On Monday, for one day only, you can pick up a copy of Quickbooks Pro 2009 for free at Staples.

This appears to be a real offer. Staples stores will sell Quickbooks Pro 2009 for $159, after applying a $40 "instant rebate."

There will be coupons in the store to mail in for a $159 rebate.

There are more details in an email from an Intuit representative here. Quantities at the stores will be limited to stock on hand but this isn't a bait and switch deal - the stores have been bulking up their inventory. The same offer will reportedly be available online on the front page of the Staples web site. You can buy it online from the Staples web site. Don't forget to print out the rebate form!

Quickbooks is the only game in town for a small business. If you haven't upgraded recently, this is the time to do it!

Karl Palachuk, one of the best bloggers on small business technology, had this to say recently:

"The undisputed 800 pound gorilla among small business finances is Intuit's QuickBooks. No one loves it. Everyone uses it.

"Overall, QuickBooks does a great job or they wouldn't be where they are. Having said that, their program is amazingly bloated, filled with annoying spam and popups, and they have some of the worst technical support in the history of software.

""Everyone" integrates with QuickBooks. That is to say, everyone does something with QuickBooks. Most of them import and export aggregate data and lose all the detail. As a result, many people who could be "integrating" QuickBooks end up doing double-entry in their line of business application and QuickBooks."

Looking for an alternative to Quickbooks? Microsoft has several accounting programs that might look like contenders. Karl quotes a summary from Ernest Cook of Better Idea Group to clarify the current status of the various accounting programs from Microsoft.

"Due in no small part to the overlay in markets focus and similarity of the names, many people over the years have confused the Small Business Financials, Small Business Accounting and Office Accounting products so let me clarify for the group:

"Small Business Financials is based on the "Great Plains" code base. A quick call to Customer Source today confirmed that I can say publicly that Microsoft has NO plans on creating any more new versions of this product. The LAST version of this program is version 9 and if you have a client on an earlier version and is still current on support they could upgrade to that version. If they are NOT current on support, they need to start planning on what they will migrate to. In short, Small Business Financials is in fact going away +++ DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT TO YOUR CLIENTS +++

"Small Business Accounting - This product was written from scratch in 2004-2005 with a target market of 1-5 users. The only version that has this name is the inaugural edition that was labeled 2006. Due in no small part to the iterative nature of the initial product, a "service pack" came out later in the year but was still called SBA 2006. It had SQL 2000 technology and was based on the .Net 1.1 framework. Anyone that is still running this program and "stuck" on the workflow should, at the very least migrate to Office Accounting 2009 +++ Small Business Accounting is GONE - DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT TO YOUR CLIENTS +++

"Finally...

"Microsoft Office Accounting - The first version of this was in 2007 and was a direct descendant of "Small Business Accounting". The BIG difference is that the 2007 version was based on .NET 2.0 and SQL 2005 technology and Microsoft broadened the offering by creating a FREE "express" version and pushed it thru download sites etc.
In 2008, some bugs were fixed and new functionality was added to the product, most notably the addition of a Spanish language version. The most current version, 2009 was recently published and consists primarily of resolutions to issues that had been brought up by customers and partners for quite awhile.

"As an ISV who has invested a SIGNIFICANT amount of money into my products that need Office Accounting to work, it would be easiest for me to tell you that Office Accounting has a bright future and tell you to recommend it to your clients. I can't do that. I am NOT investing anymore time or money in the Office Accounting product line. Not only that but friends on the list might also be interested in hearing that I am migrating my own company books BACK to Intuit's QuickBooks."

See you at Staples!

Labels: business, software

posted by bruceb at 12/21/2008 12:12:00 AM | permalink

I've been using my PayPal account more frequently to buy things online. It's connected to my checking account, so a payment made with PayPal is withdrawn directly from the bank account. Typically the payment requires a transfer to a different browser window for the PayPal authentication, then back to the merchant's web site, which in the past had sometimes been a tricky dance for Internet Explorer to handle. Lately all the transactions have gone smoothly. The merchant gets all the name and address information from PayPal so it's frequently faster to finish a transaction.

It's a little harder to use Quicken to reconcile payments from the checking account that go through PayPal. If you download transactions directly into Quicken from the bank, the check register shows a PayPal transaction but doesn't get the name of the actual merchant. (Recent versions of Quicken are supposed to integrate with PayPal to download transactions directly from PayPal online but I haven't been brave enough to try it - the reports aren't very encouraging.)

Many of you are moving more and more of your purchases online, and buying online will come even more naturally to our kids. PayPal is testing an interesting service, the "PayPal Student Account." You can't try it yet - it's being tested by an invitation-only group.

The goal is to give teenagers some financial independence but let the parents keep some control. Parents with a PayPal account set up a sub-account for each teenage child and put in some money (a single chunk or a recurring amount like an allowance). The child can spend the money anywhere that PayPal is accepted online, or (optionally) can be given a MasterCard debit card.

Parents can set alerts to monitor the account and can disable the account any time. And my favorite feature - if a teen needs money unexpectedly, he or she can send a text message to PayPal ("Get $50), and PayPal in turn will send a text message to the parent, who can approve it and transfer the money with a reply text message.

The New York Times noticed this a few days ago. No word on when it will go into broader testing or get a full release.

Labels: business, parents, web_services

posted by bruceb at 12/09/2008 12:25:00 AM | permalink

The publisher of PC Magazine announced the end of the print edition - the last copy will be printed in January. I ended my subscription and wrote a eulogy for PC Magazine earlier this year but it still makes me sad to see it go - I'm old school and I like things printed on paper.

If you're nostalgic, here's a collection of the "twelve greatest defunct tech magazines."

Labels: business, computers

posted by bruceb at 11/20/2008 12:05:00 PM | permalink

I am happy to announce that Microsoft formally unveiled Microsoft Online Services today.

I am a Microsoft partner authorized to sell and support Microsoft Online Services. I expect to set up many of my clients with Exchange Online for their mail. If you're interested, please call me or drop me a note! I do not need to be in your geographic area to assist you with this.

This is the first big step by Microsoft to deliver online services directly to customers, part of its effort to redefine the entire company and move some of your data to the online cloud. I've already written up the background information you need to understand Microsoft Online Services - click here for information about where this comes from and how it fits in your world.

