IBM NORC – The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator. Should the embedded player not work, watch the video here.
Thanks to fellow Enterprise Irregular Thomas Otter for discovering this gem. Btw., his article is worth reading, too. 
IBM’s Giant Brainchild
Posted on October 30, 2006 ·
Downloading IE7 Was a Mistake
Posted on October 30, 2006 ·
I just started to write this post when the email from ZDNet arrived: Another IE 7 security flaw pops up . But that’s not what I want to write about. Another ZDNet piece, Is Firefox 2.0 a dud? prompted me to check out Internet Explorer 7. Not that I agree with the title, being part of the 76% using FireFox, according to the poll in the “dud” article.
Are you using Firefox 2.0?
- Yes (76%)
- No (12%)
- Not yet, but I plan to (12%)
Total Votes: 7,944
OK, let’s get started, download IE7. The download itself is simple and quick, let’s click on the file to install it. It wants to do the Genuine (Dis)Advantage Validation again, although this PC has been validated before – fine, so be it. Next it downloads the latest updates to IE7. WTF? It’s not like I bough a retail CD months ago, I’ve just downloaded the thingie from Microsoft this very moment! I should have the latest and greatest, but it’s updating for a looooooooong time. Then it installs for long minutes – I don’t know if it’s frozen, but I had enough trouble with failed Windows updates to know better than interrupt the process.
About 25 minutes later the damn thing tells me to restart the computer. After reboot, in just a bit less than half an hour total I have control of my PC again. I haven’t touched IE7 yet, but I’m already biased against it. I did not agree to half an hour of my time stolen. Any program that takes more than a few minutes to install should warn the user – otherwise it’s hijacking my computer and stealing my time, which it has not right to do. Microsoft just does not learn. 
Will Geeks Become an Endangered Species?
Posted on October 24, 2006 ·
We’ve long known laptops can cause male infertility when used right where the name suggests – i.e. right on your lap. That’s long before they started exploding left and right – simply by heating up the family jewels they can drastically reduce a man’s ability to reproduce. (Hm…is that why manufacturers switched to calling them notebooks?)
Now we find out extensive cellphone usage results in the same:
“Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.”
The mechanism of the damage is not yet known:
“Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate.”
Heat? Give me a break! I don’t know about you, but I either hold it to my ears or use a headset, but it’s never … you know .. down there. 
Anyway, true geeks have their laptops and cellphones permanently glued to them – if they become infertile, are geeks becoming an endangered species?
Update (10/30): Read the ZDNet story by David Berlind.
Update (1/4/08): Wow, I can’t believe this: Yossi Vardi uses my post in his TED presentation. 🙂 (It’s a 2 minutes 13 seconds)
Tags: endangered species, geeks, laptops, mobile phones, fertility, infertility, male fertility, scrotal temperature, sperm count
Wikis as Intranet + Extranet
Posted on October 22, 2006 ·
I’ve written about how wikis can become *the* Intranet, that is not only easy to access but easy to edit by everyone, in the organization. Instead of a one-way communication channel for Management to talk (down) to employees, the wiki becomes a living, breathing, participatory communication platform.
Now there’s a new case study of how a a customer of Atlassian’s Confluence wiki is using it for customer communication, by building their entire Extranet on Confluence.
The wiki has become the Intranet+Extranet.
Office 2.0: Additional Awards
Posted on October 16, 2006 ·
OK, unlike the real Awards, these are not “official” and in the lighter category. The “Awards” go to… (drumroll):
- Kevin Warnock, CEO of gOffice for the most honest statement of all: “I warmly recommend everybody to use our competitors’ products, they are fare better than mine“. Kevin concluded his presentation by saying he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his company, and invited any advice …
Oh, and how could I forget: for offering the gOffice domain to Google for free. - Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho/Advantnet, for coining the most origical term when the presenters experienced lousy connections: “office.slow“
- Ivaylo Lenkov, CEO of SiteKreator, for giving all participants a free Business Account (now, I wonder if it is the 450 who actually were there, or the 4,600 who voted? If the latter, I understand why the site is down for now …)
- Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, for hosting the Enterprise Irregulars + a few analysts + his competitors to a private dinner and not using the opportunity to pitch his business
- Michael McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, for letting the cat out of the bag.
- [your nomination here] – really. please recommend more “candidates” and I’ll post them here.
