What Bogus BS!

Keynote’s Mobile Minute quotes a study by The Yankee Group that states it measured website performance comparing a desktop computer with a tablet and a smartphone (the ubiquitous iPhone and iPad) and lo and behold, the results showed that the tablet was 8X slower than the desktop.

Of course, the desktop was probably connected via wired 1GB Ethernet, while the tablet and phone were connected via Wi-Fi and 3G, but who’s counting. (The blog entry I saw doesn’t have a link to the data so I can’t confirm my prejudicial reaction.)

Why not expend bits on something that’s not obvious?

Get your Outlook under control

I don’t review products too often, but I have to mention the best productivity aid for Microsoft Outlook I’ve found so far: ClearContext.

There are two versions, personal,which is free and professional which is not. I actually sprung for the pro version, it’s so good.

My problem was too many e-mails and too many folders to sort them into. I also needed to track contacts and project tasks and e-mails and appointments and so on. ClearContext does addressed these issues with a relatively simple to use interface and some great automation features.

For example, with a single click (in version 5, currently in beta) any message in my inbox (or a Spam folder) can be sent to the right folder location and categorized. Send a reply and instead of going to the “Sent Items” folder your message is automatically also put into the correct folder and categorized.

In addition, Outlook follow-up and scheduling features are enhanced and simplified, so they’re easier to use.

Task and project management is where ClearContext really shines. Announced features for the next version promise to make it even better. There’s a feature called the Dashboard which displays all your Projects, Tasks and Actions, Appointments and Notifications (from Facebook, Linked-in etc.) In addition to the this global dashboard, double clicking on any project in the project list will open a tab just for that project which gives you a view of messages, Appointments, Contacts (extracted from the messages and linked to your Outlook Contacts lists or from which you can create an Outlook Contact. You can also see all the attachments relating to your projects and your Tasks.

Here’s a screenshot (borrowed from ClearContext’s web site) of the dashboards:

There are lots more features, but the most important one is the time you’ll save. It seems that I save at least 20 minutes in my AM mailbox cleanup alone. And I’ve been able to find project related attachments while I’m on the phone almost instantly. Just those two features make the software worth the money.

Use MS Outlook to run your life. Get ClearContext to get more control.

Sun Microsystems Web Event - Maximizing the Economics of Computing

 

Sun's Open Network System is a modular system design approach integrating leading technologies across Sun's portfolio in networking, storage, compute and software.

This is a very interesting announcement from Sun. First of all, the architecture is very similar to what was recently announced by Cisco. That is, the integration of a virtualized network infrastructure with computers (including the new Intel Xeon 5500 – Nehalem) and storage onto a single piece of hardware, albeit a blade enclosure.

It also has some of the elements of IBM’s iDataPlex and Cool Blue offerings, including cooling doors for the cabinets using water or refrigerant gas.

But what makes this announcement truly compelling is looking at it as an Oracle database and applications platform. Think about it:

Racks of databases and applications running on virtualized Linux or Solaris OS servers with Sun Open Storage for virtually limitless storage capacity and connected via virtualized or InfiniBand ultra high bandwidth networking. Throw in some Windows and VMware and you’re talking about a very powerful value proposition for many customers.

Challenges to all three competitors: Cisco, HP and IBM.

Cisco is challenged because there’s less apparent uniqueness to their UCS offering. Regardless of other factors, Sun is an established server and storage hardware vendor with a large installed base and usually happy customers. Loosing the uniqueness of UCS makes breaking into the server and storage market just so much more difficult for Cisco.

HP is challenged because they don’t have the fully integrated stack for their blade systems yet, and more importantly don’t have the application software stack that Oracle/Sun could bring to the table. HP has yet to enunciate their response to Cisco UCS. Now, they may have to take Sun seriously again. And, of course, the value of the hardware bundling deals with Oracle is even more threatened.

IBM’s challenges are of a different order. The recent IBM/Brocade and IBM/Juniper networking deals point to IBM’s greatest areas of weakness. IBM does have the software stack and the storage and server platforms to match up well. They also have the green credibility to compete with Sun there. But the combined Oracle/Sun platform could still be a challenge, especially with companies for whom IBM’s centralized enterprise computing culture is not a great fit.

Even with the down economy, IT competition is really heating up.

The Future of OS?

It would seem that I was on the right track over the past decade. The following excerpts from a ZDNet blog, by Mary Jo Foley, and the referenced Microsoft research sites describes research into OS architecture I was writing about years ago when Microsoft was first getting legally slammed for monopolistic practices and delivering crummy software.

My points over the years have been that operating systems were being made to do things for which they were not designed and that the use of legacy code and approaches was hobbling functionality and crippling performance, security, and innovative ways of using every improving microprocessor design and features.

I'd felt that starting over from the basics might solve lots of problems that are the result of renovating and building new additions to an old architecture. This should be obvious, but it's very good to see a willingness on the part of the owners of that rickety Rube Goldberg building to start over from scratch.

The first two quotes are about a "pure" research project at Microsoft: Singularity. The third quote is about a Microsoft spin off from that research: Midori.

From ZDNet:

“The Singularity project started in 2003 to re-examine the design decisions and increasingly obvious shortcomings of existing systems and software stacks. These shortcomings include: widespread security vulnerabilities; unexpected interactions among applications; failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers, and a perceived lack of robustness. We believe that many of these problems are attributable to systems that have not evolved far beyond the computer architectures and programming languages of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The computing environment of that period was very different from today….”

Some more detail from Microsoft Research:

The status quo that confronted them (the Microsoft Research team) was the decades-long tradition of designing operating systems and development tools. Contemporary operating systems—including Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX—all trace their lineage back to an operating system called Multics that originated in the mid-1960s. As a result, the researchers reasoned, current systems still are being designed using criteria from 40 years ago, when the world of computing looked much different than it does today.

“We asked ourselves: If we were going to start over, how could we make systems more reliable and robust?” Larus says. “We weren’t under the illusion that we’d make them perfect, but we wanted them to behave more predictably and remain operating longer, and we wanted people to experience fewer interruptions when using them.”

From the same ZDNet story on Midori:

“There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.

There's not much information on Midori, but that's not too important. What's important is the possibility that as we transition from the PC paradigm to something very different (and beyond the mobile device model too), is the willingness to consider a whole new way of utilizing what we call computing technology. Without knowing more about what Microsoft is up to, and now inside knowledge about what the other interested companies might be doing, I'd like to pose an idea:

Move away from our current hardware architectures. Find alternatives to buses and other limiting structures. Look at hardware design from the same new perspective as Microsoft is looking at OS design. Start over from scratch. And start over by scratching the needs of the folks who might actually find this new paradigm useful.

Computers started as tools for breaking WWII ciphers and calculating ballistics. It was only in 1951 when the first business applications arrived. The first graphical computer game arrived a year later.  All of these inventions were built upon engineering principles, the limitations of vacuum tubes and early electronics. We're now at a point where these limitations can be transcended by a bit of imagination.

I look forward to seeing the imagination in action.