Woowar

Category microsoft openoffice symphony
I just received an email from the UK magazine ComputerWeekly with the results of a recent survey conducted by them amongst UK businesses to look at trends in desktop software.

Of course, it's just a survey, and the one thing you can guarantee about a survey is that it's wrong (it's simply a question of how wrong) ... but nevertheless it does make interesting reading. Specifically ...

• Although 93% of businesses use some sort of Microsoft Office version as their main desktop productivity software at the moment, only 66% believe that Microsoft Office 2010 will be their next rollout.
• The remaining businesses - one in every three - expect to see OpenOffice (13%), Google Apps (3%) or 'Other' (17%) as their next step.
• That represents a 30% fall-off rate for existing Microsoft customers - an extraordinary change if it comes true
• The 17% who think that their next move won't be Microsoft Office, nor Google Apps, nor OpenOffice, are interesting. What are they thinking? Perhaps it just shows that there is a serious amount of appetite in the marketplace for something 'other' than Microsoft's over-priced and over-complicated Office tools, but that nothing has - yet - risen to fully meet people's unvoiced (and probably largely un-thought-through) expectations. Somehow I doubt they're all scrabbling to roll out Lotus Symphony, although doubtless that is becoming a worthy runner.

The survey also showed that only 48% of companies have any plans whatsoever to roll out Windows 2010, with over 50% saying that they have "no plans". Whether that means they won't, or simply that the couldn't answer the question properly because they haven't yet decided when, is a question worth answering. But, once again, it seems to demonstrate a cooling of attitude towards Microsoft's product direction (and possibly pricing model).

Some 45% of businesses who don't already use open-source software said that they would definitely be using it in future, albeit mostly only for 'some functions'. Again, the "uncle Bill knows best" approach that dominated throughout the 1990s and early 2000s seems to be dissipating. This can only be a good thing, for business, for competition, and for innovation.

The survey summary can be seen in PDF form here.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:18 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft ibm partnerworld
In previous years, I have complained that Microsoft partner portal only works if you use their cruddy IE browser, and refuses to work with any other (=better) browsers.

Now, it seems, they've taken it a step further, by sending me an email asking me to renew our partnership status, and NOT A SINGLE LINK in the email actually works. Not in Firefox, and not in IE. Every single link ends up as a 404. It's nice to feel valued.

There may be constant grumblings in the yellow bubble about the inadequacies and chaos that is IBM Partnerworld, but at least it basically works most of the time!

Posted by Julian Woodward At 9:24 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft
A year ago I posted this entry, pointing out some of the inadequacies and general crapossity of the Microsort Partner Program website.

Well, a year on, and nothing has changed. You still can't use it effectively unless you run IE6/IE7 and speak English. Nice one chaps ... ever heard that there's a world outside Redmond WA??! No, thought not.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 10:57 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category microsoft yahoo aol
Back in February, Microsoft announced plans to buy Yahoo. Yahoo said "thanks but no thanks", everybody got hot under the collar for a while, and then the deal died. Or, at least, publicly it did. But things have started to heat up again - see various articles on ITWire, Yahoo.com, New York Post, IT Pro etc etc. The essence appears to be:

• TimeWarner wants to get rid of AOL via merger/acquisition at a sensible price as soon as possible
• Microsoft still needs to boost its weak position in online content delivery
• The current Yahoo board still wants to defend against Microsoft offers which is (misguidedly, probably) views as undervaluing Yahoo
• There is a Yahoo annual meeting on 1st August - could that result in changes in composition of the board, or changes in strategy?

Once again, the press focus seems to be primarily on the search and advertising businesses, because Google is seen as a highly-successful benchmark. But the ITWire article also mentions (on page 3) that anybody who acquires AOL will also get their hands on Bebo: okay, it's not Facebook, but Bebo is a significant player in the Social Networking world, and that could appeal to Microsoft. If nothing else, it would give them a good lever to exert more steering pressure on the direction that Facebook (already snuggled up to MS anyway) takes. I'm not saying I like this idea, by the way, but I can see it appealing to Microsoft.

