July 2009 - Posts

more food for thought
23 July 09 06:48 PM | ronaldg

and as a follow-on to the last post, here’s an article (link below) from a ComputerWorld writer, who by his own admission is “not Microsoft's greatest fan”.  He basically makes the same general point as Ed Bott, that many of the bloggers and tech new folks did shoddy reporting around the ScriptLogic survey.  In fact, this author says: “any middle schooler can tell you that eWeek's headline ‘Microsoft Windows 7 Will be Skipped by 6 in 10 Companies, Says Survey’ is at best an illogical conclusion, at worst a flat-out lie, and at minimum poor reporting.”  Well, the illogical conclusion and poor reporting were pretty much what I was getting at in my previous post, but he even went a little further with the middle schooler and lie comments -- but sadly, the fact that such a preponderance of the reports and articles jumped on that negative skew belies an unfortunate state in a significant part of the trade press these days IMHO.

If you have a minute, you might even read this article, it’s not long and he makes some interesting points.  [ComputerWorld article] Opinion: Windows 7, FUD and slow news days 

And, in case you don’t read it or might have missed it, one of the more interesting points that’s not obvious, but nonetheless pretty important, revolves around this (aspect of the original survey): [from article] “But had any of' them actually said they were going to skip Windows 7? If they did, you can't tell from the questions that were asked.“  In fact, the survey only mentioned the respondents intentions by the end of 2010, which is only 15 months after the general availability of Win7.  As this author also points out, to extrapolate that to mean the these folks were “skipping” Windows 7 altogether is just plain wrong.  I’ll even go so far as to say that, in all likelihood, those who were holding off on Windows 7 were also most likely folks who didn’t adopt XP until 2-3 years after it’s release, but as he states, no one asked those kinds of clarifying question.  I would point out, unlike most others, that this is conjecture on my part, and I have no specific data to back up my claim, but I would also hope that there’s a certain level inherent credibility to my hypothesis – I think it would take far more faith to believe that folks who adopted XP and Vista early would then “pass” on Windows 7, but the actually survey doesn’t allow us that level of insight in any event.  But as I’ve said in many previous posts it’s up to you to make the call on who or what you believe.  I’m just hoping you see the massive opportunity that Windows 7 represents, despite the press misinterpretations, and put yourself in a good position to take advantage of it, for yourselves and for your customers.

As before, my main point isn’t primarily to cast aspersions at all the folks who blog and report with a jaded or at least parochial (and often anti-MS) point of view, but to continue to alert my audience to the fact that just because someone has a byline and a large forum doesn’t always mean that they know whereof they speak, so please apply copious “grains of salt” to much of the Windows negativism you see and hear out of these presumed “pundits”. 

This author ends his article with the following, so I’ll end with this as well.  “But as someone who has been doing this stuff for over half my life, skipped Vista without any regrets, but conducted an in-depth review of Windows 7 for deployment in my organization, I personally can't wait to replace XP with Windows 7. I can at least confirm that in my organization, it will save a lot of time and personnel resources over supporting XP. If your organization is primarily Windows-based and your director or CIO puts a ‘6 in 10 skipping Win 7’ article in front of you as some sort of bolstering argument for not at least doing a proper shakedown of Windows 7, arm yourself with the facts.”  Given this statement, and considering the source, I’m hoping you are now even more aware of why I believe Win7 will be the massive opportunity I alluded to earlier.

Some food for thought
22 July 09 01:51 PM | ronaldg

And you may be looking down the page and thinking this is about Office 2010, but WAIT!   I was just reading an article on Office 2010 that was giving a look into the new BackStage feature.  I’ve paraphrased the article below (since it’s interesting, and many of you probably haven’t seen much of Office 2010 yet).  But what struck me, and why I’m writing this isn’t because of Office 2010 or the BackStage feature but because of something that was revealed in the 3rd paragraph of the excerpt below “Perhaps most importantly…”  Read the last half of Para3 - “For downward compatibility reasons, Print Preview has had to rely on the old GDI framework, mainly because so many customers continue to use old printers whose drivers required GDI. It was the only way older printers could provide renderings of previewed contents on-screen”.  WOW, let’s read between the lines and consider what that reveals.  Just a couple of posts ago, I waxed eloquent (Ok, so I just wrote a post) on the “unlevel playing field” that we share with the MAC platform.  If there ever was a good, if not great, example of that, I think this might be it.  So here’s my food for thought --

