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DELL’S PLAN FOR THE CONSUMERIZATION OF IT

Thanks to trends like Bring Your Own Device, previously closed business
computing environment are being broken wide open with multiple forms of devices
running very different operating systems, all bringing new challenges for IT. As
part of our series, in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®, I took a look at
what Dell is offering as it’s analysis of these trends, and plans for helping
businesses deal with and thrive under the new environment.

In a 15 page paper on the subject, Dell outlines what it sees as “Five Trends
Shaping the
Future of Enterprise Mobility”. The look towards social networks, already a
dominant force in employees’ personal lives, as changing behaviors in the
office, forcing a part of this consumerization. On Facebook, people expect to
know what everyone is up to at any time, and easily keep track of several
hundred relationships with minimal effort. There’s every reason to believe that
as people get used to this behavior with their friends, they will expect to be
able to maintain intercompany communications with the same ease, speed and
flexibility, something traditional computing just hasn’t been good for.

Another trend influencing the bigger picture is the rise of flexible working
arrangements and environments. Companies are getting smarter and realizing that
an employee that can work anywhere and anytime is an employee that can work
better. Employees need to be able to get things done every hour of the day and
in every corner of the earth, meaning they don’t want to be tethered to their
desktop PCs, and their managers shouldn’t want that either. If your workers are
willing to take a tablet to lunch and get work done while eating a sandwich or
during a vacation or medical leave or while watching the kids, there’s no smart
reason to stand in their way, and in fact companies need to do more to make it
easier for employees to do so.

The rise in powerful mobile devices is changing how we handle everything and is
certainly changing our working habits. In a perfect example, one of my fellow
managers gave birth this past week, having a wonderful baby boy at 2 AM. Five
hours later, she was emailing her team instructions on how to handle some minor
tasks from her hospital bed, before the team was even in the office! Hopefully,
she eventually had some rest.

The point is that employees are already tethered to their mobile devices and
enjoy using them for everything. The more they can work on them, the better for
them, the company, and the people who rely on them. Mobile device growth
continues unabated both in terms of the number of smart devices and their
capabilities. On my latest phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note II, even if I’m just
watching a movie on it, I can also answer my email at the same time in a
split-screen mode, bringing a very obvious form of work-play balance in a neat
5.5 inch package.

Employees who can and want to take advantage of these options are often your
hardest and most capable workers, and the most important goal of IT should
always be to enable the company’s stars to be exactly that. Evolving business
models require companies to be able work innovatively, so a company that doesn’t
embrace these trends may very likely fall behind one that does. And lastly,
employees expect their company to give them the options they need to succeed.
Every time I interview a prospective hire, and hear about the frustration they
had trying to work in their company’s antiquated IT environment, I know that’s a
company failing on all of these counts.

So, what recommendations does Dell offer to companies that agree that they need
to move forward and embrace the consumerization of IT? There are nine, which
I’ll summarize here:

 1. Articulate a clear technology philosophy and set a consumerization strategy
    that follows that philosophy.
 2. Tight-fisted security and anti-social media policies often have the opposite
    effect, driving employees to circumvent security controls and socialize
    unprofessionally. Better to work with them than against them.
 3. Stop preventing employees from using their own devices, starting by
    encouraging them to use their smartphones for work. Smartphones are the
    fastest growing category, and the first place you should direct your
    efforts.
 4. Supply employees with tools and apps designed to make it easier to get work
    done on their devices.
 5. Try out giving field workers and executives tablets and seeing if it works
    well and replaces existing devices. Encourage other employees to bring their
    personal tablets.
 6. Develop clear philosophies on cost sharing of such device initiatives with
    employees, and pay close attention to when the business case can and cannot
    be met for paying for such devices.
 7. Invest in desktop virtualization where appropriate, since it allows all
    those disparate devices to conform when needed, and provides many
    advantages.
 8. Don’t lose sight of software licensing restrictions. If your employees use
    software with harsh restrictions, each additional device could require you
    to re-purchase software, adding significant costs.
 9. Don’t use end user stipends.

I found this last point to be of particular interest. The paper points out that
end users aren’t particularly good at picking devices, especially since they
value mobility over business capabilities. Stipends also allow for an infinite
number of user-chosen configurations and support headaches.

