Pattern Finder

Looking for People to Interview on Productivity Suites

As I hinted in yesterday's post, I'm writing a quadrant report on office productivity suites. The list includes:

• Corel WordPerfect Office
• Google Apps, Premier Edition
• IBM Lotus Symphony
• Microsoft Office
• OpenOffice.org
• OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition
• Sun StarOffice
• ThinkFree
• Zoho

While I've talked to some reference customers supplied by the vendors, I'd like to talk to some customers who haven't been cherry-picked. So if you're an IT manager responsible for purchasing one of the above packages and are willing to spend half an hour answering 36 questions, I'd like to talk to you.

The answers are confidential--I won't be using any customer names, and I won't be blabbing to the vendors--I just want to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. The questions cover things such as product quality, customer support, what's still wanting in features, etc. You can contact me at gcreese at burtongroup.com. Thanks for your help.

Switching from Comcast to Verizon: There Goes a Day

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Image via Wikipedia

Well, I finally succumbed to Verizon marketing and had the "Triple Play" installed yesterday. The following is the story of the order and installation saga.

Previously, we had:

• Broadband Internet access: Comcast
• Cable TV: Comcast
• Telephone (POTS): Verizon
• Telephone (long distance): AT&T
• Telephone (VOIP): Vonage
• Telephone (wireless): Verizon

Now we have:

• Broadband Internet access: Verizon
• Cable TV: Verizon
  
• Telephone (over fiber): Verizon
• Telephone (long distance): Verizon
• Telephone (VOIP): Vonage
• Telephone (wireless): Verizon
  

Two reasons pushed me over the edge. First, Verizon was cheaper (about $1,000 over the next two years), and Verizon now has more HD channels than Comcast.

So, I ordered online, and ran into the first snag. The system automatically assigned me an installation date (which I didn't want), and even though the web site said I could change it online, I couldn't. I eventually got into online chat, where the Verizon rep said, "Book the order now, and then call the 800 number later to change it."

The Product Manager Should Be Shot

Don't you hate it when a company decides that you--a customer--should spend your time fixing their problem? I do. Here's my latest story, courtesy of Microsoft. I'm getting ready to go to Burton Group's Catalyst Conference and so this morning I installed the latest version of Microsoft Streets and Trips on my laptop. I went to activate it and lo and behold, it announced that I'd reached my activation limit. At this point there are five PCs in the house, and I'd lost track of where I'd installed it (I'd installed it on one desktop PC several months back [which I'd forgotten about] and on another one yesterday). The license says I can install it on a desktop PC and a laptop, and that's it. Fair enough. I de-installed in from one of my desktop PCs, re-installed it on my laptop, and it still wouldn't activate. Although the license says I can de-install it and put it on another machine, the activation technology doesn't work that way--when you uninstall it, the software doesn't phone home and say this machine no longer has it installed (a Microsoft Support Manager confirmed this behavior to me later).

Thus began my hour-long journey on my way to fix Microsoft's problem. My first hurdle was finding the right support number to call--the first call into Microsoft Support using the number they supplied within the software got me to a Customer Support Rep who transfered me to a different Support line wanting me to pay $35 for the call. ("So let me get this straight--your software doesn't work the way your license says it should and you want me to pay for the privilege of fixing it?") I bailed out of that one. I eventually made my way to quite a pleasant Support Rep who then said I needed to call from another phone to a different Support line to activate the product over the phone while she held on on this line (apparently conference calling isn't supported within Microsoft Support, and Microsoft assumes everyone has two lines in their house or has a cellphone). After getting caught in automated touchpad hell twice and hearing for the third time, "You know sir, you can only install this on two PCs," I finally got everything straightened out.

