The Not-So-Rapid Blog

Despite all the hullabaloo about the ODF standard versus OOXML, and alternatives to Microsoft Office, the fact remains that the biggest competitor to Microsoft Office is actually...

Microsoft Office.

This probably comes as no surprise to most regular readers here. However, it does explain this article, which I got via Slashdot.

Clippy is dead?

What, deader than last time? Didn't they kill him off when they shipped Office XP?

Oh yeah. I forgot. Most people are running Office 2000. So I suppose this is news to many. I do find it amusing that the interview focuses so much on six-year-old news of Clippy's death rather than anything new in Office itself. You can see poor Jensen Harris try to turn the conversation round to the new Office, but the interviewer evidently has a bee in his bonnet...

Still, it makes you wonder. Specifically, it makes me wonder when we'll see the Ribbon being pronounced dead...

The UI experiment on paying customers is dead! Long live the UI experiment on paying customers!

Comments (0)
philipstorry February 11th, 2007 16:08:11

Vista's out.

I have no new laptop. Nobody has asked me to edit a Wikipedia page for them. I owe nobody anything.

So I suppose I can say what the heck I like...

 

Anti-climactic seems to sum up my feelings towards Vista. I was promised the greatest film ever made; I turned up to the cinema to see two episodes of Mr. Magoo spliced together. Just the first half of each episode, too. So it made very little sense.

And that, I'm afraid, is the best analogy I can find.

 

Vista is an incredibly impressive piece of engineering. I just cannot, for the life of me, figure out why I'd want to upgrade to it. And therein lies the problem...

Go and read the reviews out there. Even the tech cheerleaders, the gaming/hardware sites that worship the latest and greatest of anything, and which excommunicate readers that are found to have hardware older than six months - even those sites have reviews which can be summed up as "meh".

 

I should feel excited. Or revolted. Surely I should have some feelings?

Something?

Anything?

 

Well, there is one thing I'll say about Vista.

This is not the end of Windows.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

(Enough with the Churchill - Ed.)

Windows' monopoly will last for as long as people believe they can only open their documents with Microsoft Office on a Windows PC.

And even then, it will still be there. Because even if you kill the Office monopoly, you have to have a better commodity OS to move to. One that runs on any hardware. Apple, are you freakin' listening?

Wow. Emotion. At last. Pity it wasn't for Vista, but it was nice to see some kind of connection to the world.

 

Anyway, this is the internet. So I suppose we have to sum this up in an appropriate internet style...

 

Worst. Product. Release. Ever.

 

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and slam my hand in a drawer, just so I can remember what it's like to feel something.

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry January 30th, 2007 12:38:00

So, everyone in LotusLand is at the 'Sphere, except for me. (Or at least it feels that way.)

And as is traditional, Microsoft have tried to issue a spoiler. Surprise surprise, it's another unfinished product beta that just happens to have bolted through the stable doors at this time of year.

But do my eyes deceive me? Can it really be true?

Have Microsoft actually used the word "coexistence" in their description of the product?

 

Crikey. They must be getting desperate. The word migration is played down significantly - it's a "transport", not a migration these days it seems. And they even managed to put the word coexistence in there. Wow!

And here's why I think this is: For the past two or three years, IBM has been giving a straight line of "migrations are expensive, time consuming and rarely satisfactory - especially when done for just email". Not that they wouldn't like you to move to Notes, nor that they don't think it can be a compelling option - especially if you want more than just email. But migrations aren't the kind of thing you bandy around for fun.

And I think that Microsoft's text reflects that this message is getting through - no longer is it acceptable for them to simply say "move to Exchange, then move everything to SharePoint afterwards". Too many of their customers were stung by that one, or are still being stung by that one. The message lacks credibility, and the coverage in the press in the last year has been reflecting a lack of perceived value in that strategy.

 

This subtle shift in language tells me that they're really having to take IBM seriously. Far more seriously than the want to have to. And specifically, it's the rebounding of the Lotus business unit that's got 'em scared.

Go 'Sphere!

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry January 23rd, 2007 13:21:00

For some months now, I've been an avid reader of Rob Wier's blog. He's an excellent writer, and I heartily recommend his blog. In fact, I've been meaning to throw some gushing praise at him for a while now.

Well, today, my hand was forced by Slashdot, of all places. They pointed at Rob's excellent blog entry on why OOXML isn't a very good specification (which in turns references Ben Langhinrichs' excellent blog entry, which I assume you've all read!).

But it was a comment about all of this only mattering when converting documents that set me off. I've been purposefully not blogging about OOXML, because others are quite capable of doing far better than I can. However, I figured that on this issue - "it only matters when converting" - I would make my stand, say my piece, and then shut up about it.

In summary, if you think that an XML format's only problems are to do with conversion, then you've missed the point of using XML. One of the key reasons to choose XML these days is interoperability.

That doesn't mean everyone will choose to use it because others can interoperate with them - it's perfectly possible to use XML, never release your specification for your XML schema, and keep mucking about with it from version to version to attempt to defeat others who wish to use your applications' data files. But most organisations choose XML because it's becoming the de facto interchange format in the IT world, and because this promotes greater interoperability between applications (and systems).

One of the stated benefits of OOXML is that it allows others to use the Office formats without having to reverse engineer a proprietary format that may be subject to sudden change.

As I wrote in my slashdot comment:

---

OOXML is supposed to open up documents for easy, cheap creation and manipulation by third parties. It's Microsoft's response to the ODF claim that now, you don't need the application which generated the data file.

Why is this an advantage? Well, imagine that you have a webserver serving financial quotes, and want to generate those quotes on the fly using the very latest data. Now you can output those quotes as documents quickly and easily, because you have the spec, right?

(Pedantically, yes you might choose to use PDF because it's "non-modifiable". I have a copy of WordPerfect X3 that allows roundtrip editing of PDFs. I have PDF cracking software that removes passwords/locks. And I have a copy of Acrobat. I'll modify your PDF if I want to. If you want to ensure your quote remains secure, then either don't give them the file or keep a copy of it for comparison later... Now back to the example.)

With ODF, outputting the file is easy. Same with OOXML. They're about equal for new documents.

What if your app needed instead to read old documents for some reason? Perhaps it's looking for links into your CRM system, using hints like the text before "yours sincerely" or for text which is right-formatted at the top of a page?

So to make this easier, you bulk convert your old data to OOXML. And then set your agent loose on the data.

Now what does useWord97LineBreakRules mean to you? Formatting is important in this context. It's how you're trying to recognise data. What the heck is a Word 97 Line Break Rule? Apparently, it refers to Far Eastern language blocks. Does it explain the weird formatting in all your RTL formatted paragraphs? Is this why the program works on documents from your Western offices but not ones from the E astern offices?

A specification's job is to tell you not only that something exists, but also what it's for and what is does. Too often, Microsoft wave the "it's old, don't use it" wand in their OOXML spec, and whilst that's fine for new documents it's an appalling disservice to the documents you already have.

Of course, this is to Microsoft's advantage anyway. Having read about the spec, I plan to try and read it. But I think that I'll stick to OLE automation when it comes to manipulating Office documents, because the OLE/COM interfaces are better documented and better supported. And they have the advantage of letting Word figure out what the heck useWord97LineBreakRules means, rather than me having to do it.

This is probably what Microsoft want. Every application which reads and writes OOXML files natively and isn't part of Office is, to them, a potential lost Office sale. Why go out of their way to support that? OOXML sets the bar for using their XML suitably high, encouraging developers to use the existing OLE/COM interface rather than use the XML.

(And in my job I maintain a small app which uses OLE/COM to scrape data from an Excel spreadsheet that the user provides, so I'm fairly sure that OLE/COM would be easier than using the XML. Why did I use OLE/COM? Because the users tend to prepare the data in Excel anyway, so it cuts down on the steps required. I'd rather pull it from CSV or XML if I had the choice, but Excel is more convenient for the users on the whole, and prevents me from having to explain what File -> Save As does over and over again. And most importantly, because someone else wrote the core of the app, and I inherited it like that later. I've just been tweaking it as necessary. *grins*)

To go back to my example - who would want to scan their old documents and put them into a CRM system as possible related items? Well, I bet most businesses would be open to the idea. Until they see the cost. I'd also bet that it would be cheaper to accomplish with ODF documents than it would OOXML documents, because of the kinds of issues I've mentioned. In that regard, OOXML will actually hold back the IT industry - it will prevent cool things from being done because it will probably cost more to develop with/for.

Microsoft have just wasted an opportunity here. They could have chosen to do it properly, but they chose instead to translate existing formats into XML rather than take existing features and rework them to use XML as a store, and fix their bugs with import/export filters rather than have to reproduce them in perpetuity...

---

That about sums it up for me. ODF is superior to OOXML because nobody is putting up barriers to entry. OOXML looks nice and open, but if you attempt to use it for anything seriously, you find all these fringe cases that are inadequately documented and leave you wondering why you should bother when you can just use OLE/COM to do the job through Office itself.

Any organisation standardising on ODF now will probably be in a position to do much cooler things with their data in two years, let alone ten. Don't get suckered by OOXML. If you're still not convinced, then read Rob's excellent post on how Excel's specification simply preserves existing bugs rather than making an attempt to break free of them and fix them.

Why should you have to reproduce someone else's bugs? Why didn't OOXML take the opportunity to put in a compatibility flag for the old buggy date system, and have all new documents use a bug-free one unless overridden? This problem could have been solved, and with minimal disruption for old documents (which wouldn't be OOXML and would therefore be assumed to have buggy dates on opening) and minimal disruption for developers alike.

