Bnpositive's Blog

Okay, it’s not directly related to Office 12, but thought I’d share this informaiton about Lotus Note’s response to the Google Office addition (it’s not really an addition is it, I mean all these apps already existed independently). I used Lotus Notes for over 5 years at one job and couldn’t stand it. I just didn’t like the way things were organized at all in the user interface or process flow of daily activities.
Greg over at the IBM Eye has a post about it here. My favorite snippet from the post is:

Notes isn’t for the little guy… it’s for serious, secure, multi admin type shops. These shops won’t let their mission critical apps sit on google’s servers.

Are you a little guy or a big guy? That’s got to impact your choice for trying office applications.

If anything has changed in the past few years, it’s the way things are marketed to us as we go about our daily lives.

Amazon recently sent an advertisement out via e-mail to promote a new show on Fox called “Justice” (it premiered tonight and I’m watching it as we speak, it’s okay, but not up to other Jerry Bruckheimer standards I’m used to watching).

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased legal/courtroom drama books, we thought you’d like to know that the new Fox legal drama Justice premieres tonight, August 30th at 9/8c on your local Fox station.

View Justice & Other Fox Previews

From Jerry Bruckheimer, executive producer of CSI, comes this unflinching, behind-the-scenes look at the way high-profile cases are tried in the media age. With their unique skill sets and the power of forensic law, a dream team of four lawyers from disparate backgrounds join forces to tackle the most controversial and newsworthy cases. Love them or hate them, in the high-stakes world of criminal defense, these are the people you want in your corner when your life is on the line.

Official Site

Enjoy the Show

Since when did Amazon get in the TV promotion business? How much was it worth to Amazon to get involved? How did it happen?

Maybe the executives at Fox are sitting in a board room wondering how they’re going to market their new show to people who have been trained to TiVo past their commercials, or maybe even worse spend most of their time now online or reading a book instead. Now where are we going to get a list of people who may be interested in legal shows and crime dramas?

“Hey! Maybe we could use those recent AOL searches that were released and see who’s been surfing the net for law stuff?”

“Bob, you’re an idiot! Do you realize how much flack AOL caught because of that? That would never work!”

“Yeah, you’re right, now where on Earth would we get really detailed information about what someone reads and how they spend their time?”

“Amazon knows that kind of stuff about me. But they’d never let us have that data.”

“Nope, but we could pay them lots of money to do the marketing for us with the information they already know.”

Okay, it may not have happened just like that, but sounds pretty legitimate don’t you think? If you were one of the people to receive this e-mail marketing campaign, what were your impressions? Did you feel like it was an invasion of your privacy? Were you impressed with Amazon’s ability to know some of your preferences and what you’ve already spent money on and appreciated the fact that they let you know about this new show?

I’m VERY interested in knowing what you think about this one.

Awhile back I wrote a post entitled Don?t Get Stuck on Stupid about Lt. General Russel Honore who’s been put in charge of the rebuilding efforts taking place in New Orleans. Officially, he’s Commander of Joint Task Force Katrina.
Fox News has a follow-up interview (“Katrina Hero”) with the same “John Wayne” of Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. He’s still impressive with his grasp on the situation in New Orleans and what needs to happen for things to continue to improve. He also discusses why it’s taking so long for things to occur, and how the media who he says got it wrong during Katrina, could also be getting it wrong again.

As the video for Fox is titled “Katrina Hero”, this guy is one of my new most favorite people. Just look at that guy! This guy embodies the impression of “I’m in charge!”. I say get out of his way, help him when he asks for it and let’s keep moving forward.

A feature that I thought of yesterday during the seminar that would be good is an “auto-hide” function for the new ribbon interface. The question came up yesterday in the seminar from a gentleman wondering what the preferred resolution to operate Office 2007 due to the new ribbon. I mentioned that the ribbon actually takes up less space than the standard menus and toolbars that are available in existing versions.

The presenter was trying to find the option to hide the ribbon and couldn’t find it (again, making me wonder why people presenting products aren’t more familiar with the products they’re presenting). I then wondering why it wouldn’t be a great feature to have a setting for the ribbon to “Auto-Hide” like I can the toolbar in Internet Explorer and the Task Bar in Windows.

One of the advantages to some of the new deployment tools and processes that have been established in preparation for Vista, will hopefully dramatically reduce the costs of deploying the new OS.

Through increased automation and improvements in the windows imaging files, users may be able to see costs of deployment like this:

• Manual Deployment: $500 – $1000 per PC
• Light Touch Deployment: $350 per PC
• Zero Touch Deployment: < $100 per PC

Some of the new features for deployment include unattended files based on XML for stepping through installation procedures. In addition, there is no longer the need to have multiple install images for every different hardware configuration in your enterprise.