I agree, and propose an alternative: More limited stipends. Rather than not
implementing such a program, IT needs to come up with a device category right
for the company, or for different types of employees. I see in our firm the
proliferation of iPads, which have proven generally worthless for our particular
business needs. In a company like ours, where powerful software and complex
productivity are key, it would make sense to offer stipends on Windows tablets
only. As a manager, I’d want my people on something like Dell’s Latitude 10
Tablet, featuring the Intel® Atom™ Z2760 processor, which does all of the fun
things an entertainment or media tablet like the iPad can do, but also does the
job when real work needs to get done. In another company, where simpler needs
make more sense for consumer IT devices, I might encourage an iPad-only stipend,
thus cutting down on IT support costs. Every company needs the right strategy
here.

I encourage you to read the paper, and share your own conclusions. I think Dell
has made some excellent ones and provides any IT and corporate decision makers
with a great starting point towards making these important decisions.

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This is a paid post in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®.

April 29th, 2013 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | no comments




A LOOK AT DELL WYSE’ CLOUD COMPUTING SOLUTIONS FEATURING INTEL® TECHNOLOGY

I’ve long used Wyse PocketCloud, a great (free) app for remote access to your
Windows or Mac PC from Android and iOS devices, to get work done with nothing
but my tablet. It’s the best designed app I’ve seen for tablet remote access,
with a downright innovative control scheme and better performance than other
solutions I’ve tried. It’s my go-to solution for simple remote access, and when
setting up employees in our organization, I always encourage them to use it.




What I didn’t know until being asked to learn more about it for our ongoing
series (in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®), is that Wyse produces a lot
more than PocketCloud. Wyse has all of these more advance cloud client computing
solutions featuring Intel® technology that go beyond the simple
get-to-your-remote-PC app that I knew about.

Wyse makes hardware, in fact, the kind of thin clients that can in many cases
replace the kind of standard PCs companies like mine usually stock. Many are
small boxes, the size of (and looking a lot like) your router, except that it
provides access to a fully featured and powerful PC environment via the cloud
without the power and hardware challenges of actual PC hardware. That tiny box
has connections for four USB ports, two monitors, audio, and other peripherals,
while drawing 7 watts of power and using practically no space at all, changing
how you look at the desktop PC.

In the IT environment I deal with every day, I can see the very real advantage
devices like this can bring. With thin client access to desktops, besides saving
space and energy, you wind up with systems that can be more easily administered
and managed in one place, while being accessed from any place. An employee can
utilize the same environment from any desk in the office, as well as the desk at
home, on the road or other means creating opportunities through flexibility.
Also, for some employees doing more complex tasks, where you can never have
enough computing power, the cloud servers deliver a lot more capabilities, and
simpler means to increasing those capabilities than trying to add power to
individual desktop PCs.

Wyse also offers thin client laptops, and even a netbook that can get up to 8
hours of battery life while accessing the same full-power system environment.
This gives you the same portability and battery life of much maligned and
underpowered netbooks without the drawbacks of their slow processors and limited
ability to do pretty much anything. Also interesting, from a security
perspective, is that since the system is all in the cloud, corporate data is
extremely safe since none of it is on the machine.

With so many end users switching from laptops and desktops to tablets at home,
it makes sense to offer more flexible cloud client options as an alternative to
the desktop PC. Dell has only owned Wyse since last year, but I can imagine it
would be a good idea for them to offer these same corporate solutions as a means
for families and students to get full-powered PCs as needed, pulling their power
from the cloud. Given time, Dell can apply what they know about designing good
hardware and mobile PCs to Wyse’s already well-working designs, and put together
a solution good not just for the office but the post-PC world at home.

Right now though, the focus is on businesses. Businesses that invest in such
cloud client solutions can find it makes managing and securing those systems
easier for IT, more reliable and simpler for employees, and downright cheaper
when implemented in a way that’s right for every business.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a paid post in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®.

April 29th, 2013 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | no comments



HOW MODERN SOFTWARE IMPROVES MODERN HARDWARE

Since dual core and 64-bit processors started going mainstream, computer users
have had more power than they know what to do with. In fact, they’ve had more
power than their software knows what to do with. To truly take advantage of
major advances in modern processors, modern software is required, all of which
makes the upgrade cycle much more interesting.