Interestingly, though, there are a stack of things lurking around in Yahoo's portfolio that Microsoft could also get their hands on if a full acquisition (not just the search business, as is one of the rumoured options) goes ahead. Let's take a quick look.

Del.icio.us

Yahoo bought the del.icio.us 'tagging' site in 2005. It's been kept as a separate brand, although del.icio.us (is it only me that gets bored of typing that?) technology has started to be incorporated into Yahoo search results. If this becomes part of the Microsoft stable then it won't be long before Internet Explorer has native support for del.icio.us tagging. But what else? Will we see del.icio.us tagging built into the Windows OS, and/or into Office, for instance?

Flickr

Yahoo was obviously hungry in 2005, as it also snapped up the photo-sharing site Flickr. If you've not seen the Microsoft Labs Photosynth demo I suggest you watch it now ... and then stop and think what might happen if the company that's creating such great technology (yes, innovation) suddenly has unfettered access to the many millions of photos (including yours and mine) that are on Flickr. Cool, or scary? Or both?

So, taken together, Yahoo owns two of the best-known and most widely-used 'Web 2.0' sites on the internet, even though they're not branded as Yahoo. To add to this though ...

Zimbra

This is possibly the most intruiging. Zimbra is a highly successful (they claim 11 million users and growing) open-source email-plus platform. It has some great front-end AJAX user interface staff (mind you, so does Outlook Web Access). There's constant development going on with this product set: in February Zimbra announced a wide range of enhancements, including support for the Blackberry Enterprise Server:

Enhancements in ZCS 5.0 extend Zimbra's best-of-breed anywhere access on the desktop, including support for Microsoft Outlook 2007, and on virtually any device, with support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, J2ME-enabled handsets such as the Motorola RAZR, and a new version of ZCS for mobile web browsers. New features in the award-winning Zimbra AJAX Web client include instant messaging, briefcase, and task applications as well as Zimbra Desktop, the world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaboration experience.

Zimbra's commitment to being a partner of choice has been rewarded by 35 percent service provider customer growth in the last quarter alone and a majority of Zimbra's revenue is now driven by its partner channel. Zimbra now serves customers in over 70 countries, a 40 percent increase of its global reach from Q3 to Q4 2007. Over 300 new universities have adopted Zimbra in the past year, driving unparalleled growth in the education market.

ZCS 5.0 builds upon Zimbra's significant momentum in the e-mail market, highlighted by a six-fold increase of its customer base in 2007 and a current total of more than 11 million paid mailboxes.

"Support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is a huge advantage for Zimbra. From a business standpoint, it's the last box to check in a product evaluation, and Zimbra is the only open platform that offers it," said David Smith, group technical director, Gyro International Ltd.

And in April they announced mobile e-mail support for any Java-enabled device.

Karen Hobert makes some interesting points about the commoditisation of email. This trend will definitely hit Exchange hard, as it just does email: so the Zimbra element of the deal would help Microsoft get in at that lower price-point in order to retain overall market share. The same price-sensitivity is, of course, also going to impact IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino product set, which is presumably where products like Lotus Foundations and Lotus BlueHouse are heading.

---

Superficially, therefore, this seems like a good deal: Microsoft gets its hands on some neat, clean Web 2.0 technology, and some whizzy offline web client stuff, can start competing on the same turf as Google Apps, and mops up an increasingly successful enterprise email vendor into the bargain. But ... Zimbra is open source and is based on Java. Neither of which facts will go down well with the 'not invented here' crowd. So what does Microsoft do? They might:

• sell Zimbra off with the seemingly inevitable result that it becomes a major competitor
• underinvest and let Zimbra die a natural death (which might be relatively quickly, given that a significant proportion of Zimbra customers will have had "it's not Microsoft" somewhere near the top of their product selection criteria)
• spin Zimbra off as a separate arms-length business and keep a shareholding
• port it to .NET and keep it as a separate product line
• or port it to .NET and try to merge it into the existing Exchange/Outlook product line