Basically, each Outlook mailbox is hosted by Microsoft for a monthly fee. (An Outlook "mailbox" is the term for the entire set of Outlook folders, including contacts, tasks and calendar.) The hosted Exchange service allows you to connect to your Outlook folders in a variety of ways:

• MULTIPLE COMPUTERS  The same Outlook folders can be displayed on multiple computers at multiple locations. You can use your Outlook folders seamlessly from a desktop computer at the office, a desktop computer at home, and a notebook computer on the road, and Outlook is always up to date at all locations.
• MULTIPLE LOCATIONS  Office workers can be linked together and share Outlook folders even if they are in different offices.
• WEBMAIL  Outlook folders can be accessed online through Outlook Web Access - full access to all Outlook folders presented in Internet Explorer, like other webmail services.
• PHONE  Windows Mobile 6 devices can sync email, calendar, and contacts over the air continuously.
• SHARING  Calendars and address lists can be shared with other people in the office.
• SECURITY  Microsoft provides virus and spam filtering.
• REDUCED COSTS  Microsoft is responsible for backups, database maintenance, security updates, and upgrades.

Microsoft has put together a very robust service that will be used by businesses of all sizes, including big enterprises that want to outsource their mail. It is best suited for small businesses if they fit within these parameters:

• The company has a domain name for mail, or wants to begin using one.
• There are a minimum of five email users.
• All computers are running Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista Business (or Ultimate), and all computers have Microsoft Outlook 2007 (or are prepared to buy it).
• The company is not set up with Small Business Server, which already includes Exchange Server. (It's possible to combine service from Microsoft with the onsite Small Business Server but I'm not sure the benefit would justify the cost for very small businesses.)
• In addition to the $10/month cost per mailbox, there will be some setup costs. You don't want to set this service up without assistance! As with anything new these days, I'm learning about hundreds of quirks and potential pitfalls as I set up clients. Call me before you sign up!

Here's Microsoft's press release about the new services, which include Sharepoint and other online services.

Other companies also offer hosted Exchange mailboxes which might be better matches for some people. I'll write more about those soon. Start to think about the advantages of having access to your Outlook folders from anywhere!

Labels: business, mail, Microsoft, mobile, Outlook, SBS, web_services

posted by bruceb at 11/18/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted on Tuesday after a company providing the servers for the spammers was taken offline.

The bad guys install malware on computers that they can control in vast networks, primarily to send spam for counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography. Approximately 190 billion spam messages are sent every day from more than 1.5 million hijacked computers. The spammers set up servers to control the hijacked computers and to display web pages offering illicit goods for sale.

The spammers don't buy their own servers. They buy server space from hosting companies, which are shielded from liability in many cases and not directly responsible for the actions of their customers. That has made it difficult to find the spammers and prosecute them, leaving law enforcement frustrated and frequently ineffective.

Reports were published recently identifying McColo Corp., a San Jose company, as the hosting company of choice for virtually all the top botnets blasting out spam or malware attacks. The company has offices in a 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose and apparently its entire business is devoted to providing a platform for bad guys and diverting any attempt to pursue the spammers by refusing to cooperate with law enforcement and shifting the spam networks around to help them evade detection. Researchers estimated that networks run through McColo servers were responsible for 75% of the world's spam.

In an interesting twist, security researchers contacted the two companies providing the Internet connection to the building. Both companies became convinced that McColo Corp. was evil and decided to cut off the company's Internet connections on Tuesday without fuss or delay.

The volume of spam worldwide dropped by more than forty percent immediately.

Lots of companies monitor spam and all of them noticed the huge decline, with estimates of drops in global spam from 40%-75% when McColo was forced offline.

This won't permanently reduce the volume of spam. It won't take long for McColo to find other Internet connections or for other companies to step up in its place. Trying to shut down the bad guys is like playing Whack A Mole - a law enforcement victory here, a broken Internet connection there, but they keep popping up.

It's always nice to have a moment of triumph, though, and this was a particularly dramatic one.

It was reporting by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post that got the carriers' attention - here's his article about the effect of the disconnect.

Labels: business, Internet, mail, security, spam

posted by bruceb at 11/13/2008 12:03:00 AM | permalink

Spammers can turn a profit even if they only get one response from every 12 million emails they send. When you see a ridiculous spam message and think, who in their right mind would respond to that?, the answer is, almost no one - but it only takes a handful of responses for the spammers to think their campaign was worthwhile.

Last year researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego infiltrated a spam network and took over a portion of the network, diverting the spam sent out by over 75,000 hijacked computers (out of more than a million in the entire spam network). They set up a fake pharmacy web site, similar to the ones operated by the spammers, and sent 350 million spam messages in about a month inviting people to buy drugs online.

They only got 28 responses in a month from people who pushed the button to make a purchase. The researchers are good guys, so they didn't capture the credit card details or take any money, but they measured how much they would have made, about $2,700.

The interesting part happens if you scale that up to the size of the full spam network, where the same miniscule rate of return would net $9,500/day or about $3.5 million dollars in a year. That's not a huge amount but it's probably sufficient to earn a profit after subtracting the cost of developing the code to exploit security holes and hijack computers, and to run servers worldwide to sell Viagra and process credit card payments.

Meanwhile, the researchers saw 10% of recipients clicking on a link to download and install the malware that hijacks computers and turns them into bots sending out those spam messages night and day. Ten percent! The researchers estimate that would allow the spammers to add between 3,500 and 8,500 new hijacked computers every day.

Here's a Washington Post article about the UC study, and here's another summary from the BBC.

Meanwhile, security analyst Jesper Johansson wrote a followup to his study of "XP Antivirus," one of the prevalent bits of malware circulating now. Here are my notes about his study. In this scam, you are led to a web site that puts up a very convincing display about viruses on your computer that need to be cleaned off, with details that make the process look genuine and convincing. Almost any click anywhere on the screen leads you to a request for a credit card payment, and one wrong move will install popup bubbles and screens that insistently take you back to the payment demands. Most variations of this malware are not destructive but I've seen it several times and the bubbles are incredibly annoying, making it almost impossible to use your computer until deep surgery is done to remove the offending files. Some variations of the this adware can be removed with a reasonable amount of effort, but some come along with the kind of malware that can only be dealt with by reformatting the hard drive. If you pay the fifty bucks, you'll get some software that claims to have successfully removed the infected files, but the infection was fictitious and the software doesn't do anything.

Recently a hacker broke into an accounting computer run by one of the scammers responsible for distributing XP Antivirus and posted some internal accounting details online. There's a lot of money at stake! Believe it or not, the software is distributed through an affiliate program that pays a significant portion of the sale proceeds to affiliates spreading the malware. The most successful affiliate earned $158,00 in a week, and even the small-time affiliates were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Here's an article about the financial details.

I've cleaned up several computers recently with XP Antivirus and other bits of malware. At the risk of being a nag, let me reiterate:

Antivirus software will not always protect you against malware if you click OK at the wrong time!

