February 15th, 2006
9:02 am
Office Live is now in beta, and lots of people are talking about it. Kip and the boys over at LiveSide have done a good job of covering the public details. They got some of the news out so fast this week that Mary Jo Foley and Robert Scoble linked to them for the details — nice work, guys.
For those who want the short version, here it is:
Office Live is a set of web-based services for the small business market. It will probably also be used quite a bit by small workgroups within larger organizations, in my opinion.
The services offered by Office Live include things like storing your documents on a web server, setting up a web site and/or a blog, collaboration functionality, and email. By using Office Live, a small business can have all of these things without spending a lot of time and money building and maintaining the necessary infrastructure.
One of the most critical but least glamorous aspects of Office Live is that the data is backed up on the server where it’s hosted. Most small businesses can’t or don’t manage their backups effectively, which often leads to disaster. By using Office Live, a small-business owner can rest assured that their data is backed up even if their in-house PC expert is not very disciplined or organized.
Office Live is compatible with Microsoft Office products, but it is not a way to run Office over the internet. Rather, it is … drumroll, please … a Sharepoint site pre-configured for typical small-business scenarios.
The official Office Live site has more information.
February 14th, 2006
10:07 am
MySpace.com has quietly grown into quite a phenomenon. I keep seeing stories about how it’s the world’s most popular social networking site, or how it has more users than Google or AOL, or how it has replaced shopping malls as the place where high-school boys find gullible junior-high girls to hit on.
Then, last weekend, I found out my nephew Paul has a MySpace account, and my nephew Phil is getting one set up, too. OK, I better check this out. So, with that peculiarly American sense of professional responsibility and moral self-righteousness that, say, led Amit Gilboa to write “Guns, Girls, and Ganja,” I have created a MySpace of my own.
There’s not much there yet. Well, there probably never will be. But I’m going to learn a bit about how to customize the hell out of a MySpace space, just so I can show my nephews some cool HTML and CSS tricks.
So far, I sort of like the way it says boldly “Doug has 0 friends.”
February 13th, 2006
3:21 pm
Notepad is a great example of the old adage “a piece of software should do one thing, and do it well.” Notepad edits text files. Period.
So why would anyone want to use Notepad in these days of multimedia Nirvana? I can think of lots of reasons. Here, for example, are two reasons I’ve used Notepad in the last hour …
To type out and format a complicated reply to an email. Sure, I could do it in the Outlook compose-message window, but that makes me nervous when I’m replying to a distribution list with lots of readers. Have you ever sent an email by mistake while it was half-done? Perhaps by just pressing Enter when the Send button had focus? If you type the response in Notepad and then copy and paste it into your email client, that will never happen again.
This approach also gives you a backup in case the email program crashes. In fact, I got in the habit of doing this when I was in India in 1999 and the PCs at internet cafes were often extremely unreliable. I’d type and edit my email in Notepad, save it on the desktop, then paste that text into Hotmail when (after a few tries) I could get a reliable connection.
Hey, here’s a good trick if you do that on a public PC and want to be sure your text isn’t found by anyone else: don’t delete the file until it’s empty. That is, delete all the text out of the file, do a File/Save, then delete your file. That way, there’s only an empty file in the Recycle Bin. And make sure to copy something else into the clipboard (a desktop icon does nicely) so that your text isn’t still in the clipboard when you’re done.
Another reason I’ve used Notepad recently: to remove formatting from some text before pasting it into a document. Ever since operating systems started getting too clever for their own good (late 80s, in my estimation), copying and pasting text has become needlessly complicated. The problem is, your oh-so-clever OS embeds lots of fancy formatting into the clipboard along with the actual text you’re copying, and that formatting can cause weird problems in the program you paste the text into. So just paste that text into an empty Notepad window, then copy it from there into your destination. No hidden codes, no messy inconsistencies, the text will look just like it would if you had typed it in.
One nice thing about using Notepad for these sorts of chores is that it’s always there. Every copy of Windows has Notepad installed, so you never need to think about it. Other programs come and go, but Notepad will always be there when you need her! OK, “it.” Whatever. Notepad’s so cool, I get kind of excited thinking about it.
