In the last few days the Help in Office 2003 which is, of course, online is malfunctioning intermittently. At first I put the problems down to a post-launch surge of users accessing the Help site.
However, the problems are persisting and if anything getting worse. Not infrequently, InfoPath 2003 is, in effect, hanging when I try to access the Help files. The Microsoft site seems not to be responding. In that circumstance, as I understand it, the Help files should display only what has been downloaded on previous occasions.
However, the Help files cause InfoPath to hang in that they are "stuck" with a message "Downloading from Microsoft Office online" but they are doing nothing.
Online Help is a great idea ... in theory ... in that the Help is always the most up to date available. But when access to Help is excruciatingly slow (at the times it works) and sometimes requires the program to be shut down to carry on working with it then it is a pretty substandard user experience.
In one of my early posts on what I call the "Big Software War", "Big Software War" - Some Economic Factors , I analysed the options of a family which had an annual income of $2,000, pointing out that Microsoft has a potentially big problem because typical Windows and Office licensing costs are prohibitive in a market where incomes are of that level.
Interestingly, I found out yesterday that the average annual income in Peru is $1,980 so my figure which was plucked out of the air to illustrate a point is directly relevant to at least one country where open source software is being actively promoted by its government.
A Danish report on the use of open source software - and therefore relevant to what I call the "Big Software War" - has been translated into English. It seems, Denmark urges government support for open source , that the Danish Board of Technology recommends that the Danish Government actively supports open source software, as a way to improve competitiveness in the software marketplace.
The European Union has a philosophy and supporting laws which promote competition in various market places, which are broadly similar to the thought pattern underlying anti-trust laws in the USA.
So far, I haven't located the original report.
The search facility on the Microsoft.com Home page now works!
I tested it with Firebird, Opera and Mozilla and the Search box now actually operates rather than, as it did previously, failing to return any results for search terms that worked with Internet Explorer.
It would have been nice if Microsoft had actually let me know they had fixed it in response to my complaint a few days ago. But I guess I can't have everything.
I criticise Microsoft when their software is unstable, or doesn't work as expected so to be even handed I need to do the same when other software lets me down too. A little disappointintly, Firebird 0.7 has crashed a couple of times in the few days since I downloaded it.
I tend to load Firebird pretty heavily, often having a dozen or two tabs open at the same time. But Firebird 0.7 in my limited experience so far is less stable than Firebird 0.61.
But the absence of tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer still means that Internet Explorer is a browser I reserve for "special" uses - for example, in MSDN where, in some areas, use of proprietary JScript makes browsing with anything but Internet Explorer a bit problematic.
There are three competitors that I am aware of for the XML Forms space: Microsoft's InfoPath, W3C XForms and (still to be launched) Adobe's XML/PDF forms.
An overview of this space is to be found in Software makers look for profits in e-forms .
For several years Microsoft has had a "Most Valued Professional", MVP, designation which is applied to individuals who demonstrate helpfulness and informedness (sorry for the neologism) on Microsoft newsgroups and in support for users of Microsoft software generally.
Microsoft has announced, Expanded MVP Program Puts Knowledge, Real-life Experience to Work for Microsoft Customers Worldwide , that it has expanded the international dimension of the MVP program.
That makes good sense in terms of building international bridges in the "Big Software War". I see it as strategically important for Microsoft to be seen to be moving from a USA Wide Web to a genuinely World Wide Web focus.
IBM and Adobe have announced a new piece of cooperation, IBM and Adobe create digital documents together and IBM and Adobe Join Forces To Deliver Enterprise Solutions Based on Document Services centered around Adobe's forms server.
It looks as if this cooperation may be targeting a similar segment of the enterprise forms market to some of the things that InfoPath is targetting. However, Adobe's XML/PDF forms tool (which isn't mentioned in yesterday's announcement) seems to be a more direct competitor to InfoPath.
I guess it won't be news to anybody that XML-based forms and document workflows are going to a growth area for the enterprise sector.
I am not asking if Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer are capable of writing a blog. They are, by all available evidence, highly intelligent guys so they ought to be physically and intellectually capable of producing a blog. I am asking a question more like, "Will it ever be realistic for senior corporate executives like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to have a public blog?".
There might be a good case for senior executives to produce an intranet blog. Even there, certain issues might be problematic. But a public blog raises potential difficulties not least for investors and others in distinguishing a "personal remark" (can really senior executives have such things?) and an official corporate statement.
If Bill Gates started a "personal" public blog can anyone really pretend that it wouldn't be studied for all manner of hints about Microsoft and its future prospects?
Currently there seem to be few blogs written by corporate employees above the level which Robert Scoble describes as the "ants".
Eric Rudder, a Microsoft Senior Vice President is perhaps an exception. He began a blog apparently in May 2003, imaginatively called Eric Rudder�s Blog but he posted, so it seems, a total of two entries.
I can sympathise with the potential time pressures when trying to keep a blog populated with new entries - I only lasted 8 days before I missed my first day - but for a senior executive I suspect that other issues creep into the picture too.
For example, how human can a senior executive afford to be publicly? Can a senior VP afford to admit a mistake, or working too hard, or that his (assuming the VP is male) favourite hobby is something "touchy feely" rather than something thrusting and macho? Or that he has been neglecting his wife due to time pressures from the upcoming PDC? The list of potentially sensitive topics is endless.
It seem to me that the corporate blogger will, without major changes in corporate culture, almost inevitably be outside the upper echelons of the corporate power structure. The corporate blogger therefore resembles in some respects the court jester at the court of a mediaeval king. The court jester, like the corporate blogger, had licence to say things which go beyond what would be acceptable from someone in a more senior, a more official or a more credible position. One problem for the court jester, and perhaps in time it will be a problem for the corporate blogger too, is that nobody took anything he said seriously.
Oracle and Corel have revealed, Oracle and Corel to Provide Open Standard Content Solutions-Corel Integrates XML and SVG Tools with Newly Introduced Oracle Database 10g , that they have teamed up to provide XML and SVG based solutions based on Oracle 10g.
It will be interesting to see how the tools this partnership produces compare to the output from SQL Server Reporting Services in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server Yukon. As far as I am aware there has been no public indication of whether or not Reporting Services supports SVG output.
However, it does look as if the Corel / Oracle combination is looking to produce a broader range of output, "to provide intelligent user interfaces for rich structured documents such as product documentation, financial reports, technical manuals and government legislation and regulation", than SQL Server Reporting Services.
The market for tools to extract and effectively present business data from enterprise class databases looks as if it is becoming increasingly competitive. The interactivity, animation and XML nature of SVG makes it a good fit with XML-based corporate workflows.
I guess that people flouting NDAs is not a problem only for Microsoft. See Where's Your NDA, man? .
I agree with Chuck Toporek's advice, "If you're asked to agree to an NDA and you feel like you can't keep quiet about what you're about to be given access to, you should just turn around and walk away.".
I have been reading an interview, Joy after Sun , with Bill Joy following his departure from Sun Microsystems.
One point he makes which interests me is that C is, essentially, an inappropriate language to use to attempt to write secure software.
Interesting thought.
There is other stimulating or provocative stuff in the interview, according to your taste / opinion.
Hm ... It seems that everybody is blogging these days. I have just stumbled across a blog by John Honeyball . If you don't know who John Honeyball is read my post SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services .
In his entry for 14th October John claims (or seems to claim) to have just had dinner with Bill Gates.
Now, if I could only work out if he was kidding or not .....
Having in a Quote of the Week - 2 expressed criticism of Microsoft marketing, I guess I may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb!
It seems to me that the upcoming Professional Developer's Conference is an anachronism.
Why do I say that?
I think that such conferences are anachronistic on several levels but in this entry I will focus simply on how an anachronistic approach to PDC potentially damages information sharing. Since I assume that PDC has a marketing component and that all marketing should be primarily customer-focussed this seems to me, at one level, to be a failure of marketing.
