Connecting the dots ...
Being an early beta user has its perks – a particular service I’ve been using and like just came out of beta, and decided to reward me with $200 credit against future fees. Now comes the really good part:
“Your current … charges come to $0 per month. With the current …. you have, your credits should last for 9223372036854775807 months from now on.”
Life is good. And around month 9223372036854775805 we’ll re-negotiate, shall we?
Should the embedded video not play, watch it here.
(hat tip: Christopher Carfi)
Should the embedded video not play, watch it here.
After glass-bottom boats, here’s the first (?) glass-bottom bridge: the Grand Canyon Skywalk is scheduled to open later this month. The amazing 1.07 million pound structure extends about 75 feet over the rim and about 4,000 feet over the canyon floor. It’s designed to withstand 100 mph winds and has shock absorbers to keep the walkway from wobbling as people walk through.
Tours will cost $25. Prior to the public opening there will be a “First Walk” event for media and VIPs. The name of the first public figure to step on The Skywalk will be announced closer to the opening. Hm, I think they should invite somebody named … Luke. 
I might as well have titled this post Radar Delay – first it was due last Friday, as part of series of reviews leading up to the Under the Radar: Office 2.0 event, but then fellow Enterprise Irregular Rod Boothby posted an “extra” article the same day, so I decided to wait till Tuesday. Yes that was yesterday, the day when Comcast, my ISP ironically responded to my push for On-Demand with a service outage.
But first things first: Web-based products received a surprise promotion from an unexpected source: Microsoft. As Phil Wainewright says on ZDNet:
“It’s astonishing that in the midst of a serious challenge from a new generation of Web-native office suites, Microsoft should give its rivals a helping hand by handicapping its own product so badly that it performs worse than an online product on a slow dial-up line.”
He is referring to the Outlook 2007 meltdown several users experienced:
“You’d think I had just sprayed the inside of my poor mega-laptop with saltwater to induce non-stop fritzing. I’ve learned to meditate while Outlook ruminates over ten incoming POP messages of 69K. Perhaps it takes a few seconds over each incoming message or RSS feed to contribute to solving a Grand Challenge. Or it and Desktop Search have to play 333 iterations of rock-paper-scissors everytime a change has to be written“
You can hardly accuse the above user with anti-Microsoft bias, since he is none other than Mini-Microsoft, who is obsessed with fixing Microsoft, the company. The Guardian, Dennis Howlett, Jason Busch, Tim Anderson, Chris Pirillo, Dan Farber, Phil Wainewright had similar experiences. Phil asks:
“But is it an even better fix to abandon Outlook and Exchange altogether and switch to an on-demand alternative?
My answer is a loud YES, and I’m making my point in Desktop Software: A Failed Model. Of course glitches occur in the On-Demand world, too, as we just witnessed Google Apps collapse soon after the announcement. We’re not quite there yet, but I share Rod Boothby’s view that we have passed a tipping point: while 2 years ago the ideal mix would have been desktop computing with additional online access, now I feel as a user I am better off mostly working online, with occasional offline access.
A somewhat doubtful friend, who happens to be the CEO of a cool company making web-based products sent this question:
“Do you really think people will use Word processors (in any significant number) through their web browser? “
Yes, I really do think, but why believe me? Listen to a US Government Agency instead: FAA May Ditch Microsoft’s Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo.
Some of the Under the Radar “Graduate Circle” sponsors posted significant news recently:
Talk about user base, Nielsen/NetRatings issued a press release claiming that Google Docs and Spreadsheets dominate web-based productivity tools since October, with a market share of 92 percent of unique visitors. Ismael Ghalimi did some research and proved them wrong concluding that Google’s market share may be closer to 50%. His take:
“It is actually quite amazing that companies like ThinkFree and Zoho, with their ridiculously small marketing budgets, can play in the same league as mighty Google.”
Ismael is the creator of last years successful Office 2.0 Conference, and he is already preparing for Office 2.0 2007. But that’s in September – first we’ll have an exciting full-day conference:
Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters on March 23rd, in Mountain View, CA. Here’s the updated agenda and a list of presenting companies:
Approver | Blogtronix | Brainkeeper | Cogenz | ConceptShare | ConnectBeam | Diigo | EditGrid | Firestoker | InvisibleCRM | Koral | Longjump | Mashery | My Payment Network | Proto Software | Scrybe | Sitekreator | Slideaware | Smartsheet | Spresent | Stikkit | System One | Terapad | Teqlo | TimeSearch Inc. (Calgoo) | Tungle | Vyew | WorkLight | Wrike | Wufoo | Xcellery
The Conference is put up by DealMaker Media, which was until recently known as IBDNetwork. (Too bad I missed their Launch Party.)