I needed to logout of my own Gmail account today so I could access my wife’s account to look up an e-mail for her. When I went to log back into the account, I noticed that the storage space for Gmail continues to expand and has now almost reached 3GB (2759.616526MB to be exact, of course that’s now changed in the time since I wrote this post).
I’ve been more than happy with Gmail since getting into their beta, let’s hope they continue to improve this service.

Again, I think this service is succeeding because of the obvious impact to additional advertising revenue based on user e-mails and impressions. If eyeballs are worth money, what other website do people visit more regularly and spend more time on than their webmail client?

I just received this comment on the site from an old post I listed about the changes to the Windows Genuine Advantage program. This reader has had an exceptionally frustrating experience with the WGA kill switch. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

WGA kill switch is a racketeers’s dream.

I could care less if Msft takes this incident seriously or not, as a set of CA lawyers likely will in class action suits against Msft. But, FYI – this is being posted all over…

The WGA kill switch did kick in when I scheduled a chkdsk to run on next reboot. Msft is LYING about a kill switch not kicking in. The keyboard and desktop were LOCKED – so I couldn’t log into any account (passwords). There was NO prior notification and I have witnesses. Those WGA screens came up AFTER the keyboard was locked. Computer came up only in SAFE MODE. Corporate customer. When I clicked on RESOLVE now, it went to a go.microsoft site THAT NO LONGER EXISTS.

And that’s where Msft will pay – hopefully in a “currency” that will hurt VISTA.

Computer was purchased 2 years ago from a reseller. As were many, many others.

Took this WGA-killed computer to Best Buy at 8pm. Best Buy looked at the hologram sticker and said the computer was Msft genuine. Someone else said the Bay Area reseller who sold the computer had been in the papers as having VL issues; another tech said the reseller had been burned by Msft; and yet another said the reseller was clean, and that was also “in the papers”.

All however acknowledged OUR company had been screwed by Microsoft’s WGA, they offered their “911 service”, meaning, 24 hour turnaround – would have cost $900 dollars. They tried to figure out a way to lower the cost to us. However, all our biz programs would have to be reloaded. SOL for 3 days at least.

I am taking this time out to start a Linux conversion business for biz applications and use this incident as the quintessential WGA horror story that Vista won’t survive.

My opinion? This WGA business is corporate thievery, as the Msft WGA “knowledge base” process can make any claim whatsoever, with ZERO TRACEABILITY and RECOURSE. It is likely a disreputable pre-VISTA marketing practice. What else can CUSTOMERS expect of a company that can buy it’s way out of anti-Racketeering laws. Lets see, if Enron lawyers can purchase a decriminalization of KEN LAY, why can’t BILL GATES – IMO a higher echelon racketeer than KEN LAY or CARLOS MARCELLO (Mafia) – get away with CORPORATE TERRORISM.

Anna
PS I posted this on Microsoft, and everywhere else I can.

If you’ve experienced this or similar challenges with WGA, please let me know.

As I stated yesterday, I went to a training/educational seminar yesterday that focused on the features coming with Windows Vista and Office 2007, along with the deployment of both in your enterprises. Even though there are some other b5 blogs that cover Windows Vista and Office 2007, I’m going to share some general thoughts here since it’s obviously about Microsoft.

There wasn’t too much new information shared about Office 2007, and I’ve already shared those specific thoughts on the Office 12 Watch blog so check them out there if you’re interested, so I’m going to focus on Vista and just general Microsoft comments.

Let’s jump in.

First, I realize it’s a beta software (specifically beta 2 Vista build 8354) that the presenter was using, but I would expect as much pre-work to have been done prior to the demonstration as possible. Things got started late because the presenter’s laptop didn’t have the drivers it needed to send the signal to both the laptop screen and the projector screen. If it were me presenting, I’d have been there an hour early to make sure everything went smoothly. Am I the only one that thinks like this? In addition, he didn’t already have his wi-fi for the room connected for his machine and also could find some of his own files for the presentation.

The other thing that surprised me about the presentation was some of the candor that the sponsoring partners had towards their almost mistrust of Vista and the new Office. It came across as more of a negative than an un-biased opinion. I’m all for openness and honesty from partners, especially in the development phase, but this seemed a little over-the-top.

The presenter did confirm that we should expect an RC1 release of Vista in early September. From the features they shared, I think I’ll be installing it on my home machine, I’m really liking what I saw yesterday.

Most of these thoughts are probably old hat for now, but they’re new from me.

