All your viruses belong Microsoft... and your personal information also.

It sounds too good to be true. The Evil Empire has repented of its ways and is actually giving something for FREE to the IT community from which it has drained so many billions of dollars over the last few decades. Step right up folks and download your free virus scanner guaranteed to totally screw up Norton's and Symantec's cash flow for the next few years until they go out of business.


Oh... and the fine print gives Microsoft the right to harvest and review all of the virus related information on your computer or, with Advanced Membership, possibly even your personal information. Ummm... it looks like they left off the option to choose to send NO information back to Microsoft.


>

Well, at least they gave it a suitable name - "Microsoft Spynet".

Whoever said there is no truth in advertising?
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Fancy a spot of industrial espionage?

The British Government is recruiting some new secret agents. Seriously. Try their aptitude test and see if you have what it takes. The skills might come in useful if you want to bluff your way into the next Microsoft Developers Conference.

I scored eight out of ten.
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I will prostitute myself for one day only...

I don't twitter and I don't tweet and I draw strength from a recent study I read (no - I don't have the URL - my bad) that showed 40% of tweets are meaningless drivel a la

# Yawn. Late night playing Warcraft.

# I h@te Microsoft

# I've just had this wonderful bowel movement - let me tell you about it.

However for one day I'm willing to sacrifice the purity of my well-known technology-neutral persona and hop aboard the social bandwagon in order to publicly state:

#Lotusknows

Rock on Lotus!
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OK! OK! Technology neutral I am not, but I still see no redeeming virtues in either Facebook or Twitter from a corporate perspective.
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Google down the gurgle... again!

Google mail went down again today. These Google failures are becoming a regular (monthly? bi-monthly?) occurrence and I've got to wonder about the economics of this model. Sure you might save some nice round numbers in short term dollars by slashing your IT budget but how many zillions do you loose in productivity (and sales and PR image) when your entire staff can't do their work?
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London Stock Exchange rejects Microsoft

Whenever I see a foreign language story like Albert Buendia's post on the Microsoft:FAIL at the London Stock Exchange, I reach for the handy Google Translate button to read the English Language version.

Give it a try and see what the rest of the world is thinking.
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Lotus Knows how to embarrass themselves...

I decided to check out the Lotus Knows website and discovered the following anomoly ...



...get you to the following error message ...



But if you send a message to that email address you get the following response:



It's bad enough that we get sent to an IBM hardware page to have an error message generated, but then to have the error report rejected is beyond frustrating. C'mon IBM, don't your web guys test these links before they load them?
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OT: Melanie Rose arrives seven weeks early

I took Belinda to Norwest Private Hospital at 10am this morning because of some minor medical issues this morning and Melanie Rose popped out at 1:24pm this afternoon. Since she was only at 33 weeks we figured we still had some time to finish the spare bedroom but we were wrong.

• 1,940 grammes
• normal delivery
• less than half an hour in labour (Belinda's secret is available on request)

Doctors are quite happy with Melanie's health although she will be in neo-natal intensive for monitoring for the next four weeks. I'm told that is standard procedure for 33 week babies.

Belinda is in Norwest Private Hospital, 11 Norbrick Drive, Bella Vista in room 216 (ph: 8882-8616) and can have visitors between 3pm to 4.30pm and 6.30pm to 8.00pm.

Melanie Rose is in neo-natal care and only immediate family can visit her (sorry - hospital rules).
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Microsoft wins the right to keep selling MS Word

The US Court of Appeals has granted Microsoft's request to put off an injunction that could have forced it to stop selling Office Word as of October 10.

While I have no particular love for Microsoft I do think this is the right decision because if Microsoft win the final appeal then their business will not have been harmed by the court delay while if i4i win the case then they can just collect another few hundred million dollars in damages.

Neither result will affect the amount I pay on my mortgage so my interest is academic at most.
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Arguments against Cloud Computing

Google have been pushing Cloud Computing it for a while but I shrugged off their initial enthusiasm because when all you have is a website then everything looks like a web application. Then Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon but I figure they'll jump on any new idea just in case it spawns a serious competitor and they miss the chance to kill the opposition before it grows bigger than they are. Now IBM has joined the party by selling LotusLive so it seems that all Three Emperors have New Clothes made from the same cloth. On my grumpy days all of this Cloud Computing stuff just seems to be just a repackaging of Domino Hosting from the 1990's - ie a useful product but not the answer to everything.

So it's reassuring for me to read this post from Cory Doctorow who's more cynical than I am about the whole idea.

...the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

There are some interesting comments following his blog post but I did notice that a significant number of the pro-Cloud comments were made by people who were selling Cloud-related services.
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How do *you* determine your consulting rates?

Customers can pay IBM's $300+ per hour domestic on-site rate or outsource the work overseas for $20 per hour (you know the countries I mean) or pay something in between to have your smiling face walk through their door. In my experience software consulting rates are one of the most volatile costs in the IT industry.

