Tom Austin

I downloaded this tool from Microsoft. According to Microsoft, “It scans your PC for potential issues with your hardware, devices, and installed programs, and recommends what to do before you upgrade.”

Nice idea! Kudos.

I installed it and ran it on my Lenovo X61 tablet. It chugged away for a while and then produced a nicely formatted report.

Lo and behold, among other things, it said that “Lenovo has a website that might give you more information about getting Windows 7 to run on your PC” and provided a link (“Visit the Lenovo website”) which dumped me onto Lenovo’s home page. Hmmm. Where’s the kit of W7 drivers packaged up for my X61 for an upgrade from Vista? Nowhere obvious, that’s where.

It was obvious Lenovo wanted to sell me a NEW notebook with Windows 7. But it wasn’t clear they were in on any plan by Microsoft to make upgrading my existing Lenovo computer to Windows 7 any easier.

Maybe Lenovo’s just “different”? I installed the upgrade advisor on my 18 month old HP minitower. Same process. Same nice report. Same useless link to the HP home page. I’m noticing a pattern here.

Now onto my Dell. It was a little better. No pitch to buy a new machine. Just a link that dumped me directly on a generic support page from which I could download drivers. Uh…which ones?

It seems to me that the top 10 hardware OEMs could provide a driver pack for Windows 7 upgrades, tailored to the machine model you have. And the upgrade advisor could dump you onto a hardware vendor’s special Windows 7 upgrade page where you’d OK an agent to determine what machine you had (or type in the exact model number) and, voila, there would be a nice driver upgrade package presented for your download.

But do the hardware vendors care? If one of them gets a lot of traction in the market for this class of customer support, they’ll all be falling over themselves to emulate that one. (Just like the Apple iPhone AppStore has driven dozens of firms to try to emulate that model.)

Or, better yet, Microsoft could incent the vendors to want to support their customers by paying the hardware OEMs a bit of a vig on every upgrade they (help) sell.

As it stands, despite the elegance of the advisor, it feels to this consumer that the upgrade is going to be a painful and tedious crapshoot (this is not a Gartner position; only my personal reflections as a consumer). What drivers have changed? I don’t know. What drivers will I have to upgrade? I don’t know. Which should I download? I don’t know. Is there a kit with all of them for the X61 tablet? Doesn’t appear to be.

This isn’t rocket science here. What’s needed is an end-to-end focus on quality of customer experience.

The upgrade advisor doesn’t hack it.

In the movie “Network”, TV anchorman Howard Beale breaks down and tells his audience to go to their windows and scream out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” That’s not me. I don’t have to tell anyone to do that. I bet there are millions of people who are already saying it directly to their Windows PC. Daily. Maybe even hourly.

In typical Gartner style, I’ll share the conclusions with you first, then explain the logic. (But understand – this posting is personal opinion and has nothing to do with formal, consensus driven Gartner positions.)

• Vonage (and others) need to offer foolproof videoconferencing to undercut the internet access providers who are undercutting it with their bundles of Internet access, telephony and cable TV
• Microsoft has to move past the “pass-the-buck” PC industry model that made them rich – or someone else is going to do it to them, eventually, on the consumer side. We need a new “I take full responsibility” model here.

This is a tale of a few personal woes – and you could probably add to them – woes that befall both professional IT and consumer IT even though my story is based on my consumer IT experiences (and, again, it has nothing to do with official Gartner positions – it’s a personal tale).

My son, daughter-in-law and our two grand children live in Los Angeles. My wife and I live in Boston. Every Sunday, we spend an hour or more on Video Skype, sharing what’s going on in our lives and reveling in the opportunity to get closer. We cherish the video, in particular, because seeing each other (and the grand kids!) does add value. We truly have big-screen (52 inch) portals into each other’s living rooms.

How is the PC business model is broken?

I moved to Boston (from New Hampshire) at the end of 2008. One of the joys of downsizing from 3300 square feet (and three quarters of an acre) to a 2 bedroom, 1200 square foot condo right off the River Charles is the opportunity to outfit a new place (and get rid of 25 years of accumulated detritus).

