Category: June 2006
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
Grr.
My last few entries were put in via Opera 9. Which is lovely, by the way. But the previous one was plagued by bad formatting. Editing it in Firefox made it worse, so now I'm forced to use IE instead. Bah!
Worse, when trying to edit in Firefox I lost a whole entry. Not what I'd expected, to be honest.
Still, this is a pretty advanced rich-text editor - so I suppose I should cut it some slack. :-)
Anyway, after a flurry of edits on Monday, there was a silent Tuesday. This is because I spent a lot of time making sure my parent's PC was free of crud. They called me after they found that they were being asked to buy something called Spyware Quake. I asked them who had installed it, and they said nobody had.
Doesn't that always make you suspicious? Software doesn't just install itself...
In this case, the software was installed by another trojan - vCodec. Which is a particularly nasty bit of social engineering. It pretends it's a Windows Media Codec, and that if you don't install it you won't see some vidoes. Once installed, it goes and installs other crud.
Cue much booting into Safe Mode, booting from CD with Bart's PE, and lots of deep scans with antivirus and antispyware packages.
What's really interesting here is that just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. My parent's antivirus program - NOD32 - was amongst the first few programs to detect this, yet they managed to get infected before they got a signature update. Then, they were fooled into running a program because it looked and sounded authentic, despite me warning them about such things. And because the trojan itself downloads and runs other programs, there's no easy way for my parents to realise what's going on - they might just be subjected to a barrage of new "leechware" programs asking for money until NOD32 finds the program on next boot/scheduled scan.
Microsoft can yack about the new security features in Vista all they want - but I don't see how they would have stopped this. And Linux/Mac advocates can shut up as well - my parents would have fallen for this regardless of what OS they were running. And I can't blame them for that - it was a well constructed, well executed attack.
There are probably ways of deflecting these kinds of attacks, but they would have to rely upon some kind of social interaction. Perhaps a giant Windows "software reference", where individual licenced users rate software as safe or unsafe?
As you go to install, Windows refers back to the service and gives you a brief Amazon-like reference... ("10,000 users or more found this to be safe software, 17 said it was unsafe", or "nobody has yet said that this software is safe"...)
Of course, being social, I can see all kinds of attacks on the site itself. But I'm beginning to think that social attacks like this can only be solved by social solutions - if you don't see many people saying it's safe, then you won't run it unless you know you can clean up after it. That allows the geeks to keep playing, and the average user to install new software with more confidence.
Sadly, it doesn't give me an entire evening back. For that, I'd need a TARDIS, a sturdy LART and the addresses of the people who wrote vCodec... But that would cause a time paradox in itself, no matter how satisfying it might be... ;-)
Comments (0)
philipstorry June 28th, 2006 13:59:00
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
A few years ago, IBM had a serious marketing problem with Lotus Notes and Domino. Their competitors were saying it was a dead product - but worse, other brands within IBM were also saying that it was a dead-end product.
Since then, IBM has really improved things dramatically. Their marketing and sales force for the Lotus brand seem re-energised, and their other brands realise that they're not going to replace Lotus Notes any time soon. It's almost as if IBM woke up one morning and realised that it had a $3.3 billion acquisition that it was not just wasting, but was actually harming.
However, because the competitors keep saying that Notes is dead, you sometimes get to wondering what other brands at IBM are saying. After all, I don't really watch every brand at IBM - some of them are just not of any interest to me, because of the kinds of work I do.
Recently, I've been looking at DB2. And I was made very happy by a simple diagram on page four of the book "Understanding DB2: Learning visually with examples".
It stakes out the brands clearly and simply. Rational is for Building, DB2 and WebSphere are for Running, Tivoli is for Managing, and Lotus is for Collaborating. Interestingly, Rational/DB2/WebSphere/Tivoli all feed into Lotus Notes for collaboration - so in brand terms, WebSphere is not for serious collaboration but is for running the big stuff on.
(I'll try to get a scan of the diagram if anyone's interested - but it'll take a short while, as my scanner is currently boxed away.)
But the diagram and the surrounding text are clear and concise, and don't harm the Lotus brand in any way. In fact, to quote:
Rational is the "build" brand; it is used to develop software.
DB2 and WebSphere are the "run" brands; they store and manipulate your data and your applications.
Tivoli is the "manage" brand; it integrates, provides security, and manages your overall systems.
Lotus is the "collaborate" brand used for integration, messaging, and collaboration across all the other brands.
I'm happy to see this kind of thing in print in an IBM Press book. If IBM could print this in December 2005, then hopefully they were circulating it internally somewhat before that. (See? I am an optimist! *grins*)
Now, can someone please post this diagram to Microsoft, so that they can understand this as well? ;-)
Comments (0)
philipstorry June 26th, 2006 10:17:00
Alan's latest post is an excellent one on how to get the message across on collaboration.
In short, I think that the whole industry needs to work on that simpler story. But the best company for the "simple story" is undoubtedly Microsoft. Granted, half their "simple story" is just FUD or move-and-fire-vapourware designed to hit competitors, but they do a good job of simply telling you that they can improve your day-to-day working.
IBM needs to get better at that. And it's not like they don't have some great tools. Total time for me to turn on Sametime for some users to test recently? About five minutes - I set their Sametime server in the Domino Directory, and next time they connect to their home server Notes reconfigures itself magically.
Total time for me to explain it - even by going into full and painful detail - to any user? Ten minutes. The slick integration within Notes makes it about as difficult for them to grasp as starting Notes itself. In short, if they can click on an icon then they've posed no problems.
(Let's not talk about the ones that did pose problems, though. Some people are just afraid of technology.)
Total time for me to sell this to the organisation? Oh, only about a year. The upper management just doesn't get it. They have PAs and most of their subordinates are in the same office as them - why would they want chat/presence capabilities?
Yet the management chain right up to regional heads is jazzed about the whole thing.
My advice - get practical demonstrations. Get them out to the users. Get relaxed - very relaxed about trial licensing, and make trials easy to do.
If I recall correctly, Notes kicked off the whole collaboration market - and then dominated it - because departments themselves took the decision to "just create a tracking database". The revolution happened at the bottom of the ladder, not the top.
With instant messaging, quick collaboration (Quickplace anyone?) and the new Activity Explorer-style functionality, IBM really needs to get it in front of users in ways that mean something to them and the way they work. Then you'll see a connection, and you'll have your second wave of collaboration. Heck, that should be IBM's new marketing catchphrase. "The Second Wave Of Collaboration". It has a nice ring to it. Or maybe I've just had way too much caffeine tonight... :-)
philipstorry June 26th, 2006 00:47:00
As you may have guessed, I'm, nowhere near current right now. I'm playing catchup with the blogosphere, and will be making stupidly late comments on everything accordingly.
Or at least I would, if someone hadn't decided to turn my home into a steambath. This weather is silly - I need to buy an air conditioner!
Comments (0)Philip Storry June 12th, 2006 21:31:47
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...
Comments (0)Philip Storry June 11th, 2006 20:19:18