MAC has the “innovation” halo going for it and basically everything it does seems to be considered magical or at least innovative (even when they actually copy someone else, and I did a post on that sometime back as I recall).  And, by the same token, MS has always suffered under the opposite perception, but this isn’t about whining about perceptions (I’ve done plenty of that on other posts, huh).  What I want to point out here is that this a prime example of a case where we were ready to innovate and put out some better technology BUT, thanks to the unlevel playing field, where we have to deal with an extraordinary universe of OEM hardware and drivers that we have little control over (that MAC doesn’t have to contend with), we were actually in essence forced to stay with a legacy technology or run the risk of alienating a significant portion of our legacy user base.  And I’m certain most of you are very familiar with what happens when we finally do release new and better technology that doesn’t accommodate all those folks – the vast majority of all the Vista negativity was around app compat and driver compat and availability.  OK, so what I hope you get out of this is just another insight into the fact that sometimes (if not many times), our apparent failure to “innovate” is driven more by the limits of the unlevel playing field than by any other factor.  I found it interesting that I didn’t even know about this aspect of the print functionality, and the limits it imposed, and I’m pretty certain that a great number of you were unaware as well.  So, again, the point here is try and give you insight and proof points around the Microsoft platform that help you understand some of the many constraints we’re forced to operate under that the average John Q Public is completely oblivious to (which doesn’t stop some of them from expressing their uninformed opinions), and also help you with some counterpoints to make if you ever have to make the case for why Microsoft is the best technology to bet on if you’re a forward looking person.

the following is an excerpt from the article: (Top 5 obvious feature enhancements to Microsoft Office 2010)

1. BackStage. One of the mo obvious visual changes in Office 2007 was the "Office button", whose functionality replaced the old File menu. Back then the official word on the change was that it was done “so folks could find it easier”.

Well, it should come as no shock that that probably wasn't the real reason. In any event, for Office 2010, the “button” has be re-designed. It is prominent, but it cohabits the ribbon menu, and resumes a rectangular shape as originally seen in the Office 12 prototypes. Behind it is a new feature called BackStage. Essentially it's designed to gather together all the file and document management functions in one complete, large window. The File > Open and File > Save functions are relocated here, and the previews are large enough that they're not really "thumbnails" any more.

Perhaps most importantly, BackStage incorporates the long neglected feature known as Print Preview. There has been a technical reason why Print Preview in all Office applications behaves like a 1986 model application: For downward compatibility reasons, Print Preview has had to rely on the old GDI framework, mainly because so many customers continue to use old printers whose drivers required GDI. It was the only way older printers could provide renderings of previewed contents on-screen, and even though Microsoft itself came up with better printing technologies years ago, there were still too many customers hanging on to old devices.

The new Print Preview features will be incorporated directly into BackStage, so users aren't effectively launching separate applications (which is literally what happens now) every time they want to preview what they're about to print. Instead, print previews will show up like document load previews, and controls will be much richer and more functional. For many businesses that rely on Word, the new Print Preview may be the feature which justifies the upgrade.

If you’d like to know more about this new feature, check out: The Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering Blog

An absolute MUST READ!!
15 July 09 02:30 PM | ronaldg

I wanted to highlight this post for 2 reasons: 1) I wanted to announce that yours truly has left TS2 after 6+ years on that team and I’m moving to a new role in the Microsoft Partner Program (which btw, has just been renamed, Microsoft Partner Network) as a Partner Training Planner (aka Learning Advisor).  So I’ll still be working in the Partner space, but in a different capacity now; AND 2) I just ran across a GREAT article by Ed Bott that I truly believe is a MUST READ.

Here’s the link to Ed’s article: The echo chamber misreads another Windows 7 survey

Those of you who read my blog consistently know that I like Ed Bott, he seems to have the best overall perspective (most objective) on Microsoft technology (like Paul Thurrott) and also gives out some very good technical info (also like P.T.).  I’ve learned quite a bit from many of his articles – he was one of the ones to give some very useful info about which processors support hardware virtualization among other things, and he also did a great article highlighting some of the updates from Win7 Beta to RC, just to point out a few.   In this particular article, Ed makes a very compelling case that really highlights the negative [press] bias against MS and, of course, you likely know that this whole negative perception thing (which is amplified by the negative press bent) is a major soapbox issue for me (and the focus of my “you make the call” posts).  I sincerely hope you read, or have already read, his article, so I won’t spend time regurgitating it here.  But I would like to point out a couple of highlights.