We bought 90% new furniture, a new TV (52 inch Samsung 1280i HDTV), a new PC to drive it (a Dell Studio HybridTM with slot load Blu-ray drive) as a video telephony box (Skype) and a whole lot more! I hardwired the PC to the Internet (via RCN cable), to the TV as a monitor (via HDMI) and to a Pioneer Audio System (Tuner-Amplifier, etc.).

The Dell machine itself is pretty simple. It’s amply configured and running Vista Ultimate. I have a Logitech video camera (with embedded microphone, a variation on a “QuickCam Communicate” product) perched right on top of the Samsung 52 inch TV and the PC is nestled inside the console on which the TV rests. There’s a Dell wireless keyboard and mouse and an external Hauppauge USB TV tuner attached as well (the RCN cable box and Windows Media software don’t want to work with each other it seems)

PC Audio out goes to the Pioneer Tuner-Amplifier (great for sound when playing movies).

I have Skype installed, as well as a few other odds and ends:

• iTunes, so I can listen to the radio while waiting for the LA branch of the family to call and know the audio is set right;
• TV tuner-control software
• MacAfee AntiVirus
• Logitech’s video camera software

Pretty darn simple. The machine is for video conversations with the kids and grandkids.

Sunday, 13 September was a day that only Howard Beale could love. I was already dealing with a serious Lenovo X61 Notebook problem – more about that some other day. In preparation for my son’s call, I turn on the PC, switch the TV input and the audio amplifier input, enter my password for the system to start and – ERROR. There is some kind of failure in the Logitech software. It doesn’t load and I get another message from Windows saying there’s a C library problem. I’ve been here before, on many machines, so have we all. Step 1: reboot.

Same result. Now Windows is giving me additional advice. It’s telling me I have to upgrade my Logitech drivers. It even provides me with a link – that dumps me onto Logitech’s home page. First puzzle is navigating menus to find the right support page for the camera I have. (Why doesn’t Vista drop me there automatically if it knows there is a driver problem?)

You would think it’s easy to figure out which Logitech camera I have, right? Wrong. There is no identification on the camera. And the web site has many different models with the same general look. So it’s a guessing game! (Why can’t they figure out what camera you have, especially if it’s connected?)

So I install what I think is the right software – and it’s newer than what I had (which makes me feel good – Windows was right – perhaps). So I download and then have to click a bazillion times and wait for it to install.

(Meanwhile, I am worried that the LA branch of the family is thinking we’re out so we’ll miss our call because of this nonsense.)

Watching what’s going on, I suspect that Logitech is apparently trying to install software that will be an alternative to Skype! I don’t want that. This is frustrating. But it gets worse.

Once the install is done, Skype insists that I have to restart my machine. (Isn’t about time Microsoft made it possible to install anything without having to restart the system?) Given Vista’s fleet of feet reboot cycle (not) and the need to see if the camera is now working, I let it reboot. Start up the Logitech camera software, tell it I want to use Skype and confirm that, at least at a basic level, the camera is indeed functioning.

So we exchange telephone messages and my son calls us and – nothing works, camera wise, inside Skype. So I wound up spending another 10 minutes, during the call, futzing with the options for the camera and then the options for Skype, to get it working. The last change I had to do? Tell Skype, which decided that since the old video camera was no longer logically there, it should now use the video tuner as its video source – that it should instead use the Logitech camera for input.

This whole cycle was ridiculous!

With Vonage – a service I’ve been using for years now – it just works. You can call me and I can call you and the only failures I have are associated with bandwidth problems when I upload huge files from my PC over the same Internet connection. The Vonage box, a modem built by Motorola, works. Period. I don’t have to buy anti-virus software for it (at least not yet). I don’t have crashes. I don’t have to update drivers or deal with conflicts introduced by system or application software updates from various vendors. Vonage works.

Microsoft Windows Vista plus Skype plus a Logitech Camera? This environment is not industrial strength. It’s not consumer strength. It’s a disaster!

Microsoft needs to take more responsibility. So do a lot of other vendors. We’ve forsaken responsibility in the name of progress and profits. The pendulum has swung too far in that direction.