Here's my list of the aggravations:

• As I mentioned above, deinstalling Streets and Trips 2008 doesn't notify the license server that a previously active copy is no longer active. In short, the activation software doesn't map to the license wording. What poor excuse for a product manager allowed the product to ship with that bug? Since it was clear I was irate, the nice Support Rep transfered me to her manager when the call was completed, and he told me that this problem was fixed in the next release. OK, but that doesn't give Microsoft a pass. Anyone who did any form of customer experience analysis ("Customers de-install the software, customers have their hard drives crash," etc.) would have seen this flaw straight away. When I was a software product manager and in this exact same boat with keys for image servers (our activation software was more anal retentive than our license), I relaxed the activation software so that it gave some wriggle room to customers but still caught the egregious violators. This is not rocket science--just common sense.
• Given how many customers Microsoft has and how many support calls it takes, it's amazing how much of a maze customer support is.
• Streets and Trips 2008 won't save its files in the Streets and Trips 2006 file format. So if I want to keep running 2006 on my daughter's and wife's laptops, we can no longer share maps. Thank you, Microsoft, for trying to force me to upgrade. However, I'm cheap and I won't; I'll just seethe at Microsoft's inability to be customer-centric.

This was an aggravating episode that I'll get over--maybe. But it highlights the fact that writing great software (and I like Streets and Trips) isn't enough; a lousy installation experience will cancel all of that great work.

The "Computer Sayings" Hunt

There's an interesting post in the Bits blog of The New York Times entitled, "Did Bill Gates Really Say That?" It describes Fred Shapiro's quest to chase down the origins of computer-related sayings such as:

• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." [Attributed to Bill Gates; sitting here with 4 GB of memory in my PC, that estimate missed the mark.]
• "Do not fold, mutilate, or spindle." [I remember it as "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate," as many commenters did.]
• "Garbage in, garbage out." [Mr. Shapiro tracks it down to 1959; twenty years later it was in full swing, as GIGO was drilled into me in my programming course at John Hancock.]
• "Information wants to be free."
• "I think there is a world market for about five computers." [Said during the days when computers cost millions of dollars and took up entire rooms.]
• "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." [Attributed to Ken Olsen of DEC. Again, another miss, at least in the Creese household, where the current census is three laptops, one desktop PC, and three PDAs.]
• "That's not a bug, it's a feature." [I was a product manager for nine years, and found this phrase very useful, especially near ship date.]
• "To err is human. To really foul up--it takes a computer."

The comments on the post are more interesting than the post itself. Some commenters go the geek route, giving mini-tutorials on memory assignments in the early IBM PC. Others do the historian thing, recalling conversations with Ken Olsen and retired IBM engineers. It's amazing how much knowledge is still out there about computing's early days--we just need to write it down.

An enjoyable read if you were into computers before the Internet arrived.

Standards Work Doesn't Have to Be Contentious

As a relief from the flame wars going on in the ODF vs. OOXML space (e.g., Brian Jones' recent blog post about Rob Weir's "We're at war" statement), check out what's going on with the OpenSearch protocol.

On November 6, DeWitt Clinton (currently at Google; previously at A9/Amazon, Microsoft, and Tripod, among others) put up a blog post in which he noted that Microsoft is using OpenSearch to implement the Federated Search Connectors in Search Server 2008. He pointed out that Microsoft is extending the OpenSearch description document format with the Location Definition file format. He then did a compare and contrast between the baseline standard and Microsoft's enhancements, and midway through the post said, "First off, it’s great to see Microsoft continue to embrace OpenSearch, and extend it in a good way. They’ve remained faithful to the specification and introduced a number of valuable improvements." He mentioned in the post that he was puzzled by a few things in the Location Definition spec, and someone at Microsoft made a comment to the post that day, explaining some of the spec decisions.

In any case, after following some of the "he said, she said" posts in the ODF vs. OOXML world, it's a relief to see rational discussions about a standard by employees in competing companies.

See, It's Proof I'm Using Windows Live Writer

For those wondering what the Temporary Post Used for Style Detection is doing on my blog, it's an artifact of my installing Windows Live Writer on my laptop. Live Writer generates the post to detect the CSS styles in the blog and sometimes is unable to delete the post. The bad news is, I can't either. My Typepad view of my blog doesn't think the post is there, so I can't flag it for deletion. Apparently 23,000 other bloggers are in the same boat.

Supposedly it's fixed in the forthcoming version 2.0. Let's hope.

(By the way, I figured out how to get rid of it from the front page: I republished my blog.)