Hope to see you there!
Update (3/09): Passing the baton to Stowe Boyd, here’s his Relay post.
Little (?) Shop of Horrors in New York: a group of NYU students created Botanicalls, an innovative project which “establishes a way for thirsty plants to effectively communicate their needs to humans – by placing phone calls to their owners.
Utilizing moisture sensors – which are attached to the plants – as well as an open-source telephony application called Asterisk, the programmed software triggers Asterisk to call a designated number whenever a plant needs watering.”
For now they are only calling …
(Full story here)
Update (3/20): Botanicalls’s is getting picked up by O’Reilly Radar and BL Ochman.
Tom Foremski points to a recent IDC study over at Silicon Valley Watcher: IDC: We face a looming crisis – we won’t have anywhere to store hundreds of exabytes of data.
The title says it all. According to IDC’s estimates, the world will produce 988 exabytes of data in 2010 – but only 601 exabytes of storage will be available.
Oops, if this is true, I’m in trouble with my push for on-demand.
But somehow I’m not worried:
Something does not compute.
(Disclaimer: I have not seen the original report, only secondary sources, like the AP news item referred above)
Update (3/06): It’s worth pointing out that the move to an on-demand model will actually reduce storage requirements: since we work natively online, it will be easier to share / link, we don’t have to send redundant copies of the same file.
Tags: storage, data storage, idc, research, analysts
I’ve been planning this post for quite awhile, when a disastrous McAfee update over the weekend pushed it to top priority. However, Phil Wainewright beat me to it in DST spells disaster for shrinkwrap software. He describes the nightmare scenario: lots of businesses fail when they miss appointments due to bungled patches, or patches just applied in the wrong order. (Update: ZDNet already talks about meltdown.) I couldn’t agree more with his conclusion:
“It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of the absurdity of customer-installed and operated software than the fast-approaching catastrophe of DST” (emphasis mine)
I fully agree, but let me take it a step further: consumers, not only businesses are in the same shoes, and it’s high time for us to rethink this “absurd model”.
For me the last drop was the bungled McAfee update that happened in the background, without me touching anything, as it should…. except that first I experienced email scan failures on send, then other applications shut down, finally I lost wireless connection, all in a course of a few days. Seemingly unrelated issues; one might think of removing recently installed “suspicious” software, doing a system restore, reinstalling windows, getting the wireless hardware checked..etc. As it turned out, a McAfee module was corrupted, it caused apps to misbehave and WinXP to turn on Windows Firewall (I normally have it off, since McAfee takes care of it), which in turn blocked my wireless connection. I’ll spare you the ugly details, but I wasted a good half day on fixing it. I feel I should send an invoice for my time, but McAfee would just laugh it off.
However, the above story is not at all unique. We all experienced bungled Windows / Antivirus / Office / you-name-it updates, the famous Patch Tuesdays actually last a week (to get a successful auto-install), than the patch that messed up the computer again has to be patched just to get your PC back to normal – but in the meantime it’s nothing like normal, spending way too much time maintaining itself. Phil raises the question:
“But is it an even better fix to abandon Outlook and Exchange altogether and switch to an on-demand alternative? That’s a question I’ll be looking at in a second article on this topic.”
I’ll jump the gun here and vote YES. The sooner we get applications and data off the desktop, the better.
Now, I can hear the loud objection: “What about performance? I can run applications a lot faster on my PC than on the Net…” Sure, if you waste a lot of money on buying the latest screamer.
And even then, you can’t be sure… recently there was an uproar as a number of users reported that the Outlook 2007 / Vista combo is unbelievably slow on spanking new PCs with superfast CPU and vast amounts of memory. Check out The Guardian, Mini-Microsoft, Dennis Howlett, Jason Busch, Tim Anderson, Chris Pirillo, Dan Farber, Phil Wainewright for details. Here are some juicy bits from Mini-Microsoft, who is obsessed with fixing Microsoft and would start by reducing its size to 30%:
“Then I finally installed my Company Store copy at home and enabled Desktop Search. You’d think I had just sprayed the inside of my poor mega-laptop with saltwater to induce non-stop fritzing. I’ve learned to meditate while Outlook ruminates over ten incoming POP messages of 69K. Perhaps it takes a few seconds over each incoming message or RSS feed to contribute to solving a Grand Challenge. Or it and Desktop Search have to play 333 iterations of rock-paper-scissors everytime a change has to be written”
Mini’s conclusion: Performance is a Feature. (And Outlook does not have it.) Well, I have news to add: it’s not only Outlook 2007. I’ve been experiencing painfully sluggish performance on my Outlook 2003 under WinXP. I already submitted to the fact that whenever Outlook downloads messages, I can’t touch my PC, it keeps itself 100% busy.
