Powers Unfiltered

OK, I’ve posted about our positive experience at a recent Microsoft conference, and I meant every word of it — it was a great event, and we had great treatment by all the Microsoft folks in attendence.  Now I want to address an issue about how policies attributed to Microsoft Legal have the (possibly unintended) consequence of reducing value for partners and customers.  (This is FAR beyond the control of individual event coordinators at Microsoft, who deserve both praise for their performance and sympathy for having to deal with misguided Microsoft corporate policies).

Here’s how the partner lead generation at a recent Microsoft event was organized (others are similar). 

• All the partners were given a badge scanner, with which to scan the bar codes on attendee badges when an attendee comes to the partner booth. 
• Any attendee who gets his or her badge scanned by at least half the partners at the event is entered into a drawing for some cool Microsoft thing (an XBox or a Zune or whatever). 
• Wonderful.  This helps to drive traffic to the partner booths.  cool.  Partners love traffic.
• But then Microsoft keeps all the attendee information (which it already has), including who was scanned by each partner, and does not share this information with the partner.   

What?

Yes, that’s right — the partner gets none of the contact information for the attendees scanned by the partner, in the partner’s booth.  Because this would somehow constitute inappropriate sharing of secret information provided by the user to Microsoft and Microsoft only.

Yes, Microsoft uses partner presentations and booths as an added draw for propective attendees when promoting their events.  Yes, Microsoft gets partners to pay a good chunk of the cost of this event (my back-of-the-envelope says maybe $60-$70K for this recent event).  But no, attendees may only (conveniently) share their information with Microsoft, not partners.  
  
Microsoft product teams (and others) go through detailed and valuable customer profiling and use case modeling exercises, doing their best to look at Microsoft’s products from the viewpoint of the user.  Let’s try this for the event process as well — here, I’ll start.  From the viewpoint of the conference attendee, here’s what’s happening. 

• I register for a conference.  Through this registration process, I give the conference organizer my contact information.
• I get a badge with a bar code on it.  I know this code allows me to be identified by a scanner.
• I visit a sponsor booth.  I see something that interests me.  I ask for more information.
• The sponsor scans my badge, and when I get back to my office after the conference, I have an email with the information I requested, and I am able to follow up as I see fit.

This use case has been mastered by conference organizers with far less experience and technical sophistication than Microsoft.  But Microsoft Legal has convinced itself that Microsoft events are different — that Microsoft is barred from sharing ANY attendee registration information with partners, even when the attendee specifically requests it from the partner.  No, the attendee must IN WRITING request FROM MICROSOFT that the partner be allowed to send any followup information.  No, the request by the attendee to the partner to scan the attendee’s badge and send information is insufficient.  
 
So here’s the surreal attendee use case we encounter instead at some Microsoft events:

• I register for the conference.  Through this registration process, I give Microsoft my contact information.
• I get a badge with a bar code on it.  I know this code allows me to be identified by a scanner.
• I visit a Microsoft partner booth.  I see something that interests me.  I ask for more information.
• The partner asks for my card.  I say I’ve run out (hey, I’m a developer, on the average day I give out zero cards, I probably forgot them in my office).
• I ask the partner to scan my badge instead.
• The partner hesitates, saying, “um, this scanner goes back to Microsoft and I can’t get the information off it.”
• I am confused.  This partner must be mistaken.  I say “no no, I gave Microsoft my information already, you don’t need to scan me for them.”
• The partner, now trying to avoid getting into an argument with a potential customer, must further explain:  “Actually, if I scan you here, you could win a prize from Microsoft.”
• I say “OK, scan away, I love prizes.”  I still don’t understand that the partner won’t get the information — I’ve been to 100 other conferences, and at each one, I get scanned and the firm doing the scanning is the one that sees my contact info.  (But the prize is also the escape clause for Microsoft Legal — no, Mr. Partner, the attendee might not want to hear from you, he or she might just want a Zune, so it’s inappropriate to share that contact information.  No, Mr. Partner, you can’t get a separate scanner to collect information for yourself — the scanned information must be linked back to the database we’ve collected and can’t share.  Catch 22.)
• The partner scans me, and as I turn to go, says awkwardly “err, could you just write your contact information on this notepad here?”
• Now I’m just irritated.  Maybe I write my contact info, maybe I don’t, but all convenience and familiarity has gone out of the interaction.
• And I get back to the office and maybe I have the follow-up information I requested and maybe I don’t — the transfer of information via notepad scribbling is slower and more error-prone than the scanning process.  