If we assume that a primary purpose of PDC is to enable developers to develop solutions for Longhorn it seems logical that the information that developers need is imparted or shared as effectively as possible.
Yet, if I understand the PDC program correctly, the program will follow a sequence that would, in essence, have been possible with the technology of 50 years ago!
An audience is expected to arrive without access to preparatory information and to, largely, sit while presenters ... well ... present. At the end of presentations there will be an opportunity for questions.
This seems to me to be inherently unimaginative and inefficient, and to miss out on potential benefits of more recent technologies.
A potentially much more effective approach would be to make Webcasts of upcoming presentations available to registered attendees for, say, two weeks before the PDC and during the PDC. This would give participants the opportunity to get up to speed on topics of interest and be much better informed in order to take advantage of the unique aspect of a PDC - access to Microsoft developers for face to face discussions to explore interesting aspects of upcoming technologies such as SQL Server Yukon, Visual Studio Whidbey and Windows Longhorn.
Similarly, Webcasts would allow attendees to check out sessions that clash with priority sessions.
Of course, some PDC attendees will already be on the alpha or beta programs for Whidbey and Yukon and will have hands on experience of selected technologies. But for other attendees ... the majority? ... an opportunity to get up to speed on upcoming technologies before travelling to PDC would be a significant improvement on the current approach. It would give them a much better opportunity to take advantage of face to face discussion with Microsoft developers at PDC.
I realise that PDC will, to some extent, be exploring new technology such as a range of blogging of PDC on PDC Bloggers . Yet a more imaginative use of Webcasts both before and during PDC could enable attendees to get much more benefit from attendance. It might also make the face to face discussions more interesting and stimulating for Microsoft staff, since there would be fewer of the repeat basic questions from attendees and an opportunity for significantly deeper discussions.
Such face to face discussion time is, or so it seems to me, one of the most valuable parts of a big conference. Surely it makes sense to use technology to maximise the achievable exchange of information?
Yes, it would probably mean more work for presenters. But isn't the customer supposed to be king?
This week's technical quote of the week comes from Randy Holloway's blog:
" In the development community, Microsoft is seen in a better light than it has been in recent years. Another face of Microsoft is its marketing machine. There is a sterile feel to much of the marketing that Microsoft does. I think it comes down to an attempt to control the message. The more you try to control the message, the less effective the message will be. The reason is that people today can tell the difference between valuable information and canned marketing material. "
Source: Dinner with Scoble
This expresses concerns that I, too, have about much Microsoft marketing. It may have been possible a few years ago for marketeers to assume that readers of marketing material would naively accept what they were told. In today's climate that assumption is, in my view, both false and dangerous - dangerous, specifically, to Microsoft's future market well-being.
With the upcoming "Big Software War" feeding marketing material of low credibility to customers adds to the possibility of making current Microsoft customers become former customers.
More customer-focussed marketing material which meets customers where they actually are, rather than where marketing dogma would wish them to be, seems to me to be a much healthier approach to marketing.
This week there will be two quotes of the week - one technical, one not.
First the non-technical one.
" Anyone who wants to stay in touch with national, international and local events looks forward to reading the newspaper every day. The variety and breadth of newspaper stories make Americans the best-informed people in the world. "
Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/143851_thomas15.html
I have to say that to someone outside the United States, particularly to those used to the much greater variety of opinion available in newspapers in Western Europe, the quote has more than a flavour of endearing naivete about it.
Many readers will likely be familiar with the name Jakob Nielsen in the context of usability. His company also publicises a Ten Best Intranets of 2003 accolade.
It seems to me that there are a couple of odd features to the award.
First the "ten best" are presented in a bulleted list, not a numbered list. So we are given no idea of which is "the best", in Dr. Nielsen's opinion.
Second, the number of entrants is not stated and there is an interesting clustering of percentages around values of 3% and 7%. The percentage values given in the report were:
# United States: 57%
# Canada: 10%
# Europe: 27%, of which
* Germany: 3%
* Spain: 3%
* Sweden: 7%
* Switzerland: 7%
* U.K.: 7%
# Australia: 7%
Notice how 3%, 7% and 10% appear surprisingly often.
What this unusual clustering of numbers makes me wonder is that, if absolute numbers (remember those aren't given in the report) were used, the geographical data would look like this:
# United States: 18
# Canada: 3
# Europe: 9, of which
* Germany: 1
* Spain: 1
* Sweden: 2
* Switzerland: 2
* U.K.: 2
# Australia: 2
If I am correct that those are the likely absolute numbers then a "ten best" out of thirty entrants looks a very different scenario from a supposed "ten best intranets" with an implied global reach.
Perhaps my suggested thirty entrants are simply Dr. Nielsen's clients?
I think I have stumbled across another facet of the broken search on Microsoft.com which I mentioned a few days ago in an article entitled, Why is Microsoft.com Search broken? .
If you use Firebird or Mozilla on the Microsoft Careers Site Search facility then any term including likely hits such as CLR and Longhorn return nothing other than the Search page again.
The result seems to be that only Internet Explorer users can search for jobs at Microsoft.
A few days ago I posed the question of Why Doesn't Microsoft have a Blogging Tool? .
Maybe Microsoft are further down the road of addressing that need than I realised.
I have stumbled across some Job ads, which mention blogging, which Dan Gilmorr spotted a few weeks back on the Microsoft Careers Site .
Version 0.7 of Firebird and version 1.5 of Mozilla are both available for download from Mozilla.org .
If you haven't experienced the great tabbed browsing in Firebird ... it's an improvement on Mozilla ... try it out. Internet Explorer is, in that respect, left for dead at the moment.
I am probably an unusually heavy browser user (despite being on a diet!). I think my record, at least the highest figure I remember when I actually bothered to count, was having 64 browser windows and/or tabs open at the same time.
Don Demcsak ("Don XML") has posted an interesting entry comparing the potential of W3C SVG-RCC and Microsoft's Avalon, Avalon Versus SVG-RCC .
Walk on past the stumbling first sentence of Don's entry to get to the meat of the discussion.
If you are not familiar with SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, and you want to view Don's SVG examples you will need to download an SVG viewer to view the examples. Adobe's SVG Viewer, for example, is available for free download .
Note that some of the SVG-RCC examples which Don mentions require a later, prototype version of the Adobe viewer.
Like Avalon, SVG-RCC is cutting edge stuff. But it has enormous potential. If Microsoft doesn't pick up SVG-RCC I suspect that others will.
SVG-RCC is included in the SVG 1.2 specification which is under development at W3C.
Robin Berjon's comment in response to Don's blog entry is interesting: "when Microsoft employees came visit, they said they'd love to have SVG in MS products". It would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions and the following in-house discussions at Microsoft when those developers put the case forward for SVG.
I stumbled across a salutary tale of how easy it is to be hacked and have your machine taken over, How a friend's computer got hacked and hijacked .
It is a straightforward description of how easy it is to move from having a system which you assume is "safe" to one which, by virtue of combination of circumstances, a little carelessness and complacency perhaps, has been compromised without you even spotting that it has happened.
I documented my initial trials and tribulations with Microsoft Webcasts a couple of days ago, Interwise or Interstupid? .
The more I explore the range of Webcasts available, and see their potential usefulness to existing users and potential users of Microsoft software, the more the difficulties in making an initial connection seem so undesirable.
In the last 48 hours or so I have made time to view Webcasts on SQL Server Reporting Services, InfoPath 2003 (the Webcast is now dated but the software is of particular interest to me) and SharePoint Technologies (includes both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003).
If you haven't yet discovered Microsoft Webcasts, and the numbers attending live suggest it is very much a minority pursuit, then I suggest you make time to explore these. They are really interesting.
You may have to endure a little of the teething problems that I mentioned in my earlier entry to get access to Webcasts at all but once you get past those difficulties the content can be very well worthwhile.
