With a name that s impossible to live up to, . launched what company CEO called the industry s first on-demand customer intelligence solution that turns sales professionals into sales 
Not exactly an stoke of genius, but useful.
His company s first product, SalesGenius (starting at $49 per user per month, with a free 30-day trial), employs an instant messenging-like Genius Tracker (at left) that alerts sales people when prospects (who opt-in for the service) take an action, such as visiting the web site and opening an email. The clickstream data allows sales and marketing people to prioritize tasks and to customize messaging and offers to prospects/customers.
According to Genius, disclosing Web site visit tracking and emails with trackable links is up to the discretion of the sender SalesGenius customers. Those customers should disclose the non-anonymized tracking up front, rather than burying it in a privacy policy page that few read. For example, a salesperson can qualify leads better by knowing what products a prospect is interested in from the clickstream or if an email was read.
SaleGenius works with CRM solutions, such as Salesforce.com, and can replay Web site visits, tracking the time spent, pages visted, emails opened or unopened. Integration with Salesforce.
com s AppExchange is planned for this summer, Thompson said. A team edition of SaleGenius and support for mobile devices is slated for later this year, according to Thompson.
If customers are willing to be tracked, just as they are on Amazon, they can reduce the amount of noise and unwanted solicitations in the buying process.
If SaleGenius has any genius, it s in providing relatively painless (no coding) and cheap on demand service (similar to the value in other SaaS applications) for sales people to reduce friction and increase productivity.
On April 26, the held a panel discussion, The CIO Agenda: Building the New IT ( ). The panelists include four CIOs Lars Rabbe of Yahoo (listen to my separate with Raabe), Geir Ramleth of Bechtel Group, John Johnson of Intel and Randall Spratt of McKesson Corp. The moderator was Dave Margulius, an analyst with Enterprise Insight.
The discussion didn t focus on building a new IT, as the title suggested, but rather on aligning and integrating business and IT. Spratt noted the shift away from IT is as a utilty, measured by cost, to more a business within the business at McKesson, assisting units within the $80 billion vendor of information systems for the healthcare market to deploy technology to help drive the top line. He s looking at per unit costs for IT, such as for deploying telephony services to an employee or supporting a server, and driving it down to create additional capital for reinvestment.
We need to price services competitively, Spratt said.
Spratt also said that the likelihood of an IT project failing is directly related to the IT connection with a business partner. IT is an enabler the change management function around that and engagement in changing a process or solving problem is an indicator if it will succeed, he said.
Outsourcing is one avenue toward competitive pricing. Bechtel s Ramleth said that he hasn t found economies of scale externally for his business, other than some offshore programming. Labor arbitrage can be done inside or outside of a company, Raabe said.
Ramleth brought up the challenges of protecting intellectual property(IP), including work processes and supporting applications for Bechtel s engineering and construction business, across cultures and nations, which may have differing views on IP rights.
Some lively discussion revolved around handling vendor relationships. The biggest problem is ankle biting, Spratt said.
There is a tremendous amount of gnawing at the base of our organization, he added, referring to vendors who try to sell into his organization via local offices. As a result, competing standards crop up with the company. Spratt is addressing the low level penetration problem by opening up more to vendors about McKesson s strategic plan.
Spratt is also in favor of the ongoing industry consolidation. Too many companies are spending money doing the same R D, he said. You run the risk of lock-in to a loser in war or predatory pricing, he said.
He advised having good contracts, which reminded me of what about negotiating vendor contracts:
The real trick is having a hard core deal team that understands the IT environment, but is a genetic cross of pit bulls and piranhas and is better at sales than the people [vendors] who show up.
Ramleth identified the Salesforce.com model as having a lot of value.
It gets selected by people with a pain point, rather than top down, he said. In particular, he admired the continous development cycle and self-teaching aspects (you don t need a manual for Salesforce.com or Yahoo, but you do for SAP, he said) of many of the hosted application services.
We could never do that we would be bogged down we have to learn to be more agile and responsive to the business. Software applications have to become more viral, intuitive and easier to deploy, Ramleth added.
Lars Rabbe has been riding a tiger.
As CIO for Yahoo the last three years, Rabbe had to deal with the rapid growth and scaling of the Web portal s IT and infrastructure services. Today, Yahoo has about 10,000 employees and over 500 million monthly visitors that touch systems under Raabe s command. Prior to the Churchill Club event, , I interviewed ( ) Rabbe about managing Yahoo s massive scale and complexity, and how he uses some of Yahoo s services to run the company.