Technically, I don’t really know nor do I care if it’s Outlook; after all there is a cornucopia of software fighting for CPU and memory: McAfee to protect me from viruses, Copernic Desktop Search so I can find again what I placed on the hard disk, since Windows can’t do it by itself, Mozy to back up my stuff, Foldershare to sync it with another PC, and probably a bunch of other stuff I could not care less about. Why? Because they don’t deliver any end-user functionality. They just keep the damn thing running and (perhaps) safe. In other words they do things I don’t have to worry about if I use on-demand applications and data.
It’s not only Outlook though: randomly my PC goes into a crazy cycle when I hear the hard disk whirl and it keeps itself busy locking me out. The other they I had someone on the phone wait for close to 2 minutes until finally the Excel file I needed gracefully opened. If I already have a browser open – and that’s the first thing I launch when I fire up the PC – opening a Zoho Sheet is much faster than Excel. The same goes for Word: Zoho Writer or Writely (yes, I know it has a new name…) are faster to launch.
Microsoft actually has some advice: reduce the size of your Outlook file. Mine is not that large, but I have two huge archive.pst files that I can’t close. If you use Outlook, in half a year or so the infamous “The operation failed. An object could not be found” error with the unclosable archives in inevitable. I know how to fix it – need to create a new Mail Profile, then recreate my accounts, rules and a few other things. I’m not going through all this again, for the n-th time. I’ll just hold tight till I can move to a better platform online. How do I know about the fix in the first place? By searching the Net. But why do I have to search, investigate, and generally become IT support for myself only to run simple applications? It’s 2007, the PC industry wants to take over Entertainment yet they can’t even deliver solid, user-friendly basic computing.
Since I’m talking about performance, I have to “admit” that my PC is not a top-of-the-line screamer. Why should it be? While it’s perfectly reasonable to upgrade to the latest and greatest for functional benefits, say playing games, or editing videos, my laptop is just a blogging machine – basically typing, occasionally opening a spreadsheet or presentation. I refuse to enter the arms race where I have to get faster and faster machines only so they can maintain themselves and barely let me use basic apps. When the first dual-core processors came out, Dell advertised the new machines claiming users would be able to work, play a video while the machine downloads email and runs virus check. That tells a lot about the core of the problem: i.e. I need dual core for the machine just to do the basics and still let leave some capacity to the user! This is nonsense.
So where are we? Performance issues, overload of patches, need to become one’s IT support: these are all signs of a failed model: installing and updating software on the desktop. Businesses are increasingly recognizing this and are turning to SaaS, and I feel we’ve reached the threshold where it will become more and more attractive for individual users, too. I’m not a religious SaaS believer though. It’s nice to see even the absolute Office 2.0 proponents to have come around and realize the importance of offline access. Seamless computing for a while will require online/offline access.
We’re clearly not there yet. However, I feel we’ve passed a tipping point: while 2 years ago the ideal mix would have been desktop computing with additional online access, now I feel as a user I am better off fundamentally working online, with occasional offline access. I’ve half made the transition, and there are two features I’m waiting for to complete it:
My bet is on Google or Zoho to get there first. As soon as it happens, I’m going 100% on-demand.
Last, but not least: I’m willing to pay for it. What, you may ask: Web 2.0 is free, isn’t it? Well, you do get what you pay for, and I want guaranteed service level and support.
Think about it: I bet if you add up the cost of time spent on fixing PC problems, tracking down software bugs, the opportunity cost of NOT doing something better in that time, the frequent PC upgrades – compared to all that paying (modest) fees for a reliable on-demand service becomes quite a bargain.
What do YOU think?
Related posts:
(This article is republished on the Enterprise Irregulars blog)
Update: I’ve made the move, and my post on Importing all your email archive into Gmail appears to be my most-read post ever.
Update (7/27): Jeremy Zawodny sums it up well:
I’m simply not going to bother with the hassle, trouble, expense, and complexity of desktop applications when an online substitute will do the job anymore. Life’s too short already.
Tags: desktop software, on-demand, saas, ms office, office 2.0, outlook, vista, winxp, dst, shrinkwrap software, software patches, patch tuesday, mcafee, zoho, zoho sheet, excel, google docs & spreadsheets, google, writely, software performance, copernic desktop search, mozy, foldershare, it support, synchronization
Anne Zelenka just incremented her version number, announcing Anne 2.1 pro.
Me, I’m staying with 3.0 
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