• The Jewel – Start no more, it’s the “Windows Jewel” now. I like it! It’s clean and perpetuates the brand image.
• Aero Glass – Wow! Some great features. I’m not so much interested in the transparency although it is nice eye-candy. I’m really eager to get my hands on the new Alt-Tab preview, taskbar preview, and Flip3D features to cycle through programs. Absolutely need 128MB minimum of video ram to run Aero glass. The other nice feature to go with that is full video rendering in the small preview screens and tabs.
• 5 Vistas – Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate. There is no Media Center edition anymore, it will be additional configuration packs you can add to any version. Also, the only difference between Business and Enterprise is that Business is sold as OEM and Enterprise is the version that’s used when Microsoft’s Software Assurance is purchased. Not really any new features, just some enhanced services that come along with it.
• Search – This is the new “Start” feature to me. As important as it was when 95 was released, search seems to be the new way to get everything done with Vista. You’re able to run programs by searching for them by name from the Windows Jewel, and applications are easily found by new indexing that takes place automatically and is continually updated.
• Screen Shots – Vista will include a screen shot grabber utility out of the box that also allows mark-up and editing of the file before sharing.
• Virtualization – One nice feature that I’m not sure was normally available is that a Windows Vista license includes up to 4 other licenses for previous operating systems if needed. This would be used for example in software development or test environments, or if you have some legacy software application that must be run in another version of the Windows OS.
• Mobility – many new improvements on mobility operations with Vista. Although not ground-shaking, but more of a heightened awareness of improved user interface is the “Mobility Center”. It works like a sub-control panel for all the settings that could be related to a laptop usage. One specific piece is the “Presentation Mode”, which allows you to quickly change power, volume, brightness, desktop wallpaper, suppress notifications and disable screen saver all with one-click.
• ReadyBoost – Don’t have enough RAM in your system? Or just need an extra boost every now and then? What if you could add another 2GB of RAM to your system as easily as plugging in a USB drive? ReadyBoost gives you this option. If you have it enabled and you insert a thumbdrive, you’ll be prompted on how you’d like to use the device. Very interesting! Regretfully in the build the presenter was using, it wasn’t enabled, so we couldn’t see it in action.
• Security – Only two default user types out of the box. Admins and Standard users. Highly recommended to normally logon as a standard user and always are prompted for credentials if you request to do something that needs admin privileges. Microsoft has improved the amounts of things that a standard user can do without admin access, like add a printer. You can still setup your own custom user levels if desired. Also to note, IE7 always runs as Standard User access regardless of login.

You’ll never look at a cartoon character the same after visiting this site. Michael Paulus has taken the opportunity to study the underlying skeletal structures of some of the most common cartoon forms we’ve come to accept today.

As you can see from the photo to the left from his site, he’s gone to great detail to really determine what the actual skeletal system would look like for a cartoon character.

Many of them look almost ape-like with the larger heads (common caricature feature) than the body.

These Icons are usually grotesquely distorted from the human form from which they derive. Being that they are so commonplace and accepted as existing I thought I would dissect them like science does to all living objects – trying to come to an understanding as to their origins and true physiological make up. Possibly to better understand them and see them in a new light for what they are in the most basic of terms.

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

He even reminded me of one of my favorite characters growing up, Shmoo!

Skeletal Study of Popular Cartoon Characters

There wasn’t a lot of information shared today in the seminar I attended about Office 2007 that I didn’t already know. I guess that maybe shouldn’t be a surprise since I blog about the new software, but I was hoping for some kind of new scoop to share with everyone.

One thing that continues to surprise me is the lack of knowledge of a product a presenter has at things like this. The Microsoft rep was okay, but there were a few times when people in the audience, including myself, were telling him how to use the tool and where to look for features.

So, nothing new or inside-scoopish for me for today. Bummer!

TechCrunch highlights that Google has launched a collection of their apps to be used as a virtual office space for domains.

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Page Creator
• Writely (Coming Soon?)
• Google Spreadsheet (Coming Soon?)

Interesting concept and a very logical one at that. I only use two of the above apps (Gmail & Google Talk) on any type of regular basis. Even then Google Talk is only because of it’s integration within the Gmail app.

This is a bold move by Google. They are striking hard at a nearly $12 billion/year Microsoft revenue stream. And they are clearly trying to get this out the door fast, in anticipation of Microsoft Office 2007, which will include collaboration features for businesses (as does Office Live, announced last year).

Although maybe it could be considered a bold move, I really don’t see this being any real competition with the Office 2007 application, even with it’s online integration. I think it’s still just a distraction from Google for Microsoft away from search.

Why is it I can’t select one of my full-featured image editing applications as the default image editor for images in Microsoft Word? Microsoft Paint or Image Editor is useless compared to other applications that most people have installed. Why can’t I easily add those editors to the ones called by Word for editing images and graphics?

Very annoying!