Raabe didn t provide a lot of specifics about Yahoo s infrastructure or IT operations, other than that the company has hundreds of thousands of servers in datacenters around the globe. On the subject of Yahoo s growing suite of customer facing software services, Raabe said, I don t really see a sharp area between products offered to the outside world and what we do for inside users, Raabe said. Granted a lot of the products created are aimed at individual consumers, but alot can be used internally.
He said that Yahoo is mostly running open source software, but has deployed Oracle, Siebel and other traditional ERP software to run business operations. The company runs a combination of its own email and Microsoft Exchange, but plans to move toward the new Yahoo Mail as its standard. I also asked Raabe to give his take Web 2.
0, SOA, software-as-a-service, Java vs. .Net, blogs and the new class or lightweight enterprise applications.
Prior to joining Yahoo in June 2003, Rabbe was the CIO of Redback Networks and has also worked at Lucent Technologies, Fidelity Investments and NeXT Computer.
The other day, via CNET Networks internal email system, fellow ZDNet blogger and technical director George Ou sounded an alarm about an he came across on . It probably didn t get the attention it should have.
Ou with a headline that for many may require That culture of convenience, laziness, and ignorance is going to doom the US in the long run. no further reading: . Ouch.
The risk to you if your bank isn t using SSL authentication is that you could end up logging into a Web site that looks like your bank s Web site but isn t (some banks like BofA to avoid this). By logging into the impostor Web site, you d be turning over your banking credentials (user ID, password) to the bad guys and what happens next may not be pretty. Wrote Ou:
This looks really ugly for the American Banking system as a whole and it s time that they cleaned up their act and learn to use some basic cryptography.
If you have a bank on this hall of shame list where SSL Login Form is listed as optional , be sure to complain to them that this is unacceptable.
What s really scary about this is that for something as sensitive as online banking, even the best banks in the US are still using little more than single factor security to grant you access to your bank account. Two years ago, a friend from The Netherlands who was visiting asked if he could use one of our PCs to do some online banking.
As he began to login to his bank s Web site, he pulled a credit-card sized authenticator out of his wallet. Hardware-based authenticators like generate a random sequence of numbers at regular time intervals (eg: every 60 seconds). The way this works is, at any point in time when yo login to your banking system, you have to use your authenticator to randomly generate a key.
I watched my friend as he pressed a button on his authenticator and then, from authenticator s LCD display, he read-off and keyed-in (on the keyboard) a long string of randomly generated digits.
If you had something similar and you were using one of RSA s authenticators, then, the bank would have an RSA-built appliance on its internal network that s generating matching keys for your account. The only way someone can log into your account is if they have your UserID, your password, and your authenticator.
Randomly generated keys are only good for a minute or so. So, even if someone gets a hold of your UserID, password, and one of the randomly generated keys (eg: if they watched you key it on your keyboard), by the time they got to a computer to pretend to be you, the randomly generated key would have expired.
This to me is secure.
I asked my friend how much it costs to have the added level of security. Nothing he said. While I m sure the cost gets absorbed somewhere and is passed along to customers, it comes with the account (much the same way you get a free ATM card in the US).
I m not sure if every European bank does this. But apparently, a bunch do. After observing my friend in action, I started asking knowledgeable people why US banks don t do the same thing.
The consensus answer, I m afraid, is a sad commentary about our culture rather than some technological roadblock. There are, of course, plenty of Americans who would gladly exchange this bit of friction in the system for the security it offers. I m one of them.
But America is a culture of convenience BEA Workshop Business Unit veep Bill Roth takes a long walk down JavaOne memory lane (describing every year of the event since 1996). Feigning to pull no punches (BEA is a sponsor of JavaOne), Roth tries to capture the essence of each year s event with catchy headlines like Mobile Java (again), and When in doubt, rename it again. and The last of the good times, and then tries to predict what will happen at .
Writes Roth:
However, if I had to bet on what Sun will announce, I would put my money on them trying copy the work we are doing (again) - this time on Blended.
Blended refers to BEA s mixed approach (open source and commercial) to Java deployment. Sun will probably take umbrage at the idea that it s copying BEA.
Perhaps Sun has less of a blended approach on the Java front than BEA, but overall, there s probably no other company in the IT business that has gone whole hog on blending the way Sun has. Not only that, long before BEA was going the Eclipse route with its tools, Sun was open sourcing NetBeans (the alternative integrated development environment or IDE to Eclipse). Roth s entry continues:
Since there are a number of Java based environments for languages like PHP and Ruby, my guess is that they will also announce something here as well, unless the Java anti-bodies kick in and kill this off.