Previously, software and hardware advances were less interrelated, and an
advance in one did not advance or require as much the other. Sure, you might
need a faster processor to run a faster version of Windows, or a new game to
push that new graphics card to the limit, but these were questions of pure
speed, not capabilities. It’s analogous to the difference between a faster car
and a self-driving car. A faster car runs faster everywhere, but a self driving
car is just a regular car until you have roads that allow and support the use of
cars that can drive themselves.

The speed race in processors and other pieces of hardware ended years ago. If it
hadn’t, Intel® would be releasing a 15 gigahertz Pentium 4 by now. Instead, you
can buy an off-the-shelf PC today that runs at the same basic speed a PC
released in 2002 could have. The newer PC smokes the old one because while both
processors might be running at 2.2 GHz, the modern one isn’t one processor, it’s
many. A 64-bit processor can run instructions 4 billion times as large as a
32-bit one. A dual core processor is almost like having 2 processors, and a quad
core is twice that. Add in multi-threading, and you have a maching that for all
practical purposes might as well have 4 or 8 2.2 GHz processors.

None of this means anything without the right software. Install an old version
of Windows on the newest, fastest Dell with a 64-bit quad- or six-core chip, and
you might get nothing more than the power of a single logical processor, not the
8-12 logical processors you paid for and would have gotten with a more
up-to-date release. As a result, upgrading your software will often upgrade the
hardware because the powerful hardware you bought years ago pre-dated the
advancements in software required to take advantage of it.

Since we are in the midst of a series examining different modern IT issues, it’s
useful to point out that it used to be that aging software in a corporate
environment was the norm, but that trend has strong reasons to change. Older
hardware is better capable of running modern software than at any time in the
past. Windows 8′s system requirements are “If you could run Windows 7, you can
run Windows 8 faster”. “If you could run Windows Vista, you can run Windows 7
faster”. Efficient operating system design by Microsoft means that a PC from
2006 could run Windows 8 in 2013, some without any upgrades. Business computers
are in fact the most likely to have been more powerful than average when
purchased seven years ago, and more likely to have survived until now, to be
able to make the move to the new OS.

The fact is that while everyone knows that newer hardware is faster than older
hardware, many software developers have been doing such a great job writing apps
that, with each upgrade, run faster than the previous version. Sometimes it’s a
new feature that makes use of the software more productive, but more often these
days it’s better written code and better use of modern hardware and software
capabilities that makes that newer software so much more awesome.

We’ve had amazingly fast computer hardware for a decade at this point. 2013
hardware is faster than 2003 hardware, but 2013 software can run faster on 2003
hardware than 2003 software ever could and draw less electricity while doing it.
We’ve had dual core processors for years, but modern software knows what to do
with it. We’ve had 64-bit processors since the 90s on desktop PCs (and the 70s
in other cases), but if you aren’t running a very up-to-date version of your
favorite software, it isn’t taking advantage of it. In fact, until a couple of
years ago, it was common for systems with 64-bit processors to ship with the
32-bit version of the OS installed for compatibility reasons. Thankfully, that
trend is almost dead.

Businesses have more reasons to perform upgrades, since they can then do more
with the hardware they already have. Windows 8, or the latest Office or
Photoshop can put both cores on your CPU to work (or all four cores or more, as
it were). They can serve up 64-bit instructions to that CPU many times faster
than a 32-bit one would have been. A new OS, in turn, adds APIs and features to
your computer, while new software takes advantage of those additions so that
they, too, can run faster. All of which is why it once you put a price on
productivity, it can often be more expensive to keep the older, slower version
of critical business software than absorbing the cost of the next version.

It’s extremely likely that whatever machine you are using right now, the
software you are running isn’t taking full advantage of its capabilities, and in
some instances, the software needed to take advantage does exist yet. For this
reason, it’s important to look at PC hardware as an investment that can grow
over time. By picking a processor with features that haven’t been fully utilized
yet, you are picking a computer that will only get better with age, like a fine
wine.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a paid post in conjunction with IDG, Dell and Intel®.

