Tag: microsoft

Bundling Web 2.0

Intel will announce SuiteTwo today, a product that brings together a number of Enterprise 2.0 apps into an integrated suite. The 4 products that are included in the release are MovableType, SocialText, Simplefeed and Newsgator. The suite will allow companies to easily install, setup and integrate these products and will be available in both a self-hosted form and also as a hosted service. With these products this suite includes a blogging platform, a wiki and apps to both subscribe to and publish feeds – giving it a real web 2.0 focus.

i am very skeptical about the chances of a such a cobbled-together “suite” against sharepoint.

Analog tax

spending time with my parents affords me an opportunity to see what they use their computer for, and some of it is not pretty: take this whole world of “mail merge”, no matter whether in microsoft office or it’s retarded cousin openoffice, is a world of pain. the user interface is unspeakably bad, quite in tune with a process that is about as fun as a visit to the dentist in the first place. bringing this bloated world onto the web with the recent craze of ajax word processors is fundamentally misguided: why deal with label printing when there is email? similarly, when you are faced with the task to protect 2.5B in revenues per quarter, why screw around with new toolbars when your products don’t help squat to solve the real problem: outdated assumptions about a paper-based world.

Mylifebits

Gordon Bell is talking about the 1TB life. (side remark: i get google ads for a 1TB drive at $900). 1 TB gives you 65+ years of 100 emails a day, 100 web pages, 10 photos a day, 8 hours of audio, etc. why not store it?
mylifebits is about capturing this information in a database. You need the ACID properties of a database to manage this information.

mylifebits is about the automatic creation of metadata for rich media

Gordon talks of the need for accurate speech recognition and automatic transcription of audio, and image recognition to identify persons on photos. he scanned in all his old papers back from the 60s to the present. his team added more data capture over the years: browser history, phone conversations, GPS information over time.. Killer apps beyond search might be nostalgic screensaver, and eventually of course, the memex.

we feel good about putting our home movies in the database (and never look at them) compared to having them on tape (and never look at them) because we know we could. they are also looking at caloric intake vs output to plot health state.

why bother? 1) because we can 2) because we need to deal with digital media 3) it eliminates atoms (hello environment) 4) for business 5) preservation for historians 6) for the frail human mind
the storage structure behind mylifebits shares many of the winfs goals, of course: freedom from the folder structure, rich metadata, useful querying. gordon mentions timelines as a very useful ordering concept. spatial ordering by assigning photos with locations on a map could also become interesting. tagging with dublin core is mentioned, or personal taxonomies. “let me not go into this ontology hole” 🙂 gordon just mentioned deja view, a device attached to your glasses that records the last 30 s in short-term memory and allows you to commit interesting scenes to permanent storage.

to really do the metadata would take another lifetime. i hired an assistant.

sounds like an outsourcing opportunity to me.
alternative write up

monad

i’m always amazed about the level of ignorance in the unix community about what’s cooking in microsoft labs. such as the news that text streams may not be the final word for IPC in the shell. check out these demos of monad (courtesy of jon udell)

monad talk monad resources

Backward or forward?

joel spolsky wrote an excellent article how microsoft shifted from making sure all applications continue to run on new os releases to rewriting everything.

Raymond Chen writes, “I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.”

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle. The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product.

he goes on to suggest that microsoft is trying to save the rich client by all means necessary:

There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn.

invisible applications

Microsoft executives demonstrated applications installing seamlessly, without any prompts or dialog boxes. Gone were the prompt boxes asking the demonstrator if he really wanted to install the application. Click once, and the application installed and launched without any user intervention.

i appreciate the vision behind this. tools should be usable just by picking them up, like in the real world. i do not buy the line that “computer users ought to know about x”. without code signing and a body that rapidly revokes certificates for spyware and the like, this will sink faster than a grindstone. though, your spyware / adware is my revenue stream..