This is nothing new. Sun has been talking about being able create Java bytecode from languages other than Java itself for a while. Sun s director of Web technologies Tim Bray wrote about a summit that Sun hosted for that very reason back in December 2004.
Wrote Bray:
It rsquo;s pretty clear that are a hot area, maybe the hottest, in the world of software development. We need to do more to make them easily usable by people in the Java ecosystem.
There s more from Bray on PHP, replete with many rants from his readers .
In addition to Eclipse, what really could be forcing Sun s hand here is Microsoft. .NET is supported by a bunch of languages.
Third parties have dropped other languages in to .NET s dynamic language capabilities. For example, .
And then there s also Microsoft s IronPython move (see ).
In the bigger picture, heavy Java seems to be getting some heat from light Java and it will be interesting to see what Sun does with that. What s heavy Java?
That s where you need to power your Java apps with a full-blown red blooded J2EE server. Light Java is where you bypass the need for an application server and take a more lightweight approach to deploying Java; for example the servlet approach by folks like Cape Clear s Annrai O Toole and the open source-based SASH stack ( , , , and ) pixie dust that ex-BEAer Byron Sebastian (now heading up SourceLabs) .
BEA tends to be pretty plugged in though.
So, my guess is you will see announcements along the lines of what Roth wrote about. What we may not see much of are announcements from Sun s competitors on the eve of JavaOne. There was a time where IBM was good for some sort of annual attempt (just before JavaOne started) to dislodge Sun from the head of the Java table.
That said, if this year s event is anything like last year s JavaOne (see ), The Eclipse Foundation, much to the chagrin of NetBeans, will likely pick up some momentum as more companies line up in support of it. Expect the Eclipse folks to make hay. Perhaps providing some counter to Eclipse s momentum, NetBeans will have some thunder of its own (I have no idea what) and it remains to be seen in January 2007.
We ll know more after JavaOne.
Joe McKendrick to a by Tim Bray where answers the question What do you think we should do about SOA? The context is a Rails conference.
Tim says:
Don t do anything. SOA may have meant something once but it s just vendor bull**** now.
That s not an unusual attitude.
There are many who feel that way and I have sympathies that run in that direction, even though I write quite a bit about products from these very vendors. But I think it s a lot more complex than the arguments you typically hear around this topic. Here are a few data points:
Most of his projects are now under $10,000. He has very few big project left. He attributes this completely to the use of SOAP-based Web services inside his shop and within the insurance industry.
Interestingly, he has registries, but didn t know if his organization was using Web services management tools.
I asked for two cases. SOA is a development methodology in the same sense the object orientation is a development methodology and there can be SOAPful and RESTful services that co-exist within well designed service oriented architectures.
Many REST proponents don t appreciate the scale of many of the IT shops who are trying to use SOA. Having been CIO of a place with lots of moving parts, I have a great appreciation for tools that manage complexity. I don t want to have to keep track of services in a spreadsheet, a home grown database, or a plain, old Web page.
I can t afford to build security policies for hundreds of services on a case-by-case basis. These are real needs that today s tools address.
Many REST proponents have avoided these topics, almost as a badge of honor. I was an of using simple, Web-based techniques to make more services available, but for that to happen, we have to be willing to layer additional functionality on top of that simplicity. The lack of description and discovery means that sophisticated intermediation cannot happen.
That puts RESTful services out of the running in organizations that needs scale.
Complex Web services deployments work well for large organization with mature governance and planning functions. They aren t the answer for building . Both techniques have their place.
Smart shops will use them where they fit best.
This week, Intel headed into slightly uncharted waters when it announced a new brand for its business desktops call called vPro. The company also took such a terrible tumble on Wall Street that it has announced a major restructuring.
Will vPro help with the revival?
Whereas Intel s business destkop messaging use to focus heavily on chip brands like Pentium (I, II, III, and 4), vPro takes the spotlight off the microprocessor itself and swings it to a package of components that, in its entirety, includes the microprocessor, the chipset (the supporting cast of characters that every Intel microprocessor uses to interface with the rest of the system) and the networking silicon. The idea, according to Intel s Digital Office Platform Group general manager Gregory Bryant, is to convince enterprise buyers that vPro as a packaged brand is sufficiently differentiated from other alternatives (AMD, older Intel technologies, etc.