Hey Microsoft — Partners drive sales.  Partners drive 96% of your sales.  I read that on a poster in Redmond.  I heard that from executive after executive at the Worldwide Partner Conference.  And we drive sales by talking to customers and prospective customers.  You should be jumping at every chance you have to facilitate this process. 

If I scan the badge of an event attendee, that attendee has the reasonable expectation that he or she is providing contact information to me (I’ve heard the arguments to the contrary, and do not find them plausible). 

I understand that Microsoft Legal wants to protect customer privacy, but in my opinion they’ve overdone it in this case.  There are better ways (e.g., a partner code of conduct, an event-specific agreeement with partners, a clear statement to attendees in advance about contact with partners, or even a simple note about the rules of a particular giveaway at the conference — use your legal imaginations).  This can be fixed — let’s fix it.

Comments from Microsoft, partners, and customers welcome. 

I just returned from New York where Dan and I worked the 5th Annual Microsoft Financial Developers Conference at the Grand Hyatt hotel. Dan and I did a tag-team presentation entitled “Scaling SOA with Grid Computing for .NET,” which was well received. Frankly, I felt like I stumbled through the first part, but eventually warmed up. Dan’s code demo was the best part of our session — showing clearly how to go from a service designed for a single server to a service designed for a grid in just a few lines of code.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, a good place to start is the Dr. Dobb’s article by Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli.

I ran into Tom Groenfeld who has moved on from Windows in Financial Services, dedicating more time to some direct projects with Microsoft and his excellent blog; if you’re following Microsoft and its partners in this market, it’s a must-read.

Speaking of Windows in Financial Services, they caught up with me for an interview and (no guffaws please) a photo shoot. They’re doing a special HPC edition this summer, which should be out sometime in June; watch for it.

Maybe the most controversial guy at the event was Harvard Professor David Platt, who teaches .NET classes through his firm, Rolling Thunder Computing. He’s an excellent speaker — funny, smart, polished — and his emphasis on championing a simple user experience was certainly a breath of fresh air at this event. He was plugging his book, Why Software Sucks…and what you can do about it, and I may pick up a copy for more of his humor.  Frankly, his presentation offered more problems than solutions (i.e.,  examples of why something sucks, without recommendations about how to fix it), but he’s calling attention to a really, really important issue.  While we pride ourselves on ease of use, it’s clear we can make many further improvements.

Kudos to the whole Microsoft event team, especially the folks I worked with most directly — Asli Bilgin, Laura Leedy, Kathy Ross, and Michelle Ledesma for putting together an event that went off without a hitch.

I look forward to participating in this event again!  

OK, it’s hard to admit, but I am nowhere near the gadget guy that many of my friends are.  Don’t get me wrong — I love new toys, and I consume my fair share of clever devices.  But I am much more likely to see what Rob or Nathan thinks of a new device before taking the plunge myself, and I am generally more interested in core functionality than all the bells and whistles. 

This goes double for phones — I am basically a Luddite in the phone world, believing that phones are for making phone calls.  Calendar on my phone?  No thanks.  Task list?  Forget that.  Camera?  I’ve taken maybe ten pictures with a phone in my life, and tossed all but a couple.  Email?  Ridiculous.  I hate typing with 12 dinky keys.  Form factor?  Small please. 

Yeah, Nathan lured me into the Windows Mobile phone world a while back with my current Audiovox SMT5600, and it’s actually pretty slick — it’s small, has a nice feel, and syncs my contacts with Outlook without too much pain.  But I mostly use it for, um, phone calls. 

Sure, I hang around with plenty of people who can’t wait to show me the coolest new phone, but I’ve been relatively immune to temptation. 

Not this time.

I won a cool new phone about three weeks ago in a raffle at a Microsoft event (thanks, Dave!) and decided to try it out.  It’s an HTC TyTN, which is a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC phone.  As a Phone Luddite, I had never heard of HTC before.  Turns out, these guys have carved out a successful niche in high-end phones.  They’re an interesting company, with a value proposition clearly differentiated from the mass-market phone producers like Nokia and Motorola.

