Month: January 2009

Why Google is Winning

Google is winning because it works.  People like things that “just work”. 

Let’s look at home computers.  They have become more complicated and error prone.  This has to do with Viruses, half-baked software, Microsoft engineering, and too many options on hardware.  Users get frustrated when their IT friend says, “Just buy a new PC from Best Buy”.  The answer is usually upgrade the hardware, wipe the drive, put better virus software on…. But the answer to “just make it work” is get a new PC.  Wonder why a lot of people are trying the Mac?

How about Google?  What “just works”? For an experiment I tried the Yahoo search bar in my browser first for two weeks. After a few searches I usually reverted to Google, and got what I wanted on the first page of results.  Today I’m switching my default search bar back to Google.  Remember “just works”?  Try putting “buy Mark lunch next Friday” in your Google calendar.  Yes, it will figure it out.  Google Calendar “Just works”. 

Rather than wrangling over features and functionality I’ve started just asking the question “Does it just work”?

KDE 4.2 Released

KDE 4.2?  Does it matter to you?

I recently tried KUbuntu live CD (8.10).  After being a KDE fan for a long time I figured it would be great to try the 4.1 version and see how it worked.  

Unfortunately, I found some of the basic things I wanted to do very confusing.  Not impossible, but after trying Ubuntu and seeing the simplicity I love in my Mac I was a bit underwhelmed.  Taking the 4.2 release for a test ride should be interesting.  There has been a lot negative press on the 4.x release – maybe 4.2 will address some of the problems.

Here is one of the big reasons I think KDE 4.2 might matter.  Each release there is a little better support for Windows.  I think a lot of Windows users that are using open source applications would love the opportunity to have a new window manager (a popular thing among us theming geeks for years [Sorry Frank, I know you don’t get this part]).  Ars Technica has a very interesting review / test drive of what worked, and what didn’t.  It’s a very interesting option that I think I’ll go try for myself.  If you are on Windows XP and planning to skip Vista but would like an eye-candy upgrade this might be the free ticket you were looking for.  I’ll add a comment on my results…

Lotus Connections 2.5

LotusSphere 2009 is going on this week in Orlando. I was unable to attend, but I am very excited to see some sneak-peek announcements this morning about the only Lotus product I care about, Lotus Connections.

Picking a base product for any service offering is a lot like jumping on a train. At the end of the day it’s a leap and if you make it, well, you probably got lucky. I’ve been busy working with the 2.0 version of this product and it seems at every turn I’m having “close but no cigar” moments. I’ve found myself adding patchwork to get some of the capabilities and look I want, often saying, “darn it’s so close!”. From what I’ve seen on this blog, the 2.5 version will add many of the things I’ve been hoping for.

It drives me crazy when systems organize information on a web site by functional views rather than usage scenarios. Can you imagine when you went to Facebook if you had to see “Picture updates” then go to another location for “Status Updates”, and then another for “Profile Updates”? You want to see everything happening, and in Facebook that’s called the “News Feed”. Looks like LC 2.5 will be adding that and we can leave behind the individual widgets on Homepage. Unfortunately it looks like the Community pages are still grouped by system, but we can easily write a widget to work off of a custom aggregate feed.

Communities is picking up a lot of much needed functionality from the screenshots. File sharing, Wiki, smells like Quickr. I’m not sure why the two products haven’t merged yet because they are so complimentary. If the Wiki is the Quickr wiki I really hope there will still be an integration plan for Confluence. Confluence is the leader in this space and many people have huge installations they won’t migrate. A simple way to map a community to a Confluence space + some member management would neatly fit the bill. Now that there is widget support I could create a widget for displaying Confluence content (oh, I have one…)

Not much information on the new forum support in Communities. The current forum isn’t really much better than FB and is too light for serious use. It needs to be top-notch. It needs to have Feed support by community, not topic centric.

Profiles is getting a “wall” which I guess in the corporate world will be called “Buzz”. There is a “status” but I wonder how Twitter-like it will be. Seems more like facebook status than twitter. I feed Twitter into FB and use it to update FB but also use it for conversations in twitterland.

Thanks Luis for the sneak peek, we’ll be waiting for a beta version 🙂