I could go on about this forever, but Rob's much better at it than I am. Go read his blog. Then make your own mind up . I've said my bit, and will shut up now.

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry January 5th, 2007 12:43:00

Peter O'Kelly points to an article asking if Firefox 2 is a dud, and highlights the fact that it doesn't run in Protected Mode in Vista in his quoting.

I think that there are two important points to make here:

1. If Microsoft hadn't designed IE so darned insecurely in The first place, it wouldn't need Protected Mode.
2. Yet again, Microsoft's bad design strikes here, because Protected Mode applies only to IE. This is like criticising a Ford car for lacking airbags when the reason the GM car has implemented airbags is that its seat-belts don't work. (Except even that analogy doesn't fit, as I'll explain shortly.)

There are two very important points that this (very bad) analysis has missed on this issue.

1. Everything I can find about Protected Mode strongly implies that it was designed for IE only, so it doesn't apply to other applications. That's Microsoft's fault, not anyone else's/
2. Vista gives us User Account Control, which is good. So any program running under Vista should be more secure by default.

I want to strongly remind everyone about those two points, especially the second one because it's an important security advance. (And thank you to Microsoft for providing it, by the way!)

From what I can see, Firefox - or Opera - can't use Protected Mode because Protected Mode is a feature of Windows that's specifically there for IE. The only way the Firefox team can create a Protected Mode analogue would be to write their own version of Windows.

Protected Mode is designed to make sure IE and its sub-processes can't write outside of specific areas in the filesystem and the registry. So that when ActiveX objects or a JVM are loaded by IE, they can't do anything nasty.

But Protected Mode is nothing more than a required sticking plaster for IE.

And if Microsoft were doing it properly, then any program would be able to run under Protected Mode, by adding itself to a list on installation or calling an API on startup.

After all, should only my browser get Protected Mode? Is my email client never going to encounter exploit attempts? Or my newsreader? And my IM programs - what about them? Could Google Earth ever be exploited? What about my RSS reader?

If Protected Mode were done properly, it would be a sandbox defined by the applications that are afraid of being exploited. Those applications would say where they need to write to, and Windows would check to make sure that those requirements aren't too general (e.g. no \Program Files\* or Windows\*). Then the app would be able to run in Protected Mode, with Windows monitoring it for untoward behaviour and stopping it. Ideally, applications running in Protected Mode would also get a little logo before its window title that tells the user they're in Protected Mode.

But instead, we have an application-specific sticking plaster rammed into the OS to make up for really crappy design. And as I believe I've just shown in my previous paragraph, the sticking plaster itself is crappily designed because it's too specific.

I suppose I should be grateful that we have a sticking plaster at all. But I just can't bring myself to feel that way at the moment...

 

And it's irrelevant anyway, because if User Account Control is doing its job, then Firefox will be just fine, surely?

This is why the Firefox comment s on Protected Mode anger me somewhat. When people apply this kind of crappy analysis to products, it gets me riled. Either User Account Control is doing its job, and Firefox doesn't need Protected Mode. Or User Account Control is useless, and we need Protected Mode as a general API/Sandbox available for all applications.

Anyone who's done even a modicum of research should be able to figure that out. Either Protected Mode is valuable for all applications, or IE is so bad it needs more protection from itself than other applications do. There really isn't much room for other interpretations of the facts here.

 

Is Protected Mode being subverted by marketing folks who want to turn a disadvantage into an advantage? Because that's how this feels. And if that's starting to happen, then I think that the technical community needs to start getting the truth out now. A 22-carat gold-painted sticking plaster is still a sticking plaster.

And only idiots that cut themselves need to improvise their own sticking plasters.

 

Comments (5)
philipstorry October 30th, 2006 12:14:00

I knew that there was something vaguely missing in IE7, that was bugging me.

No mail icons.

This is a completely blank Windows XP machine, with IE7 the first application installed - other than Windows service packs/security patches and the .NET Frameworks, of course.

Whilst testing bugwards-compatibility in IE6, I noted that IE6 has a mail icon whereas IE7 does not.

So now the browser is truly just a browser. Outlook Express was declared dead three years ago, so I was sort of hoping for a replacement..

So I did some rummaging. Under Windows XP, there is indeed no replacement for it as far as Microsoft is concerned.

If you upgrade to Vista, you'll get the new Windows Mail package - which looks quite nice. It says it'll solve a number of shortcomings of Outlook Express - including adding decent search, junk mail and phishing filters, and a more reliable data engine.

(As an aside, the name change to Windows Mail is nice - it prevents the old Outlook Express/Outlook confusion. But will Outlook get the same search capabilities when disconnected from an Exchange server? And will Exchange get a more reliable data engine? Why should Windows Mail get all the goodies, when their enterprise mail system is in such a dire state of repair? *grins*)

The funny thing about all of this is that I'm forced to conclude Microsoft thinks one of two things - people on Windows XP send no email, or that email is compelling enough that people will upgrade to Vista to get a better email client.

Reviews of Windows Mail are mixed, with Paul Thurrott claiming it has "almost no redeeming value", yet Neosmart claiming it "has everything the average home user or technology enthusiast will ever need from a mail client". (Of course, they're reviewing betas, so insert standard disclaimer here.)

I'm guessing that nobody's going to upgrade to Vista for a new mail client alone, although given how bad Outlook Express is it might be a factor for some people when weighing their options. Logic therefore leads me to believe that Microsoft thinks Windows XP isn't used by people that send or receive email. Which makes no sense, but then again logic's often funny like that.

 

It seems to me that now is the perfect time for the Mozilla foundation to do a drive for Thunderbird. It's actually quite a nice mail app, and the fact that IE7 has no mail app makes the Firefox/Thunderbird combination even more compelling to me now. Most of my relatives' PCs run this combination without troubles, so perhaps it's time for a full page ad for Thunderbird?

 

Comments (2)
philipstorry October 26th, 2006 11:16:00

These are literally my very first impressions of IE7, having used it for less than five minutes.

I never expected Microsoft to ship something uglier and less friendly than KDE 1.0. Yet somehow, they've exceeded that expectation.

It's a mess. A complete mess. Ugly, clunky, nasty looking and odd.

Maybe I'll get used to it...

The best thing so far? CTRL+T opened a new tab, and - thank $DEITY - it didn't just open the same page as the one I had open again! It opens with about:Tabs, which is almost the blank page I'd wanted. (And is helpful for new users, so I'm not going to fault them. I'm just going to change it to opening blank tabs. Which looks easy enough.)

So, anyway, some quick usage notes...

The guy who did the history function should be taken out and shot. Preferably with a howitzer. Not only are those buttons pug-ugly, badly placed and completely out of theme with the rest of the window, but the actual history function breaks previous UI convention. I want a history list dropping down from my back button, and a "forwards history list" from my forwards button if I do choose to go back. I seem to have some weird universal list, which would be great if it weren't for the fact that if I hit back multiple times, I now have to look down the list to get my place. How is this an improvement, exactly?

The tabs implementation's not bad. But I really dislike not being able to close a tab without switching to it - why not put a close button on each tab, folks?

The "Quick Tabs" tab browser and tab list just annoy me, because they appear/disappear. Here's an interesting proposition - if I have a tab bar, then I'm using tabs. If I don't want to use tabs, I'll turn 'em off. But until then, having tab bar items appear and disappear makes no real sense.

Maybe the developers feel like they did something worthwhile, but the sudden appearance of these two tab tools surprised me, and their disappearance when I closed a tab surprised me even more. Were they trying to save space on my luxuriously filled-with-just-one-tab tab bar? Because it's really not necessary. Just keep the tab tools on the tab bar all the time, so that people see them and think to use them. It's not like there isn't the space there.

And speaking of space, the whole tab bar is too chunky, too big. Move the menus and favourites onto another line, and give me a whole screen width for the tab bar.

And how do I get back a tab I closed accidentally? Oh. I don't. Well, that just sucks.

In fact, there's a missed opportunity right there - why not keep the tab browser/list buttons there permanently, and show closed tabs in a greyed-out "ghost" mode in their own section. That way, I wouldn't have two big chunky buttons appearing/disappearing for no good reason - they'd serve a purpose all the time.

I see I can close a tab from with the Quick Tabs tab browser. That's nice. Apart from the way it handles the last tab, which sucks. If I have just one tab at the end of the closing, then close the Quick Tabs browser and return me to my tab. I may be smart enough to click on the tab itself to get my web page back, but I bet my grandma is going to be puzzled by that one.

OK, so within five minutes I've decided that the tabbed browsing is broken in a number of rather stupid ways. It could have been good, but it turns out that they're trying to make it simple and have failed, actually making it more complex and less usable in the process. Whoops.

 

Favourites seems nice. But to be frank, I think you need to get Feeds and History out of the favourites centre. Trust me, I've been tricked into looking at sites I would not call my favourites, and having to find my history in favourites just seems perverse. Give them back their own buttons!

 

I've not looked at much else. I see that we finally get favicons in the address bar. The status bar still lurks constantly at 95% for almost al l pages, making it completely useless. (But then, only Opera gets status reporting right anyway.)

Oh, and for some reason, the default locked toolbar leaves Help and the Messenger bar dangling off the edge of it, when there's plenty of space. Messenger I can understand, but Help? That should be prominent. Maybe it's my screen size.  But I shouldn't have to click on one of those little "more toolbar" double arrows to get to see Help...