I suspect – but can’t prove – that the Logitech driver was disabled somehow by Microsoft’s automatic updates

• If Microsoft recognized that the Logitech driver was defective, why wouldn’t it automatically download an upgraded driver?
• If Microsoft recognized a defective driver was present, why didn’t it warn me before automatically updating whatever it was that broke the Logitech software?

I fault Logitech on several counts.

• Why can’t their site auto-recognize what devices are present?
• Why don’t they notify users of upgraded drivers? Why don’t they auto-detect the need to install a new driver?
• Why don’t they integrate with Microsoft Automatic Update (which I have turned on because of the security it provides)?
• Why can’t they recognize that I already have Logitech software installed and retain all the same preferences – and not break links to other applications, like Skype?

I’ve been through these issues before, with many vendors. I think the root cause is a defective responsibility model inside the business model.

If I want to use this as a video conferencing tool for the family, it should just work, just like my Vonage box.

That’s it. Someone has to take responsibility to make this stuff work like my audio amplifier. Turn it on and it works. This was working. It stopped working. It was most likely a problem with a Logitech driver (or application) exposed by Microsoft fixing something else. Who should fix this? Me? No. It should not have happened. Period. Microsoft and its top 100 component providers need to work better together. They’re not – witness the Vista driver fiasco.

What we really have here is a failure of the component business model.

The PC business was built primarily by Microsoft shrewdly realizing that they could maximize their profit on the guts of the software (above the BIOS) while pushing hardware competition (and lousy margins) to all the hardware OEMs. That was a great business move in the early 1980’s. Today, the whole premise of multiple parties being responsible for a single product is becoming outlandish. At some point, it has to change. It remains to be seen whether Apple can really step up to the opportunity or not.

Someone has to take full responsibility and not say “gee, the brakes on your car were provided by the XYZ company so you have to go to them to see if there’s a problem there”.

I think we have millions of people out there who screaming at their Windows systems saying “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”. 

Howard Beale would be happy today.

Who’s going to fix this mess?

(These comments are my personal opinion and are not an attempt to depict any Gartner position or consensus.)

This is such a positive move if it opens the door to something far more intelligent than the stupid haggling that most auto dealers put people through.

With gm.ebay.com, you can make an offer on-line and not have to put up with the "OK but … uh, now I gotta take this deal to my manager and see if he will approve it" nonsense. Or will you?

Let’s see how this really operates. If it brings transparency, efficiency and professionalism — and GM and its dealers stick with it for the long run — then this is likely a great move.

Will eBay post all transaction information (buyer anonymized) so the world can see the results of the process and the cost (and frustration) of the process can drop?

What about ratings by buyers of dealers? And of buyers by dealers? How transparent is that going to be?

The US auto industry needs to make its own breaks. This could be one, if they handle it correctly…

Personal notes: The purchase process for the last two new cars I bought (in 2002 and 2006) was a pleasure! I bought them from a dealer who posted significant discounts right on the windshields of the cars so you’d know what they were going to sell for. Both were in-demand autos (a 2003 Ford Mustang GT Convertible and a 2007 of same) and the dealer was selling them, haggle free, at 13% off list. The sad news is that the dealership has since changed hands and the new owner insists on stupid sales tricks. The good news is I’ve moved to a new state so I won’t have to deal with them…

These comments are my personal opinion, of course, and do not represent Gartner’s official position (except we wrote about something related to it years ago…)

The Times of London has a story today about a vendor demanding that its customer sign an agreement to not say anything, to anyone, anywhere and anytime about the fact that the vendor’s product blew up. Never mind that the customer was only asking for their money back. Not a million dollars compensation for injuries or anything like that.

And this isn’t about that one vendor (in this case, Apple). It’s really about all the major equipment and software vendors which try to block their customers from talking about the performance of their products. The UCITA "fiasco" was an instance of this.

Imagine your auto manufacturer forcing you to sign a license agreement before you could buy their car, wherein you would agree to never report to anyone if the brakes failed or the engine compartment caught fire. Silly? If the auto manufacturers acted like some software and electronic manufacturers, that’s what you’d see.

