Does It Compute?

Do It Yourself - Not

Periodically, one sees a series of posts arguing that software should be “easy to implement,” that you should not need a consultant, and ranting about programs that actually require some expert work to set up correctly. 

Analogous to this school of thought would be the argument that drafting, say a will, lease or even court proceedings should be “easy” and should not require the expert services of a lawyer. It has always amazed me that anyone can seriously make this argument. When I want to do something complex, I consult an expert.  “Do It Yourself” generally tends to be a disaster.

Ross Kodner recent re-posted a useful post that attempts to actually put some numbers on this phenomenon.  See it at Ross Ipsa Loquitur.

Life in the Cloud

As more and more people move toward “cloud computing” the question of how the “cloud” connects with their PC-based applications, where the majority of mission-critical data is stored, increasingly becomes an issne.

One place I see this is in the demand for new links between programs:

Can I link my Outlook to gmail? (Yes). Can I link TimeMatters to Thunderbird, to Google Calendar?  (No). How do I store my webmail on my hard drive to preserve it?  Can I link my Practice Management program to my Blackberry, iPhone, etc? And so on.

The question of links between programs is a difficult one for two reasons:

First, writing links is not easy. It takes a lot of time and effort.  The second, related, reason, is that it becomes very expensive for a given software maker to write separate links for every iteration of PDA, email program, etc. that is out there. Therefore the easy and less expensive path is to link to Outlook and let the various third-party programs write the link between their program and Outlook. This is almost certainly one of the things that is preventing more people from moving away from LookOut (oops, I mean Outlook). I know I would have moved to Thunderbird long ago if the links were there.

For example, Gavel & Gown has dropped all the old Palm links (and it never did link with the Blackberry). TimeMatters link with the Blackberry is notoriously iffy. And so on.

Eventually, when XML and Open Document Format (the real one, not the proprietary Microsoft one) become standards, this issue will have a better chance of being resolved. For now, however, you need to go through the jungle of third-party applications to make your desired link work. Many of them will require an export-import routine (for example, you can export your contacts from Outlook and then import that file into gmail).

Software makers who invest the time (and money) in developing links to Open Office, Google apps, etc. will have a step up on the rest of the market when the time come. So money invested now would be well-spent.

Bill Gates Leaves

Among all the articles and analysis of the meaning of Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft, one of the best is in this week's Economist. That article is supplemented by an editorial ("leader"), which sums things up like this:

Microsoft successfully extended Windows as an operating system for servers; it has moved into new areas, such as mobile devices and video games; and it has lavished billions of dollars on all sorts of research—without much to show for it. Despite all those efforts, the PC, Mr Gates’s obsession, has ended up as an internet terminal. The company still has everything to prove online. Watching Microsoft in the company of Google and Facebook is a bit like watching your dad trying to be cool.

Definitely worth reading.

Dell Technical Support

A lot of people like to rant about Dell Support.  While I’ve had my share of problems with the hardware over the years (particularly laptop screens and motherboards), I’ve always found support to be quite good.

When I got home this weekend to cap off a great vacation, I found I couldn’t send outgoing email (although I could receive it - I’ve had this issue with Comcast before), and one of my computers appeared to have died - it would not boot, claimed there was no boot drive and would not recognize the drive ID.

When I bought this particular PC (an Optiplex 755) about 9 months ago I took the plunge and got Dell’s Gold 24/7 4 hour response support contract for Small and Medium Businesses.  So I called Dell about 10:30 am Sunday morning after trying a couple of times and running the built-in diagnostics (which did not recognize a hard drive).  Jason, the tech (NOT outsourced to India), walked me through testing (by switching the hard drive and CD/DVD drive cables) and determined that the problem was with the motherboard. He was great.

The motherboard arrived about 12:15 and the tech was there by 1 pm on a hot, horrible Sunday. Of course, it turned out that both the motherboard and hard drive were fried, so I didn’t get back up and running until Monday about noon.

But hardware aside, I think the moral is that if you get the proper support contract, you get what you pay for. And in this case the support was excellent – and on a Sunday no less.

COFEE -- Remember Carnivore?

Microsoft has announced a new tool that lets law enforcement agencies examine the content of your computer in an automated fashion. Called “COFEE” (for “Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor”), it comes on a USB stick. You plug it into a PC, it runs its programs, and bingo, you’ve stolen data about the PC.

Exactly WHAT data is unclear, as is the question of what it does with encrypted or passworded files.  Microsoft says it is meant for use “by law enforcement only with proper legal authority,” but in Bush’s America where there is virtually no such thing as illegal wiretaps and eavesdropping, that’s a pretty meaningless statement.

So with this tool, the police can presumably peek into any passworded Microsoft Office files (although whether it can access PGP or other more secure formats is unclear) and see what you’ve been up to.

This is reminiscent of the ill-fated “Carnivore” program launched in 2000 by Clinton’s FBI which was designed to secretly scan millions of emails.  After a huge uproar, the program was dropped.

A psychiatrist friend of mine used to say that his favorite patients were the paranoids because “they have a good grasp of reality – they think the government is out to get them.”

MicroHoo Not To Be

So Microsoft has “walked away” from the Yahoo deal. Assuming this is not just a very aggressive maneuver to force Yahoo stock down precipitously, this is a good thing.