Let's ignore the two extreme cases for the moment and look at the middle. Let's even ignore your personal stable of tame clients who know what you're worth and are willing to pay over the odds for your services. I'm interested in the long term domestic trend when bidding for new customers. Are you charging your time out at less than you were two years ago just to win the business?

Personally, I don't charge top dollar because I want to win the work and I don't want to give that new clients a reason to ever look anywhere else. Certainly I'll negotiate for a big project ("Three months full-time work for one of my people? Let me just sharpen my pencil here and see if we can make the deal more attractive for you") but normally there's only $30 per hour difference between my new-customer-with-an-emergency-at-1am rate and my long-term client rate. My point is that those rates haven't moved for a couple of years despite increases in cost of living.

So is it the consulting market rate perpetually stagnated because of the off-shore alternative? Will it dive further because of all of the down-sized IT workers opening up their own shop and competing for your customers? What's your opinion?

There's a joke in there somewhere about people putting in their two cents worth, but I'll leave it to the comedians to work out how to phrase it.
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Evaluating a Consulting company based on their website

Here are some rules for evaluating IT consulting companies based on their website. The idea is to give the work to the supplier who has the highest score at the end of this process:

• Start each company with a score of 100.
  
  
• Subtract 1 for every meaningless (ie unprovable) adjective on their website - look for words like "passionate", "committed" and "highly skilled".
  
  
• Subtract 5 for every graphic on their website depicting a person who doesn't work for their company.
  
  
• Subtract 10 for every client reference on their website where the consultant(s) who did the work are no longer employed at that company. If possible, use Linked-In etc to track down where those top-gun consultants are currently working and include their new employers on your list of potential suppliers.
  
  
• Subtract 20 if their website lists a technology (eg Lotus Domino) without identifying a specialized skill set within that technology (eg System Admin v. Application Development v. integration with SAP v. software upgrades)
  
  
• Subtract 50 if the staff they want to assign to your project don't have current technical certifications in any of the technologies listed on their website.
  
  
• Automatically disqualify any supplier who outsources the care and feeding of their own website to another IT company.
  

Then pick the three companies with the highest score and mention to each of them that you're going to run your shortlist past the Vendor and ask for a recommendation. If any of them offer you a free lunch or other bribe at that point then take it and subtract 10 from their score.

... or you can just pick the supplier who gives you the cheapest quote. That seems to be the way most customers work.
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The GMail Outage Autopsy

Apparently yesterday's problem with GMail was caused by some hardware being taken off line for routine maintenance but the remaining boxes met a spike in the message traffic and weren't up to the job so some of them closed down which threw more work onto the hardware that was left resulting in more of them closing down (Rinse and Repeat).

In looking at this issue I've learned three lessons :

1. Obviously Google can't (and won't) adjust its upgrade schedules to avoid everyone's deadlines so these problems will continue to occur at inconvenient times. All that you can predict is that in future they will do their upgrades after 9pm USA time (which, of course, is prime working shift for the rest of the world).
   
   
2. If Google's hardware redundancy is so bad that it can't handle a spike in message traffic when they're doing a PLANNED upgrade, then I don't see how they can hope to handle an UNPLANNED emergency.
   
   
3. When you're using Google to search the internet for information on Google Applications, don't type the word 'GAPE' into your search bar and hit the 'I'm Feeling Lucky" button (don't do it! trust me on this one!).

The article concludes:

The problem was fixed once Google brought more routers online and spread the traffic among them. Google says it is tweaking its architecture so that the problem doesn't happen again.

Sounds like it needs more than a tweak.
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Telstra follows Google into the Black Hole

Being Australia's largest provider of telecommunication services didn't stop Telstra from sharing an hour's worth of unscheduled network downtime today.

Telstra's national internet network went down for an hour today, the company says.

The outage is understood to have affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers nationwide.

All services were restored by about 8.50am, a Telstra spokesman said.

The company formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage. It's not yet known what caused it.

So all of those companies using Google Apps had a somewhat lengthy coffee break while companies running internal Domino servers just kept on running. I think the hardest part of running your company on Google Apps would be when your IT person tells you (quite truthfully) that there is nothing they can do except wait for someone else to fix the problem.
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Another GMail outage...

Google had two separate outages this week.

One was a small outage on Monday that wiped out email to only a "small subset" of users.

Tuesday afternoon's outage affected "a majority" of Gmail users and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the problem was fixed, the company said.

Clinical reports of Google email outages don't reveal the angst of the businesses that suffer loss of service. When it's your own servers that are down you can get rapid status updates from your IT staff and decide whether to invest in additional system redundancy. When it's all in the cloud then all you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wait.

The same questions about system uptime apply to the Microsoft and Lotus offerings in this area. I'm not an expert on the cloud but it all seems terribly fragile to me.
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What Vaughan meant to say...

In recent months IBM/Lotus has been revamping their software distribution model and part of that process was to change the criteria by which a company could be an authorized reseller of IBM/Lotus software. Vaughan Rivett spent some time preparing a slideshow presentation about the new business model and (at last count) attracted over 100 hits from Planet Lotus. I respect Vaughan's technical expertise but he's missed a few critical points about the new Business Partner model and I'd like to clear up that confusion.

