Matt Loney's Blog
What it says on the box
Thursday 20 March 2008, 9:56 PM
I will blog, despite Vista's best efforts
I was going to blog this evening but Vista, as I shall relate below, had other ideas. Still, I found it an illuminating example that captures much of what is wrong with Microsoft as an operating system vendor.
I had several thoughts that I imagined might be interesting to share: about how, despite all the advances that have generated all the product upgrades from the 'Wintel' duopoly, I have this week discovered that an eight-year old Toshiba laptop with a slow PIII processor and humble Windows XP boots approximately five times faster than my almost brand new Asus Core 2 Duo with Vista Ultimate. Why? Well, despite the Asus having a nice fast SATA hard drive, the Tosh is booting from a Samsung SSD.
Who'd have thought that a simple hard drive could make such a difference.
I thought about blogging about how valuable Windows XP discs are set to become as there is an increasingly widespread opinion that XP is the only Microsoft operating system worth owning because, quite apart from application compatibility issues, it is the only decent Microsoft operating system without the truly obnoxious product key checks and associated penalties that come with Vista. (Indeed, my own observations are that XP discs are regarded as gold dust, and I've never seen people so anxiousy to hang on to copies of an old Microsoft operating system).
I also thought I might blog a little more in-depth about Google Docs, and particularly the formiddable brew that is fermenting in the Google spreadsheet department as that company continues to quietly expand the functions and, as I blogged very briefly about earlier, adds to the gadgets that can be built using spreadsheets.
But Vista had other ideas, and has left me with a salutory tale to tell.
As I fired up Vista on my Asus to a) time accurately how long it takes to boot, and b) take another look at Google Docs and those eye-candied gadgets, Vista informed me that the product key I entered is not valid, indeed the whole operating system is not valid, and that unless I enter a correct product key it will only run with reduced functionality. That essentially means that all I get is a browser, through which of course I can buy a valid product key.
Like hell I will. The copy of Vista that I'm running came with the laptop, so I followed the instructions on screen with the intention of speaking to someone and explaining the situation, hoping to catch a sympathetic ear. Failing that, well, I suppose I could also pull rank and plead with an understanding Microsoft PR. Unfortunately, this being Thursday evening before Easter Friday, everybody is stuck in a traffic jam somewhere as they head off for the weekend. Phone lines are open 8 to 6 on weekdays (and, I imagine, not public holidays).
I'm sure others have found themselves in a similar position. Like them, I suspect, my main problem is not so much being asked to pay to continue to use something that as far as I am concerned I already own. No, my real problem right now is that because of some admin error far off in the ether, my laptop has been locked down.
And yet here I am, happily blogging away, on my Asus running Vista with reduced functionality. I could easily reboot into Ubuntu, and in fact was abot to so so, but something occurred to me.
It occurred to me that even when Vista brings down the shutters and bars me from virtually all my applications but one (Firefox), I can still do some pretty cool stuff. I can type this blog entry in a fully-featured word processor with spell checking and so on. I could if I wish create a pretty slick presentation. Or I could go and create a fairly complicated spreadsheet of the type that generated the widget in my previous post. In fact I could go and create more of those widgets, publish the data for others to edit and collaborate on. Yup, I'm in Google Docs. I appreciate this is pretty obvious, basic stuff, but it illustrates an important point.
The point is that Microsoft's business model relies on making life difficult for me, as a user, and ensuring it extracts every penny that it *thinks* it is due from me. Google on the other hand is firmly in the opposite camp when it comes to my perception as a user: they really are very good at making things exceptionally easy. Granted, Adwords have been known to cause headaches for advertisers, Google news has caused news operations some sleepless nights, and Google Search has turned out to be heroin for many publishers, but thinking purely as a user, I'm bowled over by how easy it is to collaborate on, create and publish some pretty sophisticated content -- despite Microsoft's best efforts.
Microsoft may buy Yahoo. It may bring out another OS upgrade. It may even produce an online version of Office - oh wait, it has, let's go and try that.
"BROWSER OR OPERATING SYSTEM NOT COMPATIBLE
Your Browser or Operating System is not compatible with the Test Drive System. The Test Drive System supports the following:
* Windows 98, 2000 and XP
* Internet Explorer 5.5 and later"
Oops. Well that didn't work very well did it? As I was saying, Microsoft can try all these things, but this is not about acquisitions or about poducts, or even about licences. It's about a company's fundamental philosophy and attitude to its customers. Until Microsoft truly gets that, I'll be sticking Ubuntu - or XP as a backup if I really need to run Windows. Hmm, now where's that old Tosh...
