Microsoft | Betchablog

12Apr/103

Digigirlz

A few weeks ago, I got an email at work advertising a free technology event for teenage girls run called DigiGirlz. It was being run by Microsoft Australia and it's aim was to promote careers in the IT industry for girls. It's a good idea. Women are far too under-represented in IT in Australia (and probably other parts of the world too) so I'm all for supporting any initiative that can help attract smart, creative women into the world of technology.

The event sounded like it would actually be pretty interesting. It was being held at Microsoft's main Australian Offices at North Ryde and offered a chance to meet some of the inspirational women who work at Microsoft to find out what they do, and to have a chat with several Australian universities about the sorts of career paths that IT might offer. There was also a couple of hands-on workshops in Microsoft's Photosynth and DeepZoom technologies, as well as a chance to to see the new Project Natal gaming platform. It all sounded pretty interesting to me! However, we don't offer any IT courses at PLC (that's right, none! Something I'd like to see change!) so I wasn't quite sure who I'd ask to attend the event.

After a phone call to RSVP for the day we were offered 15 places at the event, so, using the Feedback Module in Moodle to collect details of interested students, I offered it to our Year 10 students on a first-in, best-dressed basis. 13 students responded positively and when the day arrived (March 24 - which was Ada Lovelace Day of course!) we all bundled into the PLC minibus and made our way up to North Ryde.

The folk at Microsoft went out of their way to try and give us a great experience and provide a range of things to see and do. They gave each student a goodie-bag with information, fed them with snacks and drinks, and then put them into groups and rotated them through the 4 sessions. We had a short address by a very dynamic female executive who works at Microsoft Australia and a few shorter addresses by several others.

The students then went off to their four workshop sessions, which they rotated through for the next couple of hours. Overall, I thought it was a useful experience, although I had a few suggestions for how it might be improved for next time...

While it was a lovely gesture to feed the students before they started the sessions, getting teenage girls all revved up on soft drinks and chips just before you then ask them to sit still and listen for the next few hours was not a great idea.
The discussion sessions with both the women from Microsoft and also the university people were informative, but too long. Kids don't want to just sit and listen like that, at least not for that long!
The hands on session in Photosynth and DeepZoom was pretty good, although there seemed to be a few technical hiccups in the session I saw. I'm still not really sure what to make of these technologies, and beyond a mild cool-factor, I wonder just how useful they really are.
The biggest disappointment was the session about the Project Natal platform. Natal is the next generation of the XBox 360, and takes gaming to a new level by enabling natural interaction without wires or controllers. It's been floating about on YouTube for a while now, but I was really keen to actually see it in action. Alas, all we got to actually see of Project Natal was a PowerPoint with a few videos (the very same ones that are on YouTube) Although we were told that Natal was getting close to release for this year, there was no working demo to play with. Despite the fact that we were being told about Natal by former FragDoll, Ashley Jenkins (who totally knows her stuff when it comes to games!) we didn't see any live game demos at all. I thought this was a big mistake by Microsoft, and I thought it odd that a product apparently so close to release would not be given a demo. It would have been good (even expected!) to see Project Natal in action, but even without the live Natal demo I thought we would have at least had some real live gaming action with Ashley, perhaps showing us what a really serious gamer is capable of on the regular X-Box platform. Instead, we saw a PowerPoint with a few product roadmap slides and a brief exposé of Ashley's gamer heros. To be honest, I was looking forward to this session the most, but I thought what we were shown was a bit lame under the circumstances.
It might be good in future events to include some sort of hands-on programming experience - kept fairly simple of course - as there would be many students who have never had a go at programming a computer before.

Overall though, despite these little criticisms it was a worthwhile experience and the feedback from students that I saw was politely positive (although I felt it could have been much more hands-on, practical and faster-paced to hold the full engagement of the students). PowerPoints and roundtable talkfests might be fine in the corporate boardroom but this style of presentation misses the mark somewhat with most teenage girls. I know that quite a few people mentioned this in their evaluation forms, so I'm sure that next year will be even better.

Thanks to Microsoft and especially Catherine Eibner for running the event. (And thanks also for the XBox 360 raffle prizes, one of which was won by one of our students. You were very popular for that one Catherine!)