) because of the advancements Intel says vPro makes in both systems management and security two major pain points for enterprise IT staffs today. The interview is available as an , or, if you rsquo;re already subscribed to , it will show up on your system or MP3 player automatically (see ).
Pain points equate to cost and so the main question that enterprise buyers should be asking in terms of a getting a report card on the main technologies in vPro has to do with the extent to those technologies can or will drive cost out of IT management.
The answer? The jury is still out. That s because in both cases (security and management), Intel is relying on partners to unlock the value in the underlying technology it has developed.
For example, on the management front, vPro includes a technology known as Active Management Technology or AMT. AMT is an OS independent technology that, among its many goals, is designed to save IT doctors the trouble (and the cost) of a bed side visit. Working at strictly a hardware-level, IT staff should be able to reach out and probe any AMT-enabled system regardless of what state it s in (on, off, crashed, etc.
) or operating system it s running. But, as the AMT FAQ on Intel s site says, AMT is more of an API for third party developers than it is an end user deliverable. :
Third-party IT-management tools work through the uniform network-connected application programming interface (API) provided by Intel AMT.
The FAQ goes onto say that AMT is an industry standard. It may be an Intel standard. But industry?
I guess that depends on your definition of standard. Either way, knowing whether or not AMT will drive cost out of IT management means ! more understanding where desktop support teams are bearing the most cost and to what extent AMT drives that cost out.
Is it really those bedside visits to ailing PC patients that, in total, is costing some IT organization some ungodly sum of money? And if it is, will AMT eliminate the need for those visits? For example, some system crashes require an IT staffer to haul the system away no matter what.
These days, diagnosing wireless connectivity problems is probably my number one headache when it comes to helping other people with their systems. But those are mostly notebooks and there is no vPro for notebooks. Yet.
In my interview Bryant says something like vPro is coming for notebooks, but he doesn t know what it will be called. Perhaps cPro (for CentrinoPro); speaking of which, Bryant says there s no formal meaning for the v. Not Virtual (because of vPro s inclusion of virtual technologies).
Not Vista (because it will run Windows Vista).
My number two headache which does affect desktops is malware. For example, an overly chatty personal firewall repeatedly red-flagging some Windows component s attempt to contact an Internet domain that the end-user knows nothing about.
As Microsoft , reprovisioning an malware-infected system with a fresh image of the operating system and required applications may be the only answer. So, based on my experience using PCs, managing them, and helping others, most of my bedside visits really required a bedside visit. Will AMT provide any real cost relief?
For example, will and IT staffer be able to diagnose a malware problem, determine that reprovisioning is the only answer, and make it happen without ever leaving the comfort of his or her desk chair? It s hard to tell since the bulk of the deliverables the third party solutions that support the AMT APIs aren t here yet.
The same goes for the security solutions that Bryant says should be revolutionized by the virtualization technologies found in vPro.
As if lack of any hypervisor standards isn t bad enough (Xen, Microsoft, and VMWare all use different hypervisor techs to host virtual machines), Intel is giving away a new (and fourth) hypervisor with a slightly different twist. It supports two partitions (using Intel s VT technology which has been shipping in Intel chips since last year), one of which is for the end users production operating system (eg: Windows) and the other which Bryant says is ideal to be an appliance with an embedded OS. For example a security appliance running intrusion detection software for the whole computer so the production operating system doesn t have to.
Cool idea. But again, Intel is just now working with partners like Symantec to build the software that turns that sidecar partition into the appliance that Intel has in mind.
Just because the third party solutions aren t here yet doesn t mean you shouldn t buy vPro.
You re probably better off having it than not so when those third party solutions do arrive, you won t be cursing yourself for not buying a system with longer shelf-life.
In the interview, Bryant and I go pretty deep on a wide variety of issues. Everything from whether standards are necessary for virtualization and why Intel didn t join VMWare s recently formed virtualization alliance to the differences end-users will notice in their experience because of Intel s VT to the difficulties that developers may (or, according to Bryant, may not ) encounter because of the incompatibilities between VT and AMD s virtualization technology (AMD-V, formerly code-named Pacifica).
I also rib Bryant numerous times by pointing out to him that the Berlind household is running quite a few AMD-based systems.
Worth reading: Ross Mayfield has come up with a way to , peeling it back so that is has some granularity. Not all participants participate with an equal level of engagement, as illustrated in the Power Law of Participation Ross came up, below.
