My Digital Life

There’s a good post over at Vertigo discussing the future of virtualisation in MS.  I started my career doing desktop deployment projects, so the idea of virtual desktops is something I’ve kept an eye on over the years.  It one of those things that has been promising lots for a long time but never really delivered.  I know there are some organisations using virtual desktops successfully, but from what I’ve seen it tends to be for very specific requirements, and as deployment of traditional OS’s has got easier uptake seems to have been quite limited. 

The Calista deal is interesting because the technology has the potential to remove one of the big obstacles to wide scale adoption, the user experience.   Alongside the other technologies in it’s portfolio MS should now be quite well placed to deliver true virtual and streamed desktops.  How about a world where your PC boot’s off the network, a Hyper-V hypervisor is streamed into RAM and then connects to a VM desktop running on a server in an (MS Hosted?) data centre?  Sounds kinda cool to me. 

…From Steve Clayton.  I’ve only really been on Twitter for a few weeks but already I spend quite a bit of time on there.  In fact along with Google Reader and Outlook its one of the apps I seem to have open all the time.  At the moment I use it more as a feed, but that’s really because Twitter hasn’t quite sparked yet in my circle of friends and colleagues.  That seems to be changing though, a few people have picked up on it from the Facebook app - my Facebook status is updated with my Tweets.

For now though Steve’s post has some good advice and links.  Take a look and get over to twitter.com. 

I’ve got an idea for a site, it’s been knocking about in my head for ages, but I’ve never managed to find the time I’d need to get the coding and data source stuff done.  The more I’ve thought about it recently though, the more I’m thinking I could get 90% of what I want by mashing up a few existing services.  Time to give it a go I reckon :)

An article on Techmeme is suggesting that Windows 7 might have moved forward a year and arrive sometime late in 09.  Whether this is true or not who knows, but from my perspective as an enterprise customer it would make some sense - and probably make my life easier in the long run! 

Selling a Vista migration to the people who will pay the bills is proving to be quite a task.  The business isn’t overly interested in what OS we choose to run, only that they have the applications they need, can use them where they are and that they’re nice and speedy.  This makes Vista rather a hard sell, especially considering the work needed to assess and fix Vista compatibility for application portfolio of some 1600 apps.  That’s not to say Vista isn’t a great product - I’d have migrated six months ago if it was up to me.

Bringing Windows 7 forwards would provide businesses with a renewed incentive to move away from XP.  It’d assume it’ll include a whole bunch of new functionality to further improve on Vista (mobile working, deployment etc), and I’d guess will also provide improved support for some MS’s S+S initiatives - something we’ll be looking at in a lot of detail this year.

The problem for MS is that a quicker release would be effectively writing off Vista for any big corporate’s who haven’t already started their Vista migration.  Certainly if the move is true I would doubt we would do much work towards a vista, we’d delay those projects by six months to include Windows 7.  Having said that, those same large corporates are going to have enterprise licensing so they’ll probably be paying for a ‘desktop’ not the version of windows that’s on it.  Interesting stuff…

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC.  It started out as one of those ‘hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I…’ chats.  He’s basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade.  We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC’s so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on…

We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense for him to buy local disks any more.  He’s got a wireless router, so there’s network infrastructure.  He’s not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn’t an issue.  And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he’d rather go the Home Server route. 

I’ve done network storage at home for years, but that’s because I’m a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff.  With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense. 

I’ve been following the MS Software + Services stuff for a while now, and a post by Steve Clayton yesterday got me thinking about it again.  Skydrive and Office Live Workspace seem to me to be great little products, and free ones at that.  With Broadband now common place at home and services such as the Three mobile broadband now offering proper ‘anywhere’ connectivity targeted at consumers, cloud services now really make sense. 

How does this relate to work?  Well having worked within big SharePoint deployments and knowing first hand the amount of effort it can take to get a working solution for a big company, the idea of SharePoint Online really appeals to me.  For the most part MOSS deployments are centralised, so for most users it’ll make little difference whether their docs are in our data centre or Microsoft’s.  With Exchange and OCS also available as Online services, it becomes a very interesting proposition.  I’m guessing there’ll be challenges around authentication and identity (to name a few), but they shouldn’t be anything that MS can’t solve with federation and ILM, solutions already in their portfolio.