Of these, the last two seem far-fetched. Depressingly, the second seems most likely to me: let it wither on the vine. Why? Well, I'm looking at what Microsoft did with Groove. They bought into (and then bought outright) an outstanding product, run by an enterpreneurial visionary (Ray Ozzie - now Microsoft CTO in place of Bill Gates), that could have been the "Lotus Notes killer" that they've hankered after for so long. But then for whatever reason - perhaps the Microsoft techies don't "get" Groove in the same way that they never "got" Notes - Groove has languished and is now merely a weird add-on thing you only have if you buy the super-duper edition of Office: nobody uses it and it seems destined for obscurity and obsolescence. A sorry tale for a potentially great product, although admittedly quite a relief for those that earn their living working with Lotus Notes/Domino.

So, three great software products that could soon be part of the Microsoft stable. If you were M$ would you be happy with just the beleagured search part of Yahoo, or would you want to get your grubby mits on the whole caboodle? Other Yahoo-owned sites which might be worth a look if you fancy some more wild conjecture include Bix - an online contest site; and MyBlogLog - a blog-based community site.

In this mini-article, I've tried to pick out a few of the aspects of this potential deal that are not, I feel, getting the coverage they deserve. Of course, with a deal of this size, there are many many angles to consider it from ... what's yours?

Posted by Julian Woodward At 1:41 PM Location London | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category microsoft windows
ComputerWeekly ran a story last week entitled Microsoft may switch to modular versions of Windows, analysts predict.

The essence of the story was:

• Vista may well be the end of the road for Windows as we know it*
• Windows Server 2008 is already modularised to some extent
• A modular Windows would be easier for corporates to deploy and manage, thus reducing cost of ownership and speeding adoption, thus heading off the threat from Linux and OS X, thus bringing more cash into the Microsoft coffers
• The licensing model could get interesting
• The development process itself for Windows could be made more Agile as a result of modularisation
• Different modules could be on different release cycles, thus improving maintenance cycles and reducing the impact of upgrades

If this is true, and if Microsoft successfully make that transition**, then Windows will maintain more of its current market share than it might otherwise do.

However, far be it from me to be the cynical naysayer, but on past record they might struggle to actually achieve this in a sensible timeframe: Windows is currently very tightly coupled, which is to say that it's the very opposite of being modular. In fact, to date the strategy has been to tightly couple it - e.g. the dependence on IE - to lock customers into the Microsoft software stack and the Microsoft view of the world. They deliberately*** sacrificed good software architecture to create that lock-in, and will now pay the price if they want to modularise Windows. They may succeed, of course, but it will feel like trying to untangle 5 balls of string. In the dark. With gloves on.

 

 

* Ain't that the truth

 

** In fact, they may find taking Windows apart and sticking it back together again to be a "paneful" process (groan).

 

*** I sincerely hope it was deliberate - if that's the best they can do then, well, oh dear.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 5:28 PM Location London | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category fun microsoft vista

Full source code ...

/*
       GNOT General Public License!
   (c) 1995-2007 Microsoft Corporation
*/

#include “dos.h”
#include "win95.h"
#include “win98.h"
#include “sco_unix.h"

class WindowsVista extends WindowsXP implements Nothing
{}

int totalNewFeatures = 3;
int totalWorkingNewFeatures = 0;
float numberOfBugs = 345889E+O8;
boolean readyForRelease = FALSE;

void main {
    while (!CRASHED) {

    if (first_time_install) {
        if ((installedRAM < 2GB) ||
        (processorSpeed < 4GHz))
        {
            MessageBox("Hardware incompatibility error.");
            GetKeyPress();
            BSOD();
        }
    }
    Make10GBswapfile():
    SearchAndDestroy(FIREFOX|OPENOFFICEORG|ANYTHING_GOOGLE);
    AddRandomDriver();
    MessageBox("Driver incompatibility error.");
    GetKeyPress();
    BSOD();
     }

     //printf("Welcome to Windows 2000");
     //printf(Welcome to Windows XP");
     printf (“Welcome to Windows Vista”);

     if (still_not_crashed){

      CheckUserLicense();
       DoubleCheckUserLicense();
      TripleCheckUserLicense();
       RelayUserDetailsToRedmond();

      DisplayFancyGraphics();
      FlickerLED(hard_drive);
      RunWindowsXP();
      return LotsMoreMoney,
   }
}

(PS If I knew the originator of this, I would credit him ... but I don't, so thank you whoever you are)

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:30 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft
Interesting final session! Steven Peyton-Jones (sp?)