One of the points in Randy Holloway's blog, Impressions from the CIO Summit , that strikes me as particularly relevant to the "Big Software War" is a statement attributed to Eric Rudder that "60% of the total cost of ownership of an IT investment is driven by people costs".
No indication is given of the methodology by which or the context from which the figure of 60% was derived. So we can't safely assume it is universally applicable.
But let's take it at face value and look at how that 60% might vary by location.
Let's assume, for simplicity that information workers in the USA cost a nominal $50,000 per year. Then if those costs are 60% of information costs it follows that software and hardware are approximately $33,333 per year - which seems high.
Note: I assume that Eric Rudder's total cost figures also factor in costs for buildings, maintenance, heating, etc etc in the "non-people" 40% of costs. I have ignored those since it isn't the absolute but the relative figures which are of primary importance for the purpose of this discussion.
If, and there is lots of uncertainty here, 50% of that $33,333 is software then we have software costs of $16,667 per year per employee. Which again seems high.
For a country with information workers costing and earning much less, say $10,000 per year, an annual figure of $16,667 for software becomes enormous, relatively speaking.
In the USA, with the assumed nominal information worker figures, there is already an incentive to reduce business costs by cutting software (and other) expenditure with the hope of reducing total cost of ownership. In countries with a lower wage structure for information workers the push to reduce software costs would, I suggest, be much stronger.
While Eric Rudder's figures may not be universally generalisable the kind of actions taken by some countries to promote open source software is a practical outworking of economics of the type mentioned above. The real-world figures may be significantly different. The economic push in low wage economies towards reduced software costs is strong and is not, in my opinion, likely to go away in the foreseeable future. The "Big Software War" is on its way!
Randy Holloway has blogged, Impressions from the CIO Summit , about his impressions of Microsoft's CIO summit.
I was interested to see healthy scepticism about Microsoft Marketing:
"
Microsoft is positioning their products and services and trying to get IT decision makers to spend money on those offerings. As a person that works with technology, I'm often forced to "cut through the marketing" and to try to really understand what the products can do.
"
What I find odd is that Microsoft marketeers seem to feel the need to load CIOs with marketing murk which the CIOs, quite sensibly, have to filter to get rid of the dross to get to the real information which is of interest to them.
It seems to me that the whole process is inherently inefficient. Microsoft are paying people to put forward information that the audience is being paid (by their own companies) to discard as irrelevant to their information needs. When corporations can analyse employee efficiency to the n th degree shouldn't inherently inefficient processes like this also be subject to objective analysis?
An opportunity for customer-focussed marketing to reduce costs both to Microsoft and to its partners?
One of the topics that interests me on an ongoing basis is the mindset behind Microsoft marketing.
A now rather ancient, by blogging standards, entry by Chris Sells entitled The real goals of marketing? contains an interesting quote about the mindset of the marketeer:
" Marketing is not about giving the customer what he wants, or even finding out what the customer wants and trying to get engineering to create it. It's about trying to sell the customer what you already have -- whether that's product, talent, or pre-conceived notions. If the needs of a customer occasionally overlap with an actual product, that's merely random coincidence. "
Even allowing for a little hyperbole in the statement, which was made to not by Chris Sells, it does give some insight into the old Microsoft marketing mindset.
My view on this is that that approach can't last in the context of the "Big Software War". It is, in my opinion anyway, too narrow a view of marketing. Finding out what the customer needs and finding the best possible solution within, for example, constraints of time and money is a much surer foundation for a successful business long-term. Then, although the marketeer will continue to be constrained in today's sales by what he has to sell, he will have a more customer-focussed product. And the customer should win if the customer needs have been competently analysed and a solution has been competently implemented.
Too narrow a view of marketing won't, I suggest, serve Microsoft well in the "Big Software War".
Warning: Rant-rich zone!
After creating yet another new identity to begin the process of viewing the SQL Server Reporting Services Webcast I found that the Interwise (sic) process requires me to install yet another piece of viewing software.
Well, I did download and install Interwise (sic) Participant.
Then I attempted to use Interwise (sic) Participant to play the Webcast.
Guess what? I received one of those "really helpful" error messages .... "Other applications are currently using your sound card. Please close them."
Sheesh!
Come on, Microsoft, surely, surely you can provide a better service than this?
Oh, but Interwise (sic) had more obstacles for me ... if I hadn't already been put off.
I was faced with yet another password box asking for ICC URL (whatever that is), ICC Identity (another one?) and ICC password. What is ICC? My best guess is that it might stand for Interwise Communication Center, except that the software identifies itself as Interwise (sic) Participant.
I find it hard to believe that any Web site would in 2003 have such a stupid process, putting a succession of obstacles in the user's way.
Microsoft, if you are listening, this nonsense prevents users accessing information on SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services which, I suspect, will be a key step forward in business reporting. This user's experience was very disappointing.
If Microsoft has paid good money, and I suspect they must have, they should seek much improved user experience from Interwise (sic).
So, just as I intended to exit Interwise (sic) Participant and attempted to close the application that attempt to close Interwise (sic) Participant then started it presenting the SQL Server Reporting Services Webcast!
Surreal. Totally surreal.
I was planning to spend some time today listening to the SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Webcast . Unfortunately, my Microsoft Passport identity would not let me log in to watch a Microsoft Webcast!
More than a little ironic. And not, I would suggest, good customer service.
Surely Microsoft Webcasts should be accessible using Passport. Wasn't a primary purpose of Passport to avoid the need to create multiple duplicate identities and passwords?
The XForms specification is now a Recommendation at W3C.
The single-document version of the XForms specification can be downloaded from XForms 1.0 .
There is also a Candidate Recommendation XForms 1.0 Basic Profile of a Basic Profile intended for use of XForms on resource-constrained devices.
The XML forms space - which now includes Microsoft's InfoPath 2003 and XForms and which will shortly add Adobe's XML/PDF forms - is an interesting and important one.
Mailing lists to discuss XForms and InfoPath are already becoming active.
John Udell has an interesting opinion piece on Mozilla, InfoPath and Flash and their respective roles as clients or as parts of a client-side interface, Why Mozilla matters .
I notice that John, too, prefers Firebird as his browser of choice. Internet Explorer has some serious catching up to do. Tabbed browsing is routine in Mozilla and in Firebird and is a beautifully effective piece of interface design. The absence of tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer makes it much less convenient than its competitors for heavy browser use.
John, however, omits to mention SVG as a natural choice for use with the XML documents produced by XML Web services. I guess that demonstrates that SVG evangelists have work to do to spread the news about SVG's advantages.
Microsoft yesterday sent out an interesting piece of marketing blurb in preparation for the Office System 2003 launch on 21st October. The email came from Jeff Raikes and was subject of discussion on a private email list I belong to.
I am pleased to see a positive mention of OneNote and of Windows SharePoint Services. One aspect of WSS that puzzles me is that if 50,000 WSS sites are in place at Microsoft why isn't WSS being given a higher profile by Microsoft out in the real world? Many people seem either not to have heard of it or haven't a clear idea of the improvements that WSS brings over the now outdated SharePoint Team Services. It looks to me as if some more effective marketing and product support for WSS wouldn't come amiss.
Some more Microsoft pushing of WSS would help to spread the word about the potential for real productivity benefits in collaborative situations.
Jeff Raikes refers to the need for software purchasers to get payback for their investment. This confirms the comment I made recently about Microsoft having to give businesses real benefits if companies are to continue to invest hard-earned cash in Microsoft software.
The text of the email, "The Productivity Frontier" is reproduced below for convenience.
Oct. 13, 2003
In offices 20 years ago, typewriters, handwritten financial spreadsheets and slide carousels all seemed good enough to get the work done. These tools made workers more productive and enabled them to understand and share information, which is crucial to every organization's success.
Since then, we've seen remarkable advances through innovation and the widespread adoption of productivity software that has fundamentally transformed the way hundreds of millions of people around the globe create, use, share and communicate information in their jobs.