 

Anyway, I have to get on with testing Domino Web Access. That should put it through its paces. Results will probably be posted here once I'm done.

 

Comments (2)
philipstorry October 25th, 2006 11:04:00

In May 1993, Lotus shipped Notes R3.0.

Amongst the significant improvements in that version was Full Text Indexing, which allowed the rapid searching of large databases.

A little over three years later, Microsoft shipped their Notes-killer, Microsoft Exchange Server. No full text indexing.

But now, a spritely thirteen years after Notes shipped it, Microsoft have announced a usable Full Text Indexing engine will ship with the next version of Exchange Server.

By usable, I mean that you can turn it on without watching your server melt down as it indexes mail.

To be fair, this version looks like it will do the trick. Search is finally coming to the Exchange world in a usable way, and Notes/Domino is losing one of its competitive advantages.

Of course, it's server-side. I wonder if you'll get the same search performance when offline in Outlook? And via Outlook Web Access? Or am I just spoilt by having a stable, consistent storage layer between server and client in my messaging environment?

Anyway, it looks like Exchange is finally catching up. One down, hundreds to go...

 

Comments (2)
philipstorry October 12th, 2006 14:28:00

I've been silent on Exchange 2007 for a while now.

It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. And feel like I just don't want to slow down and rubberneck, as I've got better things to do.

But I can't help myself.

And I don't think that's so hard to understand, given the case I have to make.

It's mostly down to the recent blog entries from the Exchange team over at You Had Me At EHLO - a fine blog, by the way.

 

They almost got me going with this hilarious entry on Exchange Server 2007 Roles. My main gripe with it is that is shows that you can have clustering, or something besides mailboxes - but not any combination of clustering and services beyond mailboxes.

As a Domino admin, this is laughable. If I want my POP3 server clustered, then all I need is to set up clustering and put an IP load balancer/sprayer in front of it, and I'm done. It's a little more complex than that, and I should throw in the obligatory disclaimer around Internet Cluster Manager for http being not-all-that, but it's pretty easy really.

Up to six servers per cluster, hardware and OS independent, and very reliable. And easy. The Exchange Server roles just look restrictive and hilariously old fashioned. Someone should tell Microsoft that cc:Mail has already left the marketplace, and that they need to raise their game...

 

Sean Burgess then provides us with this lovely commentary on a series of articles on clustering Exchange. I can't say I disagree with him, although that's probably no surprise to you by now.

 

Then there was this lovely snippet on Records Management. To be fair, they've made some great improvements here, which the Domino community needs to look at and decide whether or not we want to match them. We can match them with third party tools at the moment - the excellent Mail Attender from Sherpa Software is a great example, doing much more than the Exchsange policies do.

But this Records Management theme tickled me because of one simple bit of text:

The first move is to increase the size of your mailbox quotas so that users can fit all the e-mail they needed into them. We've done a lot of work in Exchange, including the new 64 bit architecture, to make larger mailboxes much more performant and manageable. The next step is to wean users from their .PSTs in as painless a manner as possible.

Wow. So without 64-bit storage systems, you just couldn't get the performance to do records management? So how did Sherpa Software manage to get Mail Attender ported to Exchange Server? Or was buying that software a waste of time, because you'd never have enough mail in a mailbox for it to manage? So many questions. So little time...

I think you can see why I chuckle so much...

Still, I do applaud Microsoft for putting Records Management into the next version of Exchange. It's a great business move. I just wonder how often it will actually be used properly by businesses...

 

Then there was a snippet on RUS being removed in Exchange 2007, which featured this gem:

The RUS has always been a bit of a black box for administrators. When it works, it's great. But if it ever stops working as expected, it is quite difficult to figure out what's wrong.

 

Quite. I feel that way about Exchange Server as a whole, actually. But nevermind...

But this is what tipped me over the edge today: Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2003/2000 systems management co-existence.

Basically, if you thought things were bad on the server side, prepare to hear your administrators weep openly when they see the mess that is the admin side.

I just can't believe anyone would do such a thing. I won't even quote selectively. I really won't. It's a travesty, and should be read in its whole so that you can understand how bad it is...

Domino's backwards and forwards compatibility is excellent. I have no doubt that, despite it not being supported, I could probably go and grab an R4.6.x client (the last version), and manage the Domino Directory on an R7 server with it. It wouldn't quite be fully functional, but I could edit Server and Person documents and send administrative commands to the console. I only need the last version of R4.6.x so that it understands tabbed, nested tables that were introduced in R5. Otherwise, I reckon it would work. It would be ugly, it would be manual, but it would work and it wouldn't represent any danger to the environment.

That's how good the Domino/Notes backwards compatibility is. And all that comes with all of the improvements that Wild Bill recently found he takes for granted.

Yet with Exchange Server 2007, we get explicity warnings to not use the old familiar tools. Big red explicit warnings, at that. The mind boggles...

 

So, basically, not only do you need new all new hardware for Exchange, but you need to revise all your procedures and train all your staff for new management software. Yet more costs.

This upgrade just doesn't make sense. And with every new thing I learn about it, it makes even less sense.

 

This should really have been a few seperate entries, but with my recent absence I'm cramming it all into one big entry. Follow the links, explore the impacts, and please accept my apologies for letting you draw your own conclusions.

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry October 9th, 2006 21:18:00

I have lost so much time to Internet Explorer it's just no longer funny anymore.

My preferred browser is Opera. It's faster than Internet Explorer.

Firefox also seems faster than Internet Explorer. I used it back in the 0.5 to 0.9 days, when it was known as Phoenix.

I use Opera primarily, then Firefox if Opera doesn't work, then - as a last resort - IE.

These speed gains mount up over time. I reckon that using Opera has probably gained me, ooh, maybe an hour over the last decade. Seriously. Opera's that good.

IE also sucks time away from me whenever I do any HTML work. Write to the specs, and IE still breaks when Opera and Firefox agree that there's nothing wrong. That's probably lost me quite a few hours. Let's say eight, because I don't do a huge amount of web development really. And because I'm feeling generous.

But where IE really sucks my time away is in clearing up after it. Tonight alone I lost two hours. Overall, I've probably spent something like three or four days clearing up after IE in the past few years. 72 hours or more. A lot of time.

That's time spent on machines owned by friends and family. I get goodwill, but I lose my time and get no payment for it.

Microsoft appear to owe me big, but I doubt I'll ever see a payment from them on this one.

Yeah, I could bill the friends and family who were using IE. But it's hardly their fault it's a moronic excuse for a web browser, is it?

I will start billing those who get repeat infections, though. I've decided that tonight, as this is the second time I've had to go to that machine, and the second time I find an infection that came in via a browser helper object.

I don't care if MySpace looks better in IE. It's MySpace. It's supposed to look bad, sound bad and be completely unusable. If Firefox makes you less likely to visit it, that's no bad thing.

I think I need to re-acquaint myself with the use of Internet Zones, so that I can simply make IE unusable on repeat offenders, and drive them to some other browser.

Still, at least this proves one thing.

Eight years ago, I used IE on an empty 2Mbit internet connection. It was slow. "The server can't be this slow", I thought. So I tried Opera instead. Which blazed across the web, opening ten windows in the time that IE took to load just one.

"Opera will save me so much time", I thought. "IE is just wasting my time. I'll switch now."

Wierd thing is, even thought I stopped using IE, it still managed to waste my time.

How anyone could waste their time hating any other software product but IE is beyond me. IE has arguably caused more hassle in its lifetime than any other product. Actually, remove arguably from that last sentence.

IE Sucks.

Wierd thing is, I have no inclination to set up a website saying that it sucks. You know the sort - bad screenshots of old versions, eighty reasons of which twenty are repeats, and so forth.

After all, I've already lost eight hours to getting HTML/CSS working in IE...

 

Comments (2)
philipstorry September 19th, 2006 22:32:00

So, Microsoft are being told that they might have an antitrust issue with their new security features in Vista.

Phew. Writing that sentence took time - every one of those links came from a Google News search for "Microsoft" and "EU". Marking them up took a while!

Many of them are the same C&P posting from Reuters. The article is somewhat misleading, though. I can't find a writing credit, so I presume it was just staff at Reuters. I don't know enough about journalism to be able to say much more.

I do know enough about the Microsoft/EU issue to recognise complete crap when I read it, though.

The general opinion in all those many articles is that the EU are somehow holding a sword of Damocles over Microsoft, and that Microsoft is some kind of plucky underdog that just wants computers to be secure.

Um, yeah. Or perhaps the EU is just following up this informal complaint they received from Symantec in October 2005. Almost a year ago.

Symantec play coy in that article, and say that they were asked. They also stopped short of putting in a formal complaint, they say. But let's be honest - free security threatens Symantec. The laptop I'm typing this on came with a free three-month version of Symantec Antivirus. I dislike Symantec antivirus immensely, and just about the first thing I did with it was uninstall it. But that was a pre-install that the OEM chose to do - an arrangement between Symantec and the OEM.

If Windows comes with its own pre-installed security suite, why should an OEM continue to bundle Symantec's products? Do we have more or less personal firewall products on the market now that Windows XP comes with a personal firewall? I suspect less. I certainly miss Sygate Personal Firewall, for instance. Most firewall products seem to now come as part of a complex bundle, to try and add value. How the market has changed!