A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft would surely result in another “Acquire, Merge, Destroy” episode with the devastation of Yahoo. As one of Ballmer’s lieutenants reportedly observed, if Microsoft went ahead with a hostile takeover, the Yahoo employees “would burn the furniture.” For all the complaints about Google being the “next Microsoft,” Microsoft still has a profit margin of 80% or so on Windows, so it hardly needs to increase market share.

Speaking of which, one wonders what, if any, Thompson’s recent acquisition of Reuters (the company now to be known as Thompson Reuters) will have on Thompson West and its legal products such as Westlaw, Elite and Prolaw.

In firms with such radically different cultures, takeovers are iffy in the best of times and generally result in the destruction of the culture of the company taken over – look at Lexis Nexis which is in the process of utterly destroying the culture of both Time Matters and PCLaw” and subsuming them under the “traveling book salesmen” concept that seems to dominate LexisNexis..

"Arabic" (really Indian) Numbers and the Arab World

I just finished reading a book by Dick Teresi, “Lost Discoveries” which deals with scientific discoveries made outside the world of Western Europe – and well before any Europeans stumbled to them. Many, if not most of the great discoveries from the Renaissance through the 18th century had in fact been known long before by other cultures.

Three of the most interesting are: codification of the concept of zero in mathematics; the fact that the earth is round, and questions of time (the length of the year).

The concept of zero was codified in India about the 3rd Centruy BC (you can’t really say “discovered” about mathematics, since the underlying facts were always there). It was transmitted via Arab world around 800 AD. “Arabic” numbers in fact originate in India. Zero was strenuously resisted by Christian world - a future pope, then a priest, was accused of having intercourse with evil spirits for using a zero in calculation. And of course it is easy to poke fun at the fact that even today there is no “year 0" in the Christian calendar. The Mayans (ca. 300 AD), Babylonians (ca 700 BC) and Chinese (at least by about 1000 AD) all also had the concept of zero to one degree or another.

The Indians also knew that the world was round and that it revolved around the sun, as did various other people, and dated the age of the world at 4.3 billion years - very close to current estimate of 4.6 billion years. In fact, documents attesting to a heliocentric view of the universe may well have influenced Copernicus and Galileo.

It is well-known that the Mayan long calendar is more accurate than our current calendar. What is perhaps less known is that a calendar conceived by Omar Khayyam (a very good mathematician and a very bad poet) in the 11th century was similarly more accurate.

The bottom line is that many critical scientific concepts were conceptualized outside of Western Europe and well prior to the Greeks. They were transmitted from (in many cases) India to the Arab world, which often improved on them, then through Spain to Europe. The fact that these concepts may have been worked out in order to resolve practical and/or religious problems (how do you know the exact direction that points to Mecca?) is irrelevant.

Like any work of scientific popularizing, Teresi’s book is uneven and some of the details or examples may be wrong. But the simple weight of the evidence, taken as a whole, is overwhelming. Definitely a must read.

Apple vs. Microsoft

There have been reports recently from various technology analysts that the Mac is gaining on Microsoft (love those Mac ads). But perhaps the surest indicator is the recent financial reports of the two companies.

Apple’s quarterly report for the first three months of this year reports a 51% increase in sales of Macs over the quarter a year ago, and revenue increased 54%. Apple increased its market share by over one percent – a significant increase in such a competitive market. iPod sales were flat.

Microsoft’s reported revenue on Vista (Windows) sales, on the other hand, was reported as “weak” and less than analysts’  expectations.

Now of course Apple is starting from much lower revenues, but still, such a dramatic difference is surely significant.

Abraham Lincoln on Labor and Capital

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President. At bottom, he represented the interests of the small farmers - sandwiched in between big merchant capital in the North and the Slaveocracy of the South.  So on this historical May Day (first celebrated in Chicago after the Haymarket affair), it is appropriate to take note of the statement in his “State of the Union” address to congress in 1861: 

    “It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. ...
    “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.”
        -- Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Message to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861

First Anniversary of "Does It Compute?"

April 29th marked the first anniversary of this blog: over 260 posts, pretty much 5 days a week.  The blog is driven by two major factors. 

First, my views on the software industry and various software programs. Thus you have rants about Vista; significant analysis of document management issues; trends such as LexisNexis’ “Acquire Merge Destroy” tactics towards the software it has gobbled up over the past several years - primarily Time Matters and PCLaw, but with other programs waiting in the wings (Juris?). These are the posts where I try to answer the title question of the blog:  Does It Compute?

Second, it is driven by my clients.  Over a third of my posts have been in the “tips & tricks” category, including 16 posts on document management issues; 18 on Time Matters, 23 on PCLaw, and 25 posts on Worldox.  Only 11 posts on Amicus Attorney because for most of the year it was not clear whether the new version would become a viable product or not – with the release of 2008 Premium, it seems to have remedied many of the failings of the previous version. These posts result from common questions I get asked all the time, or specific things that come up. A client asks me something and I think “the answer to that issue would make a good post.” Hopefully, these repositories can serve as a kind of advanced version of “Frequently Asked Questions,” since many of them are not just simple day to day issues.

I hope you have found it useful and will continue to do so. I welcome any questions and suggestions.

In the coming year I may blog a bit less often but will also try to contribute some longer and more systematic pieces.