Talking about Moore's Law, and how chip design is being limited by the new (and essential!) focus on green computing and power requirements reduction.

The main thrust of this talk is on changing the programming model for parallel processing and multithreading using Atomic Transactions, or "Transactional Memory". Coming soon to a Microsoft technology near you!

This will make a huge difference to the ease of writing concurrent programs. "a year or two rather than a year or five"

The other idea is "nested data parallelism". Further away, but more far-reaching.

I can see how the LINQ technology I wrote about earlier is possibly laying some of the groundwork for this kind of innovation. Interestingly, the research work for this is being done using the Haskell functional programming language. Which figures: as I said about LINQ, this is definitely going down functional programming lines anyway.

Very good and interesting speaker, who is wearing possibly the worst jumper in history.

Day over. Time for a beer...

Posted by Julian Woodward At 4:56 PM Location Birmingham | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft
LINQ is Language Integrated Querying

Language for handling data within the source code stream. Not just SQL, but XML, objects, datasets, plus anything else that a driver can be written for.

This is almost (almost) like introducing some declarative or even functional programming ideas into the Microsoft languages. May take a while to get the head round the implications of all this!

The whole thing is built on 2 Interfaces: IEnumerable and IQueryable, so very extensible. Nice.

Demo now, of using this in both VB and C#. Very powerful.

Good presenter in this session. A welcome change from the undead we've had so far!

VB9 also supports inline XML. Very very useful, and works like a dream with the LINQ stuff. Dynamic parts of the XML use an ASP-like syntax. So easy....

New project item type of LINQ-to-SQL to help generate low-level data access code using the LINQ technology.

Using this approach to access SQL is effectively, however, doing a lot of dynamic SQL. This could well have performance implications, even if the tools do provide nice ways of defining and maintaining tbat dynamic SQL. Hmm. Ah, he's addressing that concern now. So, this can be used to front stored procs, not just raw tables. The advantage is that LINQ will manage the marshalling of data into simple addressable data access objects. Also works very well with table-valued functions.

All in all VERY interesting...

Time for lunch.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 12:32 PM Location Birmingham | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft
Moving from a "database" to a "data platform".

Native support for filestreaming, better datetime handling, geospatial datatype.

Over time will add more and more support for unstructured data types.

Adding more offline support via Synchronisation Services (I know no details)

New capabilities for detailed auditing, and building compliance architectures on top of that auditing.

Transparent data encryption: database-level encryption keys. Backups also encrypted. No changes to applications are required - hence the "transparent" bit. Prevents security breaches due to access to live data files or backups thereof. This is NOT enabled by default, but seems fairly straight-forward to set up and use.

Reliability. Backup compression (hooray!) Turned off by default though. Faster than uncompressed. Only works with SQL Server 2008. Improvements to mirroring, including self-repair of damaged database pages using mirrored copy. Good stuff. Log compression to improve mirroring performance.

Scalability. Better parallelism. Dictionary-based compression for denormalised data in Data Warehouses. Improved resource pool management through the Resource Governor: assign database users to different workgroups based on attributes of the connection string, then manage CPU utilisation cut offs based on pools of workgroups. Can change the resource allocations dynamically.
Higher buffer hit rates through data compression. Performance improvements in Analysis Services.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 10:50 AM Location Birmingham | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category microsoft vista ibm
Microsoft have finally released Vista SP1 to their most loyal fans: the MSDN subscriber base. I'm at a loss to explain quite why it took them so long to realise that it might be a good idea to keep their closest friends happy.