Don't click on strange URLs! Follow links with carefree abandon to and from legitimate sites, but don't click on links that arrive in spam e-mail, instant messages, web forums, or IRC chats, or that start from an untrustworthy web site.

Never, never, never open email attachments unless you know with 100% certainty that the attachment is something you expected and want to receive.

The bad guys are liars. They will say anything to get past your defenses, without conscience or remorse.

Please, be careful out there!

Labels: business, computers, mail, security, spam

posted by bruceb at 11/11/2008 01:31:00 AM | permalink

Acrobat 9 Professional builds on the features in Acrobat 8 that made it an important tool in many offices, especially law offices. There is a vastly improved document comparison routine and enhanced Bates numbering, for example, along with small improvements in transfers to Word, file splitting, and other features.

Acrobat 8 introduced PDF "packages," single PDF files that contain multiple PDFs assembled from multiple sources. Packages are particularly good at storing email folders; a single PDF can contain messages that are listed individually, stored in the PDF with their attachments, and can be sorted and searched. Here's a good explanation of Acrobat packages.

In Acrobat 9, packages have been dressed up into "Portfolios," which have some dramatically different features. In a Portfolio, many documents can be gathered together into a single file, where they will be stored in their native format - a Word file is stored as a Word file, a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, and so on - instead of being converted to PDF format. Only a few clicks are required to add a welcome page, a page with either thumbnails of the contents or a list, a logo, and more.

A well-designed wizard makes Portfolios easier to create than packages were, so the new features do not require rocket science to use. It is important to know that Portfolios can only be opened by Acrobat 8 or 9, either the full edition or the free Reader. If they're opened in Acrobat 8, a warning message appears and many of the cool display features are lost, although the contents are still listed and the files are fully usable.

Adobe included "Binders" as a way to ensure some backward compatibility. Binders take longer to assemble and don't look as interesting, but it is possible to use Binders to gather groups of PDFs into a single file that can be opened by any version of Acrobat from version 5 forward.

The good folks at Acrobat For Legal Professionals put together a lovely guide for lawyers about Portfolios and Binders, with detailed, illustrated instructions about how to create a professional looking Portfolio with all the documents normally presented on paper at the end of a real estate closing. It's well worth reading if you use Acrobat - the results are compelling.

I was drawn to the presentation by something different. I'm not convinced that many small offices will use Acrobat.com to share files; we are overloaded with new services and forced to be selective about which ones get our attention. But the widget that was used on the blog to display a thumbnail of the file and allow it to be downloaded from Acrobat.com - well, it's just super. Really, go to the blog post and look at the little thumbnail of the document, which you can use to page through it and zoom to full screen and then download the actual PDF.

It looked so nifty that I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to get the same widget embedded in this post so you could see it. I've been introduced to an interesting variety of error messages, endless hourglass, and crashed copies of Internet Explorer. Which goes back to my point about taking these services seriously! Given time, I would discover the quirk that allowed the "Embed" feature to work and I'd be able to use it going forward. We don't have much time. Don't plan to use any new technology without effort!

Labels: Acrobat, business, law, web_services

posted by bruceb at 11/07/2008 01:45:00 AM | permalink

"Windows Azure" is a terrible name but you need to be aware of it anyway. Windows Azure is a breathtakingly ambitious platform outlined by Microsoft at last week's Professional Developer Conference, another attempt by Microsoft to position itself to profit from a paradigm shift that will be just as important as the move to the Internet in the 90s.

Yesterday I used word processing as an easy example to imagine what it would be like if you had universal access to your files with the ability to open and edit them from any computer. Of course, it's just as easy to imagine having easy access from anywhere to your Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations, with the programs running in a browser if you don't have a copy installed on the computer nearby.

Okay, now stretch a little bit. Imagine that you could have something like the same experience on your phone - Windows Mobile can sync folders using Live Mesh and it runs little tiny versions of Word and Excel. Photos can be moved around from computer to computer and/or stored online, too, so you might not be surprised by this anecdote from someone who tried using Live Mesh on his phone to sync the folder where the phone stores pictures. There were the pictures on his computer a few minutes later with no muss, no fuss, no action required at all. The camera on the phone looks a lot more usable all of a sudden!

But now let's take a big step. Windows Azure is a platform that will allow you to run programs that are identical to programs installed on your computer but which are actually running from Microsoft's online servers. Microsoft's goal is to have all of its programs run from Microsoft's data centers in such a way that you cannot tell the difference between a program hosted online and a program on your computer. The developer tools will allow all the other software vendors to do the same thing.

Some of you already have experience with that. Businesses running on Small Business Server use Outlook to connect to mailboxes stored in Exchange Server. At the office, people open Outlook to do their work; away from the office, they might use Outlook on their notebook computer, or they might check their mail or calendar on their Windows Mobile phone, or they might use Outlook Web Access to display their Outlook folders in a web browser. Outlook Web Access is already significantly improved in Exchange 2007 so it more closely resembles Outlook, and it only takes a small leap of faith to imagine the experience being identical to using the full program.

The Azure framework is intended to give developers the ability to present their programs to you over your Internet connection so that virtually all the hard work is done by the online servers. Microsoft or Google or Amazon have responsibility for holding the data and backing it up; when a program is updated, the updates are applied at the source instead of requiring you to take steps to install updates on each of your computers.

I'll be writing more about Live Framework, the unified underpinning of the various Windows Live services as they become increasingly integrated, and Microsoft Online Services, which will introduce hosted online Exchange mailboxes to many of my clients. They're early signs of this movement to online services that will change your life, whether you're ready or not. There are many miles and many competitors and the future is not assured for Microsoft, but make no mistake - the company has staked its future on this ambitious transformation.

Here are some more early comments on Windows Azure: Dan Farber on "Microsoft's Manhattan Project"; Robert Scoble says not to underestimate Microsoft's ability to turn a corner; CBS News on the Azure launch; and Joe Wilcox on the significance of the project:

"I simply cannot overstate how enormous an undertaking is Azure. Microsoft plans to support cloud services in every product. Azure is hugely ambitious and will transform Microsoft, whether or not the vision stated on Monday makes it to market. As such, Azure is enormously risky and its success as envisioned is uncertain."

Labels: business, computers, file_sharing, Google, Internet, mail, Microsoft, mobile, Outlook, photos, software, web_services

posted by bruceb at 11/04/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

There are lots of projects intended to move our computing lives online. Let me try to paint a picture of where our world is heading over the next 5-10 years. I'll use Microsoft projects as examples but keep in mind that other companies have similar projects and goals.