As Group Vice President of Microsoft's Productivity and Business Services Group, I spend a lot of time meeting with customers to better understand how they use technology to be productive today, and how new technologies can help them be more effective and efficient tomorrow. I would like to share my thoughts on this subject in this email, which is one in an occasional series from Microsoft executives about technology issues. If you would like to receive these emails in the future, please click here to subscribe. We will not send you future executive emails unless you choose to subscribe.
*********
Consistently, customers tell me that while computers have dramatically increased their productivity and their ability to gather, analyze, share and act on information, their needs are continuing to evolve. They want innovations that can help reduce information overload and impart new, competitive advantages.
I know from my own experience that even with the advances of the last two decades, there are still too many documents, too many papers and emails, and all of it is too hard to search through when something is needed quickly. I'm sure you've tried to find information that you know exists...somewhere...in some file folder or cranny of your PC or network.
Information technology today also must evolve to keep pace with the needs of a more mobile workforce, and the increasingly collaborative nature of information work. Companies want people and information to come together more naturally and effectively - just a few mouse clicks away. They want simple communication and collaboration.
Customers also want to be able to build end-to-end solutions on a foundation of easy-to-use, inexpensive commercial software. For example, they want to easily and reliably comply with increasing government regulation, such as new corporate financial reporting requirements. And they are concerned about the security of software and of the communication networks that now tie the world together.
Most of all, companies want technologies that work together and pay for themselves. Any new technology investments must show a positive return, not in five years, but five months - or better yet, five weeks.
Over the last 22 years, Microsoft has invested in improving information worker productivity with the Microsoft Office products that you've likely heard of, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Our foundation for meeting the needs of information workers going forward is the new Microsoft Office System, which launches later this month. It embraces several core productivity applications - some familiar and some new - presented as a comprehensive and integrated set of client and server offerings. It includes services delivered over the Internet, and "accelerators" that can be used by Microsoft partners and customers to speed their development of Office-based solutions.
Our goal is ambitious - to improve personal, team and organizational productivity by addressing a broad array of business processes. We're both excited by the opportunity and pleased with the results to date. I won't try to describe all of the important new capabilities in the Office System, but I'd like to share my thoughts - and my enthusiasm - for how these new products, services and solutions can once again surprise people by truly unleashing a new wave of productivity and creativity. Let me just mention a couple of innovations that illustrate their power and range.
Effective Virtual Teams
Information work today is increasingly collaborative, requiring rich and continuous communication and interaction within work teams, which are often widely dispersed geographically. A lot of workplace collaboration takes place via email, which is a big improvement, but not good enough.
To help, we recently introduced Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 and the Microsoft Office Live Meeting service, which enable online collaboration between as few as two people and as many as 2,000. With Live Meeting, participants use their telephones and PCs to share information, view presentations and review documents - or even to review an archived meeting later.
We're also devising new ways for teams to collaborate. For example, at Microsoft, employees are rapidly moving away from using the traditional PC file system to store documents that are of interest to more than one person. Instead, we're using SharePoint workspaces, intranet sites where documents and other data can be centrally located and accessed - whether team members are across the room or across the world. These capabilities have been extremely popular with Microsoft employees, who in just a few months have created more than 50,000 SharePoint sites to support their own collaboration.
Other companies report similar successes. Stevens Healthcare, a leading medical services provider in Washington State, says that using SharePoint Portal Server has reduced by 75 percent the amount of time needed for meetings to comply with new federal privacy regulations. Nordea Banking Group, one of the largest financial services providers in Scandinavia, expects to cut travel by 15 percent using SharePoint collaboration as an alternative to in-person meetings.
Meetings remain important for collaboration, of course, and in meetings at Microsoft, many people are now using a new application that helps them organize, access and act on their notes, in whatever form they take. It's called Microsoft Office OneNote 2003. Users can store and search years of notes simply by typing or writing a word, which brings up all the documents that contain that word. By recording meetings with a PC's microphone, OneNote users can later hear what was said in the room at the moment they wrote a particular sentence - a great way to jog the memory. With a Tablet PC, OneNote even stores, organizes and retrieves handwritten notes.
More Than Meets the Eye
Many of the advances in Office System will be obvious to users, but one of the most profound changes isn't as apparent. The programs in the professional edition of Office System support Extensible Markup Language (XML), a powerful standardized "language" for describing data. XML is increasingly used to help analyze and exchange business information on the Web, sidestepping worries about incompatible programs, computer networks, data structures and operating systems.
To date, the use of XML has been mostly limited to exchanging data among corporate data servers. But with our new desktop applications, information workers will be able to save, organize and share new data as XML. It will be a lot easier to fill out forms, for example, or to find and reuse text or other data without re-entering it. Productive solutions will be built much more rapidly.
Guidant Medical, a leader in cardiovascular medical products, has tested the Office System's XML capability to integrate its financial reports on a backend database, cutting the time needed to figure bids on new contracts by 75 percent. Hewlett-Packard's test of the Office System's XML capabilities has allowed it to create product sales guides in just under half the time it used to take. And soon, almost any company or partner will be able to develop solutions based on XML, thanks to new solution accelerators, tools for developing applications that support specific business processes, under development at Microsoft.
Productivity: A Glass Half Full
In the months and years ahead, our aim is to advance Office System even further by creating powerful new solutions and adding Web services for increased collaboration and richer communications.
We're working closely with other industry leaders to stimulate further innovation that will accelerate productivity, competitiveness and agility. For example, we've established the Center for Information Work to examine and demonstrate how the workplace will function in the years ahead, and we've worked with a number of companies to form the Information Work Productivity Council, which brings together top economists and other academics to examine trends in productivity and to understand their impact.
We're investing in R&D - more than $6 billion company-wide this year - on advanced technologies. With industry partners, for example, we're developing a new kind of PC that integrates voice, video and text messaging to provide much richer capabilities for communication and collaboration.
In short, the end of innovation is nowhere near. This is not to say it's not a big challenge. Individuals and businesses all have different needs and different ways they work. But they all share a common goal: they want to leverage technology to help them understand, act on, share and communicate information - the most precious commodity in the world today.
I've had the privilege of being part of the technology revolution that has taken us a long way in the past two decades. But it's the next 20 years that really excite me. Microsoft is investing for the long term in innovative products to help people work smarter and better, and enable businesses to be more profitable.
More information about the productivity innovations mentioned here is available at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/. Thanks for your time.
Jeff Raikes
For information about Microsoft's privacy policies, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/info/privacy.htm
O'Reilly have an interesting get together this weekend of technical innovators and, I guess, opinion formers at what they are calling Foo Camp .
Foo-ee! I wasn't invited.
If some of these long term ideas are a departure from your normal pattern of thinking about Microsoft, take a break and read Jeremy Mazner's blog about WinFS entitled Why a new storage platform? . As you ponder the implications of WinFS you may not be giving your brain a rest. But hopefully it will be an interesting change.
If you are following me this far and haven't classified me as a total nut and therefore "changed channels" I suggest to you that as you work your way through these issues that you ask yourself the question "How will Microsoft react?".
How will Microsoft react technically? In its marketing and public relations strategy? In its pricing?
I suggest you make the assumption that Microsoft is run by highly intelligent people. I also suggest that you assume that Microsoft staff, at least above the level that Robert Scoble describes as the "ants", are highly aware of economic and other trends as they impact on Microsoft now and as they will likely impact Microsoft in the upcoming years.
For convenience I have divided the various factors into the USA-centric "Little Software War" (ABM versus NBM) and the upcoming global "Big Software War". You might prefer to see those aspects as part of a single process. In that case since what I term the "Little Software War" has been underway for several years in addition to asking how Microsoft will react you should also be asking yourself how Microsoft has already adjusted its posture.
