“I just hope we are still far from a future where a client can just walk into walmart, buy several X-Box based internet “X-Books”, and pick from rows of plastic activation cards to outfit a new business startup with virtual hosted servers, online apps and hosted backups. Then they goto starbucks to have a startup meeting with new employees who go home with eveything they need to work. Walmart might even hire a live person at minimum wage to provide business and technology consulting to such clients.”

Well I hope we are near that future!
Gone should be the days of technology getting in the way.
Business owners. employees and the general public don’t want it. They want to surf, check emails, speak to old and new friends and basically do what they want quickly and easily.

It’s like this: When you get out of bed for a pee in the middle of the night, do you wonder how electricity is made or sent to your house? NO.
Do you want your own generator in the basement and tinker with it when it breaks or better still, get a ‘techie’ in to do it for you? NO
When you go to the shops in your car, do you think about the history of the internal combustion engine? NO
Is it interesting to tinker with the engine, maybe if you are a geek but generally NO.
You want to press a button, flick a switch or turn a key and do whatever it is you want to. Simples as a talking meercat would say.

Simple analogies maybe but there you go.
Ask any non-geek person out there if they like their computer and I bet I know the answer.
It gets in the way and all these ‘I am a PC’ Windows 7 adverts are stupid. They miss the point. Nobody cares if you can put two screens side by side. That should be something it can do anyway.
Normal questions when I go into offices are not, ‘how do I create a script to do this in Word’ but ‘there’s something wrong with the box that sits under the desk and I can’t do my work and the boss isn’t happy cause I can’t send emails’.

Seems to me that a keyboard, sceen and mouse are all that a user would need. After that they can get what they need from ’somewhere’ and it shows up on their screen.
Simple interface, as simple as a car dashboard is even though that’s a computer! People can work that, they can’t really work their computer. They don’t want to and they shouldn’t have to!

Now, how to make money from this as a traditional tech company is the big question.
That I will leave to you!

Many apologies to all who have read and will read this blog. (I hope)

I have committed a cardinal sin. One I promised I wouldn’t, namely stopping blogging for a while.

This of course turned into months!

Some good reasons for this though:

1) Re-branding: change of company name and focus. Working on new website as we speak (well, write)!

2) Being diagnosed as having epilepsy at the age of 38 after an out of the blue seizure in October hasn’t helped things. Three more in one day two weeks ago completely knackered me and I am now on life-long medication! I have to thank my clients and friends in the Edinburgh SBS User Group and wider UKSBS community for understanding and support.

3) Some IT issues have so thoroughly pissed me off that I couldn’t bring myself to vent about them until now. One being Windows 7: UAC being diluted, all the different versions and not having Bit-Locker in the ‘Business’ version!

What the F**K is that all about!

Microsoft knew what people thought about the different versions of Vista causing confusion. They knew that Bit-Locker was wanted (and needed) in the business/Pro version of Vista and therefore Windows 7.

Fair enough (maybe), Bit-locker was new in Vista so they wanted to recoup development costs but now it has been out for ages so why not add it to the ‘Business’ version of Windows 7?

Check this out:

http://hiltont.blogspot.com/2009/02/what-microsoft-seems-not-to-understand.html

They have to stave off the attitude of dumb terminals and in the Cloud servers that we are all told are coming in order to sell fully featured desktop operating systems. What do they do, they leave out one of the most important features and then ask businesses to pay even more to add it in.

Johnny business owners says: ‘Na, I don’t think I’ll bother buying SA to get this Bit-Locker, after all I don’t need a new version of Windows cause all my stuff is stored on the internet or my office server. If I do, I will get a new OS with each new PC I fork out for so why pay again. I don’t think so Microsoft!’

I never, I repeat, never, thought that I would think about thin client desktops so soon.

I knew that I would have to consider Cloud computing but I honestly thought that Windows fully featured OS’s would still be around and ‘wanted’ by the buying punters for years to come, mostly because of the features they added that dumb terminals didn’t have.

Way to go Microsoft!

Beautiful, a strong adjective. This is reserved for the most attractive amongst us!

Susanne is one of those.

Let me explain!

Apart from the obvious (unless you are hard of seeing or asexual, Susanne is a very attractive girl ), Susanne ‘attracts’ people with her obvious knowledge and enthusiasm. 

The SMB market can be a tough nut to crack but Susanne has been trying and supporting people who have tried for many years.

Many thanks to Susanne and I hope she has a great time whatever she is doing around the world, thanks for all the support you have given me!

Love ya babe!

Dave

So there it was, the challenge.

It wasn’t so much this particular Vladville post that got me going as I have been meaning to start blogging for ages. Bullshit excuses about not having time etc etc etc aside!

However, a challenge it is so…..

For the record, I disagree with Vlad about the ‘Community’. I see it in action in an albeit small way at every User Group meeting I go to. Not so much on the newsgroups anymore which have become a bit ‘he said she said’ and my all time bugbear, a newbie posts on say SBS2k google group and gets about ten reponses telling them to ’search the archive’! What the fuck, you just wasted your valuable time telling said newbie to do this in a very non-community fashion. I started with SBS 4.5 and immediately joined the relevant newsgroups where the names became very familiar. Very helpful they all were too and I don’t know if it is just that people are less tolerant that before but if you really want to help these newbs (like we all were) then just don’t reply if you deem the qusetion to be lazy or whatever.

Community is out there and it is individuals who care grouping together in a shared sense of trust and willingness to help that make it so.

Just look at Susanne Dansey! Well, we all look up to Susanne, she’s tall 

I don’t know about the States and Microsoft are very different in various global offices, but the UK is looking fairly good from an SBSC/SMB, whatever you want to call it…point of view.