Powers Unfiltered

OK, it’s mildly annoying that iTunes and Quicktime want me to install 60-MB updates pretty much weekly these days, but no big deal, I can ignore their nagging messages. But I actually wanted to upgrade today — and here’s what I got when I hit “Install 1 item:”

My Martian is a little rusty, so I did not “accept” this particular upgrade.

Maybe next week’s upgrade will be more intelligible.

I got an email from the VSIP program last night, requesting that I fill out a satisfaction survey.  I did so happily — there’s nothing like a quick dose of VSIP to wash away the taste of a bad MSPP experience.

(OK, too much jargon — sorry. Let me explain.)

The Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) program is, pound for pound, the best partner program run by Microsoft, period. The VSIP program is personal, effective, and responsive. True, it’s a LOT smaller than the enormous Microsoft Partner Program, and that makes it less prone to operational headaches than the giant MSPP, but it’s a great program. What have they done for us?

• Put our bits in front of 50,000 folks (directly in our target market) at TechEd and other conferences through the VSIP Partner DVD!
• Put our announcements in MSDN Flash!
• Helped arrange our participation in MSDN Webcasts!
• Subsidized our advertising! (Yup, we got cash — which as Yogi says is just as good as money — to spend on advertising our VS-related product.)
• Supported our press releases with timely quotes without a lot of Microsoftian fuss!

So — if you make software for the Windows platform, and it can be tied in any way to Visual Studio, RUN, do not walk, to the VSIP program. You’ll be glad you did!
And — if you run a partner program at Microsoft, and you want to see Redmond Best Practices in Action, RUN, do not walk, to the VSIP program. We’ll all be glad you did!

For the folks following our Adventures in Partnerland, here’s an update.

About two weeks ago, I wrote a post here about how the persistent technical difficulties with the Microsoft Partner Program Web site (partners.microsoft.com) had spilled over from every-day inconvenience to genuine negative impact on our relations with our customers. I howled, because I think Microsoft (and the Partner Program in particular) can do better — the people in that group are really great (I know dozens of them, and can’t think of one that hasn’t left a positive impression), yet the systems have been substandard for years.

My post apparently set off a frenzy of activity. I called out executives by name, and judging by the little traffic tracer I use (Statcounter rocks by the way) that got somebody’s attention in Redmond, and that somebody sent around a very-widely-read email, and Powersunfiltered had its all-time highest traffic day — almost all from Microsoft (and it’s PR agency — hello Waggener Edstrom readers and welcome!).

And then comments came in from other partners who were having the same (or similar) experiences — but not a word from Microsoft. After four days I got a two-line email (entirely unofficial, from outside the Partner group) from a friend at Microsoft who said that my post “got some attention here,” and he had heard that “a fix” for the Partner Web site was in the works — that was the extent of Microsoft’s response.

Not long thereafter, something was indeed fixed, our references were approved, and I renewed our Gold Certified Partner status without further incident. (And — thank you, sincerely, to those who fixed whatever was broken.)

Microsoft’s public reaction, as far as I can tell, was none whatsoever.  No comments here, no comments on other blogs reporting the same problem (like this one), no postings of their own that I could find.  The Partner group’s silence on persistent problems  faced by multiple partners seems like a missed opportunity, and callers from within Microsoft have told me the same. They (and I) can’t tell what the Partner group is thinking:

• a. Some malcontent overreacted, but to quiet things down we stayed up late, made a patch, and rebooted some servers, so now everything is ok; or
• b. There’s good reason to look at how the Partner Program systems and processes are supporting the needs of Microsoft and its partners, and to put some brainpower into reworking those systems; or
• c. Something else entirely.

As for what’s next, well, if the Partner Program wants to engage, I’m game — but in the meantime, I’m moving on.  Our problem is fixed (thank you again), an opportunity for constructive public dialog appears to have passed (if I misplayed this, so be it), and I have work to do — and more positive things to write about.