Web Analytics: Now It's Analyzing Love

Enterprises have used web analytics to analyze many things: how to cluster products on a web page or catalog page to increase sales, which product descriptions customers prefer, and which explanations visitors find confusing, to name just a few. Now, scientists are using web analytics to analyze dating and love. (You know it had to happen at some point.)

On April 10th, The New York Times carried a story entitled, "Romantic Revulsion in the New Century: Flaw-O-Matic 2.0." The article notes,

Instead of asking people about their mate preferences, scientists can now watch mating rituals in real time. They’ve tracked who asks out whom — and who says yes — at online dating services by watching the customers’ clicks and scanning their messages to look for telephone numbers and phrases like “let’s meet.”

... Just as Darwin could have predicted, the researchers have found that women are pickier than men. While men concentrate mainly on looks and will ask out a lot of women as long as they’re above a certain threshold of attractiveness, women focus on fewer prospects.

They’re less willing to date someone of another race. When using online services, they pay more attention than men do to a potential partner’s education, profession and income. They prefer taller men, but they’re willing to relax their standards for the Ron Perelmans of the world, as revealed in a study of more than 20,000 online daters by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu of the University of Chicago and Dan Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000.

A/B testing at its finest: do you prefer this 6-foot hunk who makes $60,000 a year, or that 5'8" fellow who makes $206,000 a year?

Blog-Tag: The Digital Equivalent of a Chain Letter

Peter O'Kelly has tagged me to write down five things that most people don't know about me.

1. I had lived in ten houses by the time I was 18 (two houses in Louisville, KY; one in Liverpool, England; one in Urbana, IL; one in Newport, RI; three in Champaign, IL; two in Eugene, OR.)
2. I was awarded the Key to the City of Louisville, KY.
3. I was clueless about computers in college, calling a keypunch machine a "computer" in the course of giving a college tour. Eleven years later I was Product Manager of Operating Systems at the eighth largest computer company in the world (Wang Laboratories).
4. I was involved with the development of a tablet PC that shipped in 1991, back when they were called "pen PCs" and the PenPoint OS was giving Windows 3.1 a run for its money.
5. In the course of that project, I met and had lunch with Douglas Adams, author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

For those wondering how all this got started, check out Jeff Pulver's blog.

Taking the Eraser to the Paper... er, Excel

You can tell we're in digital world when employees are altering information not by erasing it on paper, but by hiding columns in Excel. The New York Times ran a story today called "N.Y.S.E. Executive Tells of Altering Documents to Hide Grasso's Full Payout."  In it, Dale B. Bernstein, the former Executive Vice President for Human Resources at the N.Y.S.E., said,

she was instructed by her boss, Frank Z. Ashen, to hide, in an Excel spreadsheet, two columns of data that provided additional detail about Mr. Grasso's 1999, 2000 and 2001 compensation. She said she hid the columns with the bonus and total compensation information in documents that were provided to the compensation committee, but included that information in documents given to the finance department, which had to make the appropriate bookkeeping entries.

"I clicked 'hide column,' " she said in the deposition, which was provided by a person close to the case.

The digital trick here was to refer to the hidden compensation in a footnote ("In 1999, Mr. Grasso will receive 50 percent of his variable compensation in the capital accumulation plan.") but make sure the compensation committee didn't see the $18 million in bonus money as they scanned down the spreadsheet columns in their meeting.

So if you're into fraud, embezzlement, or otherwise shading the truth, throw out your Liquid Paper, and make sure you know all the esoteric tricks in Excel.

"Contact Us" and Google Maps Squeezed onto a Business Card

I had a briefing with Michael Moppert and Santi Pierini of Day Software this week -- and besides it being a good briefing -- I received a business card from their PR rep that has two Web sites built right into it. Pretty amazing stuff.

But before I get into that, a rumination on the changing nature of business cards.  Today, business cards are a short-term information transmittal mechanism: they contain the contact information that you type into Microsoft Outlook.

