Status

Microsoft has released the next version of the venerable Office suite, Office 2010, and companion products Sharepoint 2010 and Visio 2010 (is Sharepoint really an Office companion product? I'll explain that in a minute) today to business customers worldwide.

It's getting harder and harder for Microsoft to make Office launches into a big deal. Office 2010 is basically Office 2007, which was basically Office 2003, each iteration dressed up with a few whiz-bang features that do little or nothing for (and sometimes work directly against) the core functionality that people look for in the package: typing documents and making spreadsheets. While the new features are not universally worthless, they are increasingly disproportionate to the value of the package as a whole.

The whiz-bang this time is Office Web Apps, a free online version of the most popular Office applications: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

While I like the strategy the company has adopted for dealing with the advent of cloud computing, I'm not sure I like the results. I think the Software+Service mantra they have chosen to tie existing cash-cow products to various online solutions is a good way to go from their perspective, in that it provides a leash on revenues while giving customers enough taste of the flexibility and power of utility computing to keep them from jumping ship. They are not, however, helping anyone realize any of the significant cost savings that should be possible in the utility computing model, which considering the girth of the company in the marketplace, may simply serve to give the model a bad name. I doubt that anyone in Redmond would shed any tears if that were to happen.

While integration and compatibility are good things, of late Microsoft has been using those desirable elements to create an undesirable one, dependency. This is where Sharepoint as an Office component comes in. Sharepoint has always had strong ties ties to Office, but originally, it was positioned as a sort of easy-to-use, shake-and-bake corporate intranet product. It's pretty effective in that role, and flexible enough to meet most business needs out of the box. But needing a quick response to Google's suddenly popular Apps online-office package ("need" is too strong a word; nonetheless, the company apparently felt a threat from that direction and responded accordingly), Sharepoint was pressed into service as the de facto "cloud" document store for the various online versions of Office. This, again, is not a bad move for Microsoft to make, but again, it fails to showcase the potential flexibility of utility computing.

Office Web Apps are similarly constrained. While they are free, you don't get the full functionality unless you are also using them with Office 2010 on the desktop... with all the attendant costs and constraints that brings to the table. At this point, it's silly to use them otherwise; if you own the full version, you may as well use it instead (if you need access from anywhere, just store them in Sharepoint!) and if you don't, you are better off picking another product which doesn't have the explicit goal of maneuvering you into buying the full package.

Microsoft has intelligently structured the Office game in recent years to effectively prevent customers from considering these factors and to keep adoption rates high. A recent Forrester survey, cited in the link at the top of this post, names some astounding ROI numbers for the Office package, numbers that I would not dispute; compare Office to your average Smith-Corona and see what wins. But the same survey helps illustrate how exactly the game is rigged. The comparison is made in a vacuum, one of Microsoft's own creation. It's not being made against other alternatives... and the Forrester data suggests why that is. More than half of respondents planning to upgrade to 2010 are not doing so because it's better, or because they've evaluated it in any meaningful way against alternatives; they're doing so simply because their licensing terms allow it. It's a human impulse, after all. "Hey, I can get this for free!" It's not free, of course; you paid for it once and will do so again, but the adoption is severed from the payment by terms of contract, which makes it intentionally difficult to associate the two events, and particularly difficult to get out of the cycle. It's the same reason any sort of recurring billing is a hit revenue model. The customer pays before he realizes it, then decides since the product is already paid for to go ahead and use it.

Those familiar with the "business as conflict" school of thought will recognize that this scenario puts the company inside your OODA loop, a bad place to allow an adversary. You may question whether or not Microsoft is an adversary, but putting all the feel-good partnership language aside, when someone is trying to take money out of your pocket without being entirely up front about the exchange, that puts them on the other team in my book.

Of course, they won't come out and say it, but as they slowly alter Windows to adopt tried and true Unix models, you get the idea: Server Core Best Practices on Windows Server

Not having to install the kitchen sink on every server has long given *nix systems an edge in performance and security. Keep it up, and Windows will just be another Linux distribution in the crowd before long!