Mind you, they're not the only ones to have made some really bad decisions over the years...

Humble pie all round?

Posted by Julian Woodward At 10:18 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category microsoft
ComputerWorld reports that the Vista farce just seems to go from bad to worse, with TechNet subscribers up in arms over Microsoft's decision to NOT allow them early access to the Vista SP1 release, despite the fact that it supposedly has been RTM'd (released to manufacturing):

Virtually none of the 131 comments posted thus far defended Microsoft's decision, and many were extremely blunt. "[Microsoft] has done some really boneheaded stuff, but this ranks right up at the top," said Pete Mitchell in a comment added to the blog Monday.

Another user identified as "PopePeter" put it differently: "Microsoft in its infinite wisdom has chosen to kick its core user base right where it hurts."

One wag, identified as Jim, even took a humorous route: "This is the lamest decision since Microsoft Bob. I get this the same time as my mom?"

Although the comments at times wandered off topic, they generally fell into several distinct threads, among them threats to ditch TechNet and MSDN, accounts of downloading pirated code to start testing, and warnings to Microsoft that this move will force some organizations to delay deploying Vista and continue using Windows XP instead. Despite that angst, earlier this week, the delay was seen as potentially a good thing for some companies waiting to adopt Vista.

"The whole point of TechNet is for IT pros to get access to Microsoft software to test and evaluate before deploying it into a production environment," said a subscriber pegged as "solema." "It's why I bought TechNet, and why most others did as well. If we can't get access to SP1 very soon, then I have to agree with everyone else that my subscription has just been severely devalued, and I will seriously reconsider my renewal."

I particularly love the pay-off line from ITWire's coverage of this story ...

I just hope that when SP1 is finally loaded onto my computer, it’ll be Superfast Pack 1, and not Sloth Pack 1, although with all the conflicting reports I’ve read so far, to date the whole thing has been a very Sorry Pack 1 state of affairs.

Herewith links to the ComputerWorld article and the TechNet post and discussion. Read 'em and weep.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 12:06 PM Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category ibm microsoft odf ooxml
And in the other blue corner, Microsoft.

It seems that Microsoft is attempting to turn the whole debate around ODF vs OOXML into a schoolyard you-can't-be-my-friend-if-you-want-to-be-his-friend argument, by characterising the entire debate as a side-with-Microsoft-or-side-with-IBM decision. A particularly impressive form of weasel words is "If it was not for IBM, it would have been business as usual for this standard" - hmm, let me see, yes of course it's perfectly normal for a single-vendor proposal with an almost total absence of secondary support to be rushed through the standards recognition process in an immature form as a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that there's already an accepted standard which is better and more open but is likely to hurt aforesaid vendor's revenue. That kind of "business as usual". My heart bleeds.

(Of course, this approach of manipulating the nature of the debate is hardly unprecedented: Microsoft was highly successful in foisting their inferior email technology (Outlook/Exchange) on the world, by successfully backing IBM Lotus into a corner where the entire debate became centred on the question of which email client was prettier (Outlook wins - or did then), and not about overall product capabilities (Notes/Domino wins), scalability (Notes/Domino wins), relability (Notes/Domino wins), performance (okay, possibly a draw), cost of ownership (Notes/Domino wins once you consider the whole package, and it's pretty much a draw in an email-only comparison), and platform independence (Microsoft don't even TRY to compete on this one). The world having finally caught up with the idea that collaboration is about more than just email, and IBM having finally (!!) caught up with the idea that people like their software to look nice and be easy to use, hopefully the nature of that old Outlook/Exchange vs Notes/Domino debate has changed for good.)

Back to the point...

In adopting this ludicrously simplistic posture, Microsoft will again of course generate plenty of positive media coverage (something at which Microsoft is, undoubtedly, a world leader - for instance look at the way the BBC toadies up to them as though the sun shines out of Gates' bottom-crack), but they are doing all of us a grave disservice in a number of ways.