It is sometimes sensible to take the financial institutions' posture that "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance". On the other hand, given factors common to both the "Little Software War" and the "Big Software War", Microsoft's adjustments to the "Little Software War" may give some indication of cultural, technical, marketing and pricing adjustments still to come. See if you can spot them.
I guess that as I attempt to tease out issues underlying the "Big Software War" I may as well start with some basic economic factors.
In this and later entries I will assume for numerical simplicity that a Microsoft Windows XP licence costs $100 (US dollars). Adjust the actual numbers up or down according to taste and your perception of reality.
Accept numbers in this and later posts as approximations and reflections of a spectrum within and among countries. As far as I am aware the overall analysis isn't particularly sensitive to specific numbers. That is not to say that timescale and various other quantitative measures won't change if the assumed monetary values are altered.
Let us suppose that your name is Mohammed and you live in, say, Malaysia. Or your name is Surav and you live in India. Or China. Or a host of countries which are signficantly poorer than a typical Western country.
Your family's annual income is, say, $2,000 (US dollars). Perhaps because you want to better yourself (or give your children opportunities you never had) you prioritise a computer purchase - to give yourself or your children access to computing.
[Remember that the truly poor won't be even able to afford basic hardware and some may not even have access to electricity. I will return to the very poor in a later entry.]
You have the hardware. You are then faced with the choice of finding an operating system and applications.
If Mohammed selects Microsoft software he has two basic choices.
He can obtain pirated copies locally at relatively small cost.
Alternatively he can purchase a Windows XP licence (notional $100) and, say, an Office System 2003 licence (notional $400). Let's say to keep the arithmetic simple that his legal option to acquire Microsoft software means he has to spend $500 in addition to whatever he spent on hardware.
On an annual income of $2,000 he has a big problem.
For him Microsoft software may simply be unaffordable. Full stop.
Open source software, say Linux and OpenOffice.org and a host of other open source software is likely to be available for a nominal number of US dollars.
Basic economics means that Mohammed is very likely to purchase open source software. If he purchases Microsoft software legally he could be depriving his family of food, clothing and shelter.
To understand how important people like my notional Mohammed are to Microsoft's future and open source future in the "Big Software War" we need to look at demographic trends, some of which I will discuss in the next entry. In later posts I will look at some economic issues in Western countries and in the corporate sector.
[This is the first in a series of related entries that I plan to post in the next few days. You may look at this post and the article to which it points as hyperbole and fluff. Let me assure you that closer examination of the issues leads me to a conclusion that this is anything but hyperbole - it is at the heart of the "Big Software War". ... Read on. There are many dimensions to this "war" other than the technical so if your interests and focus are primarily technical you may find yourself addressing issues which you hadn't actively considered before.]
In a world without fences who needs gates?
So runs the brightly punned slogan which is popular in parts of the Linux and open source world. The global nature of the confrontation implied in the slogan hints at some of the fundamental issues that lie behind what I think of as the "Big Software War". A term that I have used a few times in this blog and which I anticipate being a major ongoing focus of discussion.
I see the conflict between the traditional ABM (Any But Microsoft) versus NBM (Nobody But Microsoft) factions, primarily in the USA, as constituting the "Little Software War".
But global factors are beginning to come into play which will make the "Little Software War" look just that. Little.
The factors which feed into the "Big Software War" relate to global economic, political and demographic trends. I hadn't intended to tease these out in any detail so soon in this blog but have come across an article today which is an interesting introduction to the "Big Software War" although the term is never used.
The article is entitled Misery and Intellectual Property Rights - Trashing Free Software . It is written by a political activist in the third world so expect to see more than a little political polemic. However, it does touch on foundational issues in the "Big Software War".
Get what you can out of the article. Ask yourself questions like "How realistic is this?" or "How much of a threat are these trends to Microsoft?".
In the course of a series of accompanying entries I will attempt to dissect out the multiplicity of issues in a way which hopefully will help you to appreciate the forces that I believe are at work as the foundation of the "Big Software War".
If there are issues which you see as relevant but that I don't immediately mention please be patient for a few days. As I post I will try to tease out single dimensions of the "war" and of possible Microsoft responses to the "war". Hopefully by the time I have worked through several such entries you will begin to gain an impression of the multiple issues which apply here. Hopefully you will also begin to see aspects of the problem which are of interest to you discussed.
Hopefully you will also come to realise why I have stated earlier in this blog that Microsoft must become more Customer-centric and produce higher quality software. If I succeed in conveying the issues effectively you may also find yourself impressed by the inevitability of the "Big Software War", even if the outcome has yet to be defined.
Have you stopped to ask why Microsoft are putting so much effort at present into stimulating interest in Longhorn?
One reason, of course, may be that Microsoft wants to prime third party developers and stimulate a flow of Longhorn-aware applications.
However, another factor that seems likely to me is that Microsoft realises that the transition to Longhorn is a time of substantial commercial risk.
A couple of days ago I mentioned a report suggesting that a significant percentage of Microsoft customers are dissatisified. If those customers are thinking of jumping ship from USS Microsoft then the arrival of Longhorn may be the final stimulus.
Why? If you have to adapt to a new interface, with associated training costs and invest in new software (and hardware?) to accomodate Longhorn then that must be a time for dissatisfied customers to examine all options - including leaving USS Microsoft.
Expect Microsoft marketing to be highlighting both the differences in Longhorn (to stimulate development of new applications) and also the continuity in Longhorn (to make the investment in staff training and upgrade costs less obvious). It will be an interesting task to marry those two essentially inconsistent threads.
Bottom line, of course, is that Microsoft must convince corporate customers that Longhorn offers real business advantages.
Readers might like to take a look at the Longhorn Forum on pro-networks.org.
Currently there are some interesting posts. One post suggests that Apple's OS X could be running about 2 years ahead of Microsoft by this time next year.
Pro networks also covers competitor products to those from Microsoft.
I have turned up a Web page which tends to confirm the rumours that I had been hearing about their being prior art in the Eolas case. Perry Wei, in a page entitled Personal Comments on Eolas vs Microsoft, and the Viola Prior Art describes apparent contacts in the early to mid 1990's with Michael Doyle, now of Eolas regarding prior art in the Viola browser.
It seems very odd, if prior art is pivotal to whether granting a patent is appropriate or not, that the evidence mentioned wasn't admissable.
From a distance that doesn't make sense. Perhaps there are other aspects to the story which have yet to emerge.
According to the School Gaelic Dictionary , Eolas means knowledge.
It is reported, Eolas files motion to enjoin IE , that Eolas is (on the surface at least) attempting to stop distribution of the Internet Explorer browser.
Of course, Eolas has no primary interest in achieving that. The true objective seems to be to cause Microsoft .... and, in time, possibly others .... to give money to Eolas. No surprise there, then.
One thing that puzzles me about this case is that I hear persistent rumours that indicate there is substantive prior art. Why then did the USPTO grant the patent to Eolas in the first place? Why didn't the putative prior art carry the day in court resulting in Eolas' case being thrown out?
If you are interested in learning more about Eolas' side of the story, visit Eolas in the News .
The Web is great for the snippets of information that unexpectedly come your way. Today when browsing Sue Mosher's site,
Outlook & Exchange
Solutions Center
I learned that I own a slipstick. Which was news to me.
A slipstick is according to Sue a 1950's slang term for a slide rule.
I guess that some younger readers may need the term slide rule explained. A slide rule is an analogue device which has precision markings which can be used to make mathematical calculations. Digital calculators, I suspect, wiped out the market for slide rules almost overnight.
My slipstick, by the way, is a Faber Castell 57/89.
Internet Week are reporting, Microsoft Dissatisfaction Running High, Users Contemplate Switch , that dissatisfaction among users of Microsoft software is running high and that 41% of Microsoft software users are contemplating switching. Only 28% of users of Microsoft software describe themselves as satisfied.
I can sympathise. What's my present grumble about? About 30 minutes ago Windows suddenly switched from using UK keyboard layout (my norm) to US keyboard layout. Why? Nothing I did.
