Catching Phishers

Microsoft has a team dedicated to finding and nailing phishers. Here's the first success story.

6/22/2006 4:50:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Reason #887 Adobe Software Sucks

I *absolutely hate* Adobe software. Every product I've ever used from them has made me beg for a competitive Microsoft counterpart. I never got up to speed on using Macromedia tools, and now I feel much better because they were sucked into the obnoxious vacuum that is Adobe's ability to make everything around them awful.

Today's complaint: why does Premiere Elements need 49MB of disk space to uninstall? Is this part of Adobe's scorched Earth initiative?

At least it's not as bad as my experience with their activation. That's a topic for another post.

6/19/2006 11:26:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  

My Take On Microsoft's Stock

I found this post from Rory Blyth to be somewhat surprising. In a nutshell, he feels (as do many) that Microsoft's core problem is customer perception. In other words, if customer perception were higher, then the stock price would be higher. While this is partly true (the stock price would go up if Microsoft sold more product) I don't think it's enough to justify the stock price.

I've always liked Steve Ballmer. I've only had the chance to meet with him personally a few times, but he was always incredibly sharp and seemed to already know what I was there to tell him. His enthusiasm is contagious. Sadly, his future as CEO is in question.

How do these things come together?

The first time I ever heard Steve speak in a public presentation, he made a joke about rating CEOs by the value they created for investors. Based on his theory, Bill Gates was the best CEO of all-time, having created $500 billion in market cap value for investors by the time he stepped down. On the other hand, Steve Ballmer's current record stands to be the lowest in history at a total loss of $270 billion.

The hard numbers aren't really fair. When you look at Microsoft, it's been going through a tremendously tough time over the past five years. Since Steve's been at the helm, the dot-com bubble has burst (not his fault) and the US has significantly changed culturally (also not his fault). At the same time, several key products from Microsoft have slipped, resulting in a delay in new product revenue.

Stepping back to Rory's post, I read through to the end with much anticipation. He sets up a great analogy about how people had lost their infatuation with Microsoft. However, we part ways when it comes down to who exactly those people are.

To Rory, those people are customers, who have a personal problem with using Microsoft software. I understand his perspective, but I don't think it has anything to do with the stock. Instead, I feel that the people who have lost their zeal for the stock are investors. Let's take a few facts into consideration:

1. Microsoft's revenue has risen steadily every year. I don't remember them ever not reaching projections, but I do know that they always seem to sandbag their forward-looking revenue, resulting in targets that are easy to exceed. Regardless, this tells me that more money is being spent on Microsoft products every quarter than ever. This wouldn't be happening is customers were being lost. Yes, an argument can be made that this model could be harmful at a small scale, but it doesn't really make an impact when you're talking about the scale of $50 billion/year in revenue.
2. Last week, Microsoft hit its lowest point in years at $21.45. It closed today at $22.55, which factors out to a P/E ratio of 17.5. Who else has a 17.5 P/E? General Electric? Nope. They're at 21.30, which means they're expected to grow considerably more than MS over the next few years. AT&T? Nope, they're at 18.30. Even Coca-Cola is 20.60! These companies do give out higher dividends than Microsoft, which means that there is more short-term benefit to investors, but also indicates that these companies feel they can't invest it better in their businesses.
3. Within twelvish months Microsoft will ship new versions of Windows and Office that will definitely drive upgrades. This doesn't have a big revenue impact from big corporations since much of Microsoft's revenue is from recurring software assurance, but it will have a huge impact on smaller businesses, especially now that Small Business Server, Dynamics, and their other small business friends are making huge inroads worldwide. Consumers might take longer to warm up to Office 12 (and many will be licensed at work, so they'll be allowed to install it at home, but how many know that is up for debate) but Vista will be a huge hit. There hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade PCs in some time, and this will definitely be the incentive needed.

In the end, I'm convinced that Microsoft's financial future is going to be fantastic, and I haven't even accounted for success from their MSN, entertainment, and Windows Mobile divisions. I just think that it's going to take some convincing of financial analysts, who have much more influence than Slashdot trolls.