Start with hundreds of thousands of high-powered servers all over the world, run by big companies, providing storage space and computing power to do interesting things. Amazon and Google are already in that business, and one of Microsoft's big announcements at last week's conference was that it intends to commit the future of the company to providing services from its own global network. Assume that the companies are doing what it takes to convince you that they have the resources to keep things safe and working at full speed.

Take a step forward from where we are now (a small step, really) and imagine that when you click on File / Open in Microsoft Word and see a list of the files in your Documents folder, you're seeing a list that is the same regardless of where you're sitting or what computer you're using. Your documents are listed when you're at your desk, but the same list appears when you're at a friend's house or at an Internet cafe in Paris. You don't give that a second thought - you expect it to happen and it works.

Well, it doesn't work yet but you might be surprised at how many steps you can take right now toward that goal.

• You can store documents in Office Live Workspace; on your own computer you can open them from within Word after installing a little plugin, and from any other computer you can access them in a browser and open them in Word if it's installed on that computer.
• If you set up Live Mesh, you can have local copies of your documents on all the computers you use regularly, appearing in your Documents folder when you click File / Open in Word, plus you can access the same files online by logging onto the Live Mesh website.

Those services are still in their early stages of development and will become easier to use. I have some criticisms of the way some Office Live Workspace features are designed and those will be addressed, but I've also seen references to the likelihood that Live Mesh folders will be accessible in Office Live Workspace and you'll just have to trust me - that moves us a huge step closer to that picture I painted up there of universal, easy access to your files from anywhere.

The bigger picture goes far beyond the basic ability to store files online - there are lots of ways already available to store documents online. The future lies in whether you can create and edit your files from any device.

So let's add one more element. Microsoft announced that you'll be able to use online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote to work on your files if you're sitting at a computer where those programs are not installed. There are many, many details to be worked out about price, features (these will start out as "light" versions of the programs), and integration with your online files, but the concept immediately makes sense. Here's a screen shot of Word running in Internet Explorer - click through for shots of other programs:

Imagine that the experience of using Microsoft Word is identical regardless of whether you're using the copy installed on your computer or the online version, and you can open the same files regardless of where you're sitting. Under the hood, let's say Microsoft has done the heavy lifting to ensure that security precautions are observed for businesses. Interested yet?

Let's stop there for today. Tomorrow we'll take that a step further and try to understand just how wildly ambitious the plans are that Microsoft outlined last week.

Labels: business, file_sharing, IE, Internet, Microsoft, mobile, Office, software

posted by bruceb at 11/03/2008 12:33:00 AM | permalink

From Paul Thurrott's blog today.

Unbelievable.

I love Dell, I really do. I recently bought that Optiplex, which has been great. So when my dad called this morning and asked about buying a new PC, I told him I could probably get something at Dell for under $500. I headed over to Dell, went back and forth between the Inspiron and Studio desktops and then started configuring an Inspiron 518.

If you've spent any time on Dell.com, you know how this works. They have this nice configurator wizard that walks you through all of the components you can change on the system you're browsing, like the microprocessor, the graphics card, the hard drive, and so on. It's all standard stuff and it works well.

And then I got to this step. Honest to God, Dell.

Select my ... Iron Man Movie??? And it's between the steps for "Printers" and "Speakers." I kid you not.

But seriously. Crapware in the configurator?

People have been doomed to hell for eternity for less than this, Dell. Wake up.

I like the note that you'll be able to play the movie on your TV "through windows media extenders," as if that's something a lot of people will casually take advantage of.

That's not the only merchandising madness going on for this movie, by the way. There are eight different versions of the movie going on sale - every major retailer has a different package, one with bobbleheads, another with a comic book or a steel case or a stained glass window or something else. It's an odd world, isn't it?

Labels: business, computers, hardware, video

posted by bruceb at 10/09/2008 12:29:00 AM | permalink

Two new sites have been added to the bruceb favorites page.

• The Big Money is a business web site created by the editors of Slate, intended to be an authoritative source of business news combined with interesting business blogs. It will be trying to stand out from the other big business sites - Forbes, CNN Money, and the rest. Here's a New York Times article about the new site. (Look under Finance / Markets on the favorites page.)
• SoundUnwound is an online music encyclopedia created by Amazon and IMDB, the huge movie database. SoundUnwound starts with a lot of information and links to Amazon for purchase information and reviews, but is also open for editing by users, similar to Wikipedia. The companies hope that a community will grow up to feed information into it and make it authoritative and complete. Since that has already happened on Wikipedia, which has extraordinarily complete information about music (and roughly everything else), it's hard to predict whether SoundUnwound will find its own niche. But it's interesting and nicely presented, and that counts, right? Here's some background information about SoundUnwound. (Look under Music / Artists on the favorites page.)

The bruceb favorites page is meant to include the most useful web sites, the ones that you're looking for most of the time. If you find dead links or if you find yourself at a site that's well known and has some general interest, I hope you'll let me know so I can keep the page up to date. Thanks for your loyalty and support!

Labels: audio, bruceb, business, Internet

posted by bruceb at 9/15/2008 12:35:00 PM | permalink

The New York Times has an article today about XO Communications, a company that most of you have never heard of. It gave me a little wave of nostalgia - XO is irrelevant now but I still have accounts there and it meant a lot to me in the old days.

The article goes through Carl Icahn's emergence in 2003 as XO's majority owner and his financial shenanigans with the company since then. It's an interesting story, not untypical, where people with way too much money play games that seem to have nothing to do with the underlying business of the companies involved.

My interest is only because XO evolved from Concentric Networks, the company that was a big player in web hosting in the 90s. I registered bruceb.com with Concentric and set up many of my clients there. Prices were reasonable, the onscreen controls were better than other web hosting companies, and support was good.

None of those things have been true for a few years now. The onscreen controls are cluttered and buggy, service is occasionally erratic, and XO's prices are no longer competitive. (My experiences with tech support by phone have been good, unlike, say, 1and1.com, but I've had to call for support too many times in the last few years.)

Moving a web site from one host to another is a chore, especially for businesses that have to be sure not to disrupt the flow of email, so bruceb.com is still hosted by XO, and a few of my clients are still there. This article reminds me that it's time to move on - there's no need to stay with a company that is sliding into bankruptcy and has no particular interest in its web hosting business.

Labels: business, Internet

posted by bruceb at 8/30/2008 11:15:00 AM | permalink

GrandCentral is a wonderful free service for handling phone calls. When you sign up, you pick a new phone number and do a few minutes of easy setup. Then when someone calls that number, all of your phones ring simultaneously and you can answer any of them.