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Tagged as: adalovelaceday, digigirlz, itcareers, Microsoft, projectnatal 3 Comments

15Sep/090

Steve Ballmer – Brash, Passionate, but definitely not Stupid

There was an interesting story in today's news about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's outburst at an iPhone-carrying Microsoft employee. Apparently, Ballmer was addressing a company gathering when the employee pulled his iPhone out to take a picture of him. Ballmer went nuts. He grabbed the phone, ridiculed the employee publicly, then pretended to stomp on the device. You can read the full story over on Engadget. There is even an alleged photo taken as Ballmer reached for the device.

Ballmer is an interesting character. Certainly there is plenty of evidence on YouTube of his over-the-top antics as he revs up Microsofties with his ranting and raving, screaming and yelling. And who could forget his chant of "Developers! Developers! Developers!" at a gathering of software developers, as he tried to make the point that Microsoft's success was partly due to its army of, well, developers. It's even spawned a remix version.

Even back on the very early days of Microsoft, Ballmer was seen dressed up as a cheesy salesperson, doing the whole "How much would you expect to pay?" spiel as he promoted Windows 1.0, throwing away dollar bills in an over-the-top display of sales showmanship. If you don''t know much about Steve Ballmer or where he fits into the Microsoft story, I'd recommend you watch the excellent video series by Robert X Cringely, "Triumph of the Nerds". It's a wonderful record of the first 20 years of the personal computer revolution, and if you call yourself a geek, you absolutely should see it.

I got thinking about Ballmer as I read through the comments on the Engadget blog. One person made the comment that Ballmer was stupid. Another came to his defence, noting that Ballmer was overly brash and passionate, but not stupid. The Sydney Morning Herald even ran a story with a psychologist analysing Ballmer's crazy antics, concluding that Ballmer isn't crazy, just an attention seeker.

I actually met Ballmer once. I was at a fairly intimate Microsoft function in Sydney for the launch of Office 2003, and I managed to sit in the very front row directly in front of Ballmer as he gave his address. He spoke to the small crowd in a very reserved tone, talking earnestly about the development of the new software, and giving some background into the challenges and successes of getting it to market. I was actually quite impressed with Ballmer, and was struck by his obvious passion and belief in what he was doing. When he finished his talk, he asked if there were any questions, so I stuck my hand up and asked one. To be honest, I thought it was a bit of a curly question and I was sort of hoping to stump him a little. To the contrary, Ballmer looked right at me and fired back a detailed and well-thought out answer, explaining how Microsoft was addressing the issue I'd raised. He outlined three aspects to his answer and confidently explained each one. There was no fumbling or dodging the question. He knew what he was talking about and clearly had given a lot of thought to the issues I asked about. I was actually a little surprised at just how well he responded, and at the quality of his answer.

I was impressed not only by the clarity and detail of his answers, but also by the fact that, as CEO of Microsoft, the intricacies of how the software works and a detailed answer to the question I asked (which was related to how Microsoft was addressing the issues faced by software training providers and how it was coming up with ways of making it easier for users to learn to use new software versions) were not typically the sorts of things you'd expect the CEO of the company to be so close to. Ballmer is a hands-on kind of guy and he's clearly passionate about Microsoft. And he knows his stuff. As the Engadget commenter remarked, he may be brash and passionate, but he is clearly not stupid.

I've seen the thoughtful, intelligent and focussed side of Steve Ballmer, and I've seen the outrageous, wild and crazy side of Steve Ballmer. Perhaps the yelling and screaming, the running around the stage like a sweaty crazy person, the (pretend) iPhone smashing behaviour, the silly comments about the iPhone, the blunt denigration of anything non-Microsoft, is all a bit distracting from just how intelligent Ballmer can really be.

Most people who read this blog will know that I'm not much of a Microsoft fan, but as the Engadget commenter says, "You know, I like Ballmer - he's brash and in your face but he believes in what he does and has the guts to be passionate about it. I respect that."

Me too. Stay crazy Steve.

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Filed under: History, Microsoft, Web Life No Comments

16Sep/070

Winning the Browser Wars

Because I was doing a bit of blog navel-gazing tonight writing that last post, I decided to take a quick look at the site stats just to see what's happening there. One of the figures that really jumped out at me was the one shown in this graph.

