… is back online. We took it offline after the old version (running on PostNuke) was hacked by person or persons unknown, and used the downtime to ponder feedback from users and rethink the concept. Our general conclusion is that the big need is for a site that is intelligible to non-technical users, non-doctrinaire and pragmatic. Most people don’t have strong views about computers or software — they just want them to work, be reliable and not cost too much. Some of them now realise that there may be alternatives to Microsoft that might work for them and need to know more. We will do our best to help them understand what’s possible and what might be involved in making the switch. Now all we need is an extra 6 hours in a day…
Category Archives: Microsoft
My tiny screen is frozen
Thinking of getting a mobile phone which runs Windows? Check out this first!
The things you can do with monopoly rents
Well, well. From The Inquirer…
US ANALYST firm iSuppli said it had ripped apart an Xbox 360 to find out just how much the components cost.
The triple core IBM CPU used in the Xbox runs at 3.2GHz, the lads reckon. This CPU costs $106 and that represents 20.2 per cent of the bill of materials (BOM) for the console.
Add in the other integrated circuits and the BOM is a staggering $340 per console.
ATI’s graphics chip costs $141 including embedded memory from NEC, a Japanese company.
Add in the DVD drive to the Xbox Premium, the RF board, the wireless controller, the cable, the literature and the packaging and the total BOM is $525.
Isuppli didn’t say how much the power cord cost.
Fact: The Xbox sells in the US for $399.
That leaked Microsoft memo
From Bill Gates to his troops. Once more into the breach etc… Dave Winer’s Blog was one of the sites carrying it today. Key passage reads:
The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “services wave” of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.
We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.
This coming “services wave” will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.
But in order to execute on this opportunity, as we’ve done before we must act quickly and decisively. This next generation of the internet is being shaped by its “grassroots” adoption and popularization model, and the cost-effective “seamless experiences” delivered through the intentional fusion of services, software and sometimes hardware. We must reflect upon what and for whom we are building, how best to deliver new functionality given the internet services model, what kind of a platform in this new context might enable partners to build great profitable businesses, and how our applications might be reshaped to create service-enabled experiences uniquely compelling to both users and businesses alike.
Steve and I recently expanded Ray Ozzie’s role as CTO to include leading our services strategy across all three divisions. We did this because we believe our services challenges and opportunities will impact most everything we do. Ray has long demonstrated his passion for software, and through his work at Groove he also came to realize the transformative potential for combining software and services. I’ve attached a memo from Ray which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out. Ray outlines the great things we and our partners can do using the Internet Services approach.
The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.
Pitfalls of using Microsoft Word
From today’s New York Times…
The United Nations issued a long-awaited report on Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. It was a damning report for Syria by any standard, but recipients of a version of the report that went out on Oct. 20 were able to track the editing changes, which included the deletion of names of officials allegedly involved in the plot, including the Syrian president’s brother and brother-in-law.
A similar gaffe embarrassed the network software company SCO Group in 2004, when it filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for violations of their software agreement. A carelessly distributed Microsoft Word version of the suit revealed, among other things, that the company had spent a good deal of time aiming the suit at Bank of America instead. “It just sort of made it look like they were looking for the easiest target,” Mr. Kennedy said.
At about the same time, California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, floated a letter calling peer-to-peer file-sharing software – long the bane of the entertainment industry’s interests – “a dangerous product.” But a peek at the document’s properties revealed that someone dubbed “stevensonv” had a hand in its creation.
Vans Stevenson, a senior vice president with the Motion Picture Association of America, said later that he had offered input on the document but had not written it.
“California AG Plays Sock Puppet to the MPAA,” was one blogger’s response.
The issue increasingly nags at the legal system, as lawyers become aware of the advantages of requesting discovery of the metadata buried in word-processed documents (or debate the ethics of scrubbing the metadata from a file before turning it over to the other side).
This is an old story. The most celebrated case of the pitfalls of using Word came in February 2003, when Tony Blair’s office published the infamous ‘dossier’ about Saddam Hussein’s alleged armory in Word format. (Much of it turned out to be plagiarised from a research student’s article in the journal Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis”.) Richard M. Smith conducted a terrific analysis of the Downing Street document’s metadata and identified the people who had authored and revised it. As a result, the UK government has largely abandoned Microsoft Word for documents that become public and now tends to circulate them in pdf format. However, my experience is that most companies continue blithely to reveal the origins of, and revisions to, their internal documents!
If you must use Word, be careful to turn off ‘Track Changes’, save the document as an rtf file and then convert it to pdf before letting it out into the world.
Microsoft ponders cannibalism
This morning’s Observer column on Redmond’s half-assed foray into web services.
Some years ago Harvard academic Clayton Christensen wrote a riveting book entitled The Innovator’s Dilemma, which explored the question of why large, successful companies cannot cope with disruptive technologies. In it he shows that even well-managed firms with established products miss the next big wave in their industries unless their leaders know when to abandon their traditional business practices.
The first chapter in Professor Christensen’s book is entitled ‘How can great firms fail?’ Watching Gates & Co fudging the issue of web services on Tuesday suggested a simple answer: easily.