Firstly, there's the obvious benefit of a globally accepted standard document format: unencumbered flow of information; deep integration between different software tools; ability to choose the most appropriate software for the job; permanance of record-keeping; etc etc

Secondly, if over the next few years there were to be a significant switch from the expensive Microsoft Office product lines to free or inexpensive ODF-based products (e.g OpenOffice, Symphony), that would have the potential to free up countless millions of dollars/pounds/yen/euros of public funding to do something actually useful. Of course, there may be a challenge to meet in renegotiating licensing agreements with Microsoft, but eventually they would have to crumble. So in a very direct funding-for-healthcare-and-education way, this battle is an important milestone.

Yes, some organisations would stick with MS Office once they backed down and incorporated proper ODF support. But two things would happen:
(a) Microsoft would not support it fully anyway, because lock-in is in their blood
(b) budget holders would start asking serious questions about the business value that Office provides given that many of their peers successful use other cheaper/free alternatives.

Next, we've all been living for too long with Microsoft's prediliction for pointless and incompatible file format changes, and their utter lack of regard for backward compatibility. Instead of fixing core problems in the products (outline numbering in Word? - it STILL sucks), the focus has been on making the products appear 'new and improved' by introducing a completely different, non-standard and for the large part infuriating new user interface. So ... when I read a quote like this:

Microsoft disagrees with much of the criticism and contends that OOXML is necessary because ODF lacks support for features that are used in Microsoft Office and cannot be adapted to provide clean backwards-compatibility with documents that are already in Microsoft's binary formats.

my blood starts to boil. Coming from a company which has just sneakily, via a service pack, dropped support for its OWN older file formats this piece of hypocrisy simply doesn't hold water. I'm not generally given to quoting religious books of any persuasion, but this is perfect: "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."

Finally, Microsoft has become deeply arrogant, resembling the how-dare-you-even-question-us-we-are-who-we-are attitude that got IBM into so much trouble some years back. If Microsoft were to take a bit of a tumble - not a complete collapse, but relatively trying times with a few layoffs and some business units and products (Zune!) being put to the sword - that would force them to concentrate rather more on innovation and less on market manipulation. In turn that would be beneficial all round in making an organisation which undoubtedly harbours some impressive talent and genuine excellence to stop behaving like a playground bully and start getting along with the other kids.

 

Rejection of OOXML would be a bitter pill for Microsoft to swallow. But it is medicine that Redmond needs, and would actually be beneficial for Microsoft, and all of us, in the long term.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 6:36 AM Location London | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category lotusphere2008 lotus ibm microsoft
Ed linked to an article on Silicon.com about the future of Lotus.

If Lotus can tap into the web 2.0 zeitgeist and harness the present wave of collaboration tools visible on the internet in a way that can be rolled out to corporate customers then it will be the undisputed leader of the next wave of corporate technology.

There is no question that companies will be building immense internal knowledge networks in the near future. The only question is how quickly attitudes will change so a corporate social network becomes as essential as email. It won't be long.

All good stuff, and it's an article that offers a fairly dispassionate and long-term view of the way the industry might go and what position Lotus could hold in that.

However, to fight a strong company like Microsoft (and they do have some great products, as well as some highly dubious ones) you have to fight on many fronts simultaneously. Lotus is doing an outstanding job on collaboration tools - there's no doubt in my mind that they are once more thought-leaders, and it's very refreshing. And, of course, there are well-publicised initiatives going on in the productivity software and SMB spaces: also great moves which seem to have come at just the right moment.

But to me there is one crucial part that currently appears to be missing. While IBM/Lotus is rapidly assembling a convincing story on Web 2.0, Microsoft and Adobe are pushing for the next post-Web 2.0 thing (yes, it's already been called 'Web 3.0') with their Silverlight and Flex products respectively. To compete at the leading/bleeding* edge, Lotus is going to need to get onto that bandwagon sooner rather than later: either by developing their own 'Web 3.0' technology, or by aligning with Microsoft or Adobe. In the latter case, the fact that the Adobe development environment - FlexBuilder - is an Eclipse plug-in, might give us a clue as to which technology might be favoured ...

