Bob Browning's blog

I have my brand new shining computer with Vista. Dell delivered it last week. It has been hell. Nothing works:

We have three printers networked.

• One old HP for which there is not and never will be a driver for Vista.
• One relatively new HP deskjet for which there is a local printer driver but it seems no network printer driver. I can just about get this working by pretending it is a local printer, but creating a port which point to a network address. Thanks to someone in a forum somewhere who provided this workaround after about half a day.
• A Minolta colour laser that just works (do we see the beginning of a pattern here).

I also got Outlook 2007. The email didn’t work at all. After another half a day we found that you needed to disable some TCP framing or something. It involved copying a horrendous instruction into the prompt as administrator. Not for the faint hearted but it worked.

Trying to get a dual monitor arrangement wasn’t fun either – another whole day at least – and another story.

With all these millions being made from ‘communities’ and ‘user-generated income’ obviously there is a bomb to be made out of a myspace aimed at the business community. Now BT have one http://www.bttradespace.com/. OK I have registered (http://textor.bttradespace.com/). What do I get out of it?

1. A fairly neat way of creating a web site about my company. Actually I already have one of those.
2. I can join a ‘community’ such as software developers or business services. However apart from being listed with other members I don’t seem to be able to commune in any way
3. A forum. I don’t believe it! I have to re-register to use the forum – presumably because they have used a third-part product and haven’t figured out how to integrate it. Given how much money they spent on everything else I would have thought they could work this out.

What is this doing for me exactly?

We have discussed developing something similar ourselves in a particular niche. Investors are keen because ‘community’ and ‘user generated content’ are flavour of the month. However I coudn’t see it then and I don’t see it now. Unlike the average MySpace member who probably thinks it pretty neat to have their own web space (it is), a business looks for business benefits if this is going to take up my valuable time.

This obviously cost BT a lot of money but I don’t see it going very far.

I have a Joost account. The bad news. It won’t run worth a damn on my three year old business computer.

It queried the video memory when I installed is (it was looking for 48meg I had 32), and I don’t know if this is the problem. However a lot of home machines are not so new.

The user interface is nothing like any windows program so its hard to figure out how to operate it. The video quality is however excellent.

When I have my new computer (soon I hope) I will give it another shot.

For some reason best known to themselves Microsoft have decided to use the HTML rendering engine from Word rather than IE7 to render HTML emails in Outlook 2007.

Amongst other things this means that if you put animated gifs in your emails then only the first frame is displayed. It also means that CSS takes a step back a few years. Basically emails that used to be fine with Outlook won’t work going forward.

Why?

1. Outlook creates HTML emails using Word, so maybe they thought it would be a good idea to read them using Word as well. As long as all emails are created by Outlook it would be fine.
2. There is some security reason I havn’t thought of. I still can’t think of one.
3. There is some deep technical reason why they couldn’t integrate IE7 and this is a last-minute kludge.
4. There is some legal reason to do with IE7 being part of the operating system (not a stong one this because Oulook must use all kinds of bits of the Operating System).
5. Microsoft hates us

Maybe this will get fixed in SP1. However the fix is likely to be a switch that allows you to use IE7 to render emails, switched off by default so none of your customers use it.

Software is released with version numbers that contain dots. Version 0.x normally beta, 1.0 the first release. Then the small number changes as small upgrades are made, 1.1, 1.2 etc. The big number changes when a really big step-change in function is made (and some marketeer decides he/she can stiff customers for some more money for an upgrade – thus the somewhat miniscule incremental changes in word for windows since version 1.2)
Since the web was invented in 1994, or whenever Netscape beta was released, there have been a number of really important developments:

• Tables
• Background images
• Frames (maybe not) – but Iframes are handy
• Secure Socket Layer
• Javascript
• Java
• Sounds
• Streaming media
• Cascading style sheets
• Web services
• Different encoding methods
• AJAX

etc etc.

Now someone tell me what step increase in functionality justifies a big-number change. Secure Socket Layer – allowing us to actually make payments over the web without losing our shirt? How about Javascript allowing client-site computing? Streaming media is pretty cool how about that? Cascading style sheets – definitely.

If we gave the web version numbers like we give software version numbers we would be on version 8.5 by now.