Windows-N, the Windows Media Player devoid version of Windows, failed because none of the OEMs that had said they wanted it actually chose to ship it and put RealPlayer/SomeOtherPlayer in place of Windows Media Player, as they said they would. Given Microsoft's history, do you think that this is because of informal comments from Microsoft about their relationship, or because they genuinely felt like lobbying the EU for a Windows Media Player-free version of Windows and then changed their mind when it became available to them?

The security market now seems to face exactly the same problem. And there are lots of good security companies based in the EU - F-Secure, ESET, Sophos, Norman and others. I wonder what other informal conversations have been had with the EU?

The EU isn't doing this for jollies. Symantec asked them to do it almost a year ago. Other companies have probably had informal discussions along the same lines.

So why are the news articles not noticing this? And when will the EU get around to reminding people about year-old news?

I smell spin...

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry September 12th, 2006 20:15:00

Some guy named Pete Wright leaves Microsoft behind, claiming that they're the new IBM. (Spotted at The Inquirer.)

They wish!

It's hard to generalise from one man’s experiences. But it has to be said that Microsoft's edge is dull these days. And it also has to be said that (outside of the groupware/collaboration market and a few other niches) it's not any traditional competitor that's killing them. It's the fact that open source has taken so many itches and so many scratches, and somehow delivered something that still manages to have less festering sores than Microsoft's own solutions.

Open source works. It's that scratch-your-own-itch thing. IBM are safe from it, because they're smart enough to sell solutions for problems that the average programmer or sysadmin doesn't think are a priority, or possibly doesn't even think are a problem.

No nerd is going to wake up tomorrow and say to themselves "Hey, I need a document management system that can handle millions of documents!" They're more likely to wonder whether or not they can squeeze two percent more performance out of their webserver...

(You'd be pretty sad if you woke up and thought either, of course.)

Microsoft's market has traditionally been the lower of computing - the stuff people work with on standalone machines or within small workgroups - and that's where open source roams free these days. That's the market Microsoft took from IBM, and the market that open source will leech away from Microsoft.

 

I can understand where Pete is coming from though. I was browsing the computing magazines a few months ago, and saw something of vague interest in a Linux magazine. Feeling it might be worth six quid, I bought it. I've bought another since. These two computing magazines are the first I've bought for over five years.

In the early nineties, I bought computing magazines religiously. There was no other way to stay informed... There was no internet to speak of (although FidoNet was good for unconfirmed rumours and slander), and printed media was it. I bought PC Magazine (both the UK and occasionally the US version), PC Plus, Personal Computer World and much later PC Pro when it first came out.

PC Magazine was staid, really. Reliable, business-focused, but staid.

PC Plus was wilder, treating computing as a frontier and having fun hobby-oriented sections in which you were taught programming by Wilf Hey, using nothing more than debug or qbasic. PC Plus was fun to read, yet had some passion and fire.

But if PC Plus catered to the hobbyist market, Personal Computer World dominated it. Dedicated sections for Unix, OS/2, Amiga and others - even when Windows 95 was about to ship and many considered those technologies dead. PCW wasn't filled with as much joy as PC Plus was, but its breadth and knowledge was fantastic. It was also the size and weight of a small paving stone, which meant that carting it home was your monthly exercise done in an hour. (Unless you cheated and used a trolley. Which some did, because PCW was the nemesis of the plastic bag - tearing through them in seconds and requiring its own double-bag arrangement just to survive the trip to the end of the road, let alone to get it home!)

PC Pro was a later arrival, and was an interesting cross between PCW's breadth and PC Magazine's business focus. But not as large as PCW, so easier to read...

But as printed media, they were all too slow. And internet sites/newsgroups/mailing lists for special interests - like groupware - were alive and buzzing with characters and zeal.

O pen source has passion and joy. It's a community thing. Microsoft's been pretty good at generating a feeling o f community in the days gone by, but the "all change" rapids of recent years have split that community - the VB6 fiasco, the massive changes needed between versions of software, roadmaps that change after every single corner has been turned... It's all adding up.

 

Are Microsoft are becoming the printed media of the software industry? Can initiatives like Channel9 keep the community spirit up, or are they too far gone to be rescued?

I guess time will tell. But I don't think bellowing “developers” at anyone is going to fix things this time…

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philipstorry September 12th, 2006 14:57:00

This gem wings its way in via The Register, who found it on Microsoft Watch.

It's an editorial from Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine, titled Doctor Cockup - Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Delays (And the lies, and the bugs, and the horrific management quagmire, and the...).

No, wait - sorry. That title was a typo. A small Freudian slip on my part. The actual title is Dealing with Microsoft Haters.

Yes, folks, Microsoft's valued Certified Professionals are apparently being asked questions that are tough to answer.

It's about time!

So, what are these questions? Well, reading the editorial, it basks in the "I hate Bill Gates" cult of the late nineties to suitably tenderise its audience into feeling maligned. (Just in case they weren't.) Then it skips the awkwardness and discomfort of being ruled an abusing monopoly in two seperate jurisdictions, and cuts straight to the present and the prediliction for bashing Microsoft's inability to ship, or its middle management problems.

Hmm. Hang on - did they just miss the whole part about abusing monopoly?

Sssh! Don't mention the Monopoly!

(It's not like anyone would have a problem with it, after all... And to be fair, they got through the whole article using the word just twice. Once for each ruling, presumably.)

So they bring out some old Trout, who accidentlly mentions the M word but says that the perception is a good thing - who wants to run with #2? An interesting point, somewhat undermined by the fact that Microsoft isn't actually #1 in all the markets it plays in. Still, we can ignore that - the whole is evidently greater than the sum of the parts for this editorial.

They mention repeatable, predictable solutions, and that the ubiquity of the Microsoft brand helps sell them. Repeatable? Predictable? Well, I guess all their collaborative "solutions" have been repeatedly, predictably inflexible, badly designed and short lived. But hey, they've worked for the #1 company, so if you have 50 billion in the bank to throw at them, maybe they'll work for you too?

There's then a Marekting professor who delivers some Marketing 101 quotes, followed by someone who sold Exchange and SharePoint to a Linux-lover. Apparently, just showing them was enough. Funny - it sounds to me like the Linux lover didn't know much in the first place. Linux is an OS, not a collaboration tool. It's like comparing apples to Fermat's Last Theorem... Still, according to the editorial, there's nothing like an appropriate demonstration... (And that was... Aw, heck. That gag's not funny anyway.)

Next, we have a great little gem about the Get The Facts campaign:

If, for instance, a customer asks you to stop by to answer some security questions about a product, you can grab the most relevant information online—perhaps something like the number of critical patches issued by Microsoft and its closest competitors over the previous year. "That way, you walk in the door as knowledgeable as you can be, and you have information you can leave with the customer," Nyheim says. And by providing hard numbers rather than mere brand evangelism, "you take the customer conversation away from perceptions and emotions and move it toward a fact-based decision approach."

Because, of course, statistics for patches are very reliable ways of comapring products. And anyway, Microsoft would never skew those valuable statistics itself by, for instance, spuriously shipping beta software as a high priority patch. Get The Facts, folks!

Finally, we get to the real problems - costs, security, and bugs. On costs, we hear this:

"With most of the systems we sell, such as Outlook and Exchange, the customers have a perception that the product is worth maybe $120 to $180," says Prince, of NetSys+. "In reality, it costs $400 and up. Even with discounting, it winds up somewhere in the middle, maybe at $350 or $375." That discrepancy makes it particularly tough to convince customers that they need upgrades: "Usually, there's very little motivation on their part to say, 'We need new Office products because we have 52 new things we want to do,'" Prince says. Instead, they insist that what they've got works well enough, thank you very much.

Oh, I know just how his customers feel. What, exactly, will Word XP do for me that Word 2000 doesn't? I checked, and apparently it does nothing. And whilst the compelling features of Visio 2003 would be nice, those that get it will be saving in a new file format that the rest of our Visio users can't read - making this a rollout project as opposed to an occasional upgrade. What a compelling argument for upgrade - "because we're forced to, or we can't read anyone else's documents". Get used to it, because with Microsoft's XML document formats it'll be something you'll hear frequently.

And security?

Well, apparantly, some Microsoft products like Outlook suffer from the same "old version problem" disease that Notes suffers from - people can only remember what they experienced five years ago, and that colours their current perceptions. Naturally, I'm sympathetic and concerned - the shrieks of laughter are just my curious way of showing it...

And bugs?

Um... The article seems to have tapered out before they could address that issue, actually. Whoops.

Still, hopefully that'll be fixed in Version 2.0 of the editorial - available at a vey reasonable upgrade price, but not backwards compatible (SharePoint anyone?) and requiring a new machine to read it (next Exchange Server, anyone?).

And the closing note?

For that reason, experts say the No. 1 brand-management best practice to keep in mind is to resist the temptation to join in the Microsoft bashing. "Never apologize for the brand," says Calkins, the Northwestern marketing professor. "You always have to defend it. After all, if the people associated with the brand don't support it, who will?"

So theer you have it. If it's not working, don't fix it - just keep shouting that it works anyway. Because if you say it often enough, if becomes true.

I bet you're as surprised as I was to discover that advice...

 

Comments (0)
philipstorry June 28th, 2006 18:15:00

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that WinFS will live on inside SQL Server (and ADO.NET, which I forgot to mention).

Which has lead me, a short while after posting it, to muse on what this means for the near future of the industry.

WinFS was to be the next storage engine for Outlook, but is now dead.

