BPOS, some wild guesses

BPOS, as you may already know, is Microsoft moving much of its Enterprise stack to the Cloud. SharePoint, OCS and Exchange BPOS can provide these services as fully Cloud. This will directly go up against Google's Docs, Gmail, and Talk.

Given how poorly Google has done in the Enterprise space this may not seem like a very good idea. But Microsoft is going to really push this thing and from everything I can gather Microsoft sees it as the future.

So what does it mean, if it works.

For an Enterprise you are going to be buying IT services more and more as subscriptions. This just carries on the outsourcing model of the past 10 years to a logical conclusion. For companies it means you will not have to have in house IT staff to do collaboration and knowledge management, which is probably the way it should be.

For any in house IT experts left with their own little domains, you better hope you are nearing retirement or retrain, because BPOS could be the last nail in the coffin of what once was a very comfortable life.

As for the current ecosystem of small to medium gold partners around Microsoft? Well this is a open issue, but I would say they are also toast. BPOS and all Cloud are going to push for larger organisations with more leverage. And as the same service is provided to more and more companies firms will start seeing IT more and more as a commodity, requiring less customisations and alterations.

Traditionally software houses have seen themselves like doctors or lawyers. You come in and tell them your problem and they figure out some way forward. Doctors and lawyers also have a pretty piss poor record of results, cost an arm and a leg, and usually make excuses for any failure namely the client did it. Sounds like IT eh?

In the future IT is going to be more like car makers, TV makers, or clothing stores. You go in to the store, go to the item you want and buy it. Maybe you try it on or test drive it but essentially you know roughly what you want and you buy it.

This movement has been the trend for some time. Take for example clothing. Traditionally you had to go to a tailor to be fitted for most outfits, over time more and more clothing went to off the rack until today the bespoke suit market is tiny. Bespoke is constantly reduced more and more to items that simply can't be mass stoked.

Actually everything is more bespoke than ever. Just in time production means that more of what you buy is then built for you rather then sitting in a warehouse than it was say 20 years ago. The thing is that it is bespoke but not customised to much of an extent.

IT is going in this direction. Architectures will mostly be scaled and secured in the same way autos are painted and primed.

This is an inevitable process of the marketplace and unless the state steps in to impose an old fashioned process upon IT it will happen. Look even at professions like medicine. Doctors do well for themselves but the real money is made by the companies that make the pills. A pill is medicine reduce to pure commodity, and its where the real money is.

Now playing sociologist for a moment the result of this will be that there will be more really rich people in software in 10 years than there were 20 years ago. Not just guys who make it with start ups, but also people with skills around global deployments, integration, managing back end clouds, etc.

But the IT middle class is doomed. Thousands of jobs in administration, support, installation, and programming are going to vanish. This will happen as IT becomes more and more important to every day life.

The process will be similar to the industrial revolution. And there is very little anyone can do about it.

Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide

Wikipedia Down

Wikipedia is suffering major technical problems today. Much of services is still down.

What is interesting is that Wikipedia goes down and almost no one cares. If Facebook went down...

Good bye IE 8

Without support for in text spell checking and the need to click a button and enter a spell checking mode IE 8 failes for me on a critical test.

I won't be using it anymore. Microsoft this was such a simple thing, how could you get it wrong. Firefox has done this for years, and that is where I will be going.

I have gotten so use to everything from my iPhone to my Word to my Flock browser correcting my spelling in real time I simply can't believe Microsoft, who have the most experience of all in doing this, overlooked putting it in their browser.

BBC News - China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship

BBC News - China condemns decision by Google to lift censorship:


"China has said Google's decision to stop censoring Chinese search results is 'totally wrong' and violates its promise to abide by local laws"

Made the Change to IE 8 and so far happy

I so often find myself going against fads. As right now finally people seem to be getting off IE for more exotic browsers I found myself become frustrated with my old beloved Flock browser, which seem to be in need of an upgrade.

For those of you who don't know Flock is the Web 2.0 browser, aware in real time of you social networks, showing a ribbon for your cantact posts and photos it can keep you in touch with Flickr, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Digg communities which showing you photos from any web source.

The tool also offers click blogging and its the tool I use a lot to run my blogs.

But on Windows 7 I have not been entirely happy with this great tool. It hangs a great deal more than it does on my Linux boxes and I have decided to return to IE. This is a big step for me because I deeply hate IE because at work I have to use IE 6.

Well I have to say I have been very happy with IE 8 on Windows 7, it works very smothly and it has the same level of social tools integration, though not the awesome screen display.

But I am about to download Flock 3.0 beta, maybe the Social Blogging Browser which has been my main brower for years can win me back.

BBC News - Microsoft Choice screen boosts Opera browser

Web browser Opera says that downloads of its software have doubled since Microsoft introduced browser choice to Windows users on 1 March.

Microsoft now offers customers a choice of 12 browsers rather than installing its own Internet Explorer browser as a default.

A screen offering users the chance to switch browser is rolling out across Europe as part of a Windows update.

BBC News - Microsoft Choice screen boosts Opera browser

BBC News - Facebook rules out installing 'panic button'

Facebook says it will not install a "panic button" on its main pages for users to report suspected paedophiles, but will develop its existing system.

The company says it will have links to organisations including the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre on its reporting pages.

But the director of Ceop says there should be a button on every page.

The conviction of Peter Chapman for the murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall led to renewed calls for a "panic button".

The convicted sex offender lured the teenager to her death using Facebook.

BBC News - Facebook rules out installing 'panic button'

Big move in 140 characters at a time, Twitter takes on the world with @anywhere @everywhere

Twitter has announced technology that it hopes will further embed the
service into the fabric of the web.

@anywhere, as it is known, will allow people using websites such as
Amazon or the New York Times to follow new users or share media directly from
the page.

It was unveiled at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

It is similar to Facebook's Connect service that allows people to log
in to other websites using their Facebook details and interact with friends.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8570293.stm

Going Mobile

An interesting article in the BBC states that the mobile apps economy is expect to explode stating

A study done for Getjar, the world's second biggest app store, said the
market will grow to $17.5bn (£12bn) in the next two years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8571210.stm

What Enterprise developers have to keep in mind is that the long term environments for collaboration does not necessary involve a laptop or desktop.

WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 Migratoin

SharePoint Upgrade (WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 and SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007) by Joel Oleson and Shane Young

View more presentations from Joel Oleson.

OCS 2007 overview

Office Communications Server Roles overview. Very useful model. Edge servers are in a load balanced cluster at the "edge", thus the name. Director server needs not be load balanced, and will validate users who are logging in from external sites. A pool can take up to 200,000 potential users. Monitoring can consume massive sums of data but the pool will usually never need more that 100 GB of storage.