Getting Started

I got this phone at the Microsoft Financial Services Partner Summit in Redmond on March 28.  So there I was with my old phone, and this cool phone, and my laptop, and Outlook, and Internet access, and a mixture of interesting and not-fully-interesting presentations in front of me.  So it’s time to tinker. 

Dave Sugarman (our partner manager in the Microsoft Financial Services Group) is gadget crazy (he’s also the “Mobility Lead” for the FSG).  He knows my level of phone sophistication, and offered to “set it up for me.”  So we’re sitting together in the back of a presentation, and we get off to a good start — we move the SIM card, and the TyTN now knows it’s my phone, so that’s good.  Now it’s ActiveSync time, and we’re in for a few Microsoft Moments — those moments where you really wish Microsoft understood the “out of box experience” a bit better.

Oh, that’s the OLD version of ActiveSync.  Get the new one.  No, you won’t have to reboot.  Oh, well OK, maybe reboot.  Oh, the phone and the Laptop have a different opinion of what time it is — get the DST patch.  No, I have it already.  No, apply it again anyway.  OK NOW try the new ActiveSync.  Server error 85010017?  OK, yah, you’re trying to sync with your Exchange Server, so you probably need to get your certificate and apply it and trust it — get it from your IT guys.  Oh, screw that, I just won’t sync email yet — clear that selection, just sync contacts / calendar / tasks, that’s all local.  Server error 85010017?  Huh.  Not even trying to TALK to a server.  Well, I guess it will work once you get the cert.  At least now it’s a phone.

Into the office the next day, apply the cert, trust the cert, sync again — Server error 85010017.  C’mon guys, this phone’s been on the market for more than six months, and Windows Mobile 5 has been around longer…  Google around about that Server error, and here’s what you find on the Microsoft Web site:

In some cases, ActiveSync will fail to synchronize data with Microsoft Outlook with Synchronization Error code 85010017. This could be due to the presence of large volume of items on first sync or specific large items such as a calendar item with many meeting attendees. Some targeted instances of this have been fixed in Activesync 4.5.

If you are experiencing this on Windows 2000 or Windows XP SP1, please upgrade to Activesync 4.5. Otherwise you can try archiving your inbox to reduce the number of items in the mailbox for synchronization.  Also, it could help to pat your head and rub your tummy whilst hopping on one foot.

(OK, I added the last bit.)  I’m on XP SP2, and I’m not trying to touch my Inbox yet, but let’s not overthink this – I’ll archive some stuff, why not.  And then reboot a few times, quit and restart ActiveSync a few times, pat my head and rub my tummy and hop on one foot, and lookee there, now it works fine.  OK, well, not much of my life lost yet — this took an hour or two, most of which time I was doing other things at the same time.  It’s a phone AND it syncs contacts, calendar, and tasks — it’s alive.

NOW point it at the Exchange Server while still connected via USB to my laptop, trusted cert and all — and receiving email works perfectly first time.  Huzzah.

NOW disconnect it from the laptop and point it at Cingular — and receiving email still works perfectly.  Huzzah huzzah.  Now we’re cooking.

Send an email from the phone — hey, that works too, and the keyboard rocks.  Practice with the keyboard a while, answering a few more emails — this is really really easy.  This is NOT some cheesy little Motorola Q keyboard — you can really type on this thing. 

Field test — Off to Hawaii

My recent family vacation to Hawaii came just a couple of days after I got the new phone, and seemed like a good opportunity to field-test it.  I was NOT planning to “fully disconnect” on this vacation — there’s just too much going on at a rapidly-growing startup for the CEO to go completely dark for 10 days.  (At our old company, Quantum Consulting, we coined the phrase “the only thing worse than checking in is not checking in,” but that’s a story for another day.)  Nevertheless, I wanted to minimize the distractions, so lugging a laptop from place to place and booting up and searching for WiFi in the middle of the day was out of the question.  Could the TyTN keep me “just enough” in touch?

Yes.  I was concerned about the form factor at first — it’s quite a bit bigger than my old phone, and is noticeably heavy and bulgy in a pocket.  (Audiovox 5600:  1.81 in x 0.63 in x 4.25 in, 3.67 oz.  HTC TyTN:  2.28 in x 0.86 in x 4.43 in, 6.20 oz.)  But it came with a nifty holster, and wearing it on my belt, I didn’t really notice a difference. 