SQL Server was once to be the next storage engine for Exchange Server, but that didn't happen.

Key parts of WinFS will now go into SQL Server.

There was once the question of which product was more to blame for the failed merger of Exchange/SQL Server. These recent events put much more weight on the side of SQL Server being at fault...

So why are Microsoft having so much trouble with unstructured storage?

Notes has done unstructured storage, very successfully, for over a decade now. In the decade I've used Notes/Domino, I've only ever seen one Notes Db lose data - and that only became a disaster because nobody bothered to back that database up. I've had databases with millions of records in them, and still been able to get search results back almost instantly. Granted, the first-build of views has been a bit sluggish (it takes hours), but refreshes were often much quicker.

Why is Notes so successful at this, and why does Microsoft seem to struggle so?

I think that the answer is that Microsoft keeps trying to push structured storage concepts into unstructured storage. It's like building a garage by trying to disassemble a warehouse.
The two systems are just not very compatible. There can be crossover, but generally structured (relational) storage makes demands of its data and the way it's stored that are more in keeping with a warehouse methodology - when most people just want unstructured storage, which is more akin to how they store stuff in their garage.

Notes doesn't try to be a data warehouse. The performance problems I see at the edges of the NSF envelope are there because Notes sticks within the reasonable boundaries of what can be done without making assumptions about the data.

Microsoft approached unstructured storage from the wrong direction, and are still paying for that.

As an aside, Google have an excellent idea. Make no assumptions about how the data is stored, or where you find it - just index it and go. Google's solution doesn't allow for transfer/replication of data, or for easy mass manipulation, but to the end user the result is the same 80% of the time - their data is found faster and easier. 

IBM have the engineers from Iris, plus the guys on the DB2 team - who I'm assured are doing some fantastic things with native XML storage/querying in the next version. That alone has some fascinating parallels to true unstructured storage and structured storage.

I'm not a great follower of the database market, but it just seems like nobody else is even close to IBM here. Damian Katz is the dark horse with CouchDB, which shows great promise - maybe Google will buy that and become the second competitor in this arena?

Anyway, this has turned into something of a ramble about nustructured storage. I almost forgot where we started - with WinFS and its folding into SQL Server. It looks increasingly like unstructured storage has defeated Microsoft for the moment, and that their announcements of great leaps forward in this area have been consistently premature.

I wonder if IBM might now be considering dusting off that NSF file-system driver that they once had? ;-)

 

Comments (2)
philipstorry June 26th, 2006 15:23:00

I wanted to put something in about WinFS yesterday, but I had great difficulty figuring out what the blog entry meant in English.

Luckily for me, lots of people have translated it. The short version appears to be that WinFS is now eminently qualified to take the starring role in a parody of famous the Monty Python sketch about a "resting" Norwegian Blue.

It's not pining, it's passed on. This filesystem is no more! It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late filesystem. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to your strategy it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-filesystem.

This is a great pity, because I liked WinFS and looked forward to it. It was also a project which posed some major problems for the IT industry as a whole, and I had a nice draft article which talked about that. I was just waiting for the next "WinFS is brilliant" bit of hype to come along, so that it would look timely. Now, of course, it's just going to look incredibly late if I publish it.

I suppose I could be annoyed that I've wasted my time writing about something that will now never ship, but I think that's a risk I take when writing about any Microsoft future technology...

On a closing note, I have a very cynical take on the way that they're closing down WinFS. Remember, they're not killing it, they're merely moving the key technologies into SQL Server. Doesn't that smack rather of "We couldn't get it to work, but let us know if you manage to..."?

Comments (2)
philipstorry June 26th, 2006 14:05:00

In Microsoft Abuses Their Monopoly, Film at Eleven..., I talked - well, no, I ranted - about the protection of some DNS addresses from ever being bypassed by hosts/lmhosts files.

I've been alternatively ill or busy since my last posting here, so I didn't get to post something I realised about a week after I wrote that post.

So thanks to Brian, who commented that I'd gotten it wrong on where Office updates were downloaded from. Sorry! Sadly, the correct address is also "protected" from the normal resolution path, always going straight to DNS.

But the thing that annoyed me most was the protection of MSN. I couldn't see a good reason for it, and it seemed like an abuse of monopoly - after all, competitors to MSN didn't get that kind of protection.

So this particular apology/correction was necessary. I was, of course, a victim of my own computing habits. You see, the first thing I do (in Internet terms) when I get a new Windows machine of my own is download Opera. The second thing I do is set the Internet Explorer homepage to about:blank. The third thing I do is never run Internet Explorer unless I absolutely have to.

This, of course, was my mistake. If I'd not done step two, I'd have been able to see that the default homepage for Internet Explorer is MSN. Whoops. My bad.

So, a correction and an apology for not spotting that...

However, I'd also like to point out that MSN as the default homepage is still something of an abuse of monopoly. Firefox gives you a themed Google search as its homepage, and Opera gives you their community site. Firefox doesn't own Google, and a community site is pretty harmless. The MSN homepage, however, has at least one advert on it - so Microsoft probably is profiting every time someone starts a new copy of Internet Explorer.

When Microsoft was officially declared a monopoly, I took the stance that they should definitely be split into at least three companies. Preferably five. (OS, Office, Back Office, Development, Entertainment/Reference). I've not seen anything since to change my mind. Such a pity that nothing actually came of the US investigations...

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Philip Storry June 11th, 2006 20:19:18

Gregg Eldred points us at Google Trends, which is related to a topic I've been meaning to finish up and post about for a while now.

The statistics he's got show a similar trend to the ones I've seen in Google News alerts. Exchange Server gets a lot more mentions that Domino Server in my alerts, providing loads of crud I have to skim.

But what I find interesting is WHY. There are some general trends that I've noticed which distinguish the news stories about Exchange and Domino.

Exchange stories seemed to be far more likely to be third-party add-ons for high availability or disaster recovery services. Recently, that's changed and the most common reason to see Exchange Server is that a new mobile phone model has begun shipping, and can fetch mail from it.

The most common reason to see Domino/Notes? Well, for a while it was the R7 launch, reviews and LotusSphere. Since then, it's been Ray Ozzie. And for the past week, it's been nothing but the SAP integration.

What I find interesting is that Exchange seems to get into my news alerts through third-party products, whereas Domino tends to only get press releases from IBM.

These are, of course, very general trends. Observations made by one person, which are potentially skewed by my own bias.

Speaking of which - since when was high availability something you had to get from a third party vendor? *grins*

Comments (0)
Philip Storry May 15th, 2006 21:16:19

I just upgraded from one of the beta releases of DominoBlog to the latest full release. I hadn't been holding back or anything - just a little too busy to get around to it.

In the process of doing so, I got to thinking about other upgrades I should be looking at. I'm usually fairly current with my software releases, but sometimes I delay on purpose (because I want to wait for a service pack, or to hear good things about the release) or because of cost/time. Usually cost, but some upgrades can just be so much work it's not worthwhile. (That's rare, but some companies just don't seem to care about their customers like that...)

The one thing that I do know is that eventually, I will be running Linux. There are a variety of reasons as to why this is, some of them social/political and some of them technical. I won't go into those reasons just now, but I would like to share why I'm still with Windows at the moment.

The main reason is applications. Not a lack of available ones - Linux seems to pick up software like small children pick up rude words. It's one of those unstoppable, unfathomable things of the universe... The problem I have is that there are some applications that will be incredibly hard to replace or migrate to Linux. So here's a handy list of them, in no particular order:

• My Palm software - I have a Palm T3. I've had a Palm since the days of the old Palm 3, and I only had that because I just missed out on buying the good old Palm Professional... Through years of Palm ownership, I've gained a small but valuable set of programs that sync data to the Palm in ways that are incredibly useful. Documents To Go, SmartList To Go and Passwords Plus from Dataviz are three good examples. Iambic's Agendus is another. I have some outliner/project software and some accounting software which also have both a Windows program and a Palm program that synchronise. Unless I can find a way to get HotSync running under Linux perfectly, this area is going to be a major problem for me. Just looking for replacements will be a long and painful task.
• WordPerfect - Nothing beats WordPerfect for writing. Explaining that would require an entire new entry, but just trust me - no word processor has ever beaten WordPerfect's simplicity, elegance or predictability. At a pinch, I would switch to OpenOffice.org's Writer - but I'd really rather take WordPerfect with me. They did produce a Linux version a long time ago, but good luck finding a copy... *sighs* I do already use OpenOffice.org as a secondary word processor, in case WordPerfect chokes on an MS Office document. Which means that it's rarely used, but has been used enough to know it's good enough. I'd just like to not lose WordPerfect.
• My development tools - Mostly my development tools are from PowerBASIC, with their excellent Console Compiler and Windows Compiler. I have a few third party tools which revolve around those compilers, making my development ecosystem rather Windows-centric. A long term solution to this is to pull my finger out and learn Java...
• My mail client - I use The Bat! as a mail client at home. Like WordPerfect, there's a whole blog entry on its own about why that is - but rest assured that if I'm moving to Linux, then I want a mail client at least as good as The Bat! - if not better.
• Paint Shop Pro - Or any decent image manipulation and creation software, actually. Paint Shop Pro does 95% of Photoshop's work at a fraction of the price. The GIMP is nice, but not as nice as PSP. I don't want to have to relearn my image editing package - I did that once when I tried to switch from PSP to Photoshop, and don't want to try it again. It's a waste of time I could be using to do creative or satisfying things in.
• Hardware support - My laptop is my main concern, but I might find other hardware that's problematic. You never know, really. On the whole, for the past few years I've avoided buying anything that might cause hassle. Cameras have ALWAYS had to be ones that did USB drive mode, so I
  didn't face awkward problems. My printer had to do PCL or PostScript, and had to have both a parallel and network interface so that I could get it to talk to anything... I hope I'll have minimal problems with hardware, but even a Windows upgrade can cause problems - so who knows?
• Notes, Domino Designer and Domino Administrator - These go without saying. If I can't tinker with products that I like SO MUCH that I made my career from them, then I'm not switching.

