Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Desktop

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Who will Longhorn appeal to?

Right now it seems to me that Longhorn is being targeted at three communities:

  1. Home users, particularly those looking for a great multi-media experience

  2. Knowledge workers, especially those at the top end, who aggregate, integrate and assemble lots of information from many different sources

  3. Mobile workers, for whom thin client computing solutions don’t work and to whom the blend or personal and corporate features will appeal.

It’s got lots of other features that will appeal to the mass of task and structured task workers in corporate environments, but true thin client approaches will probably appeal more strongly for these users IT managers, particularly with the current wave of smart client rich UI toolkits that run on top of a JVM.

So how might this pan out in reality:

  1. Microsoft might get 20% market share from portable users

  2. A maximum of 20% market share from high end knowledge workers, who are not mobile

  3. Maybe 20% that it picks up just so they can use the same environment as the rest of the people in the office

So maybe that leaves 40% of users who will either switch to thin clients, unless Microsoft can convince businesses to stick with them because of the benefits …

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A good description of WinFS?

I have been looking for a good description of how Longhorn would behave in a client server environment.  The Longhorn evangelists have been posting some scenarios, but they don’t completely work for me because they are not general enough to allow me to easily extend them to my own environment. ...

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In pursuit of personal and team productivity

There is a conflict between people and the companies they work for, (well probably lots, but I’m only going to talk about one of them). The bigger the enterprise a person works for the more focussed that company is likely to be in central server centric computing, central support, consolidation, BPM, single sources of information etc. All very important for sure, but these companies will probably not even consider team productivity and almost certainly personal productivity as worthy of investment. These companies are on a crusade to save money, real money, i.e. savings off the bottom line. 1 hours labour saving per month for a big company project would be amazing….

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Tablet PC related Software I still use

Tablet PC related Software I still use. 

I have played around with pretty much all of the software, but not much of it has survived the several rebuilds I have done for various purposes, eg HD upgrades, beta tests etc.  This is what’s left.

So why did these survive:

Zinio survives because in my enthusiasm I went and subscribed to a couple of magazines.  My feeling is that its not quite there.  Its a bit slow, the TC1100 screen size is a bit too small, and the 1024*768 resolution a bit too low.  In addition it does not maximise correctly, if you have your task bar at the top of the screen as I do. 

Top Desk is a real find.  Its a bit of freeware, that sits in your tray and when you click it it shows you all of the shortcuts on your desktop.  if you are anything like me you have far to many applications to fit on the Start menu, so this provides much more room.  If you are ultra-tidy it also lets you hide everything from your desktop, which makes …