Office 2010

Besides the overall confusion of having all the commands scrambled up and re-arranged, seems like there are many specific, little things to dislike:

The whole ribbon context thing may--may--make it simpler for a new user to absorb. It amounts to applying the old computer science dictum--there is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of indirection. The problem is that it also inserts a layer of navigation for many common operations. Things that used to be just a click away require first moving to the right ribbon, before being able to access the function. One example: switching windows in MS-Word.

What is really bad--many keyboard commands don't work, or at least don't work from all contexts (though some do). For instance in Outlook, I was accustomed to Alt-O to get to today. Very useful, very frequently used. No longer works (at least not the way I expect it to).

Went and returned to default a lot of things that I had set--sort order, group by. It's been so long since I upgraded Office, I can't remember if all versions have done this with upgrades, or just this one..

As far as I can tell, there is no option to make updates to a meeting, save but not send. Yes, I understand the logic behind prompting you to send after making updates, but there ARE use cases for updating, saving and not immediately sending. As far as I can tell, that is now impossible!

Then there is the "To-Do" bar, which might be okay in the Calendar pane, but I really don't need in my email window. So the good news is you can minimize it--the bad news is--it doesn't minimize all the way (or down to a vertical bar a few pixels wide)--it still takes up significant space, and the first few events are displayed horizontally. I think the M$ UX people were high when they designed this one.

Things I like:

• Finally, >9 recently-used files (this one is so overdue it almost seems like M$ doesn't actually deserve any credit here)
• Outlook--meeting updates that don't require a response and re-set all response-tracking

How IT Got Boring (It's All About De-Commissioning)

I have been in and around big-corporation IT[1] for 20+ years. I started my career in 1987, fairly early in the PC era. I was attracted to computers in general for the technical and micro-scale problem-solving challenges. I was attracted to corporate IT for the opportunity to build systems which solve problems, deliver efficiency and enable innovation.

For the first 10+ years of my career, that worked out pretty well. The technology improved quickly, and there were numerous opportunities to apply technology and make a big impact quickly. Automating a manual process for the first time is usually a sure winner.

But something subtle started happening. It became apparent to me personally in the post-Y2K, post-dot-com era. The fact was that corporate IT was no longer a fast-moving, innovative, technology-driven profession. IT has reached "maturity". This maturity is manifest both in the technology, and in the projects.

Regarding the Technology
In the 80s and well into the 90s, it was conventional wisdom that keeping up with technology was an exhausting rat-race. If you weren't careful, and allowed yourself to work in the same "old" technology for 5 years, you would fall hopelessly behind. For corporate IT, that has long-since ceased to be true. The pace of technology turnover is way slower now. Information technology tools may develop and improve steadily, but they don't go through wholesale, next-generation replacement very fast at all. The web was probably the last pervasive new technology to break over corporate IT--and that wave hit 15 years ago. If you were at the top of your game 5 years ago, and sat out of the workforce for 5 years and came back, I think you would have no trouble picking up where you left off.

Regarding the Projects
At some point around the year 2000, everything that could be automated, had been automated. At least once, sometimes more than once. Somewhere along the line, in the rush to automate stuff and gain all those efficiencies, we didn't really think too much about maintenance[2]. We just built a bunch of systems. But we discovered that the care and feeding of those systems was becoming a crushing burden. As companies acquired other companies, or created new product lines, or just generally modified business processes, they found that it was getting harder and harder to alter computer systems to keep up. Ironically, the software became the most rigid ingredient in business processes and capabilities.

This fact in turn led to behaviors which ultimately compounded the problem. Since it was already hard for the systems to keep up with business changes, there was an inevitable tendency to take shortcuts. In particular, older (aka, "legacy") systems, when being superseded, were often not completely de-commissioned, but were left in place, performing some vestigal functions that the new system did not provide.

Other trends have only compounded this problem. SOX separation of duties requirements--while generally appropriate--slow down the pace at which small changes can be introduced. Data-privacy requirements create further burdens. Outsourcing, and turnover in general, also make the problem worse: it is an axiom that documentation for computer systems is always woefully incomplete and out-of-date, so work arrangements that eliminate the handing down of "tribal knowledge" further undermine the organizational knowledge needed to understand how a system works, and what is needed to take it out of production.

Conclusion
So the result of all this is that the typical large corporation, circa 2005, started to feel that it was choking on the complexity of its own systems environment. The single biggest focus of most IT departments, after keeping the lights on, is an increasingly frantic quest for environment simplification. However, because of the complexity of the problem, and the effect of running frantically while trying to shoot a moving target, this is not so easily done. Nothing goes quickly, and many of the results are close to invisible. In other words, corporate IT work has gotten kind of boring[3].

I will be interested to re-visit this post in a decade--my guess is that some progress will have been made, but this will still be a big concern.


Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to try to describe this problem for the "lay" person, as my sense is that most non-IT people have little awareness of this situation.


Notes

[1] This article pertains to the IT systems that are built for in-house use, by typical large companies. The situation is likely different for other categories of IT systems--such as software products or embedded software. For a fuller treatment of those distinctions, see Joel Spolsky's essay "Five Worlds of Software".

[2] Sort of like the original Y2K problem itself.

[3] It's not truly boring, any more than many other kinds of complicated, but slow-moving, professional work are boring. In fact, once you adjust your mind-set, simplifying the complex environment provides a very challenging problem to work with. But it is no longer intrinsically exciting, the way only building shiny, new things can be. (And remember--this only applies to BigCo in-house software, as per note #1.)

.

.

