As somebody who was on the pointy end of Microsoft’s competitive activities for many years and responsible for a lot of marketshare analysis (and explaining it to Microsoft exec’s) I have always admired and respected Apple. If I had to explain “why” I guess it would look something like this:

• Hardware design and useability innovation
• Passionate user community
• Tech media love to talk about them 
• Relatively simple product line-up
• Ability to redefine and then “own” existing product categories

So I found last week’s iPad announcement interesting for several reasons…

Firstly, Apple were, I believe, bitten by months of iPad over-hype. While they have benefitted from free publicity in the past I suspect that right now there is a team of PR people in Cupertino working out how they do a better job of managing it next time around because, as they have discovered, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Secondly, the iPad is, aesthetically, substantially ahead of existing category products - tablet and slate PC’s - from OEM’s such as HP, Dell and Toshiba. Based on Apple’s track record, this isn’t surprising but I suspect that there are engineers and designers at the aforementioned OEM’s who are already working on designs which are a lot more iPad-like. It’s important to understand that those engineers don’t have to start from scratch, they just need to make existing hardware more iPad-like.

So this is where things get interesting…

In a couple of classic cases in the not-too-distant past, Apple’s offerings have – as defined by customer demand - been perceived as substantially more attractive than existing technologies and therefore completely changed what many people thought, at the time, were stable product categories:

• the iPod - which re-defined the existing MP3 player category
• the iPhone - which did the same for smartphones

In both cases existing vendors were caught flat-footed and have scrambled to catch up. In fact I think it’s even bigger than this - the MP3 category is effectively now “iPod and others” and the smartphone is now “iPhone and others”. So, given past successes, it’s not surprising Apple have chosen the “category re-invention” strategy again however I believe things are slightly different this time around in that:

• Apple have innovated the hardware but not the software (sorry, it is a big iPhone)
• PC OEM’s have performance-superior hardware in market today
• PC OEM’s now know what their product needs to look like (i.e. an iPad)
• Windows 7 provides the multi-touch OS such devices require

I therefore have a suspicion Apple will find this a somewhat different battle.

They have certainly re-ignited interest in the slate/tablet category, which the major PC OEM’s have not focused on for the last few years. The lead Apple currently has is primarily an ergonomic one backed up by the amazing delivery/lock-in/experience mechanism which is iTunes (disclaimer: I think the Windows iTunes client is appalling piece of software but the iTunes/App Store business model and the experience on iPod’s and iPhones is innovative and well-implemented). So…

Assuming that the HP’s, Toshibas and Dells of this world can make their hardware more aesthetically-acceptable (i.e. iPad-like) and assuming that there is a latent demand for iPad-like devices (I believe there is) I think the next 12 to 24 months will see a lot of innovation in this space and an explosion of new usage scenarios and opportunities. I can’t pick a winner but I can predict it will be a fascinating game to watch unfold in real-time.

I suspect somebody will invent an application to track all of the above. It will be interesting to see if Apple will let them deliver it via the App Store  :-)

Windows 7 was released to Microsoft’s volume licensing customers with Software Assurance on August 7th and Gavrielle Schuster has written an interesting blog post detailing several large-scale Windows 7 deployments which have already been completed and case studied. The three customers involved are:

Baker Tilly (Professional Services - UK): 2,200 users
City of Miami (Local Government - US): 2,235 users
Getronics (IT Services - Netherlands): 14,300 users

What caught my eye were the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings which have been directly attributed to Windows 7:

• Direct cost savings of IT labor dedicated to PC management are expected to be in the range of $89-160 per PC annually. That means IT Pros are saving up to two hours per desktop annually. For companies with several thousand PCs, this frees up a lot of valuable time, allowing IT departments to focus on more mission critical efforts and support their business more efficiently.
• Overall, the $70-$160 in savings per PC annually represents reduction of IT labor costs ranging from a 10-20%. For example, Baker Tilly has been able to re-focus their IT force on strategic projects and estimates they’ll save 18% on PC management costs.
• Companies are realizing power savings with Windows 7 that add to the direct savings in IT Labor. For example, the City of Miami estimates their expected power savings alone ($54 per PC per year) justifies their Windows 7 deployment.
• City of Miami also expects to save big on service desk costs. Previously, the city IT staff had to physically travel to the PC user’s location to resolve support issues. Windows 7 has advanced capabilities such as Remote Desktop, which now help the IT staff to diagnose and resolve issues remotely, saving both travel time and end-user downtime. Built-in features like the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) have been described as a “nugget of gold in the operating system.” Specifically, PSR helps users communicate problems to the service desk, reducing the need to dispatch technicians to user locations by as much as 90%.

Windows 7 is one part of a much bigger Desktop Infrastructure Optimisation picture. If you’re interested in reading more about Desktop IO I recommend this whitepaper as a great starting point.

Gray Knowlton notes in his latest blog post that the Compatibility Pack has now reached the 100 million download mark. This is an amazing number given that every download is manually initiated (i.e. it’s not pushed down automatically via Windows Update) and the total doesn’t take into account companies downloading one copy and then rolling it out to thousands of PC’s. Also of interest in the post is Gray’s analysis of the growth of the Open XML formats versus ODF (which are displayed in the table to the left). There’s a long way to go until the open format numbers surpass the binary format numbers but good progress is being made.

I have been doing some not-very-scientific research with regard to running Windows 7 on older desktop and notebook hardware and I have been pleasantly surprised with the results. In particular it’s running very nicely on my 3 year old, low-end Compaq PC with only 512MB of shared RAM. I was therefore pleased to see that others have been doing similar experimentation, in particular Michael Scalisi at PC World who has published a very informative article on the topic. The final sentence is worth quoting:

“However, if you have a computer that is newer and more capable than my worst-case-scenario tester, I recommend doing a little research to make sure drivers are available for your hardware. If all checks out, your computer is ready to run Windows 7”

Whether you’re a small business owner or the CIO of a large multi-national company (or somewhere in-between) I strongly recommend you grab the Windows 7 Release Candidate and start looking into whether Windows 7 will run on your existing hardware. Like me, you might be pleasantly surprised.