NOTE: The criteria for IBM Business Partners in ANZ are slightly different to those for other regions so please check the details before you post 'corrections' to anything I say here.

To be an IBM/Lotus Business Partner in ANZ you need to...

1. Get Member-Level membership in the IBM PartnerWorld® program - Go here to get your free membership.
   
   
2. Register with the A/NZ Business Partner Program Manager - Either call your local IBM office and ask for her name or send me an email and I'll give you her details.
   
   
3. Nominate a Brand or Product group - IBM/Lotus please.
   
   
4. Obtain 2 Lotus technical certs for that product group - No problem...I'm a Certified Lotus R8 Application Developer and Certified Lotus R8 System Administrator.
   
   
5. Obtain a Lotus sales cert for each location you have registered in PW - Yep... I've got that certification also. Note that the IBM Business Partner criteria are different to the IBM Partnerworld criteria for Advanced-Level status because Partnerworld imposes a two-certification-per-person limit while the IBM Business Partner criteria allows all certifications to be held by the same person.
   
   
6. Submit your client reference document - OK, that might be a problem if you're just starting out because you haven't got any IBM/Lotus customers yet. Have a chat to the ANZ Business Partner Program Manager and see if you can negotiate an extension on this point.
   
   
7. Submit your Business Plan (via PartnerWorld online tool) - Ten minutes work on-line to type in my numbers.
   
   
8. Register to participate in SVI or VAP - Another five minutes of paperwork.
   
   
9. Accept the additional resell terms and conditions - And even more paperwork.
   

There's also the matter of paying the annual USD$2,000 partner fee to IBM but that's the cost of doing business.

So it really comes down to getting three Lotus certifications (one sales and two technical) and paying your annual partner fee, and if you chose not to get the certifications then you can't be a Business Partner. I think Vaughan's major problem was that he presumed that one person could not hold all of the certifications, but that is incorrect. I believe the requirements are similar for the Tivoli, Websphere, Rational and DB2 crowd but since I don't play in those ballparks I'm not sure of the finer details.

I have my disagreements with IBM (don't get me started on any Lotus Foundations issues here) but I believe they are heading in the right direction with the new Business Partner model. For all of the Business Partners who made the effort and retained their certified status after the September 1st cut-off I think we might be pleasantly surprised by the benefits coming out of the renewed relationship with IBM.
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Lotus Knows... that Australia is asleep at 1:30am

Listening in on the "Lotus Knows" awareness campaign discussion with Kristen Lauria, Sandy Carter and Shaun Jones sounded like a great idea until I realized that 11:30 AM on Monday Eastern Time (US & Canada) is equivalent to 1:30 AM on Tuesday Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Hey, I'm keen on knowing about Lotus, but not quite THAT keen.

However Deborah Cole (Lotus Channel Marketing and Communications and winner of Miss Congeniality 2009) advised me that the call will be replayed at a more sensible hour in the not too distant future. So if you were planning to listen in to the call but were put off by the inconvenient Time Zone, then all is not lost. Register here and wait for the replay.
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I lost a Lotus Foundations sale yesterday :(

A few weeks ago I cold-called into an opportunity where the client was looking to throw out their Notes R6.5 mail system in favor of MS Exchange. I rapidly pitched Lotus Foundations against MS Exchange but lost the deal mainly because the customer was only using Notes for mail and Exchange was seen as an adequate substitute. There was also the issue that their regular trusted IT provider was pitching Exchange while I was the new boy on the block.

So what did I learn from this?

• Lotus Foundations needs more airtime. The client hadn't heard of it and was wary about moving their key SMB architecture to an unknown OS.
• Lotus Notes is still perceived as "just email" in some companies. In this case MS Exchange was seen as an equal competitor to Lotus Notes/Domino and talking about the free application databases available at OpenNTF just didn't push this clients "tell me more" button.
• SMB relies heavily on their key IT supplier and if you're already selling hardware and network services into a company then you have pole position for helping them pick an 'email solution'. OK, that observation isn't rocket science, but while multiple IT suppliers are acceptable for larger companies, the average SMB might accept higher prices and an inferior product as a fair trade for maintaining a single 'go-to' guy for all of their IT problems.
  

This brings me back to my previous post about the role of the IT consulting company. Would I be a better IT provider to this client by offering them the MS Exchange option? My guess is that I'd probably still have lost this sale to the incumbent IT provider but, more importantly, could I have honestly recommended MS Exchange over Lotus Notes/Domino and still consider myself as a Partner to IBM/Lotus?

I don't think so.


BTW I agree that it makes business sense for an IT provider to embed themselves into a client and become an integral part of that client's decision making process. There is obviously a better opportunity to professionally guide the client to choose your IT services over those of your competitor, and I don't have a problem with that scenario because I make no pretense of representing my competitor for professional services in that customer. However I don't see how an IT Provider can claim to represent IBM/Lotus if they don't seek out every opportunity to sell IBM/Lotus products ESPECIALLY when the customer will be equally well served by Lotus Domino or MS Exchange.
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