Securosis Blog

Securosis is a info tech security consultancy, who have this great blog where they publish most of their research. I have found it tremendously helpful for a project I am working on.(I also think "Securosis" is a great name--I assume it is meant to convey "obsessed with IT security, to the point of neurosis".)

Finally, the Perfect Use for Texting

This has been a very rainy spring here in Minnesota. I have 3 kids in practices, and am coordinator for one of their teams. More than once, it has been touch-and-go as to whether weather would cause a practice to be canceled. When storms threaten, several things happen, all bad:

• Parents call the coaches cell phone all afternoon.
• Some parents don't get cancellation emails in time, and make the trip for nothing
• Other parents assume practice is canceled, when it isn't

While email is very convenient, it is often not timely enough. One, because not everyone carries a BlackBerry; two, because many people use the work email address.

It finally dawned on me that texting was the solution. Everybody carries cell phones, all the time, and texting is very near-real-time.

But I didn't want to solicit and hand-enter 40 or more cell phone numbers (2-3 per athlete). And I wanted all 3 coaches to be able to send the cancellation (or non-cancellation) message.

I looked around the web a little bit, and found a site called www.networktext.com. It's basically a newsgroup for texting. Ad-supported. It has the key features I need:

1. Self-service registering for the members (parents).
2. Ability to designate administrators--the only people who can send messages to the group.
3. Ability to send texts to the group from a computer.

I put out the word to the parents only two days ago, expecting to have low participation. I figured maybe after the next time it was a rainout, that would motivate more people to sign up. But this spring being the wet, unpredictable season it has been, 48 hours later we had our first opportunity to use it. When I logged in, I was surprised to see 23 members registered.

It seemed to work well, one of the parents even replied (by email) thanking me for setting it up, and another replied by text. To be honest, I am surprised this hasn't caught on more. This seems like a very obvious area for Google to move into.

Regarding IT As A Profession

A pair of terrific columns by Cringely. He hits the high points in some inter-related themes that I have been thinking about:

1. IT as a profession isn't all that fun any more.
2. IT if factionalized and balkanized.
3. Outsourcing and off-shoring have lots of problems, including quite possibly not saving money, just buying a much higher volume of labor at lower prices.

Choice quotes for each:

One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s.

in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process. The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture.

Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.

Business Idea: Third-Party Password Custodian

This Cringely column got me thinking...

Identity thieves aren't so lazy, especially when they have technology to help them. They can start a sweepstakes website that requires only free registration to win that cruise of a lifetime to Bora Bora. And in doing so the thieves can know that a majority of registrants will use a username and password combination that they also use at a lot of other sites, like bank and brokerage accounts. Not only don't they need to actually award the cruise, they don't even have to break into your bank account in order to benefit from the username/password combo. They just sell that information to another crook.

That is kind of scary. I don't tend to register for sweepstakes, but you never know. Plus, there is the old "inside job" possibility, that a company employee will steal and sell your data. Because I DO register for a lot of eCommerce sites. I know, the first line of defense is to use a special password for financial accounts.

Wouldn't a well-established, highly-trusted third-party password custodian be the solution? Kind of like how it works with the certificate authorities in PKI? So you register your User ID for each site, along with a master password (you get to have more than 1 master password, if you want), and then that site generates a strong password for you, which you don't even need to know, and performs the actual login, using that password. I remember reading, several years ago, about a hardware device that did this.

Also, a nice enhancement, to defeat keystroke-loggers, would be to present a bitmap of the alphabet, to allow graphical log-in.

Windows Power Management

Power management in Windows (XP) seems so iffy and unpredictable. Often, I will find a drained battery when I power up my laptop 4 hours after shutting it down at the end of the work day. What seems to happen is that after I invoke Shut Down on my laptop--which takes a bit of time, especially if connected to the corporate network--and I flip the screen closed, that action--flipping the screen--invokes Sleep mode. Instantly, thus over-riding the shutdown in progress.

Getting Users to Print More

Vyomesh I. Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard’s printing division, wants to know how to keep people printing and how to get them printing more. I have a tip for him, but he might not like it: cut the cost per page. Substantially.

I print a lot of stuff of the web, for off-line convenience reading. Just black plain text, so any printer has more than enough quality. All I care about is cost and speed. So I buy the laser printer with the cheapest possible consumables. Usually that means generic substitute cartridges. Brother is typically the best bet here, HP the worst.

I will grant that he has one idea I like: getting web formats that don't have an "impedance mismatch" with printing. THat would be most welcome. A fair amount of the stuff I print requires me to do a Select-All, copy to clipboard, then paste into Word for readable printing.

Automatic Backup-to-Net

Here's a business-technology idea...a background feature that automatically backs documents up via the internet, as you work on them. Just as MW-Word, Excel, etc can auto-save in the background, this would auto-save to your personal backup repository in the "internet cloud". A key feature would be that no configuration or filing would be necessary--it just happens automagically.

Another important design consideration is the "find, don't file" metaphor Gmail uses. So no need to specify where to file.

Of course, this feature would be a slam-dunk for Google...

Postscript--just tried Google Docs and it essentally has the feature, of course--including the no-file-folder option.

Getting Widescreen TVs on the Right Aspect Ratio

It always bugs me when I am in a restaurant/pub that has TVs showing standard 4:3 broadcasts, and they have the TVs set to "wide" mode. It also surprises me that other people either don't notice or don't care. (This would include the rest of my family, as it happens; I'm the only one who ever switches the aspect ratio on the TV.)

Google Apps--You Read It from Me First

Google Apps for small business seems very much along the lines of my suggestion of almost 2 years ago.