April 29th, 2013 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Adobe, Applications, Corporate,
General, IT Series, Mobile, Office, Sponsored, Tablets, Vista, Windows, Windows
7, Windows 8, XP | no comments


IT’S CHALLENGES IN AN EVOLVING MOBILE DEVICE LANDSCAPE

Ten years ago, managing IT in a company was simple. Okay, to be fair, it was
incredibly complex, with enormous tasks facing system administrators, who had to
configure complex computer systems, often with out of date hardware, major
security concerns, and inadequate tools. IT has never had it easy, but there are
very different challenges today, and one of the biggest questions modern IT
departments now face is how to manage the myriad devices users bring into the
corporate environment.

A lot of the more complex traditional challenges of IT, including corporate
servers and security, have been greatly simplified by evolving and more powerful
tools and cloud solutions, and that outdated hardware we all knew and loved has
mostly been replaced by cheaper and more than adequate PCs. Since nature abhors
letting anything become too easy, the void left by those challenges has been
filled by smartphones, tablets, and whatever other strange devices users decide
to plug into the company network.

It used to be that IT could declare mastery of at least the hardware on every
desk. Every PC could be similar, every access point could be locked down, and if
you wanted email, you might be lucky enough to get a Blackberry. The huge
evolutionary leap forward taken by smartphones (and the lack of participation by
the old standard Blackberry in those innovations) meant that a huge percentage
of users now have devices in their pockets that rival those on their desks, and
are upgraded every 18 months. While certainly some organizations are still
fighting that development, forward thinking ones know they can take advantage of
all that power, if they can meet those challenges head on. Plus, who wants to
tell the CEO he can’t use his shiny new iPhone?

With smartphones breaking down the device firewall, other dominoes have fallen.
Laptops outsell desktops now, with tablets pacing to outsell laptops in the near
future. Wifi networks are ubiquitous at modern offices, making it easier to
bring those home devices to work and get some more productive use out of them
(or play Angry Birds during lunch). This means employees can be more efficient,
taking their entire corporate server to meetings, to lunch, to offsite events,
and not be tethered to a desk, leading to more productive meetings, more active
and mobile workforces, and more possibilities for where and how work gets done.

While all of this may sound like a bright future, and for the average employee,
it is. The average IT department, however, faces new questions every day on how
to support the transition from a secure device monoculture to an omni-diverse
free-for-all, where not only can employees have many different devices, but any
employee can walk in with some new and odd device and demand it work with their
usual workflow. In this four part series, we will examine some of these
challenges, and with the help of some suggested solutions from our sponsors,
IDG, Dell and Intel®, show how modern IT departments are and will continue to
handle these challenges and allow users to take advantage of this new world.

April 8th, 2013 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Corporate, General, IT Series,
Mobile, Sponsored, Tablets, Windows, Windows 8 | no comments


SOFTWARE PIRACY MEETS “DATELINE”

Dan sent me this video that parodies Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to
deliver a message about software piracy. Take a look:



The link at the end goes to nopiracy.com, which is just a redirect to the
Business Software Alliance’s page for reporting software piracy.

August 6th, 2009 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General, Humor, Law | one comment


HOW TO INSTALL OUTLOOK CONNECTOR IN OUTLOOK 2010

I had installed Office 2010 last week, and the Outlook Connector installed just
fine. When I reformatted and reinstalled Windows 7 over the weekend and then
installed Office 2010 and got the same error I’ve been reading about all over
the internet. A good number of people are saying they try to install it and get
this error message:

> You should have Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010 installed for the
> connector.

This was driving me nuts, until I figured it out: Last week, when it worked, I
had Outlook 2007 installed, and didn’t after reformatting.

So, I installed a trial of Office 2007, and it worked! Just install Outlook
2007, which you can get here in Office Standard and don’t bother to enter a
product key. Create the Hotmail account in Office 2010, it’ll download and
install the proper version of Outlook Connector automatically, restart Outlook,
and you’re done. Uninstall Outlook 2007 when you’re done.

Thank god I got this to work. It was driving me nuts!