Microsoft to cannibalise its core business
Amazing news. Early next year Microsoft plans to launch a new Web site called “Office Live” in an attempt to create a new platform that will liberate some of its applications from user’s hard drives. (Translation: to head off Google’s plans to make the PC platform irrelevant.) Office Live, Microsoft said, will be targeted at the 28 million small businesses worldwide. It will have “elements that enhance regular Office applications” while others will work independently of the software suite.
(Reality check: where did that number of 28 million come from? There must be 28 million small businesses in the US alone.)
Some of the tools promised for the site will allegedly help small businesses build an online presence as well as offer applications to automate tasks such as project management, expense reports and billing, among others.
“With Office Live services, we make complex technology affordable and easy to use for small businesses, empowering them to reach their business goals,” said Rajesh Jha, general manager of Information Worker Services at Microsoft. (Don’t you just love that cant about “empowering”!) Meanwhile, Chairman Bill was rolled out to put the best spin he could muster on the development. “It’s a revolution in how we think about software,” he told reporters and industry analysts. “This is a big change for…every part of the ecosystem.”
You bet. Especially the Microsoft ecosystem.
Here’s Good Morning, Silicon Valley‘s take on the development…
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie today outlined the first steps in a critical change in the company’s business — a move into providing software and services over the Net, prodded by the specter of being disintermediated on the desktop by Google and Yahoo and in the business market by companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite. But this venture, which Ross Mayfield describes as nothing less than the “third coming of Microsoft,” comes with a whole new set of challenges for the company. For one, eventually it would put Microsoft in competition with itself as services vie with packaged software (though Steve Gillmor thinks Gates is ready to bite that bullet). The other problem is that it seems to take Microsoft about three tries to get something new close to right. In the past, that meant users were pretty much forced to suffer through a couple hinky iterations, there often being no viable alternatives. Hardly the case this time. Microsoft will be trying to move into a territory with some significant and experienced occupants — a territory in which, as Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble notes, the company is already regarded with distrust and dislike.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the increasingly popular Web-application development framework Rails, sees it this way: “Microsoft is now entirely optional. No part of the stack needs Microsoft. Not on the client, not on the server. And I think that’s a pretty tough challenge for a company that used to be a necessity. … To be frank, I don’t ever see the good times coming back for them. Microsoft will have to move to higher grounds. Get out of the infrastructure race. Like Apple did. There is no dominant future for the Microsoft tool chain for Web development in sight. But I doubt the company will acknowledge that before it’s game over.”
And after you’re finished mopping the bathroom floor, be sure to write up that portable music device contract
Lovely post in Good Morning Silicon Valley…
At a court hearing to review Microsoft’s progress in meeting the sanctions imposed in a 2002 antitrust settlement, a U.S. District Court judge upbraided the company for handing some of its partners a contract that would have forced them to stop bundling rival music software with their MP3 players (see “Sorry, just an old chunk of monopolist boilerplate we had on a save string”). Microsoft maintains the contract was a gaffe, a proposal drafted by low-level business person who did not understand the company’s obligations under the antitrust settlement, which seems something of a stretch to me. “This maybe indicates a chink in the compliance process,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said. “This should not be happening at this point in the decree. I realize people make mistakes, but this should not be happening.”
Old habits die hard…
Why Microsoft isn’t supporting the Sony DVD format
Well, well. Here’s an interesting interview in The Daily Princetonian with Bill Gates. The bit that grabbed me is this:
Q: There has been a lot of debate about the next generation Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies in recent weeks. It seems more and more companies are backing the Blu-ray standard. The current debate seems to harken back to the Betamax vs. VHS format war in the 1970s and 80s, where Betamax was ostensibly the superior technology yet it did not gain wide acceptance. Why is Microsoft not backing Blu-ray today — a technology that many consider to be superior?
Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.
It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.
For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.
At first sight, this looks encouraging. At last, a major computer technology company is standing up to the copyright thugs. The only problem is that the same Bill Gates has ceded veto rights to Hollywood studios over some features of the forthcoming Vista (aka Longhorn) release of Windows. Not much evidence of concern for consumers there. So either Redmond’s right hand knoweth not what its left hand doeth; or Mr Gates speaks with forked tongue.
Update: Cian Ginty of Gamestoaster.com writes:
Possibly overlooked by many people, Microsoft’s main reasons for not supporting the format may be because Sony is to use Blue-ray in their rival PS3 games console, which is to launch within a year after MS’s Xbox 360 console which should be out for Christmas.
The Microsoft Protection Racket
No — it’s not my headline, but one from John Dvorak, a prominent technology commentator. He’s been musing about the significance of a change in the way Microsoft approaches the provision of ‘patches’ to its flaky software. Sample:
Does Microsoft think it is going to get away with charging real money for any sort of add-on, service, or new product that protects clients against flaws in its own operating system? Does the existence of this not constitute an incredible conflict of interest? Why improve the base code when you can sell “protection”?
So what is actually going on here? I think there were some bottom-line questions that must have been brought up internally. Obviously someone at Microsoft looked at the expense of “patch Tuesday” and asked, “Is there any way we can make some money with all these patches?” The answer was “Yeah, let’s stop doing them and sell ‘protection’ instead.” Bravo! And now the company has a new revenue stream.