The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is an initiative led by Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OGDI uses the Azure Services Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ (coming soon) with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API's. OGDI-based web API’s can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc.

Whether you are a business wishing to use government data, a government developer, or a ‘citizen developer’, these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications, visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to government information. This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources for writing applications using the OGDI API's.

DaVinci is a Microsoft Surface-based Physics Simulator. The blurb on the site says “DaVinci is a prototype/experiment that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual world by combining object recognition, real-world physics simulation and gestural interface design on Microsoft Surface” but that doesn’t come close to getting the concept or “wow factor” across. I highly recommend you take 5 minutes and 47 seconds out of your day to watch this.

The Windows team have announced that Windows 7 will include a “Windows XP Mode” designed to help those businesses with legacy application requirements to more easily move to Windows 7. This is great news for for the obvious application compatibility reasons but it also helps businesses who might be concerned about mainstream support ending for Windows XP. They did a great job of keeping this under wraps – the first I heard about it was when Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera blogged about it late last week.

One of Microsoft New Zealand’s goals is to substantially increase the amount of software we donate each year to charitable organisations. Up until a year or so back the request and approval process was somewhat manual and we were becoming frustrated at how long it was taking us to review and approve requests.

The frustration was due to the fact that we were dealing with a large – and increasing - number of applications and the complexity of processing them meant we weren’t able to donate software anywhere near as quickly as we wanted to. Fortunately we weren’t the only subsidiary in that position and the decision was made in Redmond to appoint a third party to manage this process for us on a worldwide basis. That organisation is TechSoup.

The good news is that TechSoup are doing a great job for us here in New Zealand as you can see from the graph above. The specific numbers are:

• Aug 07 – Feb 08 approx NZD 827,088 of software donated to 55 charitable organisations
• Aug 08 – Feb 09 approx NZD 2,050,200 of software donated to 178 charitable organisations

At the current rate, we’re averaging $292,886 worth of software donations to 25 organisations each and every month. Looking at it another way, YTD donations have more than doubled and the number of organisations we’ve donated to has more than trebled. But…

… we think we can do even better than that and I would love for you to help prove us right

If you are involved in a charitable organisation and would like to apply for a software donation please head to the TechSoup NZ site and click on the “Getting Started” link to start the process. I’ll post an update in a few months to let you know how we’re tracking.

One of the best things about working for Microsoft is that (a) we have lots of competitors and (b) I get to be involved in lots of competitive situations. There will always be an opportunity for us to improve what we do and one of the best ways to figure those things out is by competitive engagement. Nothing focuses the mind like a good win or loss :-)  So it upsets me greatly when I see an IT department wasting time and effort on ‘science experiments’ rather than an intelligent way of supporting and delivering value to the business which pays their salaries:

“How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we've figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We're not looking for kiosk mode — we're looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?”

source: Slashdot

I could paraphrase the above as “we in the IT department really hate Microsoft so we’re willing to waste inordinate amounts of time looking into non-viable – or even non-existent – solutions if it means we can remove all Microsoft technology from our environment. Sure the end result might be expensive, flaky, bleeding edge, difficult to support and perform badly (especially once we’ve left this company in search of the next science experiment) but it’s all about our ideology”.

I’m sure the CEO and/or business owner would be rapt.

From my perspective there is nothing more exciting and energising that getting involved in a competitive situation with an IT department who is intent on delivering value to their business. The person who wrote the query above doesn’t work for one of those.

Does s/he work for your company ?

The BBC are reporting an interview with Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, in which she makes some insightful comments about the slow erosion of civil liberties in the UK. Included in the BBC report are these data points from civil liberties group ‘Liberty’:

• Government plans for a giant database to record the times, dates and recipients of all emails and text messages sent and phone calls made in the UK
• The growth of Britain's DNA database - it is now the world's largest, per head of population, with samples from some 4m people
• The use by councils of laws designed to track criminals and terrorists to spy on ordinary citizens. In one case a family was watched to see if they were really living in a school catchment area
• The spread of CCTV cameras. Britain now reportedly has some 4m, the highest density in western Europe
• Proposals for "secret inquests," excluding relatives, juries and the media, which the government says would prevent intelligence details leaking out

Combine all of that with the topsy-turvy world economy where governments are increasingly becoming majority shareholders in key financial institutions and, if you squint a little and extrapolate a lot, you can almost just about kind of see East Germany 2.0. Of course this version will have new, improved features such as lip-reading CCTV cameras but they (hopefully) won’t have Trabants  :-)

It’s moments like these that remind me just easy it can be for the freedoms we take for granted to be gradually eroded over time, often in the name of ‘security’ and mostly by people whose ‘hearts were in the right place’.

Wendell Phillips’ quotation that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ is as true now as it was when he said it back in 1852. What worries me is that there appears to be people in positions of power who are under the mistaken impression that “surveillance” and “vigilance” are synonyms.

Update 20Feb09: while driving to work this morning I heard a radio news item which mentioned that UK Police are requesting all pubs and clubs to install CCTV cameras and that the cameras must be positioned in such a way as to ensure that a full facial picture is taken of each customer. They are also demanding access to the CCTV files as and when required. Apparently failing to comply with this ‘request’ will result in the local police branch not supporting the publican / club owner’s application for renewal of their liquor license. When I wrote this post the title was written with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Now I’m not so sure.

Image credit: Banksy