July 21st, 2009 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Applications, Office, Outlook | 5
comments




$10 TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION

I’m completely unable to find an answer (though this Russian forum might have
something), so I’ll give ten bucks via PayPal (or whatever) to the first person
to give me a working answer to this question:

How do I force an ATI X1550 card to output YPrPb signals on VGA under Windows
Vista?

Even if it’s a stupid answer, if it works, I’ll pay you. It’s probably a
registry key, or maybe there’s software, or maybe the Russians know something.
If I have to buy the ATI HDTV dongle, and you can confirm that for me, I’ll give
you five bucks.

Thanks for the assistance.

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | one comment


IS WINDOWS XP SP3 A HUGE MISTAKE?

Microsoft is in the process of testing Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, in
preparation for a wide release, and all indications are that it is a significant
performance improvement for XP. In fact, the performance of XP under SP3 is so
good, that some are saying it makes Windows Vista look like a chump.

It’s already a fact that Windows XP, with a six-year old architecture and tons
of patches to stabilize and protect it, is Windows Vista’s number one
competitor. XP is relatively stable, carries lower requirements, is compatible
with almost everything and is usually already installed on most computers
(except brand new ones). The challenge for Microsoft isn’t so much to prove
Vista is better than Apple’s Mac OS, but that it is better than XP.

Microsoft until now has been challenging the image of XP in the marketplace, but
when SP3 releases, it’ll actually be competing with itself. XP SP3 is an
improvement to an already popular operating system, one that puts a direct shot
across Vista’s bow, and actually sets up the team that developed SP3 as
competition for Windows Vista.

Microsoft’s not stupid. It knows that it is in some ways shooting its own Vista
in the foot with SP3, making Vista’s adoption harder against an improved XP
point release. It would have been dishonest to its customers to cripple XP SP3
just to help Vista, and you can see how much Microsoft has improved in that it
isn’t doing so. An “evil” company certainly would have.

Microsoft is likely counting on two things. Most probably, it will not
significantly market SP3 like it did for Service Pack 2 three years ago. Current
users will get the improvement, but Microsoft won’t encourage people to buy XP
now that it has been improved. Microsoft wants you to get a better XP, but if
you don’t have it, they still want you picking up Vista, which is also getting
an improved Service Pack 1 release.

Besides that, Microsoft is probably hoping the good will from SP3 will encourage
you to keep using Windows. Microsoft is seriously improving an older product at
a significant cost to itself, showing commitment to improving its users
experience at any cost. Microsoft will remind you that Vista will receive the
same commitment, and that Apple charges money for point releases every two
years.

Will it work? SP3 is going to cost Microsoft and Vista in the short run, but in
the long run it could be a huge help for the company. At the least, if you’re
buying XP, you’re still not buying Apple, right?

Photo by doobybrain under CC license

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Apple, General, Vista, Windows,
XP | 5 comments


MSN VIDEO SURGES INTO SECOND PLACE

MSN Video is now the second most popular video brand on the internet, following
a 25.3% traffic surge in October. MSN jumped to 35 million users, giving it 9%
market share, good enough for #2 in an area heavily dominated by Google’s
YouTube. Yahoo is half a percentage point behind Google. If Microsoft can
sustain big gains for a few more months, they could pull away to become the
indisputed top at the “Best of the Rest”.

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | MSN, Soapbox | no comments


IPHONE TO GET POWERPOINT SYNC WITH MAC OFFICE 2008

Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has announced that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
OS will allow iPhone and iPod users to sync with PowerPoint. You will be able to
run PowerPoint slideshows on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Classic and fatty
iPod Nano (any iPod with picture support) if you have a Mac with PowerPoint 2008
and iPhoto (2006 or better).

PowerPoint will connect with iPhoto and export your presentation as a series of
high resolution photos. Those photos will be saved on your hard drive and synced
to your iPhone as photos normally are. Then, you can whip out your iPhone at any
time and show slides from your PowerPoint presentation, or you can even plug the
iPhone/iPod into a TV or projector to run a version of the presentation, minus
the usual animations and transitions.

This via Mary Jo, who mentions that the Exchange sync iPhone users were promised
four months has still not arrived, with no word on when or if it is ever coming.