You could say that's a long list - longer than it needs to be. But actually, it's pretty short - far shorter than it ever has been before now. With Opera available for Linux, and most other needs catered for, Linux is actually "almost there" for me.

The problem I think I now have is that some of these issues are insurmountable. I have faith in IBM to provide a solution for the last item, but some of the other problems are very serious.

Hopefully, with time, the WINE project can probably solve all of them except for my Palm issue. That, I suspect, will be the sticking point for some time to come, and may be the cause of a painful set of decisions.

Two more years? One more? Well, I'm certainly not planning on running Vista... So here's hoping...

But I wonder how many other people have similar lists? If you still run on Windows, what's keeping you there except inertia?

Comments (6)
Philip Storry May 14th, 2006 22:17:03

Two posts in one evening? I must be ill... Or very annoyed.

I was about to go to bed, and was waiting for my backups to complete. I read the news to keep myself occupied during this time, as I've not had much time in front of the computer over this Easter break.

And I'm annoyed, because I found this little gem:
Microsoft have deliberately broken the DNS resolver in Windows.
Effectively, it ignores certain HOSTS file entries so that no matter what nasty worms do, you can always get back to Windows Update and grab the Windows Update Malware Removal Tool.

I don't mind that. That's kind of smart, actually - not foolproof, but smart. It raises the bar for malware - editing the HOSTS file isn't enough, they'd need to instead change your DNS settings and point you at different DNS servers if they wanted to sneak past Windows Update. (And those DNS servers would probably get noticed and be shut down pretty quickly, I'd hope.)

What I mind is the list of domains associated with this functionality. All the Windows Update ones are fine, but what's MSDN doing in the list? That's just odd. But not as odd as www.msn.com - yeah, you can get a worm and total your machine, not find google, not find Yahoo!, but heaven help you try to get away from the adverts on MSN.

How, exactly, is that not an abuse of monopoly? Or are Microsoft planning to open up this particular "feature" to Yahoo!, Google, and everyone else?

But what really gets my goat is this one address: office.microsoft.com

I'll say this as calmly as I can... THAT'S ABUSING YOUR MONOPOLY, MORONS!

I have pretty strong feelings on this one. (Did the bold text give that away?...) I always felt that Microsoft's ability to put up "chinese walls" between its divisions was very poor, and that this allowed them a competitive advantage for software like Office. Things like the release date of Office slipping to match the slipped release date of Vista are hints, but they could always just be high level marketing - or one division following another, just as many other companies probably adjusted their shipping dates to follow Vista.

It's technical advantage that makes for the most insidious monopoly abuse, and this is distinctly that - a technical advantage for Office that no other office productivity software gets.

The addition of MSN and Office DNS addresses to this functionality is an abuse of a monopoly position. It proves that Microsoft is unable to resist abusing its monopoly position in the OS market, and that they cannot be trusted to run as one company. You can talk about the altruistic intentions behind these DNS additions until the cows come home, but that doesn't make it right.

Personally, I'd like to see five mini-Microsoft companies - an OS/platform company, an Office/Productivity company, a Development Tools company, a Back Office company and a Services/Consumer (e.g. MSN/XBox) company. Of course, Microsoft's "you need 17 products" model of integration will make dividing their products between five companies an interesting process, but I can't see how else Microsoft can be prevented from abusing their monopoly position in the many markets they dabble in.

I'm sure many people will read this and think I'm over-reacting, or that I'm taking this way too seriously. Heck, I might feel that way myself someday in the future and read this again. I doubt it, though - because Microsoft have proved, time and time again, that they are incapable of acting as a monopoly should.

Split 'em up and let the market deal with them. They're just not going to learn any other way...

Comments (2)
Philip Storry April 17th, 2006 23:04:01

According to the latest news, you'll have to buy Halo 2 if you want to run the next version of Exchange.  Continue Reading "You'll have to buy Halo 2 to use Exchange 12..." »

Comments (0)
Philip Storry February 10th, 2006 21:51:00

It is with deep regret that I announce that the SharePoint Application Analyser has been withdrawn from download.

This application was, of course, only a beta.

Neither the fact that it produced no useful information, nor the fact that it crashed with remarkable reliability, have influenced this decision. It was simply the end of the beta cycle.

I am committed to producing a working final release of the SharePoint Application Analyser, just as soon as SharePoint Applications become worth analysing. I wouldn't hold your breath on that one... ;p

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Philip Storry February 7th, 2006 21:00:00

Over at the charmingly titled You Had Me At EHLO, a post appeared yesterday about the Exchange 12 64-bit only decision. This is something I stayed relatively quiet about a month or two back when the rest of the Domino world was pointing and sniggering, except to comment on other people's blogs.

The reason for that is that I occasionally dabble in development, despite being a systems administrator. I have a reasonable idea of what sorts of decisions developers are sometimes faced with, and I've collected a few wise quotes from computing luminaries which guide me in my own development efforts. One of my favourites is this:

"When in doubt, use brute force." - Ken Thompson

Yes, THAT Ken Thompson. I think it's safe to say he knows a thing or two...

Continue Reading "The penultimate 2005 edit - Exchange 12 and 64-bit" »

Comments (2)
Philip Storry December 30th, 2005 15:16:42

With the recent Windows Mobile 5.0, there seemed to be a strong intimation that Windows Mobile had an edge because of the legal problems RIM have been having.

So the fact that NTP have filed suit against Microsoft is, I suppose, no surprise at all.

I don't know whether to laugh or to mention patent reform. *grins*

Roll on Exchange Server SP3, sans Push Email perhaps?

Comments (0)
Philip Storry December 15th, 2005 22:04:24

I was going to do something about HP today, based on what Brian Benz and Ben Rose have been saying. However, something more interesting popped up - which says a lot about HP these days anyway!

Microsoft's Push Email system in Exchange Server 2003 SP2 seems, after closer inspection, to not be a push email system after all.

Continue Reading "Thoughts on Microsoft's Push Email System" »

Comments (2)
Philip Storry December 4th, 2005 19:24:25

Microsoft held a wake yesterday for Exchange 5.5.

This means that any Exchange 5.5 server you see from now on is, officially, a member of the Living Dead. Without further ado, here's a quick survival guide for any encounter you have with Exchange 5.5 the Living Dead:

1. RUN! - the Living Dead are famed for being poor performers. You should be able to outpace them pretty easily. However, they may outnumber you considerably in some environments - if this is the case, remember that they are notoriously poor at scaling things. Climb on top of that old mainframe, for example, and you'll be fine. They'll never reach you up there.
2. Don't let them bite! - They're quite contagious. You get one, and suddenly you find you've got more and more of them. This is because they're not very intelligent, so they need to recruit more and more hardware bodies to get anything done. If you get even a whiff of an Exchange Server the Living Dead, go straight to step three to remove them while you still can.
3. Decapitate them - don't pussyfoot about, go straight for the lovely, juicy braaaaaaaains... Take out the Directory Services head, preferably with a shotgun or a chainsaw. Remember, whilst it has a directory service head, it can still harm you. Take no half measures, and don't let it upgrade - get it splattered whilst you can!
4. Burn the remains! - Make sure they can't come back. Burn the remains, and if possible consider getting a priest in for an exorcision just for good measure. (Yes, we know that exorcisms are normally for vampires or werewolfs. But take no chances, eh?) Oh, and burn their backup tapes possessions too - they're probably infected with Living Dead Evil, which makes them utterly useless. Scientists don't know why, but they've never managed to get anything to work properly once tainted...

So, now you know. Remember, folks, a good server room needs three things in it - the door release button, the fire alarm button, and a loaded shotgun in case of the Living Dead. Don't say you weren't warned!

Comments (0)
Philip Storry December 1st, 2005 17:31:00

We all know that Office sales are down, because Microsoft has saturated the market, and nobody sees a reason to upgrade. Nevertheless, I think that there will be one last surge of sales with the next version of Office.

I say last for good reason. The next version of Office will introduce the new XML format, which we should be able to get specifications for. That means that the competition can finally break the file format monopoly that Microsoft has had for a while... Corel (with WordPerfect) and Sun/OpenOffice.Org (StarOffice and OpenOffice.org's Suite respectively) have done a good job of making compatible import/export filters for the existing Office formats, but with closed file formats there's only so much you can do.

A new file format for Office may sound like pain and hassle, but I think that once the benefits are explained to the key influencers in organisations - senior management, executive teams, and so forth - people will upgrade. Just so that they can then convert their data to the new format.

Because if it's in the new format, when the Office 12 licenses expire (probably in about 2009), you can just migrate to some other suite that's cheaper but understands the Office format.

The drivers of this process will be government departments, most likely, who are under increasing pressure to use such open formats.

That's not to say that Office will die. But it is to say that an open file format will, I hope, give those who only use 50% of Office's features an escape route to use something else at last.

Or maybe I'm just thinking wishfully.