However, in the past, they meant more: you stuffed them in your Rolodex. Ah, those were the days.  You zinged your Rolodex around with a satisfying flick of the wrist, put the brakes on at the appropriate time, and looked up the card that you needed. You kept the cards because they made up your contact database -- and heaven help you if someone walked off with your Rolodex.

Today, business cards are ephemeral. In my case, a business card is lucky if it lasts a day before I enter its data into Outlook and toss it into the recycle bin. That is, assuming I can read the small type (my eyes are going as I get older) and decipher what the legends T, F, M, E, and W mean (telephone, fax, mobile, e-mail, and Web site, respectively).

But when Katie Eakins of Lewis PR handed me her business card, I suddenly realized I couldn't do the normal card heave ho. Besides the usual contact info, it has a picture of her on the front. Secondly, it has a map and directions on the back, telling me how to get to the Lewis PR office in San Diego. Now those two out-of-the-ordinary additions are useful. My memory won't fade as to what Katie looks like, and if I'm in the San Diego area and need to get to the Lewis offices -- for a briefing, perhaps -- now I'm set.

Geez, a picture and a map -- wait a minute, that's like putting the (1) Contact Us page (including photographs) from the Lewis Web site and (2) Google Maps onto the business card.  Four pounds lighter than my laptop, fits in my shirt pocket, I don't have to go to either www.lewispr.com or maps.google.com, and I don't have to navigate to Katie's picture or a San Diego map.  Now that's time-saving, space-saving high tech. (Or maybe it's just an intelligent person's rethinking of what should be on a business card.)

Before you know it, someone will come up with the idea of putting a mini-bio on the back of the business card, and save me Web site reading time as well....

Moving Digital House

Well, I'm finally back from a move that took me about 30 hours to complete.  No, I didn't move house; I moved computer.  I finally got around to upgrading my office PC to a Dell Dimension 9100 -- a nice, fast, and amazingly quiet PC.  I kept my monitor, a Samsung SyncMaster 955DF, which meant it kept crashing until I installed the driver, but other than that it worked out of the box.

I know that 30 hours seems like a long time, but when you're installing/moving 50 GB of files, it takes awhile.  First, of course, I had to de-install some of the junk that Dell installed, such as WordPerfect and various obnoxious multimedia programs that spend all their time telling you you need to upgrade.  Then comes the installation of Microsoft Office, Streets and Trips, FrontPage, Palm, Adobe Reader, etc.

After that, comes the moving over of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and then a whole slew of music and picture files.  I used Detto's Intellimover to do that.  While the Program/Settings Mover was relatively snappy, the File Transfer utility that comes with it was not -- and had a penchant to hang every 20 minutes or so.  After that I had to reboot each PC (time consuming since I had only one monitor and had to switch back and forth), restart the File Transfer program, and drag-and-drop the unmoved files.  Unattended file tranfer it wasn't.  So while I wouldn't recommend the utility, burning the files to CD and copying that way probably would have taken even more time.

Then came connecting the new PC to Comcast and re-installing the wireless router.  This morning I finally sync'ed my Palm.

All I can say is thank God I'm a geek.  Keeping the sequence of activities straight, files to be moved, etc., would have driven a normal person up a wall.  Most any other appliance (microwave, refrigerator, iron) you just buy it and plug it in.  Microsoft/Intel came up with Plug and Play.  Why can't they come up with Move and Play?  (True, XP does come with the File Settings and Transfer Wizard -- but the documentation is abysmal.  It's along the lines of, "...and then magic happens."  Sorry.  When I've moving valuable data, I want more than a black box.)

Sorry, Not Everything is Public Domain

Boy, I sure piqued some interest with my Tuesday post, where I noted that I could think of a workaround to the NetRatings patents.  I got a number of e-mails -- from both the vendor and analyst camps -- asking me what I was thinking of.

Sorry, but my clients get the first crack, not the public at large.  Also, what I have in mind is not a clean replacement, but a workaround -- a bit of a kluge that's not as functional as what people have in place at the moment, but at least would get NetRatings off of a vendor's back.

So hold off the e-mails -- but think outside the box.  I can't imagine my idea is the only alternative.  If enough people think up other ways of tracking online behavior, NetRatings will ultimately find it holds patents no one wants.