All my regular readers know I use the Microsoft partner Web sites fairly often, and that I experience frustrating time-sucking issues almost as often. Believe me, I spare my readership the great majority of my experiences with the unending nightmare that is the Microsoft partner online world, and when I do raise these issues I’m trying to be constructive — I really want to see Microsoft improve the online experience for its partners and customers. So I sometimes do a lot of self-editing and softening of language and hedging . . .
But I’m done caring who I offend — this is just ridiculous. The emperor has no clothes.

One thing I get to do every year is renew our status as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Fine. The program requirements are difficult enough without technical hassles. Previous years have been a joy — one time, partners.microsoft.com was sufficiently screwed up that I managed to pay our $1500+ fee twice (yes, I eventually got a refund) — and this year appears to be worse.

So far, using the forms on the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following absolutely basic and routine steps that are completely necessary to renew our status, I’ve encountered timeouts a few dozen times in the past two weeks. Fine. If Microsoft wants to provide a poor online experience for its partners, we can assess for ourselves whether the value is worth the pain.

But those few dozen timeouts don’t even include the repeated timeouts encountered by Digipede’s best customers, who have agreed to serve as references for us.

That’s right — my best customers get to sit in front of multiple timeouts waiting for the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following Microsoft’s own instructions in an autogenerated email, just so they can provide Microsoft verification that we’ve done work for them. And yes, I get to explain to my best customers that they should be patient with Microsoft in order to do Digipede a favor. And yes, this conversation is every bit as delightful as it sounds.

My experience is not “bad luck,” nor is it unique. I’ve tried to submit information at different times of day, and on different days of the week; my customers have tried the same. And yes, I have talked to technical support, and reproduced the problem for them (“yeah, we’ve been having some of those problems lately…”). Is this just viewed as an acceptable cost of doing business by other Microsoft partners? By the rest of Microsoft?
Hey Debra Chrapaty — do you really expect to deliver online “cloud computing” services to hundreds of millions of customers when you can’t serve 640,000 partners any better than this? Do you want the help of those 640,000 partners in delivering online services to your customers? What level of confidence do you think your best partners and best customers have in your ability to deliver responsive online applications when our primary online experience with Microsoft goes through partners.microsoft.com?

Hey Kevin Turner — is this the “operational excellence” we keep hearing so much about?

Hey Allison Watson — how can your team be so great in person (and they are) while your systems are so consistently flawed (and they are)? Never in all my interactions with Microsoft do I encounter as much eye-rolling and well-practiced apologies as when I talk with your team about your systems.

(Woohoo! Invoking Allison’s name must have been the key — I just hit “OK” for the 8th or 9th time on the dialog box that’s been sitting there mocking me as I type this — these are LONG timeouts –, and FINALLY I’ve assigned ONE additional customer reference successfully. Hang on — gotta go tell another of my best customers to hit retry while the site may (briefly) be working!)

And these minor trials and frustrations are NOTHING compared to the slog we’ve been going through to get Certified for Server 2008 — but that’s another story for another day.

UPDATE:  In the past two hours, I’ve had about 70 hits on this post from within Microsoft.  In the past two hours, I’ve had one of my customers give up trying to provide a reference through the Microsoft Partner Program Web site because he does not run Internet Explorer (not sure what he uses, but I just tested with Firefox 2, and sure enough, there are some features that apparently do not work).  In the past two hours, a different one of my customers tried again to approve his reference; he received timeouts again, and now wants to know how to fax in his reference instead.

Functional programming and grid computing are a good match for some types of computing problems. 

Digipede Director of Products Dan Ciruli has been experimenting with F# and the Digipede Network.  He has posted a code sample showing how to distribute F# calculations across a grid using the Digipede Framework SDK, along with some comments describing his experiences.  He’s looking for comments — check it out!

I will be attending an event called “Advancements in Quantitative Finance,” sponsored by Microsoft and its partners, on Wednesday 12/12 in Midtown. Information on this free event, including how to register, is found here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032358329

The agenda looks good; the presentations appear to be primarily financial customers and academic experts, not Microsoft or other vendor staff (although Microsoft is providing the MC and one other speaker).

I’ll have a table, and some good stories to tell about the quantitative financial applications our clients are running on the Digipede Network.
If you’re going to be there, contact me.