Comments (0)
Philip Storry July 27th, 2005 10:00:00

I spent most of yesterday setting up a Domino and Domino.Doc server on a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 machine, across our WAN. (I'm in London, the machine's in Manchester.)

I have to say, it was quite pleasant. The whole experience was done via a web browser and an ActiveX applet, and setting aside my dislike for ActiveX I have to say I was a little impressed. The ActiveX remote control applet isn't bad in terms of providing options and functionality, and the performance of remote control was pretty good - at least as good as UltraVNC over a similar connection.

That virtual server will have three servers in it, and serve our training room in Manchester. Because it's training, if one server there goes down the whole room is probably a bit useless anyway - no backup domain controllers, no backup mail servers. So we're just imaging the one virtual server, and if the hardware dies, we can just get new kit and re-apply our image.

I wouldn't yet recommend Microsoft Virtual Server for actual business applications, but I liked what I saw and can see it being useful for environments like our training one. Well worth looking at, I think.

Comments (0)
Philip Storry July 20th, 2005 11:00:00

Remember Ed's recent article on what you miss from the mail client you normally use when you're forced to use another?

Hosun Lee and David Price have chimed in that they like the fact that they can simply drag and drop mail from their mailbox to a local PST file.

OWCH! My head!

Guys, this really isn't a good thing. REALLY.

Yes, you feel organised after you do it. And it helps keep you below quota. But on the other hand, it's an Information and Corporate Governance nightmare.

Here's the scenario. Your organisation is being sued. You have a copy of the email that's needed to keep the shareholders happy and your bank account healthy. Except it's in a local PST file.

And you're on holiday.

How is your legal department supposed to find that email?

Don't try to excuse it. Yes, you can put it on a network - where someone now has to get a search tool to search both your Exchange Information Store AND all the PSTs. (Not to mention keep nagging people to cull mail from their PSTs and compress them, because they're running out of space on the server.) It's a maintenance and information management nightmare.

Not to mention that there's always people who don't even put their PSTs on the server. So when their desktop PC (or laptop) goes boom, they lose all their email. Was it backed up? Puh-leeze. Be serious. Why backup a desktop? All the data should be on the server.

And server backups are no guarantee. In a disaster recovery event, not all servers might be brought back up at the DR site. Sometimes, "less important" servers are left off the DR plans. So you could find yourself at a DR site with functioning email, but no idea what that phone number you need is, because it's on a server that's not available right now.

Oh, and anyone using PST files also loses the right to talk about Outlook Web Access, for obvious reasons.

It's not that PSTs are bad themselves, or that Outlook is bad. You could do similar things in Notes (I've banned archiving before now because users do it locally, then lose their data when their laptop dies...), but Notes tends not to encourage it.

Information like how to archive locally (in Notes) or how to create PST files (in Outlook) is viral in nature, I'm sure. Someone finds out somehow, and uses it to stay below quota. Before you know it, everyone is doing it, as the secret gets out. And once the genie's out of the bottle, you're shafted.

I have some remote users who came to us from another organisation, and didn't get a policy to stop them from archiving. Trying to stop them now is almost impossible politically, because they've just become packrats. Worse, they do it on their local machine - their laptop! The only solution we've found is to use the same grapevine that the problem got round on in the first place - we're allowing them to archive for the moment, but when someone's machine dies we point out that the local archive wasn't supported by us, and wasn't backed up. People are slowly stopping doing it as more data is lost, and we'll soon be able to apply that policy and have them grateful for it!

So be warned. Keep it in your mailbox. And if you're an administrator, get them to keep it in their mailbox. By hook or by crook. Because otherwise, those emails are going to disappear sometime...

Comments (4)
Philip Storry July 19th, 2005 22:37:00

Just musing, but something occurred to me about the future of collaboration. When you speak to people who've used collaboration systems like Notes, you find that the reason Notes works is that it allows you to take your data with you.

Of course, Notes extends that beyond just data and into the actual use of the data - allowing you to take your business processes (workflow) on the road as well.

In a nutshell, that's the success of Notes. Getting people working when they're not actually connected to your network by a rather short network cable.

Of course, this doesn't come free. You have to massage your data to get the benefits - Notes requires the use of the NSF data store, which is nowhere near as interchangeable as the average Word document. It's all swings and roundabouts.

There's heritage there, driving that particular downside - Notes began to evolve when networks themselves were rare, and when sneakernet was dominant. The novelty of being able to take your data with you so easily was definitely something that outweighed the additional steps needed to get your data into a suitable NSF (or set of NSFs). Notes has benefitted most from visionaries who saw this as an opportunity to look beyond the data itself, and see how people actually work - and then fit the solution around that.

This is important, because all of Microsoft's attempts to collaborate have fallen a bit flat. The reason for this is that they have an enormous advantage that they don't want to lose - by the time they started shipping collaborative software, they owned the de facto standard file formats. Microsoft's attempts in collaboration are restricted by an unwillingness to move away from those file formats.

That makes a lot of sense in one way - you can then try to sell collaboration as an add-on to your existing technologies, rather than taking collaboration as an opportunity to reflect upon your workflows and perhaps improve them. Microsoft's collaboration strategy is one of demanding as few changes as possible from the customer in how they handle their data.

The problem is that the file formats themselves are now the restriction for Microsoft - if nothing else, because they just won't move around as easily as data in a database can. This is why Microsoft's acquisition of Groove is so important.

But it's only important in the short term. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a quick prediction - that Microsoft's long term collaboration strategy relies upon WinFS.

WinFS is Microsoft's much-delayed searchable, fast, database-oriented storage system that will replace the use of a folder (or set of folders) on your hard disk for the storage of your files. The desktop version has been delayed, but it still coming. What's faded off the roadmaps is the server-side version, which basically had massive scaling problems. Searching tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, totalling gigabytes or more, is difficult. But there was to be a server-side version, and I have no doubt that it will arrive eventually.

So, there you are with WinFS on your laptop, and WinFS on your network. As both are databases, what's to stop you from automatically exchanging data between the two of them? From replicating a small subset of the WinFS server side down onto your laptop?

I know what you're thinking - you're thinking that they tried this with Briefcase in Windows 95, and quietly retired it some time later when it became obvious it didn't work.

But WinFS will be closer to the way NSF works than the way a normal file system works in many ways. I believe that replication could well be a capability it will have. Maybe not in the standard setup, maybe as an add-on install for corporates. But it's certainly possible.

With the ability to take your data with you, Microsoft are a hop and a skip away from a solution that truly competes with Notes. An application framework, strong security and document routing are all that's needed. With .NET as the application framework, WinFS/Active Directory providing the security and Exchange/Outlook providing the routing, you have a solution.

Of course, the big question then will be which approach works better - an approach which attempts to fit the tools around your workflow, no matter how bad it may be (or good the tools are) - or an approach which puts the tools foremost, and asks that you change your workflow/working practices where necessary.

I have a feeling that the former will probably be more popular, no matter how inappropriate it may be sometimes.

So, do you see the same future I see?

Or am I just bonkers?

Comments (1)
Philip Storry July 4th, 2005 09:00:00

I was just about to turn in, but couldn't resist noting this gem: The Exchange information store maximum size goes up to 75Gb in Exchange Server 2003 Standard Service Pack 2. (And the change also arrives for the SBS version of Exchange Server, too.)

It's been a while since I worked with Exchange - just over a year, in fact - but if I recall correctly, that's a leap from 16Gb. Quite a change! And the limit applies to both the public store and the private store, so you get more for your public folders too.

Maybe now Exchange users won't have such anaemic mail quotas on their mailboxes.

Of course, this does raise the question of scalability. This is the same kind of jump that we saw from R4 NSF's to R5 (from a 4Gb maximum to a 64Gb maximum supported), and there are certainly scalability issues to be handled. For starters, can your server handle that kind of size of database, or will you be looking at an upgrade? What about your backup systems? And did you foolishly partition your server(s) on assumptions based on the old maximum size? (Tip: One partition per logical drive, as large as it can be. Only differ if the OS forces you to. Otherwise, you're building in limitations on your systems.)

But for me, the real question is backwards compatibility. Exchange Server is famous for upgrades that aren't easy to back out from - the databases get upgraded, and you're pretty much relying on backups from that point onwards. Such a change in the database format is, I imagine, going to mean the same situation, making this quite a big service pack rollout.

On a lighter note, this changes the eternal Exchange/Domino advocacy wars ever so slightly, of course. Now the Exchange maximum (supported) database size is larger than Domino's, but still shared between all users. Domino still wins on scalability, as far as I'm concerned, but this change ensures that Exchange will continue to dominate in the low-end (<100 users) of the market without hitting storage problems - which was a problem slowly creeping up on that market, I think.

Actually, I think I titled this post a little generously. It should have been "Exchange buys time for its storage problems". I'll leave it as is, because I feel generous - but I still think that the storage engine in Exchange is one of its most limiting factors in scalability terms.

Comments (0)
Philip Storry June 6th, 2005 22:48:08

Microsoft's next version of Office will use XML to store the data by default, and that XML format will be something we can get the spec for and use royalty free.

This is, of course, massive. Not very original - the actual format description (XML files stored inside a ZIP file) should sound suspiciously familiar to users of OpenOffice.org's products, for starters. But the Office document formats have been a pain for years, as have most other formats.

Take RTF, for instance. Rich Text Format. What could be more of a lingua franca than the venerable RTF that we all know and love? You know - the one that's akin to a Word 6.0 document from years ago, and hasn't changed since?