 

* Bleeding edge yellow, of course

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:16 PM Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category lock-in lotusnotes lotusphere microsoft symphony
In the Lotus Strategy session just now, Microsoft Office was referred to as "legacy". In many ways true, but I think it will be a while before the wider market (non-Lotus customers) wake up to this way of thinking.

It does seem, though, that for a significant minority of people who are sufficiently switched on to question assumptions, Microsoft is becoming as irrelevant now as IBM became in the 80s. The collective wisdom of the stock market seems to back that up too: over the mid term the Microsoft share price has pretty much flatlined.

Of course, the decline of the incumbent monopoly doesn't automatically mean that Lotus will benefit, but with the pace and depth of advancement in the Lotus product family over the last couple of years, Lotus is as well placed as anybody to pick up a decent chunk of market share.

The next few years are going to be interesting.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 4:14 PM Location Lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category microsoft lock-in
Trying to do Axiot's annual re-enrolment as a Microsoft Partner today, and this is what their website shows:

Oh yes, of course, I exercised my free will and used Firefox to access the Microsoft website. Silly me. Honestly, these days I only crank up the rusty wheezing old Internet Explorer engine for tasks like this. Is it ignorance, arrogance or incompetence on their part? Perhaps I should start a poll?

AND ....when one DOES finally manage to get through, here's some guide text they place on the details entry page:

Please provide your customer information details using the Latin Character Alphabet ONLY. If you are typing the word frére please type it in as frere as the system cannot recognize special language characters – other examples include ÈÉÊË. This is the same for all languages with special language characters.

Nice.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 8:54 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category ooxml microsoft
Alan Bell has just posted a very succinct and thoughtful article about the current battle between Microsoft and, well, basically everybody else. The fight is over whether Microsoft's own OOXML specification should be elevated to the status of a 'standard' by the ISO. Microsoft's argument seems to be primarily that

• Lots of people use Microsoft Office
• Eventually most of those people will end up using the OOXML formats, because that's the default in the latest Office editors and most users don't bother to think about such things
• We're Microsoft and we're bigger than you
• Look guys, this is a 35-squillion-page specification document, so it must be good, right?
• We're still Microsoft, and we're still bigger than you, so neeeeerh
• er
• that's it

Alan's well-made point is that the ISO - the International Organization for Standardization - should retain its historical emphasis on the quality and longevity of the proposed standard when making decisions. To agree to a 'standard' simply because one large and powerful organisation wants it to happen, whoever that organisation might be, would be A Bad Thing for the future of the IT industry. The ISO is analogous to the House of Lords, or the Supreme Court, or the International Court of Justice. It HAS to be seen to be above being influenced or bought. If it can't maintain that level of impartiality, then the whole notion of IT standards, which the vast majority of people in the industry (and those outside if they stopped to think about it) know is A Good Thing, will be corrupted. One rotten apple, and all that.

Given that one deliberate attempt at subterfuge has been exposed and stamped on, what next from the world's most prominent sufferers of the not-invented-here syndrome, I wonder?

OOXML = Office Open XMLOnly Our XML

Link: Alan Bell: Why OOXML should not be an ISO Standard and why it matters

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:45 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category sharepoint microsoft

I've just spotted an article by Matt Asay that CNET published a few days ago. It highlights that SharePoint is as much a strategy for dominating the market as it is a technology.

Steve Ballmer calls it the next big "operating system" from Microsoft. It is designed to bind enterprise customers to Microsoft's processes, just as Microsoft is starting to lose its grasp on file format lock-in. Microsoft could give away its file format lock-in if it can just get content into its proprietary repository (i.e., SharePoint). At that point, it won't matter whether the files are JPEG, Open Document Format or PDF--Microsoft will own that content and, hence, the customer's future.

SharePoint is the future of lock-in, and Microsoft is doing everything it can to enable its partners to bind companies with it.

I've nothing against somebody investing in SharePoint ... as long as you know what you're getting yourself into...

Posted by Julian Woodward At 10:54 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)