As you can see here, the majority of browser share is now coming from Firefox! Of course this is only just the stats from my blog, and being an educational blog with a predominantly teacher audience I guess there may be a disproportionate number of users who don't use Internet Explorer, but I was still surprised to see Firefox edging out IE. Not so long ago IE had no competition at all, then Firefox came along and started to gradually steal market share, but last stats I read still showed it with a fair way to go before it could claim to have a greater share than IE. Based on these numbers, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 combined only account for 38% of the traffic! That's a huge drop and won't be making Microsoft happy at all.

As a Flock user myself (which is based on the Gecko rendering engine in Firefox) I'm pleased to see the gain. By the way, I exclude my own visits to the site to try not to skew the numbers.

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Filed under: Ed Tech, Microsoft, My Tools No Comments

31May/070

Not even scratching the Surface

Ok, I must admit I'm impressed by Microsoft's new table-like project called Surface, which Bill G has been showing off lately. It's a multitouch capable computer that works in a table form factor. There are some obvious uses of it, like restaurants, casinos, etc where transactions take place largely on a table. I don't know how commercially successful it will be but I think it's a pretty cool technology!

Watch the video and check it out for yourself... I particularly like the way it interacts with devices like digital cameras and PDAs. I presume those devices would have to have some form of wireless interconnectivity such as Bluetooth or Wifi? Very cool though!

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

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Filed under: Microsoft, User Interface No Comments

25May/070

Raising your Browse

You might think that your world of browsing the web begins and ends with that little blue "e" logo on your desktop, but you might be surprised at just how many other (better?) alternatives exist out there. Over the years I've probably had a play with just about every web browser I can lay my hands on, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the others.

Browser life began in 1992 with the granddaddy of them all, Mosiac. However, after the famous "browser wars" between Netscape and Microsoft many years ago, it seemed like Internet Explorer was destined to be the only browsing kid on the block. Of course, for the alternative thinkers amongst us, there were some notable options like the wonderful Opera browser which just got better and better with every version, but for all intents and purposes it appeared that Microsoft had won the browser battle with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Was it a better browser? Probably not.

Like so many technologies, the race does not always go to the swiftest, strongest or most technically able, but to the one that gets the marketing edge over its opposition. Once this marketing edge begins to form a positive feedback loop the adoption rate starts to feed itself and it gets very difficult to justify an alternative, even if the dominant technology is not necessarily the best technology. Because Microsoft had the ability to bundle IE with its Windows operating system it was in a unique, and many say unfairly anticompetitive, position to force its browser onto users who didn't even question this imposition. There was a browser built in to Windows, it was free, there was a shortcut on the desktop, so why not use it? Add to this the fact that Microsoft "extended" the ability of IE with a whole bunch of proprietary technologies such as Sharepoint, and people slowly got locked into the idea that the web needed IE to work properly...

Of course, Netscape never really went away. In a stroke of inspired genius, or possibly desperation, Netscape decided to give away the source code for its browser to the Open Source community and gave birth to the Mozilla Foundation. With a global volunteer workforce of dedicated programmers and engineers, the end result - Firefox - has evolved into what many believe is the world's best web browser. With a sleek and lean codebase, sensible security features, plenty of extensibility and customisation options with Add-Ins and Themes, Firefox has plenty of good stuff to talk about. It's fast, it's powerful and it's free, both as in speech and as in beer. Firefox has also forked off other into interesting browser projects such and Camino and Flock.

There are other players too, like Apple's Safari, itself built on KHTML code, which forms the basis of KDE's Konqueror, another browser with an Open Source Linux heritage. Using a variation of the KHTML source code, Apple developed a rendering engine called Webkit and this in turn spawned more browsers such as Shiira, OmniWeb, Sunrise, wKiosk, and Bumpercar. Webkit also forms the basis of a diverse range of other related web tools such as Adium, Growl, SubEthaEdit and Vienna.

As you can see, there are plenty to choose from, and every browser has its own distinct features or tools that its creator feels make it the "best" browser. In particular, this is true of Flock. I looked at this browser a while ago, but as so often happens when you look at lots of things quickly, its easy to overlook the obvious benefits. Flock is built on the core Firefox engine, so its fast and stable, but it also has a few added features which make it a pretty interesting alternative for anyone who does a lot of work with Web 2.0 tools. The Flock website describes it like this...

Flock is an amazing web browser built on fast and secure Mozilla technologies. View and share photos with an innovative new photo bar in the browser. Subscribe to your favorite websites to get the freshest content automatically, in summaries that are easy to save and blog. Search more quickly, more effectively, and more richly with the innovative Flock Search Toolbar. Download the Flock beta and you'll be spreading the word that there's a new way to web.

