My Tech World

Microsoft have finally seen the writing on the wall and adopted a more web-centric focus on their products.  This has been on the boil for over a year now with much marketing and rhetoric being delivered as a result.  But there has been one major omission from the software giant’s new-found religion: Office.

Microsoft Office has been one of the dominant products that the company has depended on for its bread and butter.  But it is also the one most under threat as alternative suites such as OpenOffice, Zoho and of course Google Docs gain more and more traction.  So it comes as little surprise that Microsoft announced today that they will begin offering a web-based version of the ubiquitous productivity suite.

At the Microsoft PDC2008 conference being held in LA this week, Microsoft announced that the next version of Microsoft Office will include “lightweight” browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  Other suites have been available for years so Microsoft have had plenty of time to watch and learn.  The real question will be “have they?”.  Also of note is that the other three big players in this market all offer their services for free.  How will Microsoft change its revenue model to seriously compete?  I suspect it’ll either have to be on features (unlikely) or a more scalable licensing arrangement where the basic features are free, but subscribers pay for greater levels of functionality.

This move ties in well with the new initiative from Microsoft: Windows Azure.  This is Redmond’s new cloud-computing platform that will let developers create and deliver programs over the Internet.  This signals a new push from Microsoft to reassert its market dominance in a competitive environment that seems to have changed too quickly for the lumbering giant.  What happens in the next 12 months will be very interesting indeed.

There was an article published by the NZPA on Stuff at the start of the year that highlighted a teenager’s battle with his ex-employer McDonalds.  In it, the article detailed how the blogger posted some rather controversial views about what his until-recently employer could do with his job and a few other comments besides.

McDonalds secured an Employment Relations Authority injunction to remove the blog (on pretty good grounds too, I might add); peace was restored.

I was presented today with a slightly similar issue where I’d named my employer in the context of discussing technologies or methodologies.  The concern by The Office was that it did not consent or want to be seen to affiliate itself with a public forum that was not sanctioned or condoned.  Basically, they don’t want their name associated with this blog because I might (potentially) pan the company or leak sensitive information.

Fair enough.  I wouldn’t be stupid enough to trash my employer or in any other way bite the hand that feeds me.  Besides - I’m not unhappy with my workplace.  I like it here and I think there’s a lot of opportunity.  So I’ve gone and removed any reference that could possibly associate me with The Office and made sure that there’s nothing in my post content that could implicitly or explicitly tie my workplace with this blog.  But it did get me wondering as well - especially when the original request was to outright remove all posts with the company name.  Who owns the opinions and content on a privately-owned forum (blogs, books or other media)?

My view is that one should be judicious about the sorts of comments being made.  After all, it just wouldn’t be prudent to soil one’s own bed, as it were.  Don’t list off a bunch of reasons why you hate your employer and don’t make comments like our friend at McD’s about wanting to “kill them all”.  Not very bright.

However, I feel that your employer does not have the right to demand the total removal of published material where that material does not in any way associate or attempt to associate the employer with the views or opinions expressed.  In other words, if you haven’t named your employer and your topic isn’t even about them, there should be no grounds for grievance.  That said, I’m sure there might be exceptions to this view.  So where is the line drawn?

Sounds much cooler, don’t you think?

I have two presentations to make at work over the coming weeks and some of the content is going to be pretty dry - especially given my non-technical audience.  A good portion of my audience for one of these presentations is going to be marketing and product delivery people.  That means it’s all about the appearance, less about the substance (my apologies to any marketing types out there - I’ve become very cynical in my dealings with the marketing departments of my last three companies).  So given that I want a bit more visual impact than the familiar, ubiquitous and cliched options provided for in PowerPoint 2007, it was very timely that Sarah Perez’s article on Slideshows 2.0 appeared on RWW today.

Sarah’s article lists off a raft of options for presentations including ways to add more impact or functionality, sharing tools or sites and various alternatives to the dominant PowerPoint.  One of these alternatives was SlideRocket, which I am trying out now.

I have to say I’m quite impressed with SlideRocket.  It’s intuitive and fast, which seem to be two of the most basic requirements in any online application these days.  Using Flash as its base platform, you get a lot of zing for your experience; with much improved transitions and effects than you might be used to from PowerPoint.  The big driver for me is the slide transitions.  Something that doesn’t distract the user but still creates a nice, smooth shift from one topic to the next is important from both a UX point of view and my own preferences.