I've relied on GrandCentral for more than a year. When you call me, my office phone and my cell phone ring. I can answer either one and transfer calls between them with a single push of a button. A web-based utility allows calls to be re-routed on the fly - you can literally make your phone calls ring at your parents' house when you arrive and turn off the forwarding when you leave. Call handling can be chosen based on time of day, or by groups, or by individual decisions for different names in your address book. Here's what I wrote about GrandCentral last year.

It's great - you should try it!

Except you can't sign up for it.

Google acquired GrandCentral in July 2007 and immediately stopped signing up new members. Existing members could invite new users for a few more months but no one has been added since the beginning of this year.

There is dead silence about what to expect. It's been months since there have been any meaningful changes on the web site or blog posts by anyone knowledgeable. Nobody from GrandCentral participates on the support forum. No one knows if a new version will be rolled out with even more wonderful features - or if the plug will be pulled on short notice.

It's not the only time this has happened to a company purchased by Google. This article about the "Google black hole" lists several more companies with promising technology that were acquired by Google only to disappear from sight, with the founders and employees gradually shifted away into other projects.

Google's image is starting to tarnish - its non-search products are always on the verge of greatness but never seem to become great. I hope GrandCentral doesn't die! If my phone number changes, it's a bad sign for some good technology.

Labels: business, Google, phone, web_services

posted by bruceb at 8/28/2008 12:39:00 AM | permalink

Take a look at Jungle Disk, a service for online backups with a good reputation. I'm testing it now and finding a lot of things to like.

The idea is simple - back up folders to a secure place online at regular intervals, and retrieve them any time but especially in the event of a computer crash.

Jungle Disk's backup software is extremely simple to use - pick the interval for backups and put checkmarks by the folders to be backed up. The software can be installed on Windows servers and desktops as well as supporting Linux and Macs.

After a disaster, you'd install the Jungle Disk software on the new computer, then run Restore. By default, Jungle Disk keeps multiple versions of files, so you can also use it to recover earlier versions of individual documents.

The interesting thing about Jungle Disk is that it has almost no investment in this process at all. All of the hard work is done by Amazon. Yup, Amazon.

You see, Amazon has built a simply unbelievable global array of servers, capable of providing nearly unlimited amounts of storage. A tiny fraction of that is used for Amazon's online stores.

Amazon is providing access to that online storage to anyone, at trivially cheap prices. When you install Jungle Disk, the first thing you'll do is set up your personal account with Amazon for storage space in Amazon's S3 service. The cost is fifteen cents per month per gigabyte, plus trivial charges for transferring files to and from the service, billed through your Amazon account. You can store as much or as little as you like - there is a size limit of 5Gb for an individual file but there are otherwise no limits whatsoever.

The Amazon storage space cannot be accessed directly, however. Developers are given the technical tools to build whatever they like for people to use with the service. Jungle Disk built a backup program. There are lots of other backup programs as well as web hosting companies, photo sharing services and many more services built around the Amazon S3 online storage.

The Jungle Disk software costs twenty bucks for a lifetime license. If the company went out of business, chances are somebody else would write software to recover data stored in Jungle Disk's proprietary format. But Jungle Disk was immediately profitable because it just wrote some simple software - it did not try to build a global network of secure servers to go with it.

Jungle Disk is secure and simple. The first backup is slow - it's going through your Internet connection, after all. It might take days for the first backup to complete. After that, only changed files are sent. You wouldn't back up your entire hard drive to Jungle Disk - it can't be used for a bare metal restore.

Personally, for the reasons I wrote up recently, I would use it in addition to another backup method.

I'm going to start using it to store another backup of my files, my Quickbooks & Quicken data, and my family photos. That's about 35Gb of data, so that should be about five bucks a month. Nice! If I have trouble (like I did last year when I had a poor experience with another online backup service), I'll let you know.

Labels: backup, business, Internet, web_services

posted by bruceb at 8/13/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

By the close of the 2008 Olympic Games, NBC will have broadcast 2,900 hours of live coverage - more than the total number of US television hours for all previous summer Olympic Games combined.

In addition to the broadcasts on the primary NBC channel, video coverage will be virtually nonstop on NBC's Spanish-language outlet, Telemundo, and on five of seven major NBC Universal-owned cable channels. Huge amounts of video covering every sport will be served up by streamed video on NBC's Olympics Web site, NBCOlympics.com. Here's a good article about the monolithic coverage and the accompanying promotional effort.

This article examines the technical challenge of handling that much video - 11 terabytes of high definition content alone. NBC has spent billions on storage (180TB of available space in Beijing), servers, and creative technology to make it possible for editors around the world to stitch together the coverage from the available shots and create a finished piece without choking up all the bandwidth moving the HD video around.

The NBC Olympics web site will be streaming video using Microsoft's Silverlight technology - you'll have to install "Silverlight v.2 (beta)" to see the video. Microsoft paid large amounts of money to get the opportunity to install Silverlight on computers around the world, and it's putting on a very impressive show - the high quality 720x480 video is quite remarkable after the last couple of years spent enduring miserable low-quality streaming Flash video on YouTube. Check it out - watch the incredible men's swimming 4x100 relay. (When the video starts, click the button to "Enlarge" in the lower right corner.)

You'll get a quick screen to indicate who your television provider is - if you don't claim to have service from one of NBC's "partners" (like, say, Comcast Cable in zip code 95404), you don't get to watch the online video. There's no check on the information you put in. I've seen one unconfirmed report that if you put in Time Warner in zip code 10001, you can see some coverage three hours earlier than it's turned on for the west coast.

There is a link to the NBC Olympics web site on the bruceb.com Favorites page - near the top, under the Amazon search box.

Enjoy the Games!

Labels: business, games, Internet, video

posted by bruceb at 8/12/2008 12:15:00 AM | permalink

Microsoft has put up a web site for "The Mojave Experiment," with film footage of people responding favorably to what they believed was a brand-new secret operating system, then catching their reactions when told they were looking at Vista. It's pretty effective advertising! And the video wall on the web site is pretty cool. Go take a look!

Labels: business, Microsoft, Vista

posted by bruceb at 7/29/2008 10:47:00 AM | permalink

Two weeks ago, Microsoft announced new services that might drastically change the email technology used by small businesses. Let me give you some background, then give you some information about Microsoft Online Services - a way for a small business to have its Outlook folders stored online by Microsoft.

Companies running Exchange Server for Outlook reap tremendous benefits. For example:

• The same Outlook folders can be displayed on multiple computers at multiple locations. You can use your Outlook folders seamlessly from a desktop computer at the office, a desktop computer at home, and a notebook computer on the road, and Outlook is always up to date at all locations.
• Calendars and address lists can be shared.
• Outlook folders can be accessed online through Outlook Web Access - full access to all Outlook folders presented in Internet Explorer, like other webmail services.
• Windows Mobile devices can sync over the air.