The companies, of course, claim they have the right to demand conformance (or they’ll either sue or not deliver the product in the first place). And, of course, customers (or potential customers) have the right to refuse.

But in most cases, what we see is corporate bullying. Big software companies bullying big customers who are locked into their products. And big device manufacturers bullying their customers (often after the ‘click-wrap’ or ’shrink-wrap’ license has be ‘accepted’).

There’s something important about freedom of speech that we are losing sight of. People (and companies) should not be able to sign away their right to disclose a problem that could materially affect someone else’s future purchase decisions. There’s something deeply important about this, at least to me — and, I suspect to the millions of consumers (and companies) adversely affected by forced withholding of key information.

There oughtta be a law…

• How many of you are willing to sign away your right to disclose, in the future, defects not apparent at the time of purchase?

• How many of you (or your companies) have been burned because others may have known of the problems you faced but failed to make it public?

This is a moral problem very much like the Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. If we sell out our right to disclose widely problems we may discover in the future, we are implicitly injuring all those who would have benefited from transparency and disclosure.

Do we really want our legal system to support that?

Have you ever sent out a word document to several people for their review and revisions only to then struggle with multiple overlapping edits in 6 to 8 different word-doc versions of the document that you have to piece together? What can you do? With Microsoft Word, you have to do multiple pair-wise comparisons but you don’t get the chance to easily compare multiple proposed changes to the same copy. Is there any hope for an easy way to do this?

This morning, I was pleasantly surprised by a startup’s technology. (This, of course, is not a formal Gartner position, only a personal comment and it’s not an endorsement, either, only the starting point for a discussion of "collaborative editing".)

I came across “TextFlow” (http://textflow.com/) and spoke with Tomer, their CEO. I also watched the online demo and played around with the free version of the tool.

TextFlow presents a very interesting approach to dealing with the results of email-document-revisions coming in from hither and yon. (This is the primary way people — including Gartner analysts — collaborate on a doc.)

To do some hands-on experimentation, I signed up for a personal test on their web site and installed the desktop version (which uses AIR) to get full drag and drop capabilities.

On the side, I took a word-doc (a draft research note) and spawned two edited-variants of the draft. Three files in hand, I dropped the first one in as the baseline case and then the other two and asked TextFlow to compare versions.

Doesn’t Microsoft Word do that?

Yes, but what happens when you ask it to compare multiple versions (not just 2)? Word only compares two docs. If you want to add a third to the mix, you have to save the result of the first compare and then compare that result to the third doc file *but only if you have accepted all the proposed changes in the first set of differences*! The net is Word doesn’t deal well with multi-document comparisons!

TextFlow positives:

• This works!
• It’s EASY to use, particularly the desktop version.
• It deals well with multiple files (to a limit, of course…) within a pretty clean presentation layer. [I only tested three doc variants; I suspect the UI will be challenged to go beyond simultaneously comparing several files.]

TextFlow not so positives:

• It’s YAA – yet another application! (ARG)
• It doesn’t deal with formatting/layout changes – it’s using an analytic (pattern matching) approach that only looks at the content (this may be OK – you don’t want to use this tool for final copy editing) but the early version I played with doesn’t seem to do a great job of retaining formatting/layout either.
• Tiny vendor, early stage startup.
• Their PR was confusing – I at first assumed it was another instance of what you can do with Google Docs. Wrong – it’s a different value proposition. They need to figure out how to articulate it more clearly.

Alternatives:

Beyond manually comparing several document variants (a typical chore we all deal with), there are tools that support simultaneous-multi-party-editing of the same document. Some provide for component locking at the section level; others, such as Google Docs and Microsoft OneNote 2007 provide for pseudo-realtime simultenaous editing with no (apparent) locking. Let’s call this the realtime-free-for-all model. This realtime capability performs best when it really works in realtime (so you can see someone else editing the sentence you’re writing).

Realtime free-for-alls have their place. They work.

They’re not for everyone and they don’t replace email document "fan-out" and "fan-in" collaboration.

That’s where a tool like TextFlow seems to fit well.

What are your collaborative editing needs?

Do you use realtime-free-for-all tools? (Google Doc seems to have fewer latency issues than OneNote but both need to improve.)