Here’s the intro for the report from the download page:

“The primary goal of this survey was to assess the impact of the weak economy on IT infrastructure projects and we found that, despite its impact on short-term plans, 41% of organizations [emphasis in original] plan a wholesale migration to Windows 7 by the end of 2010. This is actually a strong adoption rate when compared to the historical adoption rate of Windows XP in its first year which was cited as 12-14%. [emphasis added]

Furthermore, in ScriptLogic’s primary market segment it is usual for businesses to upgrade operating systems piecemeal as they purchase new desktop hardware, so the fact that nearly half of organizations surveyed are planning major rollouts during 2009-2010 indicates a high acceptance of Windows 7 among small and medium businesses. [emphasis added]”

So Ed then points out a whole bevy of articles (shown below) that, instead of focusing on the facts and intent of the report (which was to show an expected extraordinary adoption rate for win7), actually, and obviously purposefully, take the report’s info and cast it in not just a negative way by focusing on the non-adoption number, but add on their own additional negative spin (“prepares to yawn” and “Post-traumatic Vista syndrome”) in their attempt to add insult to injury if you will.  WOW, if that doesn’t give you some sense of where all the negative (and inaccurate) perception is being generated, then I’m guessing you’ll continue to be victimized by these folks.  The real shame here isn’t so much that they don’t like MS or that they always have to take the negative approach to anything MS, but that they’re actually doing their readership a disservice IMHO in that, in this in particular, they’ve actually missed the significance of this report and it’s info and are actually leading their audience to a wrong conclusion.  Re-read the intro above if you don’t follow me here.  The accurate conclusion (and intent of the report) has to be that Windows 7 adoption rate will be significantly higher (approx 3X) than even XP in it’s first year (and this despite the impact of a “weak economy”).

• Reuters, “Six in 10 companies plan to skip Windows 7: survey”
• PC World: “Does Anybody Want Windows 7? Most IT Pros Say “No””
• Electronista: “60% of businesses to avoid Windows 7”
• Computerworld: “Survey: 6 in 10 companies to skip Windows 7”
• Daily Finance: “As Microsoft prepares to release Windows 7, tech world prepares to yawn”
• All Things Digital: “Six in Ten Businesses Suffering From Post-Traumatic Vista Syndrome”
• Information Week Weblog: “Windows 7 A No-Go For Business, Survey Says”
• CNET News: “Survey: Many businesses plan to skip Windows 7”
• BusinessWire.com: “ScriptLogic Corporation Survey Reveals that 60 Percent of IT Administrators Do Not Plan to Deploy Microsoft Windows 7”

So my main point in all of this is severalfold.  I want my readership to be aware of this report, and what it truly indicates about WIn7 adoption, and not be mislead by the preponderance of negatively spun articles around it and thus come to the wrong conclusion.  Secondly, since many of you are partners, I want you to realize that this means a boatload of opportunity for you in sales and services in the coming months and years, so if you haven’t already started “ramping up” on Win7, now would be a better time than later (and btw it should be RTM’ing within the next few weeks).  And, lastly, just wanted to point out that you should not only read this report but perhaps download it and use it in your marketing toolkit to show some of your more consistent late adopters that, especially with Win7 since it leverages the now proven [secure and reliable] Vista platform, it’s no longer necessary to wait until SP1 before beginning your move to current technology.  And, btw, it’s the survey results here that the central issue here, so here’s the link Windows 7 Survey Results (by ScriptLogic), but I also want to highlight their associated WhitePaper at the following link: Featured White Paper: The Proactive Migration to Windows 7 with ScriptLogic.  And, I might add, I just did a quick scan of the WhitePaper and it appears to be a pretty comprehensive “cookbook” for how to do a Win7 migration – I suggest you take a look at it if you don’t already a tried/tested migration methodology.

To close, I’ll do a pull-quote from Ed’s post that I thought was particularly clever and apropos:  “For today’s jaded technical press and pundits, anything less than 100% adoption, overnight, is a colossal failure. Which is kind of like saying that this year’s Star Trek was a flop because 268 million Americans didn’t go see it.”