Some of the neat things I've discovered in Flock (thanks to a chat I had with Judy O'Connell the other day) are the ways in which it integrates with services such as Flickr. Photos stored in your Flickr or Photobucket accounts can be easily accessed and added to blog posts, and with many new Nokia phones now having direct Flickr integration, this could get pretty interesting. Flock also has some pretty innovative features for storing photos or snippets of information that you find while browsing the Web, so you can reuse them later. The inbuilt search tools dig through not only the Web's major search engines like Google and Yahoo! but also your own local bookmarks, giving and added richness to searches. It comes with a very easy to use inbuilt RSS feedreader, shared online bookmarks to del.icio.us or Shadows, and a neat blog integration feature that let's you select any text on a webpage to instantly create a post about it and add it to your blog... (in fact, this post you're reading right now began life as an experiment in using that very feature). For those times when you want to blog about other stuff you find online, Flock appears to have some incredibly useful features.

So check it out... if you're a serious blogger, Flock looks like a very interesting alternative!

technorati tags:firefox, explorer, flock, opera, camino, safari, mozilla

Blogged with Flock

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Filed under: Apple, Blogging, History, Microsoft, web2.0 No Comments

18Apr/070

Life in the Office

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office. As a teacher, I think it's hard to avoid. Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids. I even have a few "qualifications" in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence, and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program. I mean, if you're going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right?

I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007. Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite. The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them. Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them. I even had an semi-heated discussion with a guy at a technology trade show once who was telling me that certain features would be really neat to have in Excel, and when I told him that everything he was wanting was already there, he argued back that I was wrong... these tools simply didn't exist in Excel. I showed him, he was amazed that he had overlooked them. even though he considered himself a "power user", he had never found some of these must-have features, some of which I thought were pretty obvious. After I showed him they were there, he was a happy camper again.

So the goal in Office 07 was to bring as many of the available tools right out to the front of the interface. That's a big ask, since there are literally hundreds of tools and features in there, and while there will still be people who criticise the new interface for being too cluttered, too different to the previous versions, too whatever, I must say I think they've done a pretty good job of taming a rather big animal. I found the new Office easy to learn (though I will confess to being a power user of Office software to start with) and the new Ribbon UI seemed pretty intuitive to me. I'm really looking forward to see what they do with the Mac version...

The only thing about Office that is irksome is the price. At around AUD$1150 for a full copy, it's just way too overpriced, and it is little wonder that piracy is such a huge problem in the home market. Fortunately, there is a Student and Teacher edition (which is basically the same as the full version) that can be had for a few hundred dollars, and there is even a promotion happening at the moment over at It's Not Cheating, where Australian university students can buy a copy for only $75. Not a bad deal, and probably well worth it for a clear, piracy-free, conscience. Makes you wonder about the sort of profit margins in the software though when you see these sorts of discounts being offered. I guess Bill became the worlds richest person for a reason...

The other interesting development in the Office space is Google's recent announcement to add a presentation module to the already existing word processor and spreadsheet modules in Google Docs. Sure, it won't have all the bells and whistles that MS Office has, but like I said, most users never use the more advanced features anyway. For the majority of users, if they can type and format a document, calculate some numbers or keep a list in a spreadsheet, and do a basic presentation for an audience, that's most of their computing needs right there. Add in the Gmail and Google calendar features, and Google Docs is starting to look like an interesting proposition. It also has two nice extra features... it can enable online collaboration on documents, and of course it is free. Free is good. Free is hard to beat. At school, we just renewed our Microsoft licensing agreement for the year and it cost us about $18,000. That's every year. As I say, free is good, and Google Docs is starting to look very attractive, especially now you can even brand it with your own domain name using Google Apps for your Domain. I'm sure Open Office and some of the other open source office stuff is also worth a more serious look these days.

The downside of Google Docs of course is that it requires a user to be online all the time, with a fairly fast connection if it is to be at all usable. But that's becoming more the norm, and is probably not a big issue. The flip side of that is that it makes all your documents available online, anywhere, anytime, which can certainly be a good thing in a Web 2.0 world.