Thursday 20 March 2008, 12:55 PM
Google Gadgets test
Bear with me. I've been looking this morning into the new gadgets and associated functionality available with Google Docs. The more I look at this stuff, the more revolutionary I think it is, and the more damagig to Microsoft's Excel.
I've just been creating a Motion Graph (using Google's own data, but publishing it in my account), and have pasted the code below as an example. Let's see if it works:
Thursday 13 March 2008, 3:48 PM
Teleworking: Truly green or just naive?
I'm sat in the European Green IT Summit at the Sheraton Hotel in London, listening to a remarkable range of speakers and hearing people sat around me nodding heads in agreement. What has emerged as being abundantly clear during the day is that first, the ICT industry has a huge, huge part to play in enabling the economies of Western Europe and elsewhere to achieve economic growth while reducing the rate of carbon emissions. And second, that there is still a great deal of confusion over the most basic of green issues in ICT.
Cisco is here with Webex and their telepresence kit. And of course it's green; it lets us cut down on face-to-face meetings. This morning we heard Ann Caluwearts, president of corporate social responsibility for BT Global Service espousing the benefits of telepresence – BT has 14 percent of its workforce working from home, and believes that it make substantial savings both in terms of costs and carbon emissions by doing so. And let's make no mistake: BT, which I believe consumes some 0.7 percent of the UK eletricity supply (that is BT's own figure) and as such is the single consumer of electricity in the country, has a large number of programmes in place to reduce its carbon footprint and, naturally, energy bills (more on how it is achieving this in its datacentres to come).
Ann's enthusiasm for telepresence was infectious: she uses it for interviews, she travels less, and across the company some 850,000 meetings a year are conducted by telepresence. “People are convinced that face to face time is important, but it is not needed. Obviously you can't pass chocolates around but you may try to because it is so good now.”
And yet there were voices of dissent on a later panel. Frank Tudor, director of supplier relationship & performance management at the Department of Work and Pensions, who's suppliers are (I'm guessing) in the audience, was more sceptical. “I'm not convinced. I think it just shifts the carbon from the office to the home – it probably costs more in carbon to heat my home for eight hours a day than it does to travel to and be supported at work.”
If we can't agree on something such a fundamentally basic (and, you'd think, easy to calculate), what hope for the big questions that the ICT industry needs to answer, and on which more later...
Thursday 6 March 2008, 4:32 PM
Why SSD makers don't talk SSDs up
SSD manufacturers have a dirty little secret that that don't want you to know about. At CeBIT this week there were a number of companies displaying their solid state drives (SSDs) in capacities ranging up to 64GB. We've heard of larger capacities available, and of SSDs appearing in everything from notebooks to servers, but I believe there is still a large mismatch between the small trickle of supply and the gaping thirst of demand.
There is a reason for this mismatch, and this is the dirty secret that SSD makers don't like to talk about, at least not in public: namely, that SSDs are simply still too unstable and too slow for the mass market, and the manufacturers are still struggling to figure out which technology to go with.
There are, I am told by the manufacturers, two options: the safe way with single-level cell and the hard way with multi-level cell technologies. Single-level cell is simpler, faster, and has higher endurance but costs a lot more to manufacture. Multi-level cell SSDs are the opposite: mroe complex, slower and cheaper.
Finding the right solution is crucial: SSDs hold the promise of reliable storage (though as we demonstrated in Dialogue Box last year, they do have a peculiar reaction when exposed to radioactivity. They hold the promise of lower power consumption and higher I/O density than hard disks, which is as important for servers as for laptops.
If the manufacturers get it right there is a lot in it for them too; SSDs will command a significant price premium for some time, though once the manufacturing problems are sorted out this could well decrease but even if it does so there will be margin in the business again, which is something that hard disk markers haven't seen for years.
Update (06/03/07): One extra thought about SSDs, again, from talks with SSD makers who would really rather not be quoted, is just how important this could be for Vista. Vista's performance (or lack thereof) is well documented, one reason being that the operating system spends a lot of time grabbing bits of data from the hard disk, even with a decent-sized swap disk. We have cheap, powerful processors and memory, front side bus speeds getting faster, fast graphics cards with features such as SLI – and then we have the hard disk. It's essentially the same technology we've had for 50 years, and the last moving part in the computer - aside from the fan.
I've heard from more than one person in the SSD business that their products will, when they get the technology right, make Vista fly. I'm inclined to believe them because they are not yet, as previously noted, pushing SSDs hard into the market. It's all about getting the mass production right.