Dan and I arrived in Scotland on Monday after a long but trouble-free journey (thanks, British Airways and BellaTerra Travel). After attempting to catch up on sleep Monday night (I can’t sleep on planes, day or night, no matter how long the trip…), we attended Day 1 of High Throughput Computing Week at the UK National eScience Center facility at the University of Edinburgh.

The mix of attendees was interesting — but not as diverse as I had hoped. One idea of this event was to bring together business and academic users of high-throughput computing solutions. There are a handful of business speakers (including me and Dan), but I did not see many other business attendees. The attendee population seemed primarily UK academic.

Day 1 presentations included the incomparable Miron Livny, father of Condor and the leading academic in HTC. While he’s given similar presentations before, I learn more each time I hear him speak. You can hear the frustration creeping into his voice as he describes the current grid computing movement — because there is so much re-discovery and re-invention and re-defining of concepts Miron has worked on for nearly three decades. His insights are excellent, and anyone serious about HTC needs to listen — carefully.

One benefit of attending events like this is that I get to meet people with whom I’ve only corresponded via email before. For example, Professor Antonio Mungioli of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, came to our Web site and asked many good questions last year.  He also gave an excellent presentation on Day 1, describing his experiences with grid computing in the state of San Paulo.  Like Miron, he emphasized social and organizational issues over technology issues — in his view, cooperation and collaboration are more important to a project’s success than any specific technology choice.

We were also fortunate to have Akash Chopra of Barrie & Hibbart present on Day 1.  Akash described some of the compute-intensive calculations his insurance customers must perform, and how he used the Digipede Network to grid-enable their Economic Scenario Generator (ESG) software.  He also discussed some of the real-world problems associated with bringing grid computing to his customers, who in most cases have very limited and specific requirements for application performance.  He encouraged the audience to think from a customer perspective, and to focus on short-term value delivered to those customers, rather than getting caught up in the dream of “the grid” as a worldwide plug-in computing resource.  His perspective was a refreshing dose of reality.

There were also several other interesting presentations by academic HTC users, by the Condor team, and by Jason Stowe of Cycle Computing.  But if I wrote about everything, I’d never finish this!

We went out for some authentic Scottish food with about half the participants (it’s better if you don’t read the definition of haggis until after you’ve eaten it), and had a fine evening.

Day 2 was entirely devoted to two hands-on workshops — the morning one by Digipede, and the afternoon one by the Condor team.  As improbable as it sounds, Dan and I were both pretty coherent considering the Digipede half of the day ran from 1:00 AM to 4:30 AM Pacific time.  I gave a short introduction to Digipede’s space in the HTC world, and then we moved downstairs to a lab / classroom with 22 user workstations (several participants had to double up — we had good attendence).  Dan gave a more technical introduction to Digipede, then led the participants through a “hello world” exercise.  After that, we let them figure out a more realistic eScience application mostly on their own (code used in high-energy plama physics experiments, courtesy of conference organizer David Wallom).  All the participants successfully completed this second exercise in less than an hour, so we had plenty of time left for code demos — and even in this crowd of (nearly) no .NET developers, the audience immediately saw the benefits of the Digipede programming model.

(The Condor guys did a workshop too — it also went very well, but I was unable to attend much of the afternoon.)

I missed the morning on Day 3 (out visiting partners / clients, and seeing Edinburgh Castle along the way), but the afternoon was all about requirements gathering for HTC in the commercial sector.  This was interesting, and I participated enthusiastically (not surprisingly, I have some opinions on this!) but I’ll leave it to conference organizer David Wallom to  synthesize the results.

It’s clear to me that the area of High Throughput Computing is not exactly the same as grid computing, high-performance computing, cluster computing, or any other area.  When it comes to mapping specific products to these areas, however, there are limits to how useful these distinctions are.  There are some workloads that will run about equally well on HTC, HPC, grid, and/or cluster products.  The current version of the Digipede Network falls closer to HTC and grid computing than to HPC and cluster computing, but like many other vendors we’ve been known to creep across boundaries as required to broaden the problem-space that we address.