For me, I will keep using Office for now because I do tend to regularly tap into many of its more advanced features. But I can see a day in the not too distant future where even I might start to seriously rethink my attitude to the alternatives.

Technorati Tags: Google Docs, Microsoft Office

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Filed under: Microsoft, User Interface No Comments

4Apr/070

Education, Innovation and Microsoft

Not three words you normally find in the same sentence, but last week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Education Roadshow in Sydney. It was part of the regular traveling circus that Microsoft puts on every so often to show off its commitment in the education space. I've been a number to these events before, but hadn't committed to going to this one since they were usually little more than a sales wolf in educational sheeps clothing. But a few weeks prior to the event I had been asked by Intouch Consultancy if I would like to contribute some lesson plans based on the new Office 2007 applications, and those lessons would be released as part of the package of new educational content being shown at the roadshow. For that reason alone - I think it's called ego - I decided to attend the event this year.

I've been a little critical of Microsoft in the past, and some of their events... you may have read my thoughts about the Vista release in Toronto last year. But I have to say, this year's Roadshow in Sydney was really good. It makes such a difference when the speakers at an event like this are teachers, and can talk about stuff from the perspective of a teacher. I enjoyed listening to guy from the Maitland Catholic Education Office talk about their new Scholaris network deployment and how it solved a whole bunch of problems for them. I could relate to the issues he spoke about, since my school faces many of the same ones albeit on a much smaller scale. As the demos unfolded, I became more and more impressed at just how well thought through some of this new stuff is. The big problem in any school, and any network for that matter, is in getting disparate systems to talk to each other. Getting your school admin package to talk to your Active Directory server, and to talk to your payroll, your library software, your proxy server, your print management software, your timetable etc, is a pain. Getting all these systems to play nicely together is a major headache for any system admin. Yet, here was a guy showing us how they had solved all of these problems across a large number of different schools, all with slightly different configurations, all with a single sign on. I have to say I was pretty impressed... if you weren't impressed by this, then you really didn't understand the problem in the first place.

A guy from Intel got up to speak for a while, and it was sooooo obvious when a non-teacher addressed the crowd. the language changed from education to that of sales, and every sentence was full of corporate-speak. They really do need to keep these people away from the microphone at events like these. Seriously guys... if you invite a bunch of teachers along to an event, then keep the focus on education... we don't care about the technical mumbo jumbo or the product specs or the projected sales figures for next quarter. That stuff is interesting to you, but not to us. Just focus on our needs and your bottom line will be just fine.

They had a guy from Microsoft show us a whole bunch of new stuff for education and I must say a lot of it looked really good. The new stuff you can do with Sharepoint was way cool, some great ideas and demos of software like Flight Simulator and Photostory, and a look at some of the new tools still in beta - in particular one for developing learning object-like apps (It's name escapes me right now, but it looked very interesting) It looked to me like Microsoft was finally getting its act together in the education space. A final demo of Office 2007 and some new stuff for teachers by my buddy June Wall finished off the demos nicely. There was some cool stuff here too, although despite the oohs and ahhs from some of the audience at Vista's eye candy effects, I still wouldn't swap Vista for OSX!

I also got a chance to catch up with Margie Gardner, a teaching colleague that worked with me at Penshurst Marist. Margie took over my role when I left there and it sounds like she is doing a great job of keeping it all going. Margie and I had lunch sitting out on the steps of the Conference Centre, overlooking Darling Harbour on what was a beautiful Sydney day and had a chance to catch up on each others gossip.
Finally, back inside, we heard from the winners of the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Awards. Without intending to take anything away from these guys and girls who had been recognised as innovative teachers with technology, I have to say that it really doesn't seem to take all that much to be “innovative”. I absolutely applaud what they have been doing with the projects and ideas that they have been applying in their classrooms, but I was stunned at how ordinary some of the “innovation” was. Margie nudged me during the demos and commented that we had been doing most of that stuff back at Penshurst more than eight years ago! I guess I just think that this sort of innovation should be seen as standard practice and not something out of the ordinary. Regardless, it was good to see people getting recognised for their work, and I hope it rubs off on some of the other teachers in the room, some of whom were perhaps seeing these ideas for collaboration and learning with technology for the first time

Before I left for the day I got to look around some of the vendor stands, had a play with the Wacom tablets, spoke to a few developers about Sharepoint, bumped into a few industry people I know and had a chat. Overall, it was a worthwhile day and I'm glad I went.