The added advantage in having cloud-based presentations is obviously in the accessibility and sharing departments.  I can make the presentation available to anyone I want and access it from any computer (PC or Mac) since it’s (obviously) platform-agnostic.

Once I’m done, I’ll let you know how the presentation goes.  In the meantime, why not check out SlideRocket anyway?

There’s a certain maturity that needs to be reached before a business is ready to adopt Agile as a project methodology.  Many people would submit that you decide that you’re going to “go Agile” and just get on and do it, but it is much more complex than that.

“What?!”, I hear people cry.  “Who the hell said it was as simple as just waking up one morning and deciding you’re Agile?”.  Well, no one said that.  But there are businesses who still think that’s all there is to it.

Mike has posted some really good comments about some of the common complaints you typically get (from upper management, usually) about Agile.  In addition, he’s provided a superb PDF resource for noobies, which I won’t link to here - go read the article.  But I think there’s one point that is still missing - maturity.

I believe that a project team or business department needs to be mature in the processes they currently use to successfully migrate over to Agile.  Or at least, they need to have a realistic and mature appreciation of what is not working in their processes in order to understand the merits of adopting Agile.  If your project management is a mess and you don’t know what your targets or deliverables are, no methodology is going to help you.

We tried using Agile at The Office for our recent project and it was largely a disaster.  Not because most people didn’t understand how Agile worked (although this was the case as well), but because the team was new, roles weren’t defined and lines of communication weren’t formalised.  The fact that we didn’t have signed-off requirements didn’t help either, but that could have been managed.  In short, our team was immature and not ready to add an unfamiliar project methodology into an already-volatile mix.

Maturity in process or team is crucial in adopting a new way of doing things.  Without them, your project will likely fall into disarray.  If you’ve got at least one out of the two, you’re in a much more commanding (i.e. stable) position to add another ingredient to your recipe.

Up until today I have been a huge Dell fan.  When I purchased my Inspiron, their site was very usable, intuitive and purchasing was easy.  Same experience when L purchased hers.

But as many people know, Dell’s batteries were never that great (although they’re making a concerted effort on that these days) and as expected, my battery now lasts for about 15 minutes on the lowest power settings.  So I called Dell to order a replacement.  The order process was fast and efficient and again I was impressed at how easy it was.  I was told that the battery in question would arrive in 7-10 working days.  So I waited.

…And waited.  And after 3 weeks, I decided to check where the battery was.  “No problem”, I was assured.  There was a slight delay in supply but it would definitely now arrive in 5-10 working days.  Again I waited.

14 days later and still no battery.  Now I’m getting worried.  I call again and learn that there’s a “global battery shortage”.  Wow!  The horror.  I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it on the news.  Batteries do take a long time to grow and land for cultivating them is scarce.  Given all the climate change, hurricanes and landslips, I can see why supply would be lower than expected.  Worldwide Oxfam’s resources are stretched as they try to get little children to power their laptops with candles…  Another 5-10 working days before they can get some more batteries from, er… batteryland.

So now it’s 7 weeks since I first placed the order and I’m on the phone to Dell now speaking in VERY angry tones to the indonesian(?) woman on the other end of the phone.  Still no battery, still another 2 weeks before the supplier gets parts, still another 5-10 working days after that before said battery arrives.  I am SERIOUSLY pissed at this point.

Dell has a good standard of service when it somes to sales of their products, but support and after-sales service (especially for accessories, it seems) has been, in my experience, the worst I’ve ever experienced.

Shocking form, Dell!!

… stick to the familiar option, apparently.

NBC was reported by RWW yesterday to have dropped Microsoft’s Silverlight platform in favour of familiar and ubiquitous Adobe Flash.

NBC used Silverlight to stream the Olympic ceremonies although as it turned out later, 40 million visitors in the US didn’t have the plug-in installed.

It seems that people fall into one of three camps when it comes to Silverlight: the “I’m afraid of installing anything I’m not familiar with and don’t trust” majority; the “I don’t see the benefit and I don’t see anyone else using it, so why bother” group and the third group: developers (”New technology? SIGN ME UP, BABY!”).

Obviously Microsoft have a LOT of work to do if they want this dog to hunt. It’s one thing to get the development community enthused about a technology, but it’s a whole different problem to get their users to buy into that enthusiasm. How long do you reckon it’ll take for Silverlight to get a serious foothold?