Regarding Rory's view on evangelism, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I think evangelists that go out to extol the virtues of shipping products are among the most valuable assets to Microsoft's sales force. However, Microsoft also has a tendency to aim evangelists at products that haven't shipped yet. Could you imagine how excited people would be about Vista if there hadn't been so many evangelists out there overselling it for the past 5 years? Given that almost every visible feature has been played out (even many that have been since cut) it's incredibly difficult to get people excited.

Bringing Steve back in the picture, I do think he's great for Microsoft. Unfortunately, analysts may have already decided that they're not going to get behind the man who has seen more than half their investments disappear over the past six years.

6/19/2006 6:49:44 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Bill Gates Retiring From Microsoft (Eventually)
Everytime someone leaves Microsoft, there are the flurry of "they had such an impact" blog postings and emails. This time it's undebatably true.
6/15/2006 6:17:14 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Robert Scoble Is Leaving Microsoft

Wow. No word yet on where he's landing, but I'm very curious too see what he does at the new startup. Although I sometimes disagreed with his methods, Robert was able to drive significant change in a huge company as an individual contributor, which is an amazing feat.

Good luck Robert!

6/11/2006 12:46:55 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  

R.I.P. WinFX (2003-2006)

WinFX has been officially retired as the name of what you get when you take the .NET Framework 2.0 and add WPF (Avalon), WCF (Indigo), and WF (WWF (in-application BizTalk for clients)). It'll now be called .NET Framework 3.0, which is pretty easy to comprehend. I must admit that I'm a little surprised by the move. After hearing for years about how the .NET brand was going away, it's pretty clear at this point that it's definitely not.

.NET began life as an ingredient brand that was designed to own the Web services space. Just like Microsoft used 2000 for a generation of products to signal to customers that those products were Y2K-ready, .NET was supposed to tell businesses that the branded product was Web services-ready.

The .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET launched in 2002 and absolutely rocked the Web services space. They also did a great job across the board for other types of development, but since the marketing was so Web services-focused (the right thing to do at the time), some customers raised concerns about the products being for Web services, only. Of course that wasn't the case, but there was enough customer confusion that it sort of soured the brand for other product teams. If you can remember way back then, there was supposed to be Windows .NET Server, Office .NET, etc. With the exception of Passport (which has since been unbranded and seems to be heading towards the new Live brand), everyone else bailed on .NET and it became almost exclusively a developer brand.

Over the years, the .NET Framework has continued to accrue great brand value. However, when .NET was dropped from the Visual Studio naming in 2005, it seemed to be in-line with the strategy to retire .NET. It seemed clear that the final .NET product, the .NET Framework, was to evolve into WinFX, but this delivered new customer concerns regarding the future of .NET Framework applications, which many companies had made huge bets on. There's been kind of a hybrid story explaining how the .NET Framework would be around for "reach" scenarios (but not as "reachy" as Web apps) and WinFX would be the ultimate "rich" platform. Unfortunately, more choices actually produces less clarity and can be detrimental to the success of the platforms. The retirement of WinFX clearly signals that the .NET Framework is the way to go for apps today and tomorrow, and that's a great thing for the long haul.

6/9/2006 7:56:54 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Roller Hockey Comes Back To Redmond!

I don't know how this slipped past me, but apparently the Marymoor folks are making my dreams come true:

The roughly 200,000-square-foot pad will convert two grass soccer fields into a multi-sport event area that can accommodate...roller hockey....

6/8/2006 11:01:40 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

Support For LEGO and Skype Sample Projects

We've been getting quite a few emails lately regarding support for Microsoft's LEGO and Skype starter kits from MSDN. While we did develop these samples, we're unable to provide public support for them. Ordinarily, we don't get any requests for sample support, but these two projects have slightly different circumstances that have caused people some problems. This entry is intended to outline common issues and easy ways to get around them.

The first issue is a matter of history. We delivered these samples to Microsoft in June 2005 (Skype) and November 2005 (LEGO). Both were built using pre-release versions of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. However, they weren't shipped until April 2006, well after Visual Studio 2005 had RTM'd. As a result, some issues that come up are due to changes in the final .NET Framework 2.0. For example, there is a bug in the VB piano sample of the LEGO project where an enum is parsed. It wasn't a bug in Beta 2, but is in RTM. As a result, they both worked when we handed them off, but break for people (at runtime) on RTM, even though they still compile. I know the piano app worked, for example, because there's a video on MSDN showing it working.

