Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Desktop

All Posts

More on the Consumerization of IT

Nic, points out in a comment on this post titled The decline of enterprise influence over IT that CSC Research Services have recently published a report on Consumerization, which I have just read and must say makes very good reading, especially the first few pages.  One of the authors is currently thinking through some of the related personal responsibility issues.  This topic has sparked my interest and I have been talking through some of the implications with network, storage and infrastructure services architects.  It took a while for them to get it until I used the Internet Access analogy which we all lived through:

1.      When the internet was first established enterprises saw individual Internet access it as an activity of little interest, undertaken by enthusiasts only, with niche needs.

2.      Then they saw it as a threat as they noticed people with networked PC’s who also had active modem connections to the internet, they started to create policies to control it

3.      Then they saw it as a need, but only to be provided to the select few and only then in very controlled conditions

4.      Then the saw it as obvious …

All Posts

The benefits of WinFS

Given all of the negative talk about the delay to WinFS I just wanted to say that I have thought since I first glimpsed it that Microsoft are really onto something with WinFS, I have discussed it before but its timely to give my top five reasons again: 1.      It’s...

All Posts

The decline of enterprise influence over IT

IT is becoming more accessible and more personal in many ways.  The combination has many implications. 

1.      If I can get at the services others provide for me from anywhere

2.      If I can customise the access to these services in a way that suits me

3.      If I can aggregate the information that flows to and from these services in a way that suits me

and if I can do all of this from any device, and over any network then the power that corporate IT held over me declines and IT just becomes more like the rest of the world I live in, for example:

1.      Most companies don’t specify which car a salesman has to use they just provide the money to buy it.

2.      They don’t specify or fund the suit he wears, just the standards he has to comply with

3.      They often don’t specify the pen I use, or the type of diary

As standards mature, security becomes more pervasive and applied to content, rather than container, (e.g.  the content of the document is protected, rather than the directory it resides in), IT will go in this direction. …

All Posts

So what will be included in Longhorn?

In an email message to all full-time employees on, Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin said that the company’s customers “love our vision” but just wanted parts of it to be delivered sooner. He said that Microsoft will deliver the following in 2006:

 

  • The highest quality OS we have ever shipped

  • New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files

  • Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware

  • Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers

  • Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe

  • A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]

 

“Our commitment to broad availability of the Longhorn client in 2006 and broadening the API set underscores our long-term vision for the Windows platform, and our desire to deliver high-quality innovations that our customers and developers are asking for in a timely …

All Posts

So you want to understand what the changes to Longhorn mean?

Summary: The reaction to the news on Longhorn seems mainly positive

 

There is an enormous amount of debate on Microsoft’s decision to change the content and timing of Longhorn.  I discussed it in brief yesterday.  Since then there has been some very well informed discussions and links to these can be found on Robert Scobles blog.  However Robert just provides a very long list with little opinion so here is my take. In a bit more detail.

 

By far the best place to start in understanding this debate is this interview with Bill Gates by CNet.  It’s a fascinating piece with lots of snippets, a few of which I quote below:

 

We realized that we could do a lot of rich search capabilities in the OS without the full database, taking some of our text technology that’s been used by Office, and actually, MSN is doing some nearer-term local-search things, building on that same technology.  So that’s why MS bought LookOut!

 

Then we have other groups, like WinFS, where we’re way out in front, and there’s nobody to compare ourselves to. Making sure that they see how we’re committed …

All Posts

Richard gives his view on the Longorn roadmap changes

Richard draws simillar conclusions to me

Myself I am ecstatic that Avalon and Indigo are going to be available to both Windows XP and Longhorn clients. Why? Because this might signify the resurgence of the thick client applications and also make the deployment of those applications simpler with the subsequent release of one click deployment. No longer will I be shackled to the confines of a web browser but rather I will be freed to create a rich user experience like the “good old days” and thereby increase the number of available features to each application I create. The fact that Avalon is going to be released to a wider audience means applications that were once awkward to deploy over the web will now be easy. Forget the marketing hype this is a great leap forward for the smart client developers

All Posts

Why no one wants to save money saving paper

I admit I have written a business case or two in the past that included saving paper.  One actually did make the savings it claimed, but the other like millions of others resulted in more paper usage.  There is a good article on the topic on the Bloor blog IT-Director.com. ...

All Posts

3 Monitors is the way to go!

I have been quite happy with my two monitor setup at home,  but using maxivista I am now able to drive three monitors from my main desktop PC.  This is just great.  I can now have my email in one, my RSS feeds in another, be using Office in another...

All Posts

Get it working then make it better.

I have recently been doing some research into Open Source, its an interesting subject from so many perspectives.  That’s not what this article is about but if you want to follow up on it I recommend The Success of Open Source.  Anyway reading this book prompted me to think a bit more about daily builds.  Yes I know I already posted on this topic a few days ago but I can’t resist linking it with the Linux philosophy which can be summarised as:

 

“get it working then make it better”  

 

Now this really appeals to me for a few reasons:

 

  1. I am a pretty poor programmer, a reasonable designer and a pretty good architect, (hopefully :-)).  So I incline to grand concepts, but I can never get them to work in code unless I start really simply.  In fact in most cases I start with someone elses code first and hack it around until I have proved the basic concepts.

  2. My real background is in systems integration so I never expect anything to work as documented.  In fact when I started programming with VB 2, I fell found of a whole …