Office 2.0 Awards: A Quiz
Posted on October 13, 2006 ·
What do the following have in common?
- Julia French
- A yet-to-be-built bridge in Budapest
- EchoSign
OK, to avoid any unnecessary excitement, here’s the answer: they all got far too many votes.
Socialtext’s Julia French and Stirr’s Joey Wan were the two finalists in ValleyWag’s Ms. Web 2.Ooh! contest when a Julia-fan (or not?) created a script and bombed the poll with 8000 or so votes. Julia really didn’t need this “support” – hey, I voted fo her – and certainly did not need the disqualification as a result of spam by someone else.
The Hungarian government announced an Internet poll to come up with the most popular name for a bridge to be built in Budapest, over the river Danube. Little did they know the Internet does not know geographical boundaries: Stephen Colbert publicly called his loyal viewers to vote on him, and he ended up winning with 17 million votes. Not bad, except for the fact that the entire population of Hungary is 10 million, and Budapest has about 2 million residents.
EchoSign is an interesting company that simplifies the process of getting contracts/documents signed, distributed, archived. ( I wrote about them here). They received the “Best Of Show” award at the Office 2.0 Conference yesterday. See a partial snapshot of the poll here.
Overwhelming win. A little too overwhelming. The Office 2.0 Conference was a success, instead of the originally expected 200 participants the organizers managed to squeeze in 350 – but where is the other 4,300 coming from?
Echosign did not need this, just like Julia did not need it. The Office 2.0 Conference did not need it. The real participants who voted for their favorites deserve better.
Tags: office 2.0, office20con, office 2.0 conference, echosign, office 2.0 awards, voting, polls, zoho polls, Valleywag, EchoSign, spam, cheating
Office 2.0 Awards
Posted on October 12, 2006 ·
Live from the Office 2.0 Conference, where the winners of the audience votes are just being announced:
Best Ofice 2.0 Suite: Joyent
Best of Show: EchoSign
Best Demo:
Congratulations to the winners – and all other presenters!
Update (10/13) Unfortunately there was some trouble with the voting. 
Tags: Office20con, office 2.0
Office 2.0 Announcements: Google, Zoho
Posted on October 11, 2006 ·
With the Office 2.0 Conference underway, we can expect a flurry of announcements, product launches in the next two days – no wonder that two companies, Zoho and Google jumped ahead and “preannounced”.
Zoho is releasing new products at a breakneck speed (see my recent posts From Office Suite to Business Suite and One is More than Six: Zoho Suite Single Sign-on): today’s announcement (well, strictly speaking, tomorrow’s but TechCrunch already reported it) is the availability of ZohoX, the online version of Zoho Virtual Office, a communication / collaboration product. The TechCrunch review is extensive; so instead of writing a “me-too” review, let me ponder about what it means.
I already declared the Zoho Suite complete when they added Show (think PowerPoint) to the previously existing Sheet (can you say Excel?) and Writer (you know this one…). As we will most likely witness at the Office 2.0 Conference starting tomorrow, the number of contenders in the online Office space is mushrooming. Most are one-product wonders though. Of course one can pick the “best-of-breed” (or favorite?) individual applications, deal with different sites, different UI, and different sign-on information, and still not enjoy the seamless flow and real-time data updates that Zoho demonstrated between the spreadsheet, database, document and presentation. But then we haven’t talked about email / communication / virtual desktop yet: with ZohoX, to the best of my knowledge Zoho is the only on to be able to offer a full combo. That’s still not the end of story; Zoho has products in the world of transactional, “enterprise” software: Zoho CRM actually encompasses CRM + ERP functions, essentially covering all business functions except accounting.
All these are free now, and CEO Sridhar Vembu maintains there will always be a free version for individuals. So how will Zoho make money? They will have multiple options: enterprise software guru Vinnie Mirchandani considers the Office Suite a good candidate to be used even by large enterprises, and if they so chose, they will also be able to become a unique provider of full business solutions (Office, Communication, ERP+CRM) to small businesses.
