Software

Let's step back a bit from the iPad and take a look at professional workflows and current software tool sets.

I am a Professional Engineer. I manage professional teams of electrical engineers and designers in the building science field. We work with our customers, Architects and other Engineers to make things. Our work is partly creative and partly analytical; engineering is about what is possible, what is safe, what is appropriate. We work on a myriad of projects, sub-projects, developing ideas and business concepts. By myriad, I mean hundreds of GTD style projects are active on a regular basis.

Conventional Microsoft Office tools are ill suited to planning, strategizing and determining what is important. (A lot of other applications software fits that description too.) In order to use Microsoft products, you need to smear a layer of customized developer goodness on top of the basic applications, all of which have too many features. For the average user, Microsoft Word is a Boeing 747 cockpit. It is impressive, daunting, clearly powerful and entirely useless without extensive education, practice and regular use. You have to be a highly skilled, demonstrably expert airline pilot to fly Microsoft Word. That makes no sense. It's the same with Excel and especially Outlook if you really want to lever rich value out of the software. Why do you need to become as heavily invested an expert with the craft of the tool as you are already in your field of choice? I do not have to become an airline pilot to fly from Vancouver to Toronto. Every time I need to be productive in a Microsoft application I have to think really hard about whether what I want the program to do will make me more productive or force me to burn cycles discovering how to make it work.

Many companies use Microsoft platforms and applications. The platforms are okay. The applications... well, umm.... please re-read the previous paragraph. This then is the challenge of the modern professional worker: How do you break free of the constraints inherent in tools that have a lineage forged when the space shuttle was new technology? How do you establish a workflow that can both conform to the incumbent's behaviors; but also, enhance your workflow? That kind of magic happened in 1979 with the release of VisiCalc. Ever since we've just been tarting things up with feature after feature.

There is no miracle in my efficiencies or work patterns. I am inundated with no more emails or phone calls than many; considerably fewer than many well known gurus or mavens, I would guess. The biggest difference is that, perhaps, I can afford to ignore far fewer of the messages I receive. There are nascent actions buried in about 75% of my emails. I am getting better at appraising content and determining whether it necessitates a reply, largely due to a multi-year rumination on the thoughts in "Getting Things Done". Not replying is not the same as ignoring messages. A celebrity may get thousands of "Ur kewl" greetings that can be dealt with by way of an auto-reply. Engineers don't have fawning masses that can be assuaged with a mail rule. Working professionals get deluged by documentation and deliverables. In turn, we generate a considerable number of our own deliverables; drawings, sketches, letters, reports, calculations, presentations and, latterly, many more photographs, even videos and audio recordings.

The Microsoft Office of today enhances the production of deliverable spew but it does little to organize the volume of stuff. Take a look at the average professional's computer desktop or file structure. There's crap everywhere. It may be crap. Or it may be really important. It may be a really, really important file that sits in an obscure folder, that was updated, never re-named and saved in the wrong place after being emailed to only 2 of the right people on a distribution list that should have had 3 others on it. Only in the last couple of years has a product like Sharepoint emerged that can help with these typical distribution and filing faux pas.

We have developed bad habits in office and professional workflows. The biggest of these is that we react immediately to our email applications; Outlook while at our desks and the Blackberry when on our feet. Should I be interrupting a conversation to look at my pocket delivered email? Why, how, when did email become an immediate communications medium? These are neither new nor original thoughts. Rather than lamenting what to do about it though, professionals have an obligation to move to a more productive and responsible model. For a variety of demographic, competitive, economic and humanitarian reasons all professionals must assert more creativity and innovation. That means not being professional email reactors but actually being more professional. Do more of what the profession requires of you and less of what the tools require of you. Nobody wonders what kind of typewriter Ernest Hemingway used.

Over a year ago I wrote about how "Software Stinks" in the "Activity or Action" series. That was a few months before I got my Macbook and my HP TC 4400 Tablet and... Well, let's just say that it is getting harder and harder to like most of the software I get to try.

Despite some great experiences playing with the likes of the Jello Dashboard for Outlook (now in a new and highly interesting version 4 Alpha), Vmware's Fusion and a handfull of others; only one program in the past year has completely blown me away (more on that in another post). I try too many programs and the industry is just not mature enough for that to be happening. Something is wrong with software and it's participants had better figure it out. Where's the passion? (And don't tell me how complex it is; Buzz and Neil strolled on the moon in 1968.)