As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. Even when we Read, our patterns are picked up in referral logs (especially with expressly designed tools, like Measure Map), creating a feedback loop. But reading alone isn t enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users.
Digg is the archetype for low threshold participation. Simply Favorite something you find of interest, a one click action. You don t even have to log in to contribute value, you have Permission to Participate.
Del.icio.us taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold activity of tagging.
Remembering the URL is the hardest part, and you have to establish an identity in the system. Commenting requires such identity for sake of spam these days and is an under-developed area. Subscribing requires a commitement of sustained attention which greatly surpasses reading alone.
Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band (email still lives). We Network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload. Some of us Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations.
But these are all activities that can remain peripheral to community. To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement which makes up the core of a community.
Binghamton University researchers have come up with a way link digital images to the camera that took the pictures and to detect forged images.
The technology can be applied to prosecuting child pornographers. The technology is based on the fact that the original digital image is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity, according to the . The human eye can t detect the patterns, the data can be extracted from cameras by analyzing several images taken from a camera to establish the digital fingerprint.
Here s more from the release:
Like actual fingerprints, the digital noise in original images is stochastic in nature ndash; that is, it contains random variables ndash; which are inevitably created during the manufacturing process of the camera and its sensors. This virtually ensures that the noise imposed on the digital images from any particular camera will be consistent from one image to the next, even while it is distinctly different.This week on , we debate whether the Jonathan Schwartz era at Sun will be any different than the McNealy era. Since the former CEO and new CEO claim that they can finish each others sentences, it s hard to imagine any major shifts. In an interview with Stephen Shankland, :
In preliminary tests, Fridrich s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.
Bear in mind what our starting point is: around $17 billion in market cap, a $13 billion (annual revenue run rate) company with one of the largest R D budgets in the world, facing a market that will never shrink for as long as we are on the planet.
There s no other industry in the world that can look forward and see as much untapped demand as we can.
We are going to go make sure we intercept as much of that demand as possible. We ve gone from zero to 5 million Solaris licenses in 12 months just imagine what the next two to three years are going to look like.
The margins are healthy, the revenue is growing. We ve got to orient ourselves for growth. Next year, we keep our costs in line and we ll go grow some recurring earnings that will definitely get people more interested.
According to Schwartz, most of the world s computing resources the demand side of the equation will be purchased through computing utilities, like the new Sun Grid. The problem for Sun as a supplier is that the company has been that it s ahead of the market. Schwartz better hope that his timing is right.
We also listen a few of McNealy s greatest wisecracks, and discuss some of the objections to Sun s , the curious , Intel s new business PC brand and how the will impact the establishment. This can be delivered directly to your desktop or MP3 player if you re subscribed to our podcasts (See ). For more the topics covered during the show, search our .
I ran into Grouper Networks CEO Josh Felser and Director of Business Development Scot Gensler today. (PC Mag review ) is number two, behind , among the fast growing, new crop of video sharing and tagging sites, according to Felser. After a year of development, Grouper launched in December last year and had 300,000 unique users that first month.
Today Grouper has 300,000 unique users per day, 6 million per month and serves about 1.6 million pages per day, Felser said. About a quarter of Grouper s traffic comes from Grouper videos posted via a single click (no cutting and pasting HTML) to MySpace (and a small amount to Friendster), Felser said, and he plans to add other one-click destinations, such as Word Press.
By comparison, YouTube CEO that his site serves up 30 million videos a day and uploads 30,000 files a day, and has about 5 million unique users per day. Nielsen/NetRatings clocked YouTube at 9 million unique users in February. (Update: Currently, YouTube is serving 40 million videos per day, uploading 35,000 per day and has 6 million daily unique users, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
) Both are funded to move to the next round of competition. YouTube just received $8 million from Sequoia Capital (in addition to $3.5 million from Sequoia in November 2005), and Grouper has about garnered $5 million to date, mostly from angels investors.
Felser was a co-founder of Internet music service Spinner.com, which was sold to AOL in 1999 for $320 million.
Unlike YouTube, Grouper has a downloadable application (Windows XP) for uploading videos to Grouper.
com, where they can be viewed or downloaded. Grouper also has a P2P network for connecting to hard drives of friends to share media files. Videos can be downloaded to PCs, iPods and PSPs (Playstation Portables).
Grouper also has editing tools for power users.
I asked Felser about copyright issues, which have plagued YouTube and other content-sharing sites. People don t typically upload [copyrighted material] on Grouper.