Google’s announcement isn’t really a new product, more the merger / integration of their in-house developed spreadsheet and Writely, a capable online editor acquired in the spring. I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be invited to a pre-announcement briefing in the company of Mike Arrington, Steve Gilmor, Rafe Needleman and a few other bloggers. This turned out to be a good lesson: if you accept the invitation and play the game, you get to be the last one to write about the news: by the time we sat down, the embargoed release was leaked. The announcement itself is quite underwhelming, the most significant part is the fact that it’s coming from Google: Writely and Google Spreadsheet is now one product, under the fantastic (?) name of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. As (if) Google adds new products, I wonder if the name will evolve to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations, then to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations&Databases.. etc.
About the only improvement is the ability to list, search, sort, tag ..etc all files, be it text or spreadsheet together is certainly nice, but that’s where integration ends at this point. The Googlers mentioned users with up to a thousand documents – there has to be a more intuitive way to list them than a simple alphabetical list – for example grouping by tags (labels in gmail terminology).
I regret losing Writely’s “face” – the new appearance is corporate blue uniform that could have been done by IBM, and as for the name, it would make Microsoft’s naming guys proud ….
All in all, I can’t get excited by this – the recent Google Groups announcement was far more positive, IMHO, although it largely went unnoticed.
Update (9/12): Watch this ScobleVid…
Tags: zoho, zoho suite, zohox, zhoho virtual office, google, google docs & spreadsheets, writely, google groups, office 2.0, office20con
From Office Suite to Business Suite
Posted on October 9, 2006 ·
Zoho is definitely getting an increasing share of attention. No wonder – they are releasing product updates at a rate others do press releases. The introduction of a single sign-on to six of their Office 2.0 applications generated quite some buzz on a normally silent weekend. TechCrunch, ZDNet, Read/Write Web, AccMan Pro, yours truly – the usual suspects, one might say, but when “good-old-fashioned” ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani pays attention, you know something is brewing here.
Richard MacManus claims Zoho Moving Towards A Full Web Office Suite. Previously both myself and IT|Redux claimed the Zoho Suite complete. So are we there yet? Well, MS Office was called a suite long before Word, Excel or Powerpoint could really talk to each other. It was ugly, messy, lossy copy/paste for years – Zoho demonstrated a far better, seamless flow and real-time data updates between a spreadsheet, database, document and presentation at the recent IBDNetwork event, and I’m sure we’re in for some surprise at the the Office 2.0 Conference this week.
But let’s look a bit further, and we’ll find that Zoho has a few more tricks in their hat. Near-term we can expect a web-based version of Virtual Office, a communication/collaboration solution (think Outlook), which really makes the Office / Productivity suite full-rounded.
How about transactional business systems? Zoho has a CRM solution – big deal, one might say, the market is saturated with CRM solutions. However, what Zoho has here goes way beyond the scope of traditional CRM: they support Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing – to this ex-ERP guy it appears Zoho has the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label.
Think about it. All they need is the addition Accounting, and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted for SMB’s.
(Disclaimer: although I have an advisory relationship with Zoho, the above is purely my own speculation)
Tags: Office20con, Office Suite, Office 2.0, Zoho suite, Zoho, Virtual Office, CRM, ERP, SMB, Small Business Suite, All-in-One, Netsuite, Microsoft, SaaS
One is More than Six: Zoho Suite Single Sign-on
Posted on October 7, 2006 ·
A few months ago I declared the Zoho Suite complete with the addition of Zoho Show to the already existing Zoho Write and Zoho Sheet. The Zoho team did not slow down, they kept on pumping out new products at an amazing speed – at this point there are 11 Zoho branded products accessible from their main portal, and I know of a few more in the pipeline.
The company’s strategy has been for most of this year to focus on developing the individual products, and the next step will be to tighten the integration between them. That said, the individual products work together pretty well, as they demonstrated at the Office 2.0 Under the Radar event, presenting a seamless flow and real-time data updates between a spreadsheet, database, document and presentation.
A hot item on users wish-list was the creation of a single sign-on: if it’s really a Suite, why do I have to log into the individual products separately? In fact some of these products required a username, others the full email address to log in. Not anymore: as of today, users of Zoho’s Writer, Sheet, Show, Planner, Creator & Chat will only have to sign in once, and can seamlessly surf between all these products. If so far you’ve been using the same email address to sign in, you’re just fine, otherwise you may want to read the consolidation details here.
As for integration, I believe we’ll see more next week at the Office 2.0 Conference, where Zoho presents at the One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker session. Will you be there?
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