Another issue is versioning. We developed and tested the Skype library against 1.0.2.48, which was the most recent stable version at the time. There are workarounds and tweaks in the code to account for several bugs in the Skype interop at the time, as well as places where code got pretty messy just due to dealing with the WM_COPY interop mechanism they use. Skype 2.0+ has shipped since then, and we've found that some of the issues we "worked around" have been fixed, and the workarounds themselves are potentially causing trouble, whereas new issues have snuck into the base Skype API that we have no control over.

A final issue, and this could fall into multiple categories, is one of deployment. Both of these projects rely heavily on C++/CLI and the Visual C++ runtime (CRT). Most people have a version of the VCRT on their machines or can download and install them from Microsoft. However, only developers who have Visual C++ installed have the debug version of this runtime. Since both the Skype and LEGO projects seem to have been packaged for deployment using the debug version (this was not done by SharpLogic), people who don't have Visual C++ 2005 installed are likely to see:

Could not load file or assembly 'SharpLogic.Skype , Version=1.0.2299.29912, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1)

or

Could not load file or assembly 'C4F.LegoRcx, Version=1.0.2239.29242, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1)

This is [probably] due to the dependency on the debug version of the CRT, which probably isn't installed. If you're using the Skype library, replace SharpLogic.Skype.dll with this file: SharpLogic.Skype.zip (33.93 KB). You should also update the references to it. For the LEGO project, I recommend you install Visual C++ 2005 Express, which should give you the debug CRT bits. If you want to build something to run on a machine without the debug CRT bits, build the C++ version of the C4F.LegoRcx in release mode and use the resulting DLL to in place of the existing DLLs you're referencing. I just learned that after downloading the ridiculous 17.3 MB version of the C++ version (it includes the NCBs--no, I don't know why either) that it doesn't include the core library source, so you can't rebuild those bits. Also note that the C++ project in the download is broken now, so you'll need to copy the GhostAPI.dll, PbkComm32.dll, and PbkUsbPort.dll files into the runtime directory (such as [project]\Debug) before running it or you'll get a FileNotFoundException.

Microsoft is aware of the issues raised here (and by others) but things are pretty busy, so it may take a little while longer until the downloads are updated. In the meantime, I hope this post helps. To reiterate, we can't provide support for these. If your company happens to need custom development related to either of these, feel free to ping me regarding consulting.

6/6/2006 10:15:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

I Don't Know The CRM Business Very Well...

...but this is awesome.

6/5/2006 10:16:24 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  

Top Hundred Fact About Jack Bauer

I've been a fan of the Chuck Norris Top 100 for a while, but I like the Jack Bauer one more because a lot of the facts are pseudo-truths based on the show 24 itself, which I watch (although a lot of them are duplicates from the Chuck Norris site). My unprioritized top ten based on the show are:

• Only Jack Bauer can fly a plane from the luggage compartment.
• The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times. They had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.
• Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a "knock knock" joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the goddamned bomb was.
• If everyone on "24" followed Jack Bauer's instructions, it would be called "12".
• On a high school math test, Jack Bauer put down "Violence" as every one of the answers. He got an A+ on the test because Jack Bauer solves all his problems with Violence.
• Jack doesn't believe in Murphy's Law, only Bauer's Law: "Whatever CAN go wrong, WILL be resolved in a period of 24 hours."
• Jack Bauer set an ordinary flash memory card to self-destruct. Don't ask how he did it, he's fucking Jack Bauer.
• Jack Bauer doesn't speak any foreign languages, but he can make any foreigner speak English in a matter of minutes.
• Don't ever ask Jack Bauer what is going on. He'll explain in the car.
• Jack Bauer removed the "Escape" button from his keyboard. Jack Bauer never needs to escape.

If I had to add my own, it would be:

• Jack Bauer's willingness to sacrifice your life is directly proportional to how well he knows you. If he says "Hello" to you on the street, drop whatever you're doing and run in the other direction or prepare to be killed in some overdramatic fashion--maybe not this season, but it will happen once he has accepted that he is powerless to help you.

6/5/2006 10:09:33 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]