Smallbiztechnology.com suggests you do just that unless they can answer three questions:

• What books have you recently read?


• What industry conferences have they been to?


• What tech industry relationships (and certifications) do they have?

Those questions aren't bad in and of themselves; you should satisfy yourself as to the qualifications of any contractor you hire. The justification presented for asking them, however, is terrible and exposes the number one unquestioned assumption both among these so-called "consultants" and many of the businesses they cater to. The assumption is exposed in one concise sentence in the post:

SMB Nation East took place this weekend in New Jersey and one of the big lessons learned at the 3 day event, of which I attended Friday, was the differentiation between those IT consultants who still are "only" able to fix your computers when things go wrong, but not able to provide strategic insight to help you grow your business.

Where did anyone ever get the idea that in something as complex and dynamic as information technology, the same person who is well-qualified to fix your technical problems would also be even remotely qualified to provide strategic insight into your business operations? Why would anyone imagine they could get both of those very specialized skills in a one-person package for the low-end rates that most of these people charge? It's like saying your neighborhood EMT should be able to also do heart surgery, and at the same mid-five figure salary he's already getting paid!

I suggest you put some thought first into whether you actually have an IT consultant, or have just hired a technician. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with just hiring a technician, and by default, that is what most small businesses have done... they don't like the price tags on real consultants. Where the problem comes in is when the assumption is made, as above, that your tech janitor should be making (and that you should be listening to) strategy suggestions.

This isn't to disparage those technicians; they simply have a different focus, and different motivations, than real IT consultants. But the motivations make all the difference.

Case in point is item three on the question list: tech industry relationships and certifications. You absolutely want your technician to have certifications these days for the technologies they are working with. But consider what that means for that technician. Unless he has all the certifications, for every technology, then what technology do you think he is going to recommend you use to solve your next business problem? And if, for whatever reason, he didn't suggest the one that was going to get him more business, what basis might he have for doing so without any certification in it?

A consultant doesn't have an investment in your choice of a given technology, because they aren't supporting it over the long run. This leaves them free to make strategic recommendations unencumbered with concerns over future revenue. Their goal can be exclusive to finding the best solution to meet your particular challenges.

If they can't do that, by all means, fire them. And ask more than three questions; you're paying top dollar, make sure you're getting the best. But don't expect them to come fix your printer. And don't expect your technician to provide you with top-flight strategic advice, and don't fire him if he doesn't give it to you. It was your mistake asking in the first place, not his in answering. If you need strategic insight to help grow your business, go find someone who is an expert in providing such advice, not someone who worked hard to get their Microsoft certification papers. An MCSE is an accomplishment, but hardly one that indicates a deep understanding of the broad panoply of technology options facing the modern business.

This is a bit of a digression (which is filed under "Ramblings") but then, I'm prone to those, and why go into business for yourself if you don't want to digress every now and then, eh?

The clamor on the web over the discovery, and subsequent purchase, of a prototype next generation Apple iPhone by tech rumor/news site Gizmodo has been dwarfed by the furor unleashed when it was revealed that California police later raided the home office of Jason Chen, the editor responsible for the story generated by the original incident. Because these are mostly bloggers reacting to the search and seizure of another blogger's technological assets, the stories are running ten to one against the cops, with the few supporting exceptions largely coming from die-hard Apple fans who felt the company was wronged and are hoping for a comeuppance for Gizmodo.

The police are playing it pretty close to the vest with their investigation so far, which has made it easy to attribute a sort of Big-Brother-like malicious intimidation to the act, but I think that's premature. If it's true that police are often overly secretive, it's also true that exposing too much information too early in an investigation can queer the pitch and result in the perpetration of injustice, and I think a little patience (certainly more than has been exhibited so far) is in order. The time and place for a judgement of their actions is in a courtroom when all the facts are on the table. It's way too early for that to happen.