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Apple, Applications, Office | no
comments


THE “COMPUTER RANDOMLY PLAYS CLASSICAL MUSIC”, ACCORDING TO MICROSOFT SUPPORT

In what has to be first place for “Weirdest Tech Support Article Ever” we have
Microsoft Help and Support Knowledge Base article 261186: Computer Randomly
Plays Classical Music. Apparently, certain Award/Unicore BIOSes from 1997 on and
detection circuits, which would alert you that the processor fan was failing the
power supply voltages had drifted out of tolerance by playing classical music.

What would they play?

Beethoven’s Fur Elise:



And the Sherman Brothers / Disney’s It’s a Small, Small World:



That’s a pretty funny error message, and shows some good humor by the engineers.
Plus, it creates a lot of incentive for the user to get the PC fixed, since who
wouldn’t go crazy and take their PC to be repaired if it played “It’s a Small
World After All” over and over and over and over and….

November 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Humor | 2 comments




IMPORT PDFS INTO MICROSOFT WORD

Microsoft’s Word 2007 has the ability, with a plugin, to save your documents as
PDF files. What it can’t do is import PDFs, but Microsoft’s MMEvents blog lists
two utilities you can use to take a PDF and bring it into Word as an editable
document.

Scansoft’s PDF Converter 4 lets you turn PDFs into fully formatted documents,
forms and spreadsheets that look just like the original, retaining formatting
and graphics. It even imports into WordPerfect, integrates with Word and
Windows, and has a ton of other features for working with PDFs. The software
costs $50 for download and requires Windows 2000 or better and works with Word
2000 through 2007.

Able2Doc 4.0 PDF to Word Converter also costs $50 and performs very quick
conversions, and it has a free trial. They also have the more versatile
Able2Extract PDF Converter 5.0, which can convert PDFs to Word, Excel,
Powerpoint, HTML, text and more, for $100.

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Adobe, Applications, Office,
Word | no comments


OFFICE MOBILE 6.1 RELEASED; ADDS OFFICE 2007 SUPPORT

Office Mobile 6.1, the new version of Microsoft Office for Windows Mobile
devices, has been released, and you can download it free right now for Windows
Mobile 5.0 or 6 phones or PDAs. The new version brings, most importantly,
support for Office 2007 Open XML file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Also, it adds:

 * Enhanced viewing experience for charts in Excel Mobile.
 * Ability to view SmartArt in PowerPoint Mobile.
 * Ability to view and extract files from compressed (.zip) folders.

You’ll need 6 megabytes of space on your device or storage card to install.
(via Robert McLaws)

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Applications, Office | no
comments


WINDOWS LIVE MESSENGER 9 AVAILABLE IN CLOSED BETA

Windows Live Messenger 9′s beta has begun, with beta testers getting access to
the software on Microsoft Connect. If you applied for the beta, check your email
or check Connect to see if you’ve been accepted. Here are some screenshots of it
someone leaked out:









The middle screenshots show off the new feature, which allows you to be signed
in to your account on multiple computers at the same time. You can even click to
sign yourself out of a remote computer from any computer, which is very
convenient.

The last screenshot shows off another new feature, which lets you import custom
sounds to associate with each of your friends when they log in. Not only can you
choose from a list of sounds, you can select a five second sample from any music
file on your computer to use that as the sound. The interface for choosing the
sample is so clean and simple, I feel it should be integrated into the operating
system for all programs to use to manipulate music and video clips.

Also, apparently Live Messenger is dropping Verizon Web Calling for VoIP calls,
replacing it with a service to be announced later.

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Messenger, Windows | 2
comments


HAPPY 22ND BIRTHDAY, WINDOWS!

Microsoft Windows turned 22 years old last week. Amazing, the idea of any series
of software product lasting over two decades, but Windows 1.0 was released
November 20, 1985, and after several lousy initial versions, hit respectability
with Windows 3.0/3.1 and mass popularity with Windows 95.

I’d hardly argue that the Mac operating system has lasted as long, but rather
that the original Mac OS lasted from 1984-2001, and that the current OS is a
younger six years old. That’s not necessarilly a bad thing, but it’s important
to seperate Mac OS 9 and X as two products that share a brand name and used to
share a lot more compatibility than they do now. Windows started out as a GUI
over DOS that could run its own executables, and while evolving over time never
cut off the previous generation completely.

