Category: Weblogs

Microsoft and Softricity: Licensing

The calming brook

A lot of comment on Microsoft’s intention to buy Softricity (Steve Richards, Brian Madden, others)

My own viewpoint can be summarised like this:

  • Technology: Great

  • User Experience: Great

  • Licensing: Problem

Both Steve and Brian touch on the licensing issue. The benchmark that everyone in the market works to when it comes to licensing is Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft are doing everyone else falls into line with. The Microsoft licensing engine is dominated by licensing that is installation based. In other words, you pay for every installation.

In order to accommodate the ‘terminal server’ type applications the pay-per-installation scenario has been fudged a bit to state that a license is required for each device capable of running the application on the terminal server.

Application virtualisation only becomes truly valuable where the licensing terms are flexible and fluid allowing a pay-per-use type model.

The pressure is on to make this change, but until Microsoft makes a dramatic change no-one else will see the need to. Moving to a pay-per-use model would require a huge shift for Microsoft and significantly impact the revenue from enterprise licensing and from Office; both of them things that they will be unwilling to tinker with too much.

Without a shift in licensing mechanisms application virtualisation is stick.

Tags: , Softricity,

How civilised is your organisation?

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: A strange collection

There are a number of reoccuring themes on this blog, it’s not deliberate it’s just what I’m interested in. One of them is the workplace of the future and that depends upon work culture more than technology.

Slow leadership points to a quiz on the subject of organisation civility:

 “How civilised is your organisation? Can it pass the Slow Leadership test for a working environment beneficial to the people who inhabit it? Now you have a chance to find out.”

I did the score for the organisation I work in, but I’m not willing to share the results .

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

John W. Gardner 

From my perspective the organisations that are going to succeed, particularly in the West World, are going to be those organisation that focus on creativity and innovation. Creativity and innovation requires civility in an organisation.

Cringely on IBM (Services)

Jimmy and Grandad try out the park

The other week I talked about how Cringely made me laugh.

This week’s post on IBM and in particular services didn’t – IBM aren’t the only service provider with the problems identified.

User Experience Thinking: Project Orange

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Grandad gives Jimmy a lift up

A reasonable amount of buzz has be flowing around today about Project Orange.

Project Orange is described by the WinFS Team Blog at:

The killer app for getting users organised

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,   

User Experience Thinking: Flickr Upgrade

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy scales the mighty obolisk called Guitar

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?

In the top 200,000

Feel like giving myself a little pat on the back today.

Today this little blog has moved up into the top 200,000 category on Technorati . Only just in, but that’s fine by me I’m not really doing it for the glory anyway.

Samsung Q1

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy and Grandad warm themselves by the mysterious warm black thing

While I was off sick yesterday then went and officially launched the Samsung Q1 – the sleek Origami UMPC.

People are clearly still struggling with whether they like this form factor or not.

James Kendrick point to a mixed set of reviews.

Microsoft Monitor definitely sees it as a status device.

At $1,100 in the US and £800 in the UK you are going to really have to want one to be spending.

I still think that this form factor has so many home uses that I can’t wait to be in the market for one, but I don’t need it so much that I am willing to pay £800.

Tags: ,,,

International Writer's Blog

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Where is that noise coming from?

Is there some kind of international writers block going on? There was a time when I would start my aggregator and the set of articles that met me would make me want to write a couple of posts straight away. Over the last few weeks I have noticed a distinct lack of things that made me feel that way.

Having looked through I have noticed that the writers who used to stimulate this reaction have been a lot quieter themselves.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, but I wonder whether we are witnessing an international phenomena or whether it’s a cyclical thing that should be expected. We all know that many blogs starts, run and then fizzle out because the person has said much of what they wanted to say. We also know that it’s really hard work producing original content all the time, it’s much easier to echo someone else’s content. So are people just getting to that phase in their writing, or are we actually in a phase where there is very little to say.

Having written this I’m struck by the fact that I haven’t said anything either .

Comment authentication change

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Grandad gets stuck in a psychadelic dream worldOh yes, forgot to say. I have changed the commenting regime again, no authentication required anymore, but you do have to be able to screw-up your face and read jumbled letters. Have a go you’ll see what I mean.

ARCast on Motion

Ron Jacobs has posted a couple of Podcasts on Motion.

I haven’t listened yet so can’t comment on how good they are; Motion looks like a very interesting approach to business modelling.

Microsoft Origami or Apple Newton

Is it me or does anyone else think that all of the picture floating around of the supposed Origami Project look a little too much like a colour Apple Newton??

OK, yes, I know I’m stretching it a bit, but we are talking about technology from completely different eras here.

Comments, Conversations and Blogs

I’ve always thought that it was way too difficult to transition comments into a conversation. This is especially true when you go to another blog and add a comment; you then need to go back and see whether the other person has responded. Well it looks like that issue may be about to receive some technical answers.

www.cocomment.com looks like they have a great product ready to launch.

Via: Scoble and Jason Clark

(And their name doesn’t even have a ‘r’ at the end.)