Well, even there we're ignoring the fact that there are loads of different RTF specifications from different vendors, and different products use different RTF standards. (Like Notes, for instance - there's a reason that the development documentation constantly calls it "Notes Rich Text", and that reason is to avoid confusion.)

But even with Microsoft's own RTF specification, they're up to version 1.8. Which was news to me, because I thought that they were still on 1.7 - this change must have come about within the last year or so. So much for an unchanging, constant format. In fact, RTF seems to change once per Office release (funnily enough), and what most people think of as RTF is somewhere around the version 1.1/1.2 mark. And many users - even technical experts - assume that the RTF that Word exports is this RTF. Well, I can introduce you to some developers who work with RTF, and have some unkind things to say about how compliant Word if with its RTF export on the current standards - let alone how well many RTF libraries handle the format. The bottom line is that you should never assume that RTF is just RTF and can be read by anything - RTF is a minefield of incompatibility in real life.

Because XML is almost self-describing, I'd expect better compliance from all programs outputting these new XML formats, as otherwise they won't validate. So this is a good thing, I hope. There will still no doubt be the ever-present almost yearly feature creep from Microsoft, which will mean that there will be a mad scramble to implement the new features in import/export filters. But otherwise, this is a positive move towards interoperability.

Of course, I note that only the document formats are open. No opening of a format for Outlook, for instance - nor for Access. Richard Schwartz asks whether or not IBM should open up the NSF format, and I think that the absence of an open Outlook or Access storage format shows us that he's on the wrong track. This is about opening up formats for data interchange - and you're more likely to send an individual item than a whole collection that's stored in a database.

Stan Rogers pointed out in a comment that this has serious security implications, as a lot of the Notes security relies upon the API rather than any inherent security in the format (unless you use the encryption facilities, of course!).

Basically, I don't see the need to open up database formats like NSF. I'd rather see the access methods for those storage formats opened up - which we already have with Notes, through access to NSFs via the Notes client (LotusScript/Formula language/Java), DXL, COM, C and C++ APIs. They could perhaps be made a bit better, but APIs are certainly the way to go when you're looking at a database, and Notes offers the most choice of any database format I know of when it comes to allowing access via APIs.

And most importantly, an API means that we don't suffer massive problems with different sub-versions of NSF out there. If the NSF format was documented, we might end up with the same kind of mess that RTF ended up in. Which would be totally unacceptable for NSF, given how many users it has and the good standing it maintains with them...

Comments (2)
Philip Storry June 6th, 2005 20:05:22

Some analysts (well, PR shills actually) continue to say that Notes is dead. And yet Microsoft goes out and buys Groove... Let me tell you what I think that means.

It means Microsoft knows that Notes isn't dead. It also means that they feel very threatened by IBM's Notes/Workplace strategy.

To find out why, we have to go back to the days of the DOJ trial against Microsoft. It produced possibly one of the most interesting documents I've ever read on Microsoft - the Findings of Fact, which declared Microsoft a monopoly and threw some interesting light on the way Microsoft thinks. I recommend everyone should read this document at least once, and possibly that they should dip back into it every time Microsoft makes some kind of strategy announcement or an acquisition.

That document tells you that Microsoft felt very threatened by Netscape Navigator, because it had the potential (however small) to deliver applications to a desktop without anyone needing any Microsoft technology at all. Microsoft is very protective about its platforms. They see themselves as a platform company, not a product company.

In trying to defeat Netscape, they threw away a lot of money by giving IE out for free. But they also knifed a pretty big potential cash cow - MSN. They had to open up their desktop to an AOL icon to get AOL to use IE instead of Navigator, and that made MSN "just another service provider". Not good for a service which was, when launched, supposed to kill CompuServe, AOL and The Internet within a few years. Remember - MSN was originally the only on-line service on the desktop of every shipping Windows PC. Not a small advantage...

So if Microsoft is willing to throw away an entire revenue stream to protect their platform, they're most certainly a platform company.

What does this have to do with Groove?

Windows is one of Microsoft's platforms. Office is another. And then they have their "Backoffice" platform.

Groove sits in both the Office and Backoffice platform camps, and does things that traditionally Microsoft has not been very good at. But Notes has been very good at some of the things Groove does - well, Notes and the rest of IBM's offerings like SameTime, Quickplace etc...

When Microsoft last invested in Groove, they put 38 million dollars into them. Stick your finger in the air and feel the strength of THAT breeze, and guess how much Groove must have cost Microsoft. OK, Microsoft has deep pockets - but they didn't get where they are today by wasting money buying junk they don't need.

The purchase of Groove seems to indicate that Microsoft are worried. I'm starting to see some nice parallels with their past behaviour when they were worried that something threatened their platforms. I'm not saying the Notes is a Netscape Navigator, of course. But it certainly can't be dead - and IBM's Notes/Workplace strategy may just have them a more than a little bit scared...

Comments (0)
Philip Storry March 11th, 2005 12:09:00

Do you have to organise meetings in your daily job?

It's a pain, isn't it? Getting all those people into one place at one time... Of course, your computer systems can help here. A good calendaring & scheduling system will be able to tell you when people are and aren't busy. So you won't need to call around and get everyone's schedule, instead you can just look it up yourself. Handy!

But if the system already knows everyone's schedule and can give each one to you, then why can't it check them to see if there's a common free time that everyone has, so that you can meet then?

You're in luck. Microsoft is going to introduce just that feature in the next version of Exchange. They're currently calling it a "Smart meeting picker".

So, in 2006 or 2007 - when Exchange 12 ships (Microsoft haven't created a "ship date picker" yet, it seems) - you'll be able to pick a suitable time for your meeting quickly and easily.

Or you could be using IBM's Domino/Notes combination - where this feature has been in there since Release 4.5, which shipped in 1996. Yes, by the time Exchange offers you this feature, Notes will have had it for a decade.

And here's something to think about: I confirmed which release of Notes this feature was added into by finding a technote from IBM on a problem with it.

A quick glance at that technote shows that not only is this feature mature and stable, but it's been reasonably well thought out. Which the Exchange 12 solution won't be able to match until at least 2016, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Comments (0)
Philip Storry January 20th, 2005 21:45:00

Ed Brill gets some "constructive criticism" from Jim Bernardo, who left Lotus and now works for Microsoft.

It's an interesting read, actually. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the article. For me, it's just a springboard to a closely related subject.

I've seen this kind of thing before, countless times. My first job was on the fringes of Microsoft - I worked for a company they outsourced their support to. I supported the beta - sorry, "Public Preview" - of Windows 95. And that was where I first encountered the Microsoft Culture.

The Microsoft Culture

Microsoft have an almost unique culture as a company. I've racked my brains to try and describe what I saw, and to do it politely.

Even on the fringes of the Microsoft culture, you saw that it was evangelical. It aims to enthuse everyone, to get them involved with - and eager to use - Microsoft's technology.

But it has flaws. I've tried to find polite ways to describe those flaws, but it boils down to three unpleasant words:

• Arrogance
• Myopia
• Conceit

These aren't necessarily dominant qualities, or the only qualities. But they're the ones that cause me most concern.

Arrogance

Not everyone in Microsoft is arrogant. Very few are, in fact. However, there's a kind of collective, organisational arrogance. They just can't all be wrong, because there are so many people in Microsoft.

The comparison with Star Trek's Borg is actually scarily accurate. There's virtually no difference between the Borg's infamous "We are Borg - you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." and Microsoft's "This is version X - the best version of our product yet. You'll all run it eventually." messages. The same mindset is at work here - neither one considers failure to be possible. What they say will happen - it's an inevitability, and to think of something else would be a waste of time.

This filters down into everything that happens in the Microsoft Culture. Bold statements are made, and believed simply because they came from the Microsoft Culture.

Myopia

The Microsoft Culture can't see anything it doesn't want to see. The arrogance it has seems to filter out anything that contradicts their viewpoint, unless it's a serious threat.

And if it is a serious threat, it will never be acknowledged as such except when stating that Microsoft's alternative is better.

You could call that good PR, I guess. It certainly means that Microsoft is a very "on message" organisation. But personally, I find it disturbing.

I saw plenty of people go to Microsoft, and come back enthusiastic about something. If you tried to tell them that it had already been done, you were ignored. It hadn't been done by Microsoft, and that was all that was important.

That doesn't sound dangerous. But many of Microsoft's mistakes can be traced back to this kind of myopia. It blinds them to how others have failed - let alone to shortcomings in their own endeavours.

Conceit

The conceit is the worst factor, though. It's what drives both the arrogance and the myopia, I think. The myopic view that someone else's implementation of a solution doesn't matter because it's not the Microsoft solution can only be down to conceit.

It's hard to have to say, but the Microsoft Culture loves itself almost to the point of harming itself.

And finally...

Of course, I should stress again that this isn't a personal criticism of any specific Microsoft employee. It's a view of how Microsoft as a whole thinks and acts. It affects everything that the company does.

I make no apologies for having this view, though. It's what I saw, and what I've continued to see from Microsoft ever since.

And it's what I saw in Jim's blog entry, if I'm honest. Of course, text is a harsh mistress - I'm sure this blog entry could sound just as worse, and probably won't stand up to harsh analysis.

This posting should go out automatically. Phil's doing some training today, so you can flame away in comments all you like - but you'll get no response until late evening (GMT)...

Comments (0)
philipstorry January 19th, 2005 10:45:00