Steve's Seaside Life

Daily Archive: March 2, 2005

All Posts

Why I love working in the end-user and work-group computing field!

I have worked in this area for most of my working life and it continues to amaze me that it is still an area of IT that has the – untapped – potential to transform peoples lives.  Most of the customers I work with are struggling to deal with all the information they have to cope with in their work and home life (which are becoming more integrated).  They live high-bandwidth lifestyles!  Its with great interest therefore that I read the following results from the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) which is an independent group of companies and academics that have joined together to study the issue of information work productivity. The goal of the Council is to build a model that measures productivity in today’s information-centric business environment. 

They recently published the results of a survey into how the average user spends their time at work.  According to the study, the average user:

  • Spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour work day
  • Devotes 1.58 hours/day to e-mail (49% of the information processing time, and 20% of an 8 hour day
  • Spends 47 minutes, or 24% of IP time on telephone and voice mail
  • Receives …

All Posts

Microsoft doing it right …

These two great video (one and two) interviews with Scott Guthrie on IIS7 and ASP.NET show off Microsoft at its best, you might even go so far as saying a new Microsoft.  The IIS Team and the Indigo team seem to have learned some key lessons about standards compliance and compatibility (not always the same thing).  Of course it’s a key requirement of their market segment, and they don’t dominate it,  but its still nice to see the focus in these areas.  Two other things stand out for me in the interviews:

  • The continued focus on making IIS a great platform upon which people can build additional infrastructure richness and of course great applications. This is achieved by modularising the platform and documenting the APIs of the standard modules and allowing new modules to be easily created.
  • The second is that with IIS a raft of the most common open source applications are going to be provided, and integrated,  from forums to blogs, another really great move.

I just wish they had given him advanced notice of one of the key questions, how do you differentiate yourself against apache (which is didn’t really now how to answer) and asked …