Exciting times ahead… (Well for a geek).

This is my problem for the next few weeks…

S+S and the other software and services initiatives from Google et al may well take away a fair chunk of the work needed to manage an effective IS service.  If we can do that we can devote our efforts away from the day-to-day ops and into making a difference elsewhere.  Sure there will still be challenges, but hopefully most of the operational overhead will be focused on service management and commercials than day-to-day technical design and admin.  So…  If I’m an enterprise customer planning my IS architecture for my business over the next few years what should I be thinking about?

The first thing that comes to mind is the cloud where all these services will live…  Where is it, and how do I get to it?  How do my users authenticate to it?  How is my information secured between the cloud and desktop?  How do my customers feel about having their data in a cloud somewhere in Redmond or Mountain View?  Might I be part of the cloud for my customers? 

The software side shouldn’t too much of a problem (famous last words!)… getting software to people we can do, but the more I can move that into the cloud the happier I’ll be!

Over the past couple of days I’ve had a few conversations about how people interact with computers and more importantly the apps running on them.  The conversations started off about how Nintendo Wii’s (and to a lesser extent the PS3 with its sixaxis controllers) are changing how people play games.  It got us thinking about what this might mean in the wider context of IT.  Peoples expectations of how they can and should be interacting with software are changing.  A kid who grows up today using a wii and an iPod touch is going to be a tad disappointed by a plain old keyboard and mouse.  This idea of ‘digital natives’ is something I talk about a lot in terms of the software and services we deliver as an IS organisation, but I’ve never really thought about it in on terms of the real basics - how you use a computer.

There are clearly things happening in this area, Surface for example looks very cool, and it seems like Windows Mobile 7 is going to step ahead of Apple and bring a whole new level of motion based interaction to mobile phones and PDA’s.   Tablet PC’s introduced pen/touch style input to the mainstream and have been around for a while.  In Vista I think are a genuine alternative to a regular laptop - imho it’s about time for someone to revived the old ’slate’ style tablets like my trusty old TC1100 (with Vista on it’s still by far the best tablet I’ve used in terms of size and form factor that I’ve used).  But how do these new interfaces reach the humble desktop PC? 

At home, and at work for that matter, I’ll happily use a laptop or tablet.  It works well for me and my job, but if you spend your day in AutoCAD or some random GIS app the chances are you’ll be using a desktop or workstation.  There are pretty obvious benefits to using touch style interfaces in those apps, but at the moment other than traditional graphics tablets and some bespoke and expensive tablet screens, I’m not sure how it could be achieved in the mainstream.

The obvious answer would be ‘touch’ enabled monitors.  A touch version of the Dell Crystal monitor Steve Clayton posted about the other day would look very ‘minority report’!   How well would a traditional monitor work though?  There’s probably an argument to say that it would be (quite literally) painful to use a screen that way over a full day. 

I don’t use the tablet features on my laptop nearly as much as I should, but when I do its on a desk or on my lap.  My workmate Trevor on the other hand only ever uses the pen on his tablet and found that having it flat on a desk became uncomfortable after a while.  He’s now using an small artists easel to hold the tablet at an angle like a traditional drawing board.  Having tried it myself I have to say that works very well indeed.  Perhaps the age of the drawing board isn’t quite over yet.  We’ll just have less pens than before!

There are plenty of stories out there at the moment about Vista’s poor business sales, whether they are true or not who knows.  I do know I’m having trouble selling a migration to the business here.  A Multitouch interface coupled with technology like SeaDragon and decent ISV support from people like AutoDesk could well be a ‘killer app’ for whatever release brings it to Windows.  It looks like most of the software technology is there, I know lenovo have multitouch drivers available for my T61, but where are the devices that would bring it all together?  I guess that’s where Apple have a key advantage, they control the hardware platform their OS runs on so can easily bring the whole end-to-end package together without having to rely on partners to deliver solutions to customers.