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Filed under: Ed Tech, Microsoft No Comments

5Dec/065

Such a thing as a Free Lunch

Dear Mr Gates,

Is it OK if I call you Bill? I feel like I know you so well, I've been using your company's products for so many years now. I can't say that I was there from the beginning, but I did start using Windows way back at version 3.0. (I'm told that's probably a good thing, since Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were a bit of a joke apparently.) But since Windows 3.0 I've been right there with you man! I went through Windows 3.1, then WfW (remember that one? OMG, what were you thinking?)

Windows 95 came along at about the same time as my daughter was born, in fact the hospital where she was born gave away a free copy of Windows 95 to every child born that special August day when you went on stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up"! My daughter was born a few days too early and I missed out (I've not forgiven her for that yet Bill) but hey, what a brilliant piece of marketing! And not at all tacky, like some people said it was!

Anyway since then, I've faithfully followed you and you loyal Microsofties through all the various versions of Windows - 98, 98SE, then ME, 2000, NT, XP, XPSP1, XPSP2 (to hell with those people who complain about the long times between releases... service packs count! Don't they realise that fixing all those bugs and security holes takes a lot of work?)

But Bill... Oh Bill, what happened? I went to the launch of Vista today in Toronto, and I can't believe it's finally all over between us! I kept hearing the word "innovation" but where was it hiding? I kept hearing your people - our people, Bill - talking about this new Vista operating system and how it would revolutionise my corporate computing experience, and how it would make it so much easier to meet organisational goals and to collaborate across the enterprise. But Bill, I don't want to do that stuff. I just want a computer that makes my life easier! I don't care about being 37% more efficient when I send updated figures to Steve in Marketing, or sharing a PowerPoint deck with Jane in HR. I hardly ever need to reschedule a product planning meeting with people in the Boston office... Have you forgotten about me Bill? I don't care about all that stuff... I'm an educator Bill! I just want a tool that can let me and my students manage our digital lifestyle. But based on what I saw today, it seems Vista is aimed at nothing but the corporate market. There was barely a mention of the education sector unless you include that dill from the Toronto District School Board, but really Bill, he was just embarrassing! You gotta screen these people Bill!

There used to be a time when you understood my needs Bill. You used to know what I wanted and how an operating system would make my life easier. Oh sure, there were plenty of times I'd curse Windows because it crashed and froze on me, but I stuck with it because, well, frankly, I had no option. But Bill, you need to understand that I now have options. Vista is not the only kid on the block, and to be honest, there are other kids on the block that can already do most of what Vista is talking about. Oh sure, they might be called Widgets instead of Gadgets, and Dashboard instead of Sidebar. And although I have to admit that Flip3D thing does look kind of funky, even compared to Expose, do I really need to put up with all the viruses and stuff just to get that?

But Bill, I have to say, I was disappointed with the demos. That poor guy doing the voicemail demo... I felt so sorry for him. He tried and tried and tried to make it work, and it must have been so embarrassing to have it fail in front of so many people, and I don't blame him for giving up eventually, but it didn't make Microsoft look good Bill. I saw a few other demos while I was there and several of them ended with the presenters getting so frustrated that things weren't working and they gave up as well. It's tough to watch a demo that has to be abandoned Bill... it makes it look like the product is either too hard to use or still a bit buggy. And after spending so long in development, it must break your heart to see Vista behaving badly in public like that. Luckily, the presenters explained what was supposed to happen, so even though it never worked right,at least I have an idea of what was supposed to happen. That was much more reassuring.

Oh, but Bill, I have a piece of advice... When you get your people to present their case studies about your products, you need to create some compelling examples. I can't believe that one of the case studies talked about a company who moved to Exchange 2007 because they wanted to move away from their aging Novell mail system. Come on Bill! At least give us some good examples of why we should give Microsoft even more money to upgrade our current systems! Of course an aging Novell system is due for an upgrade, but what about the party faithful Bill? What about all those of us who run Exchange 2000 or 2003? What's in it for us? Or do we wait until our Exchange 2003 server is as old as the Novell server, and simply upgrade to Exchange 2014?