It's a rich environment.

Traditionally that has required a small business to run its own Exchange Server (included with the Small Business Server suite). A small business does not strain Exchange Server, which is remarkably robust and frequently troublefree, but make no mistake - it is fiercely complex and problems can happen. I dive for the phone to pay Microsoft for support when there's a problem with an Exchange database.

Microsoft developed a community of partners - big companies offering "hosted Exchange" mailboxes. A small business would pay a monthly fee to the big company to have the Exchange database stored online for all the business users. Outlook works completely smoothly with that arrangement; for the users, there's literally no difference between that setup and having the Exchange Server down the hall. The responsibility for backups, database maintenance, security updates, and upgrades is shifted to the big company.

Until recently, small companies mostly stayed away from hosted Exchange accounts. The big companies were unfamiliar (heck, the whole concept was unfamiliar), and the prices were just high enough to dissuade business owners from moving away from traditional standalone copies of Outlook. (I set up several people with individual hosted Exchange accounts, offered by 1and1.com, but even those were tough because people weren't familiar with the concept.)

Two weeks ago Microsoft announced the details of Microsoft Online Services. Microsoft is bypassing its partners and offering hosted Exchange services directly. Pricing is still not cheap - $10 per user per month for 1Gb of mailbox storage space, with more space available at a cost for oversized mailboxes. But it comes with Microsoft's name behind it and it comes at a time when people are being bombarded with references to storing things "in the cloud." People are becoming familiar with the idea of having important data stored online.

As always, there are a lot of details to process. You can see from the chart that there are many levels of service, and other services in addition to Exchange. I've been testing the beta and there were kinks getting things set up. It's possible to integrate this service with an existing onsite Exchange Server, and it's possible to migrate from an onsite server to the hosted service, but there will be some technical hurdles to make that work.

Meanwhile the partner community is reeling, feeling betrayed, because this puts Microsoft in the position of competing with them directly and even potentially taking customers from the partners. Microsoft has set up an elaborate commission structure to try to soothe them but there is a lot of bitterness out there. I don't think that will slow things down but be alert for yet another round of Microsoft-bashing.

This might be one of those moments that changes the standard setup of computer services for a small business. The demand is already there for universal access to email, calendar and contact lists; this responds to some very real needs being expressed by every business. I expect to be talking about this with many of my clients that do not presently have a server.

Even more interesting, there are consultants in the Small Business Server community who wonder whether this will be such a compelling alternative that they should not recommend Small Business Server 2008. It could be that a small business will have a server onsite to do nothing more than file and printer sharing, and all the other company technology will be online services.

There are changes ahead! This is another one that deserves some attention. Here's more information about the presentation of Microsoft Online Services at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in early July. There's a demo at the MOS beta site. Here's an overview of Microsoft's step into this space. It's interesting stuff!

Labels: business, mail, Microsoft, mobile, Outlook, SBS, web_services

posted by bruceb at 7/23/2008 01:52:00 AM | permalink

Small Business Server 2008, the successor to SBS 2003, will ship on November 12. The first few months will reveal any lingering issues and clarify the procedure for migrating to the new platform from SBS 2003. In early 2009, I'll be talking about it to my clients with SBS 2003 running on servers that are more than three years old - it will be time to refresh the hardware that runs the business, part of my long-time belief that it is always preferable to replace a computer on your schedule rather than the computer's breakdown schedule.

In some ways, SBS 2008 sounds similar to SBS 2003 - a single server for small businesses to handle file storage and Exchange mailboxes, plus remote access and some other nice features. Many of the differences result from six years of progress on the underlying products - Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Sharepoint Services 3.0, and more. That steps up the hardware requirements - new 64-bit boxes with lots of memory are required. Existing SBS 2003 servers will be relegated to backup roles or retired. Here are some notes I wrote about SBS 2008 a few months ago.

There are architectural differences based on the increasing need that all businesses feel for 24/7 reliable computing. Small businesses have frequently relied on a single server, creating a single point of failure that can paralyze the entire business. That will still be true in part, but the Premium edition of SBS 2008 will include a license to run Windows Server 2008 on a second server and will include SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition, making it far more cost-efficient to run a line-of-business application on a second server. Law offices, for example, will be more likely to move their case management or accounting programs onto a second server, leaving the SBS 2008 server free to focus on file and printer sharing and running the huge, active mailboxes that we're all accumulating.

SBS 2008 will integrate deeply with Office 2007 and Microsoft's online Office services, making it easier for small businesses to begin using online file storage and collaboration tools.

Windows Live OneCare for Server is a new product that will be included with SBS 2008. Details are hazy but at a minimum it will provide antivirus and spyware protection for the servers, currently difficult to accomplish with SBS 2003 (third party products are available but they are quirky and frequently too complex for a small business relying on an offsite consultant). Apparently the server OneCare program will finally allow central management of OneCare on the individual desktops and facilitate backups of files on the individual computers.

It's going to be an interesting year. Now that a nearly final version of SBS 2008 is available for testing, I've just ordered a server that I'll be using for learning and breaking things and in general, feeling that my brain is too small.

Small businesses that have not yet installed a server do not have to wait; it's possible to buy a license for SBS 2003 with "Software Assurance" that will minimize the cost of the licenses to upgrade to SBS 2008 next year. Adding a server with SBS 2003 can be a tremendously important step for a growing business! In a slowing economy, though, businesses that want to postpone taking that step would be well advised to plan on next spring for their new servers.

Labels: business, computers, hardware, Microsoft, SBS, security

posted by bruceb at 7/18/2008 12:56:00 AM | permalink

Small businesses (less than 50 employees) can get free telephone support from Microsoft for any Vista-related issues on new PCs running Vista Business or Vista Ultimate purchased between July 1 and September 30. Now that Windows XP is off the market, Microsoft is trying to rebuild Vista's battered image and let people know that Vista works just fine.

Details about the Vista Small Business Assurance program - free phone support and other resources aimed at businesses - are here.

Labels: business, Vista

posted by bruceb at 7/09/2008 03:04:00 PM | permalink

The market for notebook computers is growing fast. Notebooks already outsell desktop computers in the US and will outsell desktops globally by next year, according to the New York Times. Here's a report released yesterday comparing global notebook shipments in the first quarters of 2007 and 2008, showing HP and Dell with hugely increased sales and more than a third of the market between them.