What got me thinking about Notepad today? An amusing blog post by Sharepoint MVP Bill Simser, who wants to be a Notepad MVP instead.
By the way … this post was written in Notepad.
February 13th, 2006
11:24 am
If you’re using an RSS reader to follow my blog, you may have received several copies of the last post (the pictures from our weekend road trip). That’s because I found that Wordpress doesn’t handle certain types of HTML-rendering details as I had expected, and I had to edit that post several times to get it to render correctly.
Now, I don’t think “blog software sucks” because of any of the details of how Wordpress renders HTML. I understand why HTML support within blog posts is a limited subset of “true HTML,” and that’s fine. Live and learn … now I know how to format a little grid of thumbnails like this in Wordpress.
The reason I feel like blog software sucks is that Wordpress, like most blog software, doesn’t support the concept of a little checkbox that says something like “this change shouldn’t cause this item to be re-sent in RSS feeds.” Why not?
I know, some will say “that’s an RSS issue, not a Wordpress issue.” I disagree — it can’t be that hard to work around this, and this feels to me like something the blog software should manage itself. And sure, sometimes I’d want people to know that I corrected something and get the latest version, but people don’t need to get a new copy of a post just to see that I changed “it’s” to “its” or similar corrections.
It has become sort of trendy to say “blogs are about spontaneous seat-of-the-pants posting, and not about editing for perfection of details.” I think that attitude is a cop-out, frankly. When popular bloggers say “I don’t trust any blog that’s perfectly edited,” what I hear them saying is “I’m too lazy to correct my typos, and I wish everyone was this lazy.” Sorry, guys, but if you’ve ever worked as an editor, you simply can’t ignore typos: they’re glaring, jarring disrupters of the flow of the copy.
OK, enough of this rant. I use Wordpress, a non-Microsoft blogging platform that I chose before starting at Microsoft, and I’m probably going to move my blog to MSDN at some point this year. I hope Telligent’s software (as used on MSDN) doesn’t suck! Rob, how do you guys handle this issue?
February 11th, 2006
1:38 pm
Megan wanted to fit in over here in Spokane, so she stopped driving that frugal little Honda hybrid for the weekend. In her new gas-tax bracket, the filling station is a common destination.
February 11th, 2006
7:58 am
As I’ve spent more time at Microsoft and hear more managers and employees talk about strategy, it has become clear that some people around here worry quite a bit about competing with Google. That’s a good thing, since Google has come on strong in recent years and is a serious contender in the software business. They’ve got a big stable revenue stream from search-related advertising, and they “get it” about managing software development. They’re like Lotus or Novell or Netscape in their prime, and that’s a bit scary to some folks at Microsoft.
But I think sometimes people around here are so eager to out-Google Google that they lose sight of Microsoft’s role in some of the long-term trends shaping the future of the software business. We weren’t the first Google, and I hope we’re not the next one, either.
The way I see it, Microsoft offers a suite of products that allow people to manage their own bits better than any other platform available today. Not by putting those bits up on the internet somewhere and then trying to get at them when you need them, but by putting those bits on your very own hard drive and having them with you wherever you go.
Sure, Microsoft technologies can be used to manage data in “the cloud,” but so can products from a zillion other companies. What those other companies can’t offer is a way to effectively manage offline data, except when they build products that run on the world’s most commonly used operating system. That is, our platform: Windows.
But it seems to me that a big portion of Microsoft’s current message is “we buy into Google’s view of the future, and we can do it better than them.” I’d rather see us toning down that message a bit and instead saying “we offer an alternative to Google’s put-your-data-in-the-cloud philosophy, a more balanced approach that lets you manage your data the way you want to manage it with all of your options open.” If marketing is the art of exaggeration, I think we should stop exaggerating our similarities with Google and have the confidence and vision to exaggerate our differences.