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Apple, Windows | one comment


XBOX 360 BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY UPDATED

The Xbox 360 continues to get more backwards compatibility updates, this one
adding a lot of new games from the original Xbox that will now run on the 360.
This update adds 84 news games, bringing the total to 465:

2006 Fifa World Cup Germany
25 to Life
AMF Bowling 2004
Apex
Arena Football
Armed and Dangerous
Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance
Batman Rise of Sin Tzu
Bionicle
Blade II
Blinx: The Timesweeper
Blitz The League
Blood Omen 2
Blowout
Breakdown
Burnout 2: Point of Impact
Cabelas Dangerous Hunts 2
Championship Manager 2006
Colin Mcrae Rally 2005
Crime Life: Gang Wars
Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2
Dungeons& Dragons Heroes
ESPN College Hoops 2k5
ESPN NFL 2k5
Fantastic 4
FIFA 06 Soccer
Fight Night: Round 3
Final Fight: Streetwise
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone
Freedom Fighters
Freestyle Street Soccer
Future Tactics: The Uprising
Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee
Godzilla Save the Earth
Goldeneye Rogue Agent
Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball Max’d
High Heat MLB 2004
Hunter: The Reckoning
Indiana Jones And The Emperors Tomb
MLB Slugfest Loaded
MVP Baseball 2003
MVP Baseball 2004
MVP Baseball 2005
Nascar Thunder 2002
Nascar Thunder 2003
NBA 2k3
NBA Ballers
NBA Inside Drive 2002
NBA Street V3
NCAA College Basketball 2k3
NCAA March Madness 2005
NCAA March Madness 2006
NFL 2k2
NFL 2k3
NHL 2005
NHL 2K3
NHL Hitz Pro
Nightcaster: Defeat The Darkness
NTRA Breeders Cup: World Thoroughbred Championships
Playboy The Mansion
RLH Hunt or be Hunted
Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown
Rocky
Rugby 2006
Shattered Union
Shrek Super Party
Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter
Starsky & Hutch
Syberia II
Techmo Classic Arcade
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
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Thrillville
Tom and Jerry in War of the Whiskers
Turok: Evolution
Van Helsing
WarPath
Worms 3D
Zathura

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Xbox, Xbox 360 | no comments


LIVE SPACES TOPS DOWNTIME REPORT

Pingdom tracked 12 top social networking sites from October 19 to November 19,
and found that Microsoft’s Live Spaces had the most downtime, with the site
failing to respond for a total of three hours over the course of the month. By
contrast, that’s more than Facebook (10 minutes), MySpace (10), Bebo (30),
LiveJournal (40) and Orkut (85) combined, and worst on the list.

Number one was Yahoo 360, but that service was so unpopular it’s being closed,
so I suspect the zero minutes of downtime can be attributed to zero server load.



November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Live, Spaces, Windows | one
comment


HOTMAIL FOUNDER WANTS MICROSOFT TO SUE HIM

Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail (which he sold to Microsoft) is now trying
to take on Microsoft Office and Google Docs, launching an online office suite.
While that in and of itself is a perfectly fine (albeit difficult) project,
Sabeer’s methods are surprisingly self-destructive. His Live Documents site (a
name that makes you think of Microsoft’s Office Live) uses Office 2007′s
“Ribbon” interface, designed in Flex, to power document editing, spreadsheets
and presentations.

The interface is a near-copy of the one in Office 2007, just with less features,
containing the same colors and structure. Microsoft does allow other software
developers to use the Ribbon for free and without permission, but the only real
rule is that they can’t use it for programs that compete with Microsoft Office.
Bhatia is tempting a lawsuit, considering he ignored the guidelines set by
Microsoft, and I don’t envy his position.

There is some good stuff, like a plugin that synchronizes documents between
Office and Live Docs, and makes it easy to upload, but I wouldn’t rely on a
website that is destined to be sued into oblivion. Unless Bhatia is trying to
get bought out by Microsoft, Live Documents doesn’t seem set for a long life.
(via Amit)

November 28th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Applications, Office | 3
comments


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