Some of the biggest updates of the year seem -- more than ever -- to be robust exercises in activity rather than genuine advances resulting from focused action. I'm underwhelmed by Vista. I have played with Leopard and I cannot find more than $29 worth of value in it -- let alone $129. I'm still waiting for them to get the most egregious bugs out of that one.

Office 2003 got a facelift with Office 2007 but there seem to be very few functional or operational improvements. Unbelievably, you still cannot schedule an Outlook mail rule. Outlook's cosmetic attempt to represent email on the task list does not actually instantiate what I really need. So the old right-click and drag an email to the task folder is really the only real way to move the email to a scheduled task. The ribbons are cute but on a small tablet screen there is less space than before if you want to use the full "functionality" of the ribbon.

File formats and silos are bigger than ever. Try getting task data between programs -- it's inefficient, time consuming and frought with error. On the web, some sites don't allow you to gracefully quit your membership and erase your data. That kind of trade is not fair and something has got to give.

With software, we don't get to own what we buy for our computers and we give too much away for free on web sites. Shame on us all for allowing this to happen. It's no wonder that open source draws more and more attention.

Todd Cochrane had a dream that he met with a Microsoft executive and the number of current Vista sales were something in the neighbourhood of the US national debt. That would be 8.5 trillion copies served. Since I laughed when I read the post that makes me hopelessly geeky.

Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User has posted his latest podcast and yours truly has about 4 minutes in the show. Towards the end of the show I talk about Synergy, which is a great open source software tool for replacing a KVM switch. Synergy also allows cutting and pasting between different operating systems. I use it all the time between my tablet and my MacBook.

Thanks Victor for the podcast and thanks for helping me with the switch.

Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast hosted a live Talkshoe edition of his podcast on New Year's Eve. The theme of the event was Apple predictions for 2007. I was privileged to take part in the conversation and would like to thank all of the participants for their positive contributions; it was a blast.

You can listen to or pick up the podcast here.

Victor Cajiao is the host of three great podcasts; Typical Mac User, Typical PC User and Immigration Tales. When I sat down with Victor for a chat at the Podcast & Portable Media Expo, he had just finished a fun and fascinating 40 minute interview with author Tee Morris. We were all inelegantly perched in beanbag

It seems that Dell UK has valued OEM Windows XP Home at

Forget about history, competition, restraint of trade, restrictive licenses and virtual monopolies. Let's just look at where we are now in the world of operating systems and services.

Market forces -- big and small -- have led to a world where the first operating system you buy for a new computer is essentially free. Free.

I don't want to hear about the "Microsoft tax" or how darned hard it is to buy a computer without an operating system so that you can load your favourite distro of Torvaldux. Don't ask for a discount if do get a computer without an O/S pre-loaded because to do that will cost the manufacturer money; so you will not be getting a discount. The O/S on any computer you buy -- PC or Apple -- is free. If you don't understand the economics of what I'm saying then do you think this Dell Dimension E521 that sells for as low as $329.00 would be $130.00 if there was no O/S installed on it? Of course you don't.

"But Brad" you say, "manufacturers pay OEM license fees to big computer makers. They get a cheaper price than retail." So cheap in fact that the cost of the O/S is not a significant differentiator in any buying decision. So cheap that if you don't really know the "true" price (whatever that is) and you don't even notice it, well then it's free. Essentially free. Forget about all those O/S boxes you see at the computer store with the $199, $299, $399 price tags. Who are those for any way? Who the heck is going to "upgrade" a computer to Vista? Microsoft certainly does not expect you to "upgrade". This era of PC is built for the O/S that came with it, don't whine and complain that your 2004 AMD whatzit with the really old fashioned graphics card from Feb 2005 doesn't run Vista well. If you need the tea leaves read for you just look at the new "plain English" EULA from Microsoft.

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time.

(Translation: Because you will not want to do it again.)

This is a legal way of giving us a clue. Microsoft is doing us a favour by pricing the retail product at absurd levels. You think all that Aero glass is going to clean itself without brand new hardware?

Much has been made of restrictive licensing covenants in the new Vista EULA. Buyer beware. If you don't like the idea of features disappearing or the possibility that your legal copy of the O/S may be designated for rendition or that your media files may all stop working then you have a choice. Don't boot the code. Nobody has taken that right away from you.

Microsoft Vista EULA OS