Category: March 2005
See you all on Tuesday - I'll need a while to recover from this one, I think!
I'm going to try not to think about any work whatsoever whilst I raise each dram. Wish me luck!
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 11th, 2005 12:10:01
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
Today is the first day of Whisky Live London, 2005. It's basically a hall full of people who like whisky, and lots of whisky. It's a ticketed event, but your ticket gets you 12 free drams,and you can buy more (ifthey think you're sober enough) for 3 quid for six more dram vouchers.
To say I will be drunk over the next two days is like saying that the earth's atmosphere will have a little bit of nitrogen in it.
Actually, the vouchering is likely to make me take it easy, as in previous years it's all just been free - drink as much as you like! Boy, that was tough to do...
I look back at last night's post, and realise it was pretty lucid. And I find myself agreeing with it, which is a good thing. So,one more quick blog entry about Groove, and I'm off to entertain myself...
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 11th, 2005 11:37:46
I went out for a quick drink, and nine hours later when I return I find that MS has bought Groove.
Luckily, me drinking and MS buying aren't (as far as I know) related - or MS will have bought the whole IT industry by eight o'clock on Saturday evening. (More about that tomorrow...)
But as usual, the moment Notes is mentioned the Slashdot Hordes start up with their usual "I used Notes and it was awful" drone, which has long been established to actually mean "I used Notes back in 1997, for a week, without understanding what I was using it for, and I didn't like it, and I think I could replace the world's number one groupware product with one webserver and a few PHP scripts...".
The great thing about having been drinking whisky since three in the afternoon is that it tends to make your mind function in, um, alternate modes. I was about to wade in and show them the light, but luckily my brain knew that I needed food and sleep. So it threw me a curveball to keep me less enraged and - hopefully - make me just write a single blog entry before getting some kip...
In
my somewhat inebriated state, a question occurred to me that I'd never
actually asked before:
"Why, as late as 2002, were these
people using Notes R4.x?"
The only possible answer is - in my current state - blindingly obvious. The infrastructure that was put in place much earlier had happily scaled, so that in 200x Notes was still happily trundling along just as it had back in the nineties, often with a gap of five years or more in rollout and the upgrade to R5/R6.
When the R4.x interface was unveiled, I think its major competition was - in no particular order - cc:Mail, MS Mail, and perhaps MS Exchange Client (Remember that? It came before Outlook, shipping with the first release of Exchange Server). cc:Mail was also from Lotus, and died because Lotus wanted to concentrate on just having one messaging platform. MS Mail scaled like a paralysed chipmunk that forgot its climbing kit but still turned up to the mountain-face. The MS Exchange client remembered its climbing kit, but got a cramp fifty meters into its ascent, and decided that it would simply lie and say it had scaled the mountain, and hope nobody ever tried to make it do it again. (MS have been talking about scalability - and high availability - ever since, but have delivered very little, despite ripping & replacing Domains for Active Directory...)
Whatever way you cut it, the companies that were still using old versions of Notes with horrific interfaces were doing so because it still worked. It still met all their needs, and probably could have done more for them if they wanted it to. Notes was a victim of its success - it may not have been pretty, but it was an honest and hard worker who could be relied upon and trusted.
Not bad for something that's supposed to be a piece of crap, really. So here's an open challenge to the Slashdot Hordes. Install the oldest copy of PHP you have. Preferably a copy from the same time as Notes 4.x, which would probably be PHP 3 or earlier... Now implement a solution in it that does, say: mail, discussion, workflow for some simple things like holiday booking, and a knowledgebase application. Then leave it for five or more years.
At the end of those five years, have your needs changed? If so, does your little PHP-based website still meet them?
Answers on a postcard to /dev/null, please...
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 11th, 2005 00:30:32
In one of my unpublished articles, I've been writing about search versus structure for storing your data.
I figured I'd go and check out the latest search tool, so I went and downloaded Google's Desktop Search tool. A nice small download - less than 725Kb. I ran it, and...
No dice. The error message is a bit too large to screenshot, but I'm amazed that such a small installer gave such a good error message.