So I have two choices, drag up my memories of US keyboard layout on a UK keyboard (fortunately I remember quite a bit since this problem isn't new to me) or close down all the 20 or so applications / windows I have running, lose my place in a complex piece of information retrieval and structuring, reboot and then get myself back to where I was. Total time? Maybe 20 or 30 minutes. If there were stricter product liability it would be nice to bill Microsoft for the wasted time.
FT.com have an article, Microsoft looks set to enter search battle , fleshing out a little the rumours that Microsoft are developing an Internet search engine to compete with Google .
A search on Google ... where else? ... reveals a few hints that "MSN Bot" has been spotted trawling the Internet. I assume, but don't know, that "MSN Bot" and the subject of the FT.com article are one and the same technology.
If anyone is able to confirm the relationship, if any, of "MSN Bot" to Microsoft's new product I would be interested to know. Or any further information I could see that is in the public domain, or that I could have access to under NDA.
Online search is certainly an area of interest to me.
The following news item entitled Microsoft moves to integrate Windows with BIOS may be of interest.
To the best of my knowledge Microsoft hasn't yet committed publicly to support SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics technology from W3C. See Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for further general information.
Interestingly, the GIMP has recently added SVG support. See GIMP goes SVG on Slashdot.
In addition to reliability one thing I want in Longhorn is a quality Web browser.
I am coming round to the view that Internet Explorer needs to be quietly put to one side and something more reliable and more secure written to replace it in Longhorn.
Some people experience lock ups with IE. I haven't, as far as I recall, suffered from that problem. But FTP via IE works but seemingly only when the wind is in a favourable direction. I have gone back to using Cute FTP because IE on Windows XP simply wasn't reliable. So I guess I am echoing Longhorn Wish List - 1 there. Poor reliability is something I would like to be in the past.
IE is just odd sometimes. IE has, without any intervention from me, suddenly decided that I should be given "Smaller" text. But I want "Medium". If IE was the only application affected by this new idiosyncracy it wouldn't be so bad but, if I have this right, changing text size in IE (in this case the change is by IE rather than me) also changes text size in the Office 2003 Help windows and other IE-based windows. So flakiness in one application affects several others. One of the distinctly negative aspects of tightly integrated software.
IE has also, without warning, decided that I don't want to see the status bar. Well IE is wrong. I find the status bar useful but IE seems determined not to display it without me opening the status bar explicitly on every IE window! Hm.
I guess that some IE security patch has decided to overwrite some setting I had chosen so long ago that I have forgotten that I did it.
The topic of endless security patches brings me to my main concern about IE. Is it secure?
Don't laugh. It's a serious question.
IE has been patched so often that it must be mostly patches now. Except perhaps for that little X in the top right corner of its window. I think I saw that way back in an early version of IE. Maybe it is even original.
Seriously, Windows Longhorn needs a better, more secure browser than IE.
My next point may seem silly. I think it is silly that I have to make it. I want a browser that is designed to be used on a network. I suspect that the implications of network use were inadequately thought out when IE was thrown together.
I want a browser in Longhorn that isn't cross-linked to all sorts of other programs. I don't want to fix the Help window for InfoPath 2003 by going to fiddle with a setting in IE. Cross-linking of that type just contributes gratuitously to poor user experience.
And poor user experience won't help Microsoft in the "Big Software War".
I haven't had a definitive response from Microsoft yet but did get a response from Eryck which is worthy of mention.
Eryck did a great communication job. He left me feeling that supplying further information (it had been supplied earlier but via a URL and maybe these guys don't have access to a browser) was really appreciated and that I was a valued customer.
I was left with a gentle rosy glow. Well done Eryck. I hope your colleagues on Microsoft.com can match your customer support performance.
The recent mention of unintelligible graphics which is loosely associated in my mind with the term hieroglyphics drew my attention to a very long term historical trend.
Way back in ancient Egypt people used pictures, hieroglyphics, to communicate in ... um ... writing(?).
For many centuries we have used letters to communicate in writing.
Now, with graphical computer interfaces we have returned ... for better or worse ... to the use of pictures to communicate. Assuming that interaction is a form of communication.
Interesting. At least it is to me.
Does anyone know if anyone has studied this seriously? Ideally studied it in a non-dry-as-dust way. Any URLs?
In a recent post, A Lousy Interface - and on a blog too! I indicated that I found a component of the interface on Marc Canter's blog counter-intuitive and made some suggestions for how that part of the interface could be made less lousy for a visitor to his blog.
In a comment in response to that post it seems that Marc Canter likes his counter-intuitive interface and has challenged me a public debate.
So, it looks like it will be pistols and swords at dawn! Or, failing the availability of those, we might have to settle for keyboards and words. I suggest that we avoid the use of unintelligible graphics since only one party to this debate finds those of value.
I guess the honourable thing to do is to offer Marc the opportunity to withdraw since his comments actually attempt to argue with something I didn't say. For example, Marc seems to think that I was arguing in general against graphical user interfaces. My point was more specific. I was arguing against poorly-designed counter-intuitive graphical user interfaces exemplified in a specific piece of user interface architecture.
Interfaces are part of customer satisfaction so I guess that this debate has some tangential relevance to the focus of this blog.
If Marc wants to proceed with the debate then I suggest we simply post our respective contributions to the debate on our respective blogs. That seems simplest to me.
If Marc doesn't want to retract his comment (and improve his interface) .... then I guess the blogospondence should begin!
P.S. Marc it would be really great if you could modify your blog so horizontal scrolling was not needed. Thanks.
Among the myriad of blogs that I visit - some regularly, some much less often - it strikes me that the "conversational marketing" blogs or blogs with a conversational marketing element are becoming much more common. It may reflect a bias in my reading but it seems to me that the Microsoft conversational marketing blog is more visible than similar blogs from, say, IBM or Sun.
If nothing else, conversational marketing blogs must be a fairly non-costly marketing tool.
Perhaps the epitome of the Microsoft conversational marketing blog is The Scobleizer Weblog written by Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble.
I will use my reactions to his blog to tease through some initial thoughts on conversational marketing.
Perhaps I am just feeling a little jaded this week but I am beginning to wonder how useful conversational marketing will be long term.
Scoble must put a lot of time into his blog. Various comments lead the reader to conclude that it is an out of hours, unpaid activity. Which I find interesting.
Scoble typically makes mention of an eclectic mix of blog and Web page items which, often but by no means always, relate directly or indirectly to Microsoft products. His is one of the blogs I read most often because it sometimes flags up existing Microsoft products, information sources or preliminary information about upcoming Microsoft products that interest me.
Scoble, adventurously for a Microsoft employee, will often indicate that a particular Microsoft product has problems. Yet, I guess unsurprisingly, those negative comments are often pretty muted. But he actually uses "negative" words, rather than hiding behind "marketing speak" which might acknowledge that there is "room for improvement". That the realistic comments about flaws in Microsoft products are there at all is a positive feature and arguably a departure from past Microsoft practice.
Yet it seems to me that Scoble is, ever so subtly, becoming the Microsoft corporate man. When I first started reading his blog he was a (relative) newcomer at Microsoft and his viewpoint was that of the outsider/newcomer. Gradually, and ever so subtly, his viewpoint has ... in my view anyway ... progressively moved towards the viewpoint of the Microsoft corporate man.
From my perspective as a reader that takes away a little of the freshness. Takes away a little of feeling that he sees things my way .... as a user of Microsoft software.
Scoble has, I suspect, had his knuckles gently wrapped a couple of times about being open. Yet it was that very openness which was (and still is to a degree) a key component, to me anyway, of the Scobleizer Weblog.
It seems to me that to be at its most useful a conversational marketing blog has to have, and more importantly keep , a visible sense of seeing things as the customer ... in this case the Microsoft customer ... sees things.