Well, it was certainly a challenging time away at TechEd this year. If not for a series of unfortunate events on the home front, I might have been able to form a much more comprehensive post than this. However, as it is I was able to attend the real key sessions that were most important to me.

So what were the highlights? Two names in particular: Scott Hanselman and Trent Mankelow. Scott did a number of sessions encompassing ASP.Net’s new MVC framework, some crystal ball gazing into the next 18 months and a number of different discussions on blogging. Trent is a New Zealand usability expert and gave a great discussion on self-service usability and was also involved in the aforementioned crystal ball gazing.

The main takeaway for me was a warm, fuzzy feeling of hope and promise. IE8’s beta 2 release is finally putting Microsoft on the right path (albeit several years behind the competition) and I genuinely think this is at last the beginning of the end for that evil abomination that is IE6. I can finally look forward to developing my web applications knowing that soon I will not be spending half my time trying to get cross-browser compatibility sorted out. This has been the biggest drain on not just my time, but that of most developers out there.

I’m also quite curious to have a crack at building a site using MVC - just to explore the relative merits and detractors. It feels like a return to the bad old days of Classic ASP in some ways, but actually opens up a whole new array of possibilities at the same time, so we’ll see.

And finally, I’m chomping at the bit to find avenues for encouraging The Bank to adopt a more usability-focussed approach to their application design.

I’ll let you know how things get on.

So Microsoft launched its version 2 beta of IE8 last week. Internet Explorer has been under some reasonably close scrutiny over the last year or so (or do I notice it more because of the field I’m in?). So how does it stack up?

I’m still a little confused and, to be perfectly honest, somewhat worried by some of the developments we’re seeing out of Redmond right now. While IE8 looks marginally prettier and does more things, what I want to know is “what is the added value” and “who are you targetting with this product”?

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I’ve been reading in the Website Professionals community on Mixx a lot (and I mean a LOT) lately about blogging tips. In fact, when looking at the RSS feed, one might be forgiven for thinking that the only topic of interest to web professionals was blogs and SEO. However one topic caught my eye because it was of particular relevance to my work: Three Tips for Company Blogging.

Matt Cutts is a software engineer for Google, but his blog is unaffiliated with Google in any way: it’s a personal blog. His latest article discusses his top three rules for writing for a company blog. You can read the article in full yourself, but the three rules are:

• Don’t make hard promises about the future
• Don’t trash talk a competitor
• Don’t post when you’re angry

I think these are pretty fair rules, but I would expand on that list a little:

• Don’t make hard promises
• Don’t trash talk a competitor
• Don’t post when you’re angry
• A blog is for opinions, not PR
• Don’t take your readers for fools (be honest)

The first three are essentially the same, so I’ll start with the fourth point: A blog is for opinions, not PR.

A blog, whether it is within a business / enterprise context or a personal one is a medium for expressing opinions or knowledge. Whether you’re voicing your dismay over employment matters, notifying readers about new industry developments or providing technical tips on development (or cooking for example), the motive should be the same: to give your readers something to think about or look into. A very real risk that a company blog runs is becoming another voice for the marketing department - essentially turning the “blog” into a new advertising channel.

Mike’s article on this subject is excellent. It’s now 2^½ years old and still completely relevant. I will be encouraging the Bank to read and understand his points. Especially the point about comments. Customers must be allowed to comment on your articles, otherwise it’s not a blog, it’s a web page. This is especially true if your “blog” is actually just a PR forum. If you want to stop people from voicing their opinions about something you’ve publicised, move to China.

The last point on my list is don’t take your readers for fools. Honesty fosters trust and credibility. If a business makes a mistake, its executive might very well cringe at the idea of firstly admitting said mistake and then even entertaining the idea of publicising it. Don’t hide things from your customer base. It’s never a good look to censor your content based on political motives or perception fears. Treat your customers with integrity and openness. It’s an invaluable investment in goodwill.

What are your thoughts? Is there more to add to this list?

Warning label on my (1 year-old) son’s medication: “Limit Alcohol”.

“Sorry son, but I’ll have to take that G&T back. Yes I know it’s been a tough day at daycare, but it’s doctor’s orders”.

At least he can still operate heavy machinery.