Going to Reboot

I’ll see you in Copenhagen on May 31st if you’re going…

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Make the Start button redundant

Here’s one for the Mac fanboys (and girls) who have to work in a Windows-only environment - the killer app for Macs is Quicksilver, an application launcher and much, much more. You hit a trigger key combination (usually Apple-space), type the first few letters of the application or file that you want to launch/open, and Quicksilver searches rapidly through the files on the disk and fires up the one you’re after. It sounds simple, but it really is lifechanging.

Quicksilver’s Mac-only, but there is a Windows alternative - Launchy. It works in exactly the same way, and you can skin it to make it look like Quicksilver if you’re that sad so desire.

It makes the Start button redundant, because it learns which files and apps are opened as it goes along - so the more you use Word, for example, the quicker Word will appear on the list when you start to type w-o-r-d. And so on.

It’s also freeware. Go try it…

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Open source politics, or the usual approach?

Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne’s speech about open source politics has been widely reported all over the place, most of it suprisingly positive. Although there was a quantity of “yah, boo, politicians don’t know what they’re talking about” responses, many people seem to have been suprised by his comments about open source:

“Taking into account the experience of companies and public sector bodies, it is estimated that the Government could save at least 5% of its annual IT bill if more open source software was used as part of a more effective procurement strategy.

That adds up to over £600m a year.

The open source savings would come not just from reduced licensing costs, but importantly by freeing government bodies from long-term, monopoly supply situations.”

That’s encouraging coming from a politician, but it misses one of the more fundemental points about government IT - it’s not the tools that they use which are the problem, it’s the way they’re used. Government IT is synonymous with scope creep, massive cost and timescale overruns, and all too often writeoffs. That’s not the fault of the software - that’s the fault of the people designing the software. Until the mindset of calling in the usual EDS / CSC / IBM / Accenture / Cap Gemini / BT suspects is challenged, not a lot is going to change, because large scale projects (and therefore large scale project failure) is the only model that’s in the consultancies’ financial interests.

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Consolidating before the corporate market’s cracked

Robert Scoble is wondering whether there’s another consolidation due, this time in the Web 2.0 industry. It’s a persuasive argument - more and more startups with business models based on advertising, all chasing a static pool of advertising dollars. Eventually, something’s got to give.

This got me thinking about how many of the current breed of Web 2.0 startups are going to be able to make the transition into the corporate market. Certainly there’s a significant number where there are corporate applications for the services they’re providing - a project I’m working on the moment is looking at the software catalogue that’s available to end users, and there are a huge number of what are currently desktop-based commercial applications that could be replicated very easily with a pick-and-mix of online start-up providers.

The problem with this is the lag between Web 2.0 startup, and corporate adoption. Early adopting geeks such as myself are happy to jump into the early alpha versions with both feet, and live with the occasional glitchy consequences. But when you’re talking about rolling a tool out to thousands of users in tens of countries, that sort of thing takes time - and lots of it. There’s no guarantee that company X providing the perfect online solution is going to still be around by the end of a corporate adoption cycle, as the venture capital runs out well before the corporate revenue streams start to kick in.

And to add to this, there’s also the internal FUD factor of corporate IT functions - in the old days no-one got fired for buying IBM - these days, it seems no-one is fired for sticking with the Wintel status quo, even though there is nothing - nothing - that my organisation uses on the desktop that couldn’t be replaced with online or open-source equivalents, resulting in potentially megabucks of savings.

The same tired old TCO arguments get trotted out of course , but I do wonder if Microsoft haven’t handed themselves a poisoned chalice with the redesign of the new Office environment. After all, if you’re replacing a well-trodden and familiar interface with a new one - which means training - is there so much difference in re-training from MS to Google or Open Office or whatever, particularly when you take the cost of upgrade licenses into account.

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12 ways to pimp your office

None of which I will ever live long enough to see in any of my future workplaces, unfortunately.

Probably because I don’t work at any of these companies…

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Mobiles on the ward

The BBC’s reporting that the absolute ban on using mobiles in hospitals is to be lifted - after a studies showed that there was no risk of interference with medical electronics. I predict the imminent demise of 39p/min-offpeak, 49p-at-all-other-times Patientline….

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Locking in

JP Rangaswami makes an interesting point about whether you can consider MS Office documents as a form of DRM, or at least as a form of lock-in:

Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes store and my creating a spreadsheet via Microsoft Excel.
…
How come people don’t feel the same way about Office documents? Isn’t that a form of DRM? How come nobody objects? How come we don’t have clever people finding ways of freeing up such documents from their lock-ins?

It’s certainly an interesting angle, but I’m not sure that DRM and formats like Office are strictly comparable - DRM is ostensibly (or at least legally) unreversable, whereas Office documents are generally readable in other applications. You can open and convert an Excel spreadsheet into another application and format, whereas it’s made much more difficult with iTunes - unless you bypass the DRM altogether by fair means or foul.The lock-in comes more from the inertia involved in moving users from one application to another.

That’s where Microsoft could well have shot themselves in the foot with the latest version of Office. The radically different interface (and presumably, also more powerful hardware required) means that corporates are going to take their time over a move. At the same time, there are now increasingly viable alternatives in the shape of applications like OpenOffice and formats like ODF - so by the time corporates are ready to move, the palette of choices may be considerably wider than it is today.

But that’s assuming that there isn’t an ecosystem effect to contend with - my organisation uses a document management system that’s tied to Office at a DLL level - so until the DMS vendor creates the same kind of compatibility with say, OpenOffice, Microsoft’s the only game in town.

What I find more objectionable is the way that we are conditioning our kids to equate documents with Word and spreadsheets with Excel and presentations with Powerpoint - all of the educational establishments that I’m aware of are standardised on Microsoft OSes and applications…

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