You probably have some vague idea that Apple owns the notebook market, right? It's part of the reality distortion field that Apple has used so brilliantly over the years. (Random example: an article from last fall about the "major shift in notebook buying patterns" and "ominous news for Dell.") Apple has been selling a lot of notebooks and its market share is definitely increasing, particularly in the US, but don't get all carried away about it. According to the report, Apple had been in eighth place for four consecutive quarters, but "surged" to seventh place in the first quarter of 2008 with a 4.6% market share, barely beating out Asus (which had an even larger percentage growth in year-over-year sales).

Still it must be great to use an Apple computer and live the easy life of a troublefree operating system, right?

• I trust all the Mac users got the updates two weeks ago that fixed more than forty security holes in OS X v. 10.4.11. Or perhaps you upgraded to OS X 10.5.3? Next time I talk to Mac users, I think I'll ask them which choice they made - Macs are so easy to maintain that it's probably obvious if they're running a fully patched version of 10.4.11 or 10.5.3.
• Oh, and did you get the update to Quicktime 7.5 that fixed security holes that could have allowed people to control your computer remotely? That was the update that followed Quicktime 7.4.5 a couple of months ago, which fixed more security problems. The Quicktime problems potentially affect Windows users too - thanks, Apple.
• It's not clear whether there's a fix for the security problem with Apple's Safari Internet browser for the Windows users who were fooled into installing it a couple of months ago by Apple's deceptive "update" utility.

Apple is pretty free to claim that the Windows world is unsafe and confusing, but it's just the teensiest bit annoying that Apple is one of the forces contributing to making it so.

Labels: Apple, business, computers, mobile

posted by bruceb at 6/16/2008 12:06:00 AM | permalink

Adobe has launched an online suite of software and services, along with announcing the July release of Acrobat 9. It's all interesting but I have a sense of overload already, and we're still very early in the new age of online web services.

Acrobat.com is ready for you to begin using for free - an email address and a password opens up online file storage, convenient file sharing, an online word processor, web conferencing, and a PDF converter. I can only mention a few things in passing, but this article has a nice description of each of the features.

Adobe has designed a very appealing set of controls for its services, with lots of functions presented elegantly. The file sharing feature makes it easy to send an email with a large file attachment by uploading the file to Adobe's servers and sending only a link in the message. There's a generous amount of free space for file storage. The web conferencing stands out for ease of use.

In addition to many small companies offering each of the various parts, Microsoft and Google have already begun to roll out their own online suites. Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft Live services each provide more or less the same functions: Google offers its typically quirky and sometimes overly simplistic interface; Microsoft counters with some appealing services that are all too often overlapping, confusing, and complex. Now Adobe enters the field with presumably a big promotional push.

Each of these suites will only reward a person or business who commits to one of them wholeheartedly. Who's ready to do that? There are a hundred services that will help you send an oversize email attachment. Web conferencing is easy to come by. The benefits of Adobe's services might emerge if you take advantage of their integration, which means committing to them and using them daily as a way to change your business flow. I don't feel any appetite among my very small business clients for a change like that and I'm not sure I'd be doing them a favor if I tried to create that momentum - not yet, anyway.

In just a few minutes, I ran into some limitations of the Acrobat.com services - not big problems, just typical startup issues.

• The initial login was problematic - the service didn't recognize my "Adobe ID" and I had to go through the password reset process.
• The online word processor, "Buzzword," uses a separate login name and password for some reason, and stores its documents separately from the other Adobe file storage service.
• The word processor is adequate for the basics but no more than that. Here's more info about Buzzword.
• The online file storage will not accept any media files - no online storage of music or movies. I can understand why Adobe handles difficult copyright issues that way, but it limits the usefulness of the service.
• There is an online PDF converter to create PDFs from Office documents and other formats, but the free converter can only be used five times - hardly worth mentioning. Adobe isn't going to give up its profits from selling Acrobat that easily!

Now with all that said, I encourage you to take a look at Acrobat.com! Set up your password and try things out! The design is lovely and the service has much promise. But don't commit to it half-heartedly or it will become just another forgotten password for a web site where a few forgotten files are stored.

As to Acrobat 9, there are no details yet about whether there will be any important new features for businesses. The presentation on Monday focused on the ability to embed Flash videos in PDF files. How . . . special. There will also be hooks to the online Acrobat.com service to facilitate collaborating on PDF files, which doesn't mean much if we're not otherwise using the Acrobat.com service. Waiting for details on that one.

Labels: Acrobat, business, Google, Microsoft, Office, web_services

posted by bruceb at 6/03/2008 12:21:00 AM | permalink

GrandCentral is a phenomenally useful service for some people. The service assigns you a free phone number; you can route calls so when that number is dialed, the phone rings at any number of places you choose. When you call my GrandCentral number - the only number I give out now - both my office phone and my cell phone ring, so you can reach me wherever I am, crucial in an area like Sonoma County where cell phone coverage is spotty. The web interface plays voicemail messages, which are indefinitely archived, and allows calls to be rerouted on the fly - forward your calls to Grandma's house when you arrive for Thanksgiving, then turn the forwarding off when you leave. Brilliant! Here's my notes about GrandCentral when I signed up.

Google bought GrandCentral last year and seems a little uncertain what to do with it. The service immediately stopped accepting new users, instead offering signup on a waiting list with only occasional openings for new people to join. Service has been spotty at times lately. The features haven't changed and there's been little discussion about what to expect. The official blog is almost dead, although a post last month promised that work was proceeding on "the next great version of GrandCentral and a ton of cool new features."

Today's episode is probably just an "Oops!" moment, not an indication of anything. But it was almost a big Oops.

Google almost let the registration lapse on the domain name www.grandcentral.com. Somebody forgot to renew it.

The web site actually went dead for many people today, the last day of its registration, as the registrar began to take it over.

Late in the day, somebody from Google managed to get the site back online by renewing the name for a year.

Here's a blogger summing up the day's events.

Isn't that marvelous? It's some pretty embarrassing stuff. I hope Google is doing a better job on the big picture than it is on the details!

Labels: business, Google, Internet, phone

posted by bruceb at 5/21/2008 01:34:00 AM | permalink

The latest wave of media overcoverage concerns Windows 7, the followup to Vista, which Microsoft hopes to have ready in 2-3 years. The theme of many blogs and news articles is that Vista is obviously a horrible, misguided mistake but it's okay because Windows 7 will be swell.

This article in Business Week is typical:

"CLOSING THE DOOR TO MICROSOFT VISTA

"A number of companies are opting not to embrace Redmond's latest operating system and, like GM, are waiting for Windows 7 instead

"General Motors may take a detour around Vista, the latest computer operating system from Microsoft. The automaker has encountered so many speed bumps getting Vista to work on its machines that it may just wait for the next version of Windows, due in 2010 or 2011. 'We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7,' says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen."