How dominant is email scatter-gather editing?

Net:

What TextFlow does is clearly a better model for consolidating multiple drafts sent and received in email. (Are there others?)

Realtime-free-for-all editing is clearly a better model in other cases.

Multi-authoring (as in section locking) is another alternative — but it can degenerate as well.

What would *really* be cool is if something like TextFlow were integrated into a collaborative word processor that provided for realtime-free-for-all editing sessions (with locking perhaps at the word level) and could import edited versions sent in via email.

What do you think???

I am here at the New York Sheraton Towers Hotel, this morning and was just passed by someone in a formal waistcoat and other formal regalia – a veritable Rich Uncle Pennybags without tophat. I’ve been here many times before in my life, from its early days as the Hotel Americana, famous in business school lore because (per the case studies that were published), its builders (and investors) showed the acumen to ignore by-the-book investment analysis and bet big on a vision for what could happen if their instincts paid off more handsomely than the IRR models their analysts were using.

I’ve seen software vendors, consulting firms and others cite statistics showing that business managers feel they lack the data to make the important decisions they face. And, opine the sellers, that proves people should spend more money hiring more business intelligence specialists, more financial analysts, more analytical tools and platforms, better data warehouses and all of the other modern accoutrements that surround (at least part of) the art of making business decisions.

Speaking solely for myself, of course, I ponder the logic and reach a very interesting prediction:

• Whether firms invest enormously in the recommended ways or not, 10 years from now, the vast majority of business managers will still continue to feel they lack the data to make the important decisions they face!

The problem statement – executives lack the data they need – is a canard, a clever ruse, an attempt to delude through allusions to a state that is not to be achieved.

Does that mean that it doesn’t benefit firms to devote more resources to analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing, performance monitoring, management and alerting mechanisms and that they shouldn’t hire more consultants, read more case studies and repeatedly question their  decision making processes to ensure they have the best possible data available? Of course not! All of this can be of assistance to the business.

But the data business managers really need does not exist! Because the easy decisions are conclusions drawn from historical data (and existing strategies). The hard decisions are the ones that require creating assumptions, scenarios and perhaps even visions of the future based on fragmentary, early indicators, weak signals, instinct, expertise-based early pattern recognition and “gut feel”. These are decisions about the future!

So while I wander by a huge convention-event here at this hotel, in search of breakfast, and gawk a bit at the outlandish clothes some of the speakers at a conference on investing in private real estate investment pools (or whatever it is they’re selling), I realize these outsized characters have something no BI tool, no enterprise information architecture, no performance monitoring model provides. They have a sense of the intangible variables that influence billions upon billions of dollars of investments. They are students not just of statistics and markets but also of human nature.

So if you really want to help senior business executives make better decisions, figure out what it is they need before investing in a new, better rear view mirror … or data warehouse.

We are big (with very good reason) on helping enterprises establish “one version of the truth” – but we aren’t very good yet at helping enterprises establish “one vision of the future”, particularly when that vision is at odds with the current zeitgeist.

What would Rich Uncle Pennybags do?

How do you think we can help enterprises tune their early detection systems? And their early decision systems?

Physorg has a news piece on artificial rats. This might seem whimsical (or the subject for a “Golden Fleece” award unless you apply a lot of converging threads.

This piece is about rat-like robots. It brings to mind, Rodney Brooks’ work at MIT on the elegance of simple robots.

What this article doesn’t go into is the social nature of rats.

Nor is it clear that they are working with machine learning algorithms – indeed, they may be using different approaches.

But put all this together. Brooks’ elegance. Hawkins’ work on Hierarchical Temporal Memory as well as a lot of other great work on machine learning. What we think we know about principles of social behavior in rattus rattus.

(Maybe this is too advanced. Maybe we should be looking at bees or ants.)

Create collections of AI-rats that socialize through various mechanisms to provide a test bed for exploiting the collective intelligence of simple social organisms (think termite mounds in Africa)

If we had enough available capacity in the cloud, shouldn’t we be able to build self-training, self-organizing networks of communities of rats in the cloud (or bees or …) to better test what we believe are underlying social (and, by extension, economic) models?