If they do, they get banned. Since December we ve only removed about 30 files, he said. The much larger YouTube is struggling with monitoring the content flow to weed out uploaded material that attracts the ire of big companies with deep legal pockets.
As you might expect from any content sharing service, the content varies in quality and subject matter. The Hottest Downloads and Most Viewed slices on Grouper have a healthy dose of soft porn. Like YouTube, Grouper has an advertising model, and will face similar hurdles in making a big business out of user-submitted videos, mostly created by amateurs, as .
On the other hand, as MySpace has proven, where there are lots of users in the coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic, advertisers find an way to reach them that will enrich the coffers of startups like Grouper and YouTube.
When Microsoft s Internet Plaforms and Security marketing director Gary Schare indicated that (discovered by a ZDNet reader) would be corrected within hours of his reception of my email about the snafu, the first word that came to my mind was nimble. I thought, here s a vendor that practices what it preaches.
When it becomes aware of new information that s highly relevant to its customers, it has the content management systems and business processes in place to move that new information (in this case, a correction) in near real-time to its customer facing systems. In fact, it is this ability to efficiently marry business process to timely knowledge sharing that is one of the chief selling propositions of enterprise content management (ECM) systems from Microsoft, EMC, and many other solution providers.
But, when I woke up this morning to find that the misleading information on its Web site had not yet been corrected, I wondered what is it about Microsoft s business processes or its content management systems (or both) that s turning a 2-minute typo fix into an act of God?
As of the publishing of this blog entry (around 11:30 AM ET, the typo still stands uncorrected). Furthermore, how might Microsoft and other vendors who absolutely must eat their own dog food if their pitches are to be believed either (a) heed the same marketing pitches their giving to their customers in the context of selling their solutions or (b) change those pitches to more accurately reflect reality.
Lest you think I m overstating the situation, consider the following text that I excerpted from an on Microsoft s Web site:
.
organizations are looking to ECM solutions to help with the process of authoring and publishing this information to the web without burdening the IT department .. In terms of web content management, the requirements include finding a way for non-technical personnel to take control of web sites within their departments without the need to constantly rely on the IT department .
providing easy-to-use authoring tools for creating web content and automating the publishing process encourages business users to embrace ECM and use the web to communicate with their customers user acceptance will be fastest if users actually recognize the ECM solution as making their personal work life more efficient and streamlined . .The major goal of Microsoft rsquo;s web content management system is to help businesses effectively communicate with employees, partners, and customers, to preserve corporate branding and look and feel, and to put publishing power into the hands of business users.
Microsoft rsquo;s web content management solution enables organizations to easily manage multiple, multilingual sites and mobile devices content, while ensuring that these sites can be updated in a timely manner...
Authoring can be done in the context of the web page giving authors a much better visual experience of the process Out of the box workflows are available to submit the content for approval before it is published to the web site .A Quick Deploy capability is also enabled which allows authors to immediately move content from staging to production without requiring emergency help from IT. This is particularly useful for content like breaking news which needs to be published immediately .
.Microsoft is assuming a role as a leader in the next generation of integrated user-oriented ECM systems While Enterprise Content Management may have seemed like a daunting task at first glance, organizations will learn that with an intuitive and scalable solution, ECM can easily become integral to business processes and essential to business success.
Although it seems like I m singling out or targeting Microsoft for criticism.
I m not. During my many years as a journalist, I ve observed how there are plenty of other companies that are guilty of this as well. Today s example simply served as a good one that exemplifies to me how, even if the certain solutions are efficient as their purveyors say they are, organizations might never be ready for that efficiency.
When it comes to ECM, we (the press) and probably you have been hearing for years about how advanced and well-tuned to role-based collaborative publishing certain ECM systems are with the idea being that the right people in the right workgroups at the right time can publish or edit the knowledge under their jurisdiction thereby aligning business processes with the organization s need to be nimble and competitive. If vendors don t practice what they preach, is it all talk? Yesterday, ZDNet reader Bruce Arnold received an email from Microsoft regarding the most recently issued beta version of Internet Explorer 7.
Arnold forwarded a copy to ZDNet wondering whether the system requirements portion of the email could actually be so. According to the email and to the on Microsoft s site (cropped screen shot pictured below), users who wanted to try IE7 could get by with a 66 MHz 486-class processsor and 32MB of RAM.
Meanwhile, it also needs Windows XP SP2 which by itself would choke to death on such paltry resources.