The speculation so far revolves around two possibilities: one, that they are investigating the original discoverer of the lost phone for theft (according to most interpretations I have seen so far, California law is a little fuzzy on this point but a prosecutor could certainly argue the original finder did not make the required "good faith" effort to return the device that is required to keep the act from becoming a theft), or two, that they are investigating Gizmodo for receiving stolen goods. The five thousand dollars the company paid for the device seems to indicate they knew there was something less-than-kosher about the deal.

It's entirely possible the police are investigating both and don't have a firm idea what happened. That's why investigations occur. You don't always know what the charges are going to be until you unearth the evidence, and this is a beneficial feature of our system in my opinion. If that's a fishing trip, as some people are saying, then so is every criminal investigation. While the crime is pretty clearly overblown, it nonetheless appears to have occurred. If you're not going to allow the police to get to the bottom of such things, cut them a severance check and send 'em home... there's little other use for law enforcement agency.

The primary argument against the search and seizure warrant has been that Chen is protected under both California and federal journalist shield laws, provisions made to protect First Amendment free speech rights. If anything, this portion of the debate has been even less clear than that dealing with the police investigation. Bloggers are simply throwing "shield law" out there as if it protects against all evils, without much substantiation. Few have bothered to actually read the text in question, or apply it to the situation at hand. Instead, much is being made of a single, unsupported statement in this Wired post, which says, "The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if it’s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime."

This is supposedly a provision of the federal Privacy Protection Act, but from my reading of the law (IANAL, of course) the Wired statement, if not entirely incorrect, is at least incomplete. There are at least two exceptions under which material can be seized even from a journalist, and at least one of them seems to apply, albeit rather narrowly. Indeed, it would be very strange if the government were as restricted as Wired claims; almost any crime committed by a journalist could not be investigated fully. Subpeonas can be used rather than warrants, but the potential and temptation for destruction of incriminating evidence by the guilty party would seem to militate against them.

People have gone back and forth over whether Chen even is a journalist and so worthy of such protections anyway, but most seem to agree that California law is reasonably clear on that point, and in any event I would argue that bloggers fill a much more important role than the traditional media does in fulfilling the promise of a free press in a democratic society. On the other hand, I get paid for blogging (not on for this blog), and wouldn't consider myself a journalist. There is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree on that point, but I think the important factor is that the sunshine we think is healthy in our society is increasingly being let in by bloggers, whether paid or not, and so the protections we feel should be reasonably extended to those actors in our system should apply to them as well.

On the other hand, who then is not a blogger for these purposes? Everyone uses Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Buzz, or a hundred other blogging or micro-blogging platforms. Is it time to extend protections to everyone against turning over evidence of criminal activity? Because that argument could certainly be made by enterprising lawyers looking to bog down the prosecution in whole hosts of different cases. "Your Honor, my client downloaded and stored those MP3 files as part of an ongoing story about how vile the record companies are, their seizure and the use of meta-tag information to identify the sources and dissemination was a clear violation of the PPA and we move they be excluded from evidence."

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? But it may not sound so great when it is a file full of your credit card numbers and the same motion is made.

So, Chen's case may be more clear-cut than some (despite one of the principals of Gizmodo denying, not long ago, that the company was any sort of journalistic endeavor), but most of the knee-jerk reaction so far fails to look at the implications of their arguments on technology law enforcement as a whole. If they're right, there would seem to be very little that any "blogger" would have to fear (at least in California) of committing most technology-related crimes.

As we move later in the day today, some more informed and well-reasoned analysis is coming out, and it looks as if the police may have more solid ground to stand on than some would hope. I imagine that the most likely conclusion to all this will be some hasty apologies and agreements not to sue and that the whole issue will never see in the inside of a courtroom, but once again it seems that technology has far outstripped the comprehension of legislators.

There are a lot of advantages to the cloud, or utility, computing model, but it can be difficult for small businesses to see exactly how those apply to their situations. If you are in that group, consider attending a free webinar tomorrow by Ventureneer titled "How, Why, and When Small Businesses and Nonprofits should use cloud computing." Unlike most such presentations, this one isn't being put on by one of the big providers and so looks to be about as unbiased an initial presentation as you will find on the subject.