Overall, I have to say I was disappointed. I thought the release lacked pizzazz Bill. It was flat. It lacked sparkle. Even the exhibitors out in the Microsoft Partner displays looked half asleep, and it was a bit embarrassing to see so many of them still using Windows XP. This is a Vista launch, Bill! Surely the partners should all be using Vista by now! You gotta get tough with these people and force them to upgrade! Just pretend they are Microsoft customers and take away their other options... they'll soon upgrade then!

But yeah, you gotta liven up the next major product launch, get some sparkle happening, maybe even a little charisma or charm. Maybe you could talk Steve Jobs into doing a favour for you, he's always pretty charismatic on stage, and he seems to be doing a bang-up job promoting Apple at the moment... He'd be good, although he may be a little too busy getting ready for Leopard to help you out right now. Actually, forget about Steve Jobs. You're probably still mad at him for not telling you what's going to be in Leopard. How are you supposed to make Vista better than Leopard if he won't tell you what's in it? That was so uncharitable of him! Maybe after Leopard comes out you can release Vista Service Pack 1 and bring Vista up to speed again. It's a good thing that Apple has such a small market share or more people might figure out where all the cool stuff in Vista came from!

I have to apologise and say that I can't see myself buying Vista right now, but I'm hoping that it will improve over time. Let's face it, Version 1.o of anything from Microsoft is always just a stopgap right? I'm sure people understand that, and they know that you guys eventually work it out... usually by Version 3 or so. That's just the way this business works.

I guess you'll do the same thing with the Zune huh? Once there are some decent songs in the Zune marketplace, and we drop the silly "podcast" word in favour of something more palatable so you can include podcasts on the Zune, I think sales will really take off. No sense in promoting the iPod is there? Maybe they should be called "Zunecasts"? Yes I think that's much better. Hmmm, now I think about it, I'm surprised I never saw the Zune there today. But then, I guess the launch wasn't about all that silly digital media stuff, it was about business wasn't it?

Anyway Bill, I just wanted to say thanks... it's always good to go to a Microsoft product launch... And people say there's no such thing as a free lunch!

Chris

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Filed under: Microsoft, Windows 5 Comments

5Dec/060

A Brand New Day in Toronto

I'm sitting at the official Toronto launch of Windows Vista, the theme of which is "A Brand New Day". If ever I saw someone totally miss the point of what technology means for education, it's the guy speaking right now from the Toronto District School Board, Jey Jamarararmasomething. When asked what he thought was the best things about Window Vista, and what he thought were the most important new features of Vista, he said that it will help manage the students who bring USB keys between home and school, and it will engage them in learning better because they seem to like the "wow factor" of the new interface. Now there's a couple of great educationally sound reasons for implementing new technology... not! Where was the conversation about enabling a more connected learning environment? Where was the talk about enabling deeper, better quality learning through the use of technology?

We then had a guy from Microsoft showing a demo of Vista, and we got "wowed" by Gadgets and Flip3D and System Wide Search... (Mac users can just think Widgets and Dashboard and Spotlight - we've had that stuff in OSX for years now).

Apart from the eye candy, I honestly can't see any value in Vista that isn't already offered in the current version of XP. There are a couple of new ideas there, such as the unified mailbox which allows you to have all your messages, email and voicemail in one place, but the demo of the Outlook voicemail system failed when the voice prompts could not be recognised and the system kept telling the presenter that it could not understand him and to repeat himself. In the end, he just gave up, which is a big call when you're demoing it in front of a crowd of 3000+ people!

There was a lot of talk about security and inbuilt protection for spyware and malware and phishing, something that is desperately needed for Windows. As a Mac user, none of that stuff worries me too much, so again, not too much value-add there.

Free is Good

It's always nice to find useful software that's free. The open source movement has had a major influence in enabling software makers to build great apps and get them out there for people to use, usually at no charge. Free is good.

What's more unusual is to find free software from the big names, like Microsoft. A few notable exceptions have emerged from the Microsoft stable over the last few years though, such as Producer, Photostory and even Sharepoint, which have actually been quite good.

The latest cool freebie is a thing called Paint.Net, developed by a group of student programmers who did an internship at Microsoft and developed a fresh new image editing tool using Microsoft's .NET framework. Microsoft is not a big player in the image editing area, and doesn't have a significant product in that space. They've obviously given a challenge to these young programmers to develop something for image editing and the result is supposed to be amazing.

Check it out for yourself at www.getpaint.net

Good on you Microsoft. Good to see some fresh thinking, even if it did take a group of clever young hackers to do it for you.

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