So, I checked with Microsoft Internet Plaforms and Security marketing director Gary Schare. Via email Schare wrote:
The people building the new IE7 web site grabbed the IE6 system requirements because IE7 has the same requirements as IE6 when running on XP SP2. But IE6 also ran on some older versions of Windows with lower system requirements.
So the IE6 system requirements page reflected the ldquo;true minimum rdquo; which was a 486 CPU with 32MB of RAM .We are updating the IE7 system requirements page tonight. It will reflect the XP SP2 requirements from .
But, when I checked the this morning (at 9:30AM ET), it was still showing 486/66.
I have come to the conclusion that picking a desktop operating system is a lot like picking a religion. No matter what choice is made, for many it will be made on faith alone and with the absolute certainty that their choice is the only true choice!
Once that choice is made, no discussion of the relative merits of alternative choices will be entertained.
What is it that makes Linux can successfully compete with Windows for the desktop market. some people zealots about which desktop OS to use?
And why would one blogger insist on verbally pummeling another for making a different choice as if they were infidels? I ve seen it over and over again and I just don t get it.
Of the major players in the desktop OS market today, UNIX is the oldest dating back to 1969.
Its minicomputer origins made its transition to high-performance workstations straightforward. And its remarkable scalability made it just as suitable for the machine room. Today, it makes its home primarily in that machine room or on the desktop of the scientist, the engineer, or the filmmaker.
MacOS first appeared on the scene in 1984, a year before Windows first shipped (1985). As with all modern desktop operating systems, its graphical roots are at Xerox PARC. With the introduction of Mac OS X (in 2000), Apple joined the UNIX ranks (well sort of) by building their newest desktop OS on top of FreeBSD.
Like the traditional UNIX vendors, Apple continues to focus on proprietary hardware for its bread and butter. And like those traditional UNIX vendors, it has had to face a shrinking market share as a result.
1985 also ushered in the beginning of the free software movement , the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU Manifesto.
(An acronym, GNU s Not UNIX). Linus Torvalds conceived of Linux in 1991 but it would be 1994 before Linux 1.0 shipped.
When combined with a wealth of GNU libraries and utilities, Linux quickly became a viable UNIX clone one free from AT T s licensing fees.
Without a doubt, Linux has changed the face of the UNIX marketplace much to the chagrin of many a UNIX vendor. It has done so largely by putting UNIX capabilities on commodity hardware and thus forcing first-tier UNIX hardware vendors to begrudgingly embrace the open-source software movement.
Then there is Microsoft Windows. Like the Linux community, Microsoft has built its empire on software sales on commodity hardware. And like the Linux community, Microsoft wishes to displace UNIX in the machine room, where the stakes are high and the profit margins are lucrative.
on the latest twist in the Net neutrality saga. In this episode, the Democrats efforts to protect consumers and businesses from overreaching by network operators, such as charging content providers additional fees for faster delivery, were turned back by a House Energy and Commerce Committee vote. Yesterday, the CEOs from Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, IAC and eBay sent a letter to the co-chairmen of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation with the following plea for neutrality:
We are writing to underscore the importance of an open Internet and to seek your leadership in enacting legislation that preserves the fundamental and critical nature of the Internet.
The open marketplace of the Internet, or what has become known as ldquo;network neutrality, rdquo; empowers America rsquo;s citizenry, fuels our engine of innovation and is central to our global leadership in Internet technology and services. The rules of the road that preserved openness were eliminated last summer by the Federal Communications Commission, and it is critical that Congress moves quickly to reinstate them.
The Internet has succeeded precisely because of these rules, which have prevented network operators from using their control over Internet access to dictate consumers rsquo; Internet experience.
Likewise, innovators large and small, as well as investors, have relied on market and regulatory certainty coupled with their own ingenuity to develop new and better online offerings. This ldquo;innovation without permission rdquo; is, from our perspective, the essence of the Internet.
We call upon you to enact legislation preventing discrimination against the content and services of those not affiliated with network operators and thereby preserve network neutrality.
It is our understanding that Senators Snowe and Dorgan plan to introduce legislation that would ensure the Internet remains open and neutral. We commend their effort. We encourage you to include such language in any telecommunications legislation.
Absent such safeguards, the fundamental paradigm of the Internet will be irreparably altered and that most worthy of preservation will be lost. American consumers will lose basic Internet freedoms, the engine of innovation will be hobbled, and our global competitiveness will be compromised.
We look forward to continuing to work with you and other Members of the Committee to re-establish longstanding net neutrality protections.