A conversational marketing blog that loses that freshness seems to me to potentially leave the reader with the impression of being used ... as a target for subtle, subliminal marketing.
Can large corporations ever truly allow their employees the freedom to blog from the customer's point of view? I don't know but I think they should look seriously at that as a potentially productive approach. As part of the "Big Software War" Microsoft needs customer trust. To win trust there needs, in my view, to be an openness which is a departure from traditional corporate culture. Will a new customer-centered openness win out? Or traditional "safe" closed mentalities?
Blogs are, to coin a cliche, a disruptive technology. How and to what extent they will crack the "safe" facade of corporate culture remains to be seen. To win the customer trust that it needs in the "Big Software War" Microsoft may have to allow the disruptive nature of blogs to penetrate further than it currently realises.
Those of us who can't attend the upcoming Professional Developers' Conference might be interested to monitor events from afar via the PDC Bloggers site.
The site is "best viewed" using Internet Explorer. In other words it doesn't display 100% when using a browser such as Firebird.
With Windows Longhorn soon (already?) to be the subject of great interest .... should I say hysteria? ... at the upcoming Professional Developers' Conference it seems to me that I maybe should flag some of what I see as the priorities in Longhorn.
Don't misinterpret the "hysteria" terminology, I am very interested in Longhorn. [There are several promised features that, if implemented well, could contribute significantly in Microsoft's favour in the "Big Software War".] It's just I would rather see more investment in the engineering and less in the hypology.
For me priority number 1 is that Longhorn is reliable and stays reliable. I don't expect to take my car for repair every few days. Why should I expect less reliability of my computer(s)?
I don't think I am being unfair by stating that every Microsoft operating system I have used (back to Windows 3.0) starts off moderately reliable (or better). But add a few programs and do a few Windows updates ... and just plain use the machine .... and reliability becomes much less.
Sometimes it is that the machine won't shut down cleanly. Recently I had my first blue screen of death on XP just after upgrading to Office System 2003 RTM. Maybe I was unlucky in that specific timing aspect but this progressive erosion of reliability is something I have seen too often before and I want not to see that lack of reliability in Longhorn.
I am not alone in finding such lack of reliability disturbing. For example, Chris Anderson in an entry vividly entitled I Hate My Computer also highlights unreliability as a problem.
Chris writes: "But right now I'm just finding my home PC to be almost useless for anything but email and browsing the web. When a Microsoft produced game won't run on my Microsoft operating system I really start to get frustrated."
Multiply Chris's frustration and my own by tens of thousands of Windows users around the world.
This frustration with poor reliability ... and I see little point in pretending it doesn't exist ... is very likely a fertile recruiting ground for the open source movement.
Which, I guess, brings me on to a second wish. That reboots are totally a thing of the past in Longhorn.
It is a shock to many who move from Windows to Linux, for example, that rebooting the computer after installing new software or updating software isn't something inherent in the hardware but is imposed by the (Windows) operating system software.
Please let's see the back of that anachronism in Longhorn.
More wishes later.
One of my pet hates are lousy interfaces. I have just stumbled across a "beauty" ... at least a beauty in terms of its counter-intuitive nature.
Pop along to Marc Canter's blog .
Mouse one of the juvenile images at the top of the page. No I am not being insulting using the term juvenile - the images at the top of the page are of a juvenile male at various stages of development.
A piece of text appears below the image when an image is moused.
My intuitive response is to move to the text to click a link, since that is where the meaningful textual information is displayed. However, there is no link there. The link is the image which, of course, in its unmoused state has no logical indication what it links to.
I see no logical way to associate, for example, the picture of a 5 year old child with the notion that it links to the blog author's biography.
Why not have text links rather than non-meaningful images? That would be much simpler. Why not include inside a link the text produced by mousing an image? It seems to me that either change would significantly improve the counter-intuitive situation that presently prevails.
Yesterday I mentioned my all-time favourite program, Lotus Agenda, and discussed how OneNote 2003 was beginning to take its place in my affections.
Mitch Kapor, who was pivotally involved in producing Lotus Agenda, has a project underway to produce a bigger and better successor to Agenda, called Chandler .
There is now a version 0.2 Chandler download available and I have spent a little time exploring it.
The OneNote team needn't have any sleepless nights yet. Chandler has a very long way to go until it is a product. But it's nice to have a version to explore.
Even with the limited functionality in version 0.2 there are echoes of Lotus Agenda.
It's too early to tell how good Chandler might be. I guess that OneNote and Outlook are the Microsoft products with which Chandler will, in time, compete.
There is a lot to be done to add functionality to Chandler. And the interface looks like it has been designed by programmers. Always a dangerous approach in my opinion!
There is a lovely take off of Nigerian spam email entitled, The Nigerian SCO Connection .
Only for those with a specific type of sense of humour, I think.
Having mentioned to four people (real human beings rather than online friends or contacts) that I had started a blog the response was verbatim almost identical: "What's a blog?".
It is so very easy for those of us who spend a significant proportion of our time either online, thinking about going online or otherwise working with or thinking about computer-based technology to forget that we are, in a literal sense, abnormal. Our knowledge, priorities and mindset is different from the average citizen.
Different from the average citizen in Western countries such as the USA and the UK and even more different (and even more abnormal) in the perspective of citizens of less-privileged countries.
Of course we like to imagine that we are abnormal in a good sense. Naturally.
Microsoft have done pretty well so far ... at least as far as timing is concerned. An initial email response in a little under an hour.
Content of the response isn't so good:
"While I understand you seem to be having some difficulties using our products or services, the information you have sent me does not contain enough information and is not specific enough to allow me to provide you with any clear or satisfactory resolution or answer.
Please reply to this mail and provide me with as many specifics and step-by-step details of what you did to arrive at the unsatisfactory experience, or where the process failed. The more specific details you include, the better my chances of understanding and resolving your problem."
I don't understand what isn't clear about entering "blog" in the Search box at the top left of the home page of Microsoft.com.
Might these support guys be without Internet access? Interesting thought.
Or might the support staff have access only to Internet Explorer and so are unable to test the difficulties I mention. Equally interesting thought.
The response email, including pasted text from the blog entry (to cover the no Internet access possibility) is on its way.
I know I am not the only person who visits Microsoft.com and finds the search facility flakey. However, as I use this facility more and more I am increasingly concerned by how flakey Search on Microsoft.com actually is.
Take one simple example.
If you visit Microsoft.com using the Opera, Mozilla or Firebird browser and enter the word "blog" in the Search box at the top left of the main screen you are presented with a Web page with ZERO search results and a form that you can fill in to conduct a Search.
Now that is odd, since you might have expected the box labelled "Search" on the front page to be able to conduct a search.
If you then enter "blog" (the same four letters as before) into the new Search box on the new page you are then presented with a range of results that relate closely or not so closely to blogging.
Why is the Search box on the front page broken? More precisely why is the Search box on the front page broken for all the browsers I tried other than Internet Explorer?
Is there an algorithm at the server side which says, in effect, "If the search from the home page is not from an Internet Explorer browser then produce nothing for those folks who don't use Internet Explorer."?
If that isn't the explanation why is it that Search from the Microsoft.com home page only works when the user is using Internet Explorer?
Can anyone from Microsoft explain why this fundamental aspect of Search on Microsoft.com is broken?
I have used the contact form on the Microsoft.com Web site to point to this blog and raise the issue of the inconsistent behaviour. I will let you know what response or non-response I receive.
A propos of my post about the lack of a Microsoft blogging tool, the October 2003 issue of MSDN magazine has an article,
Blogging
Design Your Own Weblog Application from Scratch Using ASP.NET, JavaScript, and OLE DB
.
I don't know if this is going to happen to me often but shortly after posting the Quote of the Week I stumble across one I simply can't ignore and which is directly relevant to the focus of this blog.
This blog, as I have mentioned more than once, anticipates a decade-long battle between Microsoft and its competitors.