That’s a sweeping generality, of course, and there are plenty of initiatives within Microsoft that are about offering an alternative to storing everything in the cloud. Look at Office “12″ — we’re giving users a level of polish and sophistication in productivity software that the world has never seen before. Or the Sharepoint platform, where you can work with your data and workflow processes online or offline, smoothly switching back and forth between those paradigms as the needs of the day dictate.
Those are the sorts of technologies that only Microsoft can offer effectively on such a large scale. Sure, we need a better search offering (and we’re getting there rapidly), and we need to figure out how to pick up more online advertising revenue as that market grows, but that doesn’t mean we need to be more like Google.
Well, the Google policy of one day a week for pet projects would be nice. On the other hand, the best developers have always found time for their pet projects, and hiding those from management is just part of the fun. What kind of wimp needs management’s permission in order to develop something cool on the side? Ha!
February 11th, 2006
7:12 am
My nephew Phil is an early riser. Whenever I visited Greg’s family in the late 90s, Phil would come in and wake me up some time between 5:00 and 6:00.
I haven’t slept over at their house for a few years, but things haven’t changed. This morning, Phil and I were up drinking coffee at 5:30, then we bundled up and went out in the freezing cold to snap a few pictures. Phil howled along with the coyotes, and we watched the full moon set while the sun rose behind Brown’s Mountain.
I love these types of twilight shots. This one’s exactly as taken, no adjustments in Photoshop.
February 8th, 2006
9:20 pm
OK, I think I’ve noticed a pattern.
When I first started reading about DPE at Microsoft (Developer Platform Evangelism, the area where I work), I did some searches and found a goofy video of SanjayP (leader of DPE) as a cartoon-character beat poet. Hmm.
Then I interviewed for a job in DPE, and VicG was my final interview. After I started the job, I noticed that emails from Vic to the group often included a prominent graphic of his face, cartoonized. Hmm.
(I tried to find a copy of VicG’s cartoon likeness on the net, so that I could link to it. But it doesn’t seem to be out, so I’m not gonna be the first! Although I did find one photo actually named VicG.jpg out there. Hmm.)
In the months I’ve been with Microsoft, the cartoonization trend has spread through VicG’s team. I can think of three cartoon likenesses I’ve seen on emails from members of the VicG group lately, all very much in the style of Vic’s graphic: flat pastel colors on a contrasty photo, un-sharp masked, the usual photo-to-cartoon tricks. And they were all from guys who are well-respected within the group. Hmm.
DPE has even produced a cartoon video (I think it’s still just for folks under NDA, so can’t link to it) that includes a bunch of cartoon characters similar to various DPE folks. Including a character that looks suspiciously like VicG. Hmm.
It seems pretty clear what I need to do, if I’m going to fit in on this team. Introducing Cartoon Doug. He even has a an Office tattoo on his forehead! Although I put it there with Photoshop, so maybe I shouldn’t emphasize that too much.
Is it too late to get this in for my mid-year review? Geez, I have so much to learn about how things work at Microsoft.
February 8th, 2006
5:54 pm
If you use Internet Explorer a lot like I do, I’ll bet you’ll find something really useful in the IE blog’s recent post about keyboard shortcuts in Internet Explorer. There are tips for IE6, and also tips for IE7 (which is currently in beta, so you only have it if you’re on the beta program or work at Microsoft). The shortcuts for moving between tabs are especially handy, since the whole tabbed interface is one of the biggest changes from prior versions of IE.
I know, I know, Firefox had tabs first. Who cares? And why do all those Mac/Java/Firefox/flavor-of-the-month bigots care so much about who had a tabbed browser first, while not caring at all about who had a mouse or a GUI or a secure OS first? (Hint: not Apple.)
By the way, if you’ve seen all the griping about RSS in IE7, I agree: IE7 is not going to replace anybody’s dedicated RSS aggregator. But as a general-purpose web browser with rich support for a wide variety of web applications and simple ease-of-use features, IE7 is great.
I’ve been on the beta for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve not once been tempted to go back. Well, there was that hour-long internal training that I took on IE7 and then discovered my results weren’t logged correctly so I have to take it 0ver in IE6. But other than that …