Have any of you come across research (or research plans) to run large scale social simulations (that require cloud-class resources) to test out social models like this, simulations based on the principles above?

Google inspires and frustrates, leads and lags, marches to the beat of a different (non-enterprise) drummer and wants everyone (including enterprises) to love and adore it.

What a mix! I have been looking at Google Wave and I am really, really impressed. At the same time, I have serious misgivings about whether Google understands what it needs to do to succeed with enterprises (I have  research note that’s about to pop out – probably will appear around 3 June).

Wave is potentially a major disruptive discontinuity, a clean sheet design. It will be darned near impossible for vendors of existing or earlier-generation products  to morph their products to effectively emulate this. Wave will force others to do new clean sheet projects.

Unfortunately, the first on the block with an entirely new, disruptive discontinuity, isn’t always the long term winner.

This is *so* refreshing and, if the design gets sticky in the consumer market, its impact will be convulsive in large enterprises. This isn’t just a new product or service. It’s a new way of working. Google’s right to focus this on consumers (not enterprises, not for the next few years).

This is not a declaration that Google will create and own “this” market.  This is a declaration that we are seeing an exciting new wave of disruptive innovation, started by Google and potentiated by a new design center (people working together in a persistent and pervasive cloud).

The design may fail. Someone else may evolve and perfect it. In the end, what matters is bold innovation that addresses many of the vexing problems posed by current product offerings.

OA – office automation – was conceptualized as automating manual tasks (typing a memo, correcting the edits, duplicating it, snail-mailing it, doing calculations on a mechanical calculator, creating slides with stick on labels and high contrast film and so forth). Current email, calendar, personal productivity and similar applications are the “ultimate” expression of those late 1970’s design goals.

Google’s wave breaks the mold, sets out to do something unique. We’ll be publishing our take on the announcement and the technology mid next week (the week of 1 June 09). In the mean time, O’Reilly’s description of Wave is a really valuable introduction. This note isn’t Gartner’s take on the Google Wave. It is my personal tribute to bold, innovative, breakthrough thinking at Google. Whether it succeeds or not, it constitutes a great step forward.

What do you think?

[We published our “Vendor Rating Note” on Google 1 April. And last looked at Gmail and other GAPE components -- “The State of Google Apps” in May 2008 – the piece in final editing right now is a major update to that 2008 piece.]

Daryl Plummer and I have been carrying on a conversation (with several others) about understanding what an iPhone is. First and foremost, it is not a phone.

The iPhone is the first clearly visible member of a new class of Internet-savvy populist toolkits that you can carry with you. (Insert list of newly introduced competitors to the iPhone with similar toolkit capabilities.)

It has a phone application. A music application (actually, many). A camera application (again, actually many), news applications, entertainment applications, communication apps, collaboration, hobbies, specialties, peccadilloes and “what have you” applications.

It’s not an extension of your corporate phone or the IT-designed, special PC image on your notebook or desktop. It’s your personal toolkit.

We were writing at the turn of the century (circa 2000) about the “Supranet”, how internet, wireless, mobile telephony and intelligent objects all come together. But we were writing about the business side – how businesses would take advantage of this (and how it would benefit end-user consumers) so we didn’t have the same populist, consumer oriented vision of Steve Jobs. (Too bad, eh?)

But that’s OK. We detected the coming tsunami. But we didn’t understand, at the time, how the populist part would become (and has become) far more important, at least for now, than the corporate part.

So… when I say that the iPhone is not a phone, I suggest we think of it as a Populist Electronic Toolkit (PET). You could buy the Apple version (PETA – a/k/a the iPhone) or not. You could go “business only” and buy a No-Pets-Allowed appliance…. or something in between.

Help me understand. Do I have this right? How often do you use your iPhone as a phone? How often do you use all the zillions of other apps on the device?

Is it just a phone for you, your family or your users?

Where have all the users gone?

The press has been repeating a piece today covering a story (originally from Nielsen) that Twitter quitters found to outnumber tweeters. 

So…are you a twitterer? Have you twittered more or less in the last 30 days than in the previous 30 days?