So what is this web 2.0 thing about? And how come we go straight to 3.0 without any intervening numbers? Who decides anyway.

Sorry chaps – its nonsense.

The EU predicts a fivefold increase in wbe sales to 8.3 billion Euros by 2010. I think the point three is a nice touch giving a bogus impression of precision.

Why can’t they be honest and say that they think that maybe Internet sales in 2010 will be between 7 and 9 billion – or whatever they think the forecasting error on this sort of thing is.

Internet TV is an exciting possibility which is in its infancy. The technical quality of TV available now is remarkable, but at this stage little of it is a scheduled program such as you might recognise on your domestic TV. Take a look at Narrowstep. Sometimes this is called IPTV (Internet Protocol TV).

However there is something else that uses the same (or similar) technology, is called IPTV and is big business now. This is essentially a muli-channel cable service offered by telephone companies using their existing telephone lines and broadband technology to deliver it.

You can’t compare the two, but it is easy to get confused. The cable type service is delivered over the telephone company’s private managed network, not the global internet. Therefore they can deliver HD TV, and they can use broadcast protocols which are much more efficient.

It is important to distinguish the two and a proposed convention is to use Internet TV for Internet TV and IPTV for the cable type of service.

The founders of Skype with all their $zillions are getting into IPTV (Internet TV). I don’t blame them. We have been looking at this area with a client and it is potentialy huge.

As you would expect the Joost web site has some movies explaining what they will do.

a) not streamed, some are 10 meg
b) quicktime which most Internet users don’t have

Jeezzzz or should I say Jooozzz…

On e-consultancy this week the following post – names changed to protect the possibly innocent:

We started to work with Xxxx and received no results. Our Googole Page-Rank is lower then before. (sic) We payed in advance and trying to get the money back. …

My response:

I have never heard of them before, but according to their web site Xxxx will do things like:

• Keyword analysis
• Create a sitemap
• Submit to search engines
• Submit to directories
• Optimise web pages (headlines, link structure etc)
• Check for compliance with standards
• Rename html files

This all sounds like standard SEO good practice. They don’t suggest that they have some magic new technology. The problem is that even doing all this, Google can change its algorithms so that you drop in the rankings.

Question. Did they promise
(a) to do the above or
(b) to improve your rankings?

If (b) then your were mis-sold because nobody can guarantee to get you top ranking. The rankings are a moving target. You can justifiably ask for your money back on the basis of mis-selling.

However if they just promised (a) to optimise your site using SEO best practice and your rankings got worse, then you have a much harder job of work. Maybe you would have dropped even further down the rankings without their efforts. You have to prove they were not competent in what they did.

The IBM PC was 25 years old yesterday.

Happy Birthday!

On the BBC the announcer introduced the story by telling us that IBM invented the PC 25 years ago and how Microsoft was so clever in inventing the PC operating system.

Not exactly as I remember it!

We had a Syrius PC in the office – and a great box it was. When it became obvious that the IBM PC was going to be big ,Syrius announced a ‘downgrade card’ that made the box PC compatable. We all nodded our heads – how true that was – and bought the card.

The Syrius, along with just about everything else in those days ran under the CP/M operating system from a company called Digital Research. That included the Apple II for which I think Apple could be justified in claiming to have invented the PC mass market. And Digital Research could have been said to have invented the Micro operating system.

You had run CP/M because Visicalc – the killer app of the time (they invented the spreadsheet) ran under CP/M. I went to the announcement of the IBM PC in New York and the presenter was downright sheepish about the PC DOS operating system they had provided. It is received wisdom that IBM provided the inferior PC DOS operating system because the authors of CP/M thought that they owned the market and could dictate terms to IBM. How little they knew about the marketing muscle of IBM in the 80s. Anyway we were assured that CP/M would be provided in a few months as an option, and PC DOS looked a bit lilke a stopgap.

Well respected comentators shook their heads and said that without CP/M the IBM PC would never fly. Then Lotus 123 was announced and suddenly CP/M didn’t seem such a big deal.

Digital research went on to develop a multi-tasking operating system which would run multiple PC DOS sessions and a graphical user interface. All to no avail. Whatever happened to Digital Research – I think they went bust.