Google Desktop Search is not currently compatible with another program on your system. You will need to uninstall this program if you would like to install Google Desktop Search. The following may help to identify the program:
NOD32 Anti-virus
imon.dll
Clicking on OK reported the problem to Google, and opened a new browser window with a nice description of what had just happened.
Believe it or not, I'm actually happy that the install failed this way. Why?
Because Google didn't damage my system, nor did they waste too much of my time. The error message was clear, concise and honest. Better yet, the web page of help they directed me to was refreshingly clear and honest - not some odd blame game, but a simple "it doesn't work with all these things. Yes. All of them." affair, which I really wasn't expecting. Most companies are very cagey about what their software will and won't work with, for fear of being blamed. Just getting an admission that there's an incompatibility with something from a large company can be a torturous endeavour...I'm not about to uninstall my antivirus system just to test out Google Desktop Search. But at least it didn't plough ahead and potentially kill my system. Nor did it do anything stupid like try to silently remove this "problem".
All technical people have seen plenty of software installers which scream "TURN OFF YOUR ANTI-VIRUS, OR THE INSTALL WILL FAIL!" - advice which is both idiotic and, in 99% of cases, wrong anyway. The installation works just fine, and disabling your antivirus system to install a fax package or a modem driver is a very stupid thing to do these days...
So it's gratifying to see that despite recent speculation, Google can still Not Be Evil.
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 9th, 2005 22:46:54
By the way, my big Notes client rollout starts this weekend.
This is why I've been quiet recently...
[This message has been pre-recorded and delivered to you whilst I'm running around making last minute changes to documentation, testing packages and training contractors.]
Comments (2)Philip Storry March 8th, 2005 09:15:00
So where's that software I mentioned last time?
In development, of course!
I fixed a bug in a win32 program, but haven't had time to upload it. I also have a second little Win32 utility which I need to upload.
The problem with all of this is that it means I need to revamp my website to take account of this blog, and revamp this blog to take account of my website.
However, most of my free time recently has been taken up with some Domino databases I want to finish off before the upcoming rollout at work. And that's taking longer than I hoped it would, as they must be rock-solid reliable for when they're used on over a thousand machines...
Basically, I'm being a perfectionist. The code is solid, but not perfect. I firstly decided that I needed to make it more defensive - now nothing is assumed, and all the objects assigned are checked before they're used. This has greatly reduced all the "Object not set" error messages in the code, which are annoying to me as a developer ("Which object? Where?"), and to users because they're not intuitive as error messages go.
Secondly, I'm refactoring my code to be more modular. Many of the action buttons/agents are doing similar things, and therefore were created by simply copying and pasting design items into new ones. I don't believe that this is uncommon in Notes development, but unfortunately it does lead to a LOT of code duplication.
I was glancing through the code, and realised that many of my IFs and the like could be better served by a function in a script library. This was just after I read Eric S. Raymond's The Art of UNIX Programming (again), and I'd re-acquainted myself with concepts like SPOT (single point of truth) and orthogonality. I realised that I wasn't developing so much as I was hacking around like a bloody amateur, because I was more obsessed with jus getting it working than I was thinking about how it worked and how easy it was to maintain, re-use and debug the code I'd written.
Of course, I'm probably still hacking around like a bloody amateur, but at least it won't be quite so bad as it was before I started thinking about such things.
The main thing is that the code is maintainable. The SPOT principle is key here.
I was reading some code from Iris/Lotus/IBM recently - the iNotes/DWA contact synchronisation code in the mail template. It was bloody awful to trace what was going on, because it took SPOT to ridiculous extremes. EVERYTHING was in a subroutine, and there were subroutines which seemed to exist only to massage data so that it could then be worked on in another subroutine. It was getting silly...
But after thinking about what I'd read about SPOT, I realised why this was so.
So now my own code is starting to look like some of the mail template code. I'm not sure it's a good thing, but hopefully commenting it will help allay too much criticism...
When will it all be finished?
Soon. And no sooner. *grins*
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 7th, 2005 22:11:06