I’ll also miss the last day of HTC Week — I’m going to London for more partner and client meetings — but it’s been quite worthwhile.  I will try to distill a few conclusions on the way home this weekend — watch this space.

I have been invited to speak at a conference on High Throughput Computing at the UK National e-Science Center in Edinburgh next week.  This is extraordinary on a number of levels.

• First, the event is called “High Throughput Computing Week.”  If someone had told you five years ago that there was a “High Throughput Computing Day,” you might well have asked “how will they fill the afternoon?”  But there will be four days packed with great content at this event.
• Second, I am an economist, not a computer scientist.  I am likely to be among the least knowledgeable attendees along a number of important dimensions, yet I will be expected to provide some useful information.
• Finally, I work with very few scientists; most of Digipede’s customers are mainstream enterprises running relatively mundane production applications.  The field of e-Science is of interest, but definitely not the primary focus of our firm.

Yet I accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and went the extra mile to commit to a three-hour workshop (which meant “volunteering” Dan Ciruli for the trip as well).  To be sure, part of the value of this trip will be seeing customers — we have two current Digipede customers and one partner in Edinburgh.  But I also think we’ll have something interesting to contribute to the event; many of our customers use the Digipede Network to solve high-throughput computing problems, and I think attendees will be interested in hearing about that experience.  We’re also pretty excited about the opportunity to learn more about what leading academic and business HTC users are doing. 

I’ll report more from the show.

I am back home from SC ’07, my fifth Supercomputing conference. I saw some really impressive new technology from market leaders old and new. I heard remarkable claims and forecasts from analysts, pundits, and marketing flacks alike. I learned a lot, and contributed what I could.

Yet at this conference, full of the so-called thought leaders in high-performance computing, I once again ran into many instances of unthinking knee-jerk Microsoft bashing. While much of the IT world has come to grips with the fact that Microsoft (like gravity) is likely to be around a while, the Supercomputing crowd still has some holdouts. Literally, I heard people claim that “nobody” would use Windows for high-performance computing (provably incorrect), and that positive coverage of Microsoft’s HPC offerings was “bought, not earned” (unsubstantiated rubbish). Another blogger in this field (John West of insideHPC.com) told me that he’s had “…readers take the time to send me an email saying they would never read my stuff again if I kept covering MS’s CCS products and their entry into HPC positively.” What?!?

It is amazing to me the level of religious ferver that Microsoft still inspires. The bashers out there can be perfectly calm and reasonable about a wide range of topics – but say the word “Microsoft,” and they turn bright red and irrational. I have watched this phenomenon for years, and still find it inexplicable. Microsoft is a company. That company makes software. Some of their software is very, very good. Some of it is remarkably bad. I don’t understand why some people find it so hard to remain objective (or even civil) when discussing their products and market presence.

Many Microsoft bashers think that all of us at Digipede are mouthpieces for the Evil Empire, and that we are just pawns of the Microsoft machine. On the other hand, while we have plenty of fans within Microsoft, there are also some Microsoft employees who think we are difficult annoying troublemakers (especially me).

In fact, none of us at Digipede love or hate Microsoft – we work with Microsoft. We do so for real-world business reasons that help us change the world for the better while building a great company. We work with other companies too, but Microsoft occupies a special place in the technology landscape, and we work very, very hard to understand how to work with them to our mutual benefit. There are some great people there doing great things, and the bashers only hurt themselves by blinding themselves to these very real contributions.

Microsoft’s HPC initiatives in the past three years have greatly increased their presence in the HPC market at a time when that market is expanding rapidly. Their HPC offerings have some advantages and disadvantages compared to other products in the market, and should be evaluated on those terms. Microsoft bashing lowers the level of discourse to a useless level, at a time when we can all benefit from a more objective and reasoned discussion of how they affect our market.

I’ll stop there for now, and climb into my asbestos suit…

I am at the Supercomputing conference in Reno Nevada today and tomorrow.

If you’re here and want to meet up, please call my cell — 510-326-1761.

Much of the time I’ll be in the booth of our partner AMD (thanks guys!) showing off the latest version of the Digipede Network running on Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) on some very cool hardware from Scalable Servers. Come and see!