Here is a quote from Linus Torvalds:
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
The quote comes from an interview with Torvalds in the New York Times, entitled The Sharer . Login is required.
Time will tell if Torvalds has this right.
Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't produce a blogging tool? To me, it seems a surprising omission.
AOL seems to see a commercial opportunity to interest a significant proportion of its subscribers. However, so far as I am aware Microsoft has no plans in this direction.
Microsoft already offers Office to students at a discount. Why not offer a blogging tool too?
The odd thing ... at least it seems odd to me ... is that Microsoft has many of the parts of a great blogging tool already in place but the parts have not been brought together yet.
This workflow appeals to me:
1. Collect ideas in OneNote
2. Publish to Windows SharePoint Services
Adding "Publish to Weblog" functionality to OneNote could create a great blogging tool.
I guess that custom WSS sites which allow only one person to post would produce a simple, if non-interactive blog. WSS already provides a Discussion Board option. Surely it would take only fairly minor modifications to a WSS Discussion Board to produce a blog.
Maybe add Document Workspace functionality too? To produce a new generation blogging tool.
Teachers, for example, could use OneNote to produce course notes and post them to a WSS-enabled intranet.
The potential is endless.
Windows SharePoint Services already offers useful customisation functionality, with themes and so on. FrontPage could be wheeled into the picture to add yet more options.
Anyone from Microsoft care to comment?
In a couple of weeks OneNote 2003 will be available on the market - as a standalone product and bundled with Tablet PCs and, perhaps, other hardware.
If you work with ideas, and use the Windows platform, then I really do urge you to take time to check OneNote out. I very nearly added, "It's brilliant". Oh well, I guess it's too late to take that back.
I have been working with OneNote for about 6 months, or maybe a little more, and it has revolutionised how I capture ideas. As a writer I need to capture snippets of ideas and bring related information together to make some sort of coherent article or book. OneNote is superb for helping in that task.
My all-time favourite application was the long-lamented Lotus Agenda. It was a fabulous program (with a long and steep learning curve). OneNote is far easier to use from day 1 but it has plenty of subtleties that you need to work at to get full value from it.
In terms of sheer day to day usefulness to me as a writer I think OneNote has a very good chance of equalling Lotus Agenda in my affections.
Not surprisingly in a version 1 product not everything that I want to see is there yet in OneNote 2003. But the version 1 functionality is already immensely useful for ideas capture.
The benefits that OneNote brings to ideas processing compare to how word processing supplanted a typewriter.
I won't often be this enthusiastic about a software product. Take heed!
I am experimenting with a so-called Quote of the Week heading.
Readers of this blog will come to realise that I have a highly individual sense of humour. So, don't be surprised if you fail to find humour in some quotes that I find very funny.
Equally I won't necessarily be targetting humour. Just something that sticks in my mind ... perhaps as perceptive, perhaps provocative, perhaps amusing. Some quotes may be technology related. Some will have nothing to do with technology.
The first quote comes into the latter category. Of all the assorted stuff I have read in the past week this one sticks in my mind. It is from the journalist Robert Fisk and is pretty self-explanatory:
" Don't Tell Me America Would Have Invaded Iraq If Its Chief Export was Beetroot "
Source: Oil, War and Panic
This quote just stuck in my mind as a wonderfully direct piece of puffery pricking. It isn't compulsory for you to agree!
Unfortunately technical writing is often couched in bland, instantly forgettable tones. But if you find a quotable technical quote that might suit Quote of the Week please feel free to point me in its direction.
Robert Scoble recently carried a link to a Washington Post article on Microsoft's intended new image.
The article, Software's Gentler Giant? carries an interview with Steve Ballmer about how he sees the new Microsoft. Or, perhaps more precisely, how he would like us to see the new Microsoft.
The article doesn't pull its punches about the task which Ballmer is facing: "Legendary for arrogant, boorish and sometimes illegal dealings, the company is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to improve its relationships with customers, partners and government regulators.".
If the assumptions on which this blog is based are correct .... that there is an upcoming decade-long battle between Microsoft and its competitors in which the customer will, perhaps for the first time, genuinely be king ... Ballmer is asking the right questions.
One of Microsoft's upcoming products that I think really does a lot to satisfy one of the assumptions on which this blog is built ... that customer needs should come first ... is SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
Businesses everywhere need to create reports efficiently and effectively. Reporting Services is intended to satisfy that customer need.
Neowin has recently carried a couple of items suggesting that the public beta for SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services will start this month. Use the Neowin search facility to locate the articles, if you are interested.
You can, as far as I can tell, still sign up for the public beta of SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
If you happen to have access to the October 2003 issue of PC Pro magazine (p.202) John Honeyball gives Reporting Services a great write up. If you are working in a business which uses SQL Server I would suggest you take a serious look at SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
Microsoft is, of course, best known for its software but one of its hardware products is, to me, an old friend.
The Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro is a superb keyboard which provides a much more comfortable angle for typing for those of us who touch type and spend, potentially, many hours a day at the keyboard.
I guess that with, at the moment, readers of this blog likely to be measured in single figures it is both premature and presumptious of me to ask Microsoft to change direction. You see, my old friend the Microsoft Natural Keybaord Pro has been withdrawn. And its replacement has neither the look nor the feel of my old friend.
Microsoft, if you are listening, I know that many people in addition to myself loved the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. Please bring it back. Bring a little joy into my life.
I guess many readers of this blog will be familiar with the recent furore of the sacking of the CTO of @stake , after he was lead author on a document purporting to identify security dangers due to Microsoft's market position in the global software market.
The original document, entitled CyberInSecurity: The Cost of Monopoly is located at http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf
I found the document poorly argued and weakly presented. I don't mean that it lacked passion. Rather it seemed to me that it substituted passion for a well-constructed logical case.
P.S. Please forgive the minor fiction of "many readers" earlier in this entry. In the second day of a blog I hope that I can be forgiven that minor fantasy.
Welcome to tfosorciM.org where I hope to discuss a broad range of issues relating to Microsoft software and wider issues which impact on that software.
I am aware of many blogs which relate, directly or indirectly, to Microsoft software. To my mind many are either of the sycophantic type which imply, without ever stating it directly, that Microsoft can do no wrong. It seems to me that blogs of that type are unrealistic and fail their reader who may be struggling with limitations or unreliability of some piece of Microsoft software that they are using.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of views are blogs which seem to emanate from a mindset that Microsoft is ultimate evil and that it is a given that nothing that Microsoft does can ever be good. In parallel with that attitude there is occasionally a hint that users should be grateful that there is non-Microsoft software available. Usability and documentation of such open-source software often, in my view, leave a lot to be desired.
Whether I can achieve a blog that avoids the pitfalls I mentioned remains to be seen.
Neither approach seems satisfactory to me. I will aim to produce a blog that is informative, realistic and entertaining. And, hopefully, consistently honest. And, perhaps not rarely, a little provocative.
From time to time I have access to Microsoft software under NDA. If you are visiting this blog to glean information that I am not free to disclose then you will be disappointed.
I take as my starting point in this blog that the customer is, genuinely, king. I see the next several years in the software universe as a battle between Microsoft and its competitors, including the open-source movement.
To my mind, at the present time both Microsoft and its competitors, to a significant extent, pay lip service to putting customers first. It seems to me that many software developers put their own perspective first rather than the perspective of their actual or hoped-for customers.
My view is that any software that gives insufficient weight to customers' needs in an increasingly competitive software market does its users a disservice and does strategic harm to the corporation or organisation which created it. Relevance of software to customer needs and careful attention to the usability of that software is of enormous importance.
It is customers' money which keeps software companies in business.
In the coming years in the software universe the customer will be king. Those corporations and organisations which produce software which genuinely recognises the importance of customers and give great attention to customers' needs will have a significant competitive advantage and are likely to grow. Those organisations which fail to give adequate weight to customer needs will shrivel.
Time will tell which category Microsoft belongs to.