Another Microsoft Blogger : Consumer Tech

information technology evolving similar to how American cities have evolved?

Removed=342783 — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 18:27:00 GMT

I love essays like this that stretch my thinking and give me new conceptual models for understanding what I see happening each day. According to Pat Helland's “Metropolis“ article, “we are at approximately the early 1880's in urban development in our parallel IT shop's growth!“ I also like his explanation of why “shared services will not be achieved by trying to put all of your applications on one version of one platform”. I'm going to use his material for my next series of discussions on “why SOA“.

Source: Steve Kirk

Activewords scripting guide in PDF

Removed=342783 — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 05:46:00 GMT

I might actually figure out how to make this scripting stuff work! AW have recently released a guide in PDF format.

Source: Marc

VoIP Now Available on Pocket PCs For Free

Removed=342783 — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 23:11:00 GMT

This article on Skype for Pocket PC mentions that Skype was founded by the two guys who in vented Kazaa! That's news to me. Wow, talk about two guys changing paradigms...

Channel9 gets media coverage down under!

Removed=342783 — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 22:57:00 GMT

Great to see ZDnet Australia giving Channel9 some early coverage!

a look under the covers of Gmail - Google's new email service

Removed=342783 — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 02:06:00 GMT

I'm all excited reading miscoranda's drill-down into Gmail. This is big. As big as OutlookMT, Scoble? I dunno. But it's big. Oh, I know, web mail is old hat. Yeah but so was “search” when Google jumped into the pond.

Also laughing at Kevin Fox's post assuring everyone Gmail wasn't an April Fools Day joke and about why he loves working at a company like Google. Hey Kevin - if you're looking for more testers... give me a yell!

Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/archive/2004/04/04/107442.aspx

why migrate from Microsoft ASP to Microsoft .NET

Removed=342783 — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 01:58:00 GMT

A few months ago I linked to an article in a local paper which mentioned that one of Australia's largest e-tailers was still running on Microsoft ASP and SQL 7. Nothing at all wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned - plenty of businesses out there are happily running on even 20 year-old technology. The challenge for vendors, though, is to make the new technology compelling enough to create a business justification for organisations to upgrade their infrastructure.

Today one of the developers at this e-tailer, Paul, posted a comment making the point that “any form of radical technology shift is going to require a pretty compelling business case to justify the expense (and, in the case of the SQL 7 -> SQL 2000 migration, it's a fairly enormous expense)“ and letting me know that they are “doing pretty amazing things with the old technology“ and I'm sure he's right on this last point. The folks at Wishlist are a very smart bunch who have a great site and an even better business model. Let's face it - any “dot com“ who survived the crunch are smarter than your average bear.

So anyway, I was wondering - what business justification have other organisations have used to migrate from ASP to ASP.NET or from SQL7 to SQL 2000? Is it compelling enough? Do we need to do more to either make the new technology compelling or to communicate the more compelling features of the new technologies? Is it really to do with price? Or with the cost and complexity of the migration?

Bungie announces HALO 2 product placement. Allegedly.

Removed=342783 — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 16:05:00 GMT

Revealing a brand synergy unprecedented in next generation gaming, Bungie today announced a list of vendors to be featured in-game in "Halo 2" the exciting sci-fi adventure heading to Xbox game systems this fall.

Gee, I can’t seem to find “Mungo McIver, a Microsoft marketing expert” in the GAL. How about that….

newsflash: the internet is popular with Gen X & Y

Removed=342783 — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 22:26:00 GMT

I had a laugh to myself reading this article today about a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association which analyzes the Internet habits of 18-to-34-year-olds, and guess what it found?? Gen X and Y have embraced the Web in a big way. Wow. No kidding. Humour aside, there are some good numbers in the report:

25 percent of this group sends or shares video via the Web, compared to 6 percent of all Internet users
42 percent burn downloaded music to CDs, versus 24 percent of all Internet users 18 and older
The 18-to-34-year-old demo turns to the Web for entertainment. In fact, 30 percent visit entertainment sites daily, compared to 32 percent who read newspaper entertainment sections and 19 percent who read entertainment magazines.

I just make it into this demographic (turning 34 in October) and it isn't unusual for me to spend 18-20 hours a day in front of a PC (and therefore the web), so of course it's going to be an integral part of how I live, work and play but I guess this is still big news for some baby-boomers who didn't grow up with a PC in front of them (come to think of it, neither did I).

Playing around with Anagram

Removed=342783 — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 08:46:00 GMT

Thanks to Buzz who introduced me tonight to Anagram. Anagram instantly and intelligently translates the meaningful text from any application into Outlook Contact, Calendar, Task and Note items. Great app! Just what I've needed for YEARS. The amount of time I spend cutting and pasting people's sig files into contacts... I hate to think!

I notice Omar's been talking about Outlook as a platform with Anagram as one example. And of course Marc covered it a couple of weeks ago. Gee, I stop blogging for a couple of weeks and the world kept moving without me...

the "Father" of Information Engineering

Removed=342783 — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:42:00 GMT

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of meeting a living legend - Clive Finkelstein. Clive Finkelstein is acknowledged worldwide as the "Father" of Information Engineering (IE), having developed its concepts from 1976 - 1980 based on original work carried out by him to bridge from strategic business planning to information systems. Many of his papers and some projects are available online at http://www.ies.aust.com/~ieinfo/. I'd love to get Clive to speak at some Microsoft events.

CIOs see increased IT spending: Gartner

Removed=342783 — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 17:35:00 GMT

A survey of 956 chief information officers around the world shows they are confident about increases in IT spending in 2004 but do not intend to increase spending until business shows a recovery, a unit of the technology research firm Gartner said in a report released today.

The survey found that the business priorities for CIOs were still security breaches, operating costs and data protection and privacy.

<Source: The Age>

Do kids blog?

Removed=342783 — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 08:23:00 GMT

Mitch Denny asks: I wonder what would happen if we encouraged school students to keep an open log of their thoughts about their studies that was accessible to teachers and parents where they could ask questions. Parents and teachers could then read the blog entries to help identify ways to help the student learn.

And I was wondering, what % of school kids currently blog? Has anyone seen a stat (in Pew etc) that pulls out that stat? I can think of a bunch of reasons having kids blog would be a good thing. There was lots of crapola that I went through as a kid which would have been good to communicate with someone outside of my immediate circle about.

Why do bloggers kill kittens?

Removed=342783 — Tue, 09 Mar 2004 05:34:00 GMT

To find out why, jump over to the Blog Epidemic Analyzer FAQ at hp.com .

And just to prove I'm not a "Blog Vampire"... source: Word Soup

Microsoft's marketing

Removed=342783 — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 05:37:00 GMT

Dylan Greene on Windows 2003 Server: "I'm sure there's a bunch of other features we could be taking advantage of, but as usual it seems that Microsoft's marketing department would rather keep them a secret."

Which reminds me of a comment a colleague of mind in Sydney made to me after a couple of tequilas a few years ago.

He said "Five years ago Microsoft had average products but great marketing. Today, we have great products but average marketing. The biggest problem is - people think it's still the other way around!"

I don't know if I agree, but I'm glad Dylan's keeping us on our toes.

I've been un-Googled

Removed=342783 — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 01:53:00 GMT

I recently changed the title of my blog to improve my googlerank for the search "Microsoft blogger". And it worked... for a couple of days. I went from #40 to #4. And now? Apparently my blog doesn't exist. If I google "microsoft blogger", Scoble is still there, Frankarr is still there, I am… nowhere. :-) What's up with that?