange 2000/2003 with no assistance. Has this really been a wise investment of their efforts.
Also, though, why a residency. Surely IBM should already know how the migration should happen, haven’t they already done it? Now don’t get me wrong here, I applaud them for listening to expertise outside IBM. My concern is that they haven’t already got a proven approach to this problem that they could just spit out. Or perhaps I’m missing the monumental change in Notes/Domino 7 that made such a radical change to this problem when compared to Notes/Domino 6.5.
Are the gloves really off?
When I speak to IBM they tell me they have a reasonable stream of users making the switch away from Exchange, but all I get are customers switching the other way, or at least considering it.
Graham Chastney 