You get the idea. The argument is that Vista is unacceptable because it requires new, more powerful hardware; there are software compatibility issues with LOB applications; it will take time to port software to the new OS; and in any case the desktop OS is increasingly irrelevant "when so many applications are available via a Web browser."

And Windows 7 - well, what a paradise THAT will be! It's being designed to be more modular, "letting Microsoft release portions of the product, including its Web browser, on a faster pace." Old programs can be run with virtual machine technology, "freeing Windows from the burden of having to support a slew of outmoded code, which could step up release dates." Whoa! That's great!

Can you find any flaw in this logic?

"Vista is not completely compatible with my line-of-business apps and older hardware, despite years of development and testing, 18 months on the market, thousands of updates from hardware and software manufacturers to improve compatibility, and hundreds of fixes and performance improvements in the first service pack. THEREFORE, I'm not going to use that nasty old Vista - I'm going to plan on adopting Windows 7 right away after a really short development cycle, because it will be swell and everything will work perfectly with it! Also, Microsoft will be including magic fairy dust that will make our offices larger! And maybe cookies! Boy, I can't wait! Windows 7 will be GREAT!"

Yeah, right.

Silly stuff. And not to be petty, but are you really supposed to pay much attention to the long-term judgment of a company whose ten-year stock chart looks like this?

Labels: business, Microsoft, Vista

posted by bruceb at 5/19/2008 12:42:00 AM | permalink

An interesting problem has developed, and there's no good answer in sight. Email is no longer a reliable business tool. We're going to keep using it but there will be more occasions when I have no good answer to mail-related complaints.

Spam is the primary reason that things are falling apart. It's at record high levels and I've seen predictions that this is the calm before the storm.

For a while we could deal with that at the Exchange Server - drop messages that are not addressed to valid recipients in the business, turn off non-delivery reports, rely on Outlook's junk mail filter and supplement it with Exchange's Intelligent Message Filter after Exchange Service Pack 2.

After a while that's not enough. Servers are using processor power and bandwidth just to drop thousands of misaddressed messages. Most of my business clients have now been set up with Exchange Defender, a third party service that filters spam and viruses. That will work for a while. Most people will read the daily reports from ED at first, until the spam builds to a volume that makes the daily reports overwhelming.

The third party services frequently don't filter messages that seem to have been returned as "undeliverable," leading to the recent waves of "NDR spam," flooding mailboxes with hundreds of messages per hour for a day or two. I've gotten a call about this every day or two for the last month or more, helping people set up an Outlook rule to delete any message with "Undeliverable" in the subject. It undermines our confidence in the mail system a little more - and ensures we will never find out that we've accidentally sent a misaddressed message.

Spam is not the only thing undermining our confidence in email. We're dealing with larger and larger files, and at the same time we're doing more work outside the office or collaborating with people all over the world. The world's email systems were not designed for large file attachments! I'm constantly hearing the frustration of people whose messages with 20Mb PDF attachments do not get where they're going. There is no answer - except to learn to use a different method because email is not a reliable business tool to exchange files.

Another problem is going to affect more small businesses in the next year or two. Outlook folders are exploding in size in a way that was never intended by the designers of Exchange Server. It's convenient to exchange huge files with co-workers down the hall by email, or to use email to send the PDFs scanned by the cool copier, but the result is that mailboxes are far exceeding the sizes called for by best practices. Outlook's built-in archiving is confusing and fragile - people just don't understand the process and have no idea what to do with an unruly collection of .PST files. (Not to mention the backup problem - PST files should not be stored on a company server but desktop computers are generally not backed up, putting those PST archives at risk.)

It's wildly expensive to set up a second Exchange Server and maintain it; third party archiving and hosting solutions are out there but not exactly easy or affordable for a small business with no onsite IT employees. But mailboxes that are 4 and 6 and 8Gb in size are going to run slowly and are at far greater risk to become corrupted, either on the local computer (requiring a long, slow process to rebuild the local cached copy), or worse yet, on the server, where the process of recovering a mailbox is painful to think about. Yeah, I can set mandatory size limits and automatically disappear mail after a certain time. I can also be fired, which would be one of the likely side effects if I try that.

I'm watching a slow deterioration in our confidence in business email, with no idea what to do about it.

Labels: business, mail, SBS, spam

posted by bruceb at 5/15/2008 12:29:00 AM | permalink

Sebastopol-based O'Reilly Media has clearly filled a need with Make Magazine, devoted to do-it-yourself technology - but a long, long way from Popular Mechanics and the other DIY magazines that baby boomers recall from their dad's garage in the 60s. The magazine features creative, eccentric projects that might require technical prowess, or fearlessness, or some cool power tools - or a little bit of all three.

A couple of years ago the first "Maker Faire" was conceived; the fourth one just concluded at the San Mateo fairgrounds. For two days, an oddball collection of people who make cool stuff was assembled in one place, a sort of updated county fair for the new century. Every corner had something that you haven't seen before! Big metal things belching fireballs (I overheard fairground workers disgustedly grousing to each other, "There's fire all over the place! Everywhere you go, there's something on fire!"). A guy offering electrical shocks to passersby. A lifesized replica of a Mousetrap game. The stars of the famous Diet Coke & Mentos video, dousing the crowd with a choreographed display of fountains from 104 Diet Coke bottles. Rockets. Steampunk. Battling robots. Pinball machines. Bending neon. Really large sculptures. A bus powered by pedaling passengers smiling and yelling at each other, "Pedal! No, wait, stop!" And a lot more! You can see a handful of my pictures here, and a lot of pictures and videos at the fair web site.

There was something so wonderful about watching Corey Fogel grimly knitting while he played the drums, pressed against the wall of one of the fair buildings. It's hard to know why - it just fit the scene so well.

Unfortunately, the Faire was a victim of its own success this year. Organizers could tell from the online hubbub that this year's fair would attract more people than prior years, but the most frequent comment I overheard from staff people was that the crowd far exceeded even those expectations. Traffic was backed up - it took 45 minutes to crawl from the freeway to the parking lot. Too few ticket booths - another 45 minutes of standing in line to buy a ticket and enter.

The Maker Faire is intended to have a loose, homemade feel, offering hands-on experiences and interaction with the creative people behind each exhibit. All too often, the crowds kept that from being possible - too many people mobbing a scheduled event, no real chance to engage a maker in much of a conversation. Expect some changes for the next Maker Faire - or plan to attend, but get there early on Sunday instead of the middle of Saturday afternoon, which didn't work out as well as I hoped.

But that's nitpicking a truly interesting family event. Keep an eye on O'Reilly and Make Magazine - they're doi