The Internet is built on a public interest model and funded by taxpayers, according to Democratic Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who is sponsoring an amendment to throttle the power of network providers. The opposition thinks that Markey is overrotating the network operators say they won t surcharge the delivery of content and services over the Internet, but at the same time they say they need to allocate some bandwidth in a pay model so that they continue investing in a higher-speed build out. What s clear at this point is that the Republican majority and telco/cable lobbyists have the upper hand, and the well-heeled club of high-tech CEOs advocating more firm declarations in the law regarding Net neutrality need to regroup.
Grassroots efforts, such as the , have an impact, but now the requirement is deeper involvement in helping to elect officials sympathetic to their causes and lots of lobbyist money. Often, it s the money, not the ideologies, that win the day. Just as in the electoral system big war chests help win votes.
So, there s no such thing as a lighter side to these scourges you say? The RIAA can go shove it? Congress should can the DMCA (but not the way it canned spam)?
EULAs are traps and all that digital rights management mumbo jumbo is ? Think again. ZDNet reader Tim Youngard explains:
Rowena Finklestien was one of the first to be sued by the RIAA for allowing her son Ollie to wear his Brother Billy s Pear Brand pants.
If my boys were identical twins I would be ok a frustrated Rowena explained, But since they re fraternal brothers they re telling me it s against the law!. Part two of the lawsuit concerns a neighbor having worn the pants as well.
One of the boys had torn his shorts and I gave him the pants so he wouldn rsquo;t go home to Lynnette (neighbor) like that sighed Rowena.
Wiley Whitehead, spokesman for the RIAA, stated that by allowing her son Ollie and the neighbor boy to use Billy s pants she had violated the Cannot Reuse Apparel Policy (CRAP) as stated on the pants REULA (rear end user s license agreement) tag. The lawsuit states, Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant, without the permission or consent of Plaintiffs, has used, and continues to use, one son s pants on her other son and to making the pant s available for distribution to others.
Think you can turn technology reality into humor? Make me laugh and I ll post it here.
on the blurring lines between analyst, consultant, blogger, journalist, and how vendors need to adapt to the new spheres and patterns of influence.
My take: the critical point about any influencer program is understanding influence as a lifecycle. Treating PR [public relations], AR [analyst relations] or consultant relations as a pure outbound marketing function is certainly the wrong approach. Those that can foster a dialogue, be prepared to get out of the way of the transaction where appropriate, but ensure the feedback loops keeps turning, is in a good position to be a successful influencer manager.
You need to learn to work multifaceted webs of influence.
I am not sure whether it makes sense to establish a new function - - because roles are converging, merging and melding. This is a renaissance era.
This is a remix era. Influencer roles are being mashed up by practitioners.
I suspect that the nature of trust is changing, too, as it becomes based on networks rather than large companies.
This is not to say classic brands and companies don t have a role to play, but transparency is leading to some different ways of quickly establishing trust. Prejudices tend to show, like dark hair through blond roots. That is maybe OK, as long as the bias is .
James is kind enough to mention David and myself, as well as as examples of role mashups that are part of the remix that should compel PR and AR practitioners to reexamine their tactics.
I got email late yesterday from : ldquo;Hey, can I call you for a minute? rdquo; He wanted commentary on After a few minutes rsquo; chat, David asked if he could record for a podcast .
even though I only had a cellphone, the audio came out OK . I thought David could have been a little clearer that I was pushing back against the thrust of his story, but on the other hand he included the whole conversation right there in the piece, so anyone who actually cares can listen and find out what I actually said, not what I think I said nor what David reported I said. I find this raw barely-disintermediated journalism (we talk on the phone this afternoon, it rsquo;s on the Web in hours) a little shocking still.
On balance, it rsquo;s better than the way we used to do things.
In the name of media transparency, I think it s better too. That s why I do it (and more journalists should).
And real-time multi-media (text, audio, perhaps video) journalism is definitely the envelope we re pushing here. is doing a pretty good job of this too. Some of their newslinks offer the video or text verion of their stories.
The videos are heavily edited though (which equates to less transparency because interviewee quotes can much more easily be published out of context). Apologies to Tim if I wasn t as clear as I should have been. I thought I was.
But what I think doesn t matter. What matters, if you don t want your sources to abandon you, is the interviewee s perception of your intent (ironically, the punchline of the interview was about overcommunicating intent through disclosure).
Finally, while I was out for my back surgery, I spent a lot of time shopping for podcasting gear that would make this sort of real-time journalism a lot easier.
I often get questions about the gear I m using. Here are the details. .
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