The ability to receive and respond to a few emails from the condo or even the beach without struggling with an intolerable keypad was great.  The keypad slides out — and when you open it, the display automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode, which is far more natural for typing.  In addition to the useful keypad, the screen is quite good — big enough to fit plenty of text without an unmanagable amount of scrolling around, bright enough to read outdoors, and sufficiently high resolution that small text is very readable.  So reading emails (even attachments) and responding with more than just a grunt was quick and easy.  (Ok, Blackberry users, feel free to act all smug now and say you’ve been doing this since the Nixon administration.)

I also used the Internet from my phone for real, locating restaurants and landmarks with surprising ease.  (This experience has set me thinking about the next killer app for cellphones, but that also will wait for another day.) 

Back to work

After vacation, I put in a 2-GB microSD storage card, and tried out Word, Excel, and other applications.  Let’s just say this is less than satisfying.  A fine idea for receiving and reading email attachments, but not for “real work.”  I have found that I lug my laptop to meetings just as often as ever — the TyTN may be fine for a quick email, but real note-taking is not convenient, and working on a spreadsheet with more than a few cells is a low-productivity exercise.  Nevertheless, on the road I dig out my laptop less often for Web browsing and email, yet I’m more current with email than ever.

Many of these capabilities were supposedly available on my old phone, but the screen, keyboard, and OS conspired to make them too inconvenient to use.  Windows Mobile 5.0 is a significant improvement over four-dot-whatever-my-old-phone-uses; easier to navigate, and just smoother all around.  My Windows gadget geek buddies are already on 6.0, and (Cingular permitting) that will be my next project.  

Yes, I’ve even taken some decent pictures with it.  No, I haven’t tried video conferencing or many other features.

OK, it’s not perfect.  It’s an awesome PDA, but only an OK phone.  Better phones are smaller, and have simple keypads exposed when open or closed.  It’s easy enough to answer the phone, but to dial a number you need to switch to phone mode and poke at a touchscreen — a good touchscreen, but still, you have to look at it, so it’s hard to do while driving (not that I ever…um…).  It’s got a stylus, and some people don’t like those.  (I had a Palm for years, back in the day, and am neither fanatically pro- nor anti-stylus.  For most applications you can poke with your finger or fingernail and get decent results.) 

Many pictures of the TyTN, plus far geekier reviews, can be found at http://mobilitytoday.com/articles/htctytn_first_look.html.

That’s it for now.  Highly recommended.

Yes, I’m going back to New York again next week.  Digipede Director of Products Dan Ciruli and I will give a presentation and demonstration entitled “Scaling SOA with Grid Computing for .NET.”  SOA here is Service Oriented Architecture, an area of increased activity for us.  Here’s the abstract we wrote for our session:

Presenters:  John Powers and Dan Ciruli, Digipede Technologies

Title:  Scaling SOA with Grid Computing for .NET

Digipede Products:  The Digipede Network, the Digipede Framework SDK
Microsoft Products:  Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS); Visual Studio; SharePoint; Excel Services; Excel 2003; Excel 2007; SQL Server 2005.

Enterprise architects in financial services are looking to service-oriented architectures (SOA) to address many real-world problems – brittle systems with tight interdependencies, data stuck in single-purpose silos, and applications that don’t scale to meet growing demand, to name a few.  But implementing an SOA can also expose new scalability issues.  New high-performance computing (HPC) offerings from Microsoft and its partners are ideally suited for scaling out compute-intensive components of an SOA.  Using real-world examples from financial services companies, this presentation will describe how to grid-enable compute-intensive analytic services for use in an SOA. 

(Sounds interesting!  I really ought to finish my slides…)

Digipede is also a Platinum Sponsor for this event, and will have a booth from which to demonstrate the latest and greatest in developer-focussed grid technology for the Windows platform.

The basics for this event: 

Where:  Grand Hyatt Hotel, midtown New York City — Park Avenue at Grand Central Station

When:  Wednesday April 25 through Thursday April 26.  (OUR presentation is Thursday 4/26 at 9:15 AM)

Who:  Architects and Developers in the Financial Services Industry working on the Microsoft platform.

How much?:  FREE.

More info:  Microsoft’s got the whole scoop, including how to register.

I hope to see you there!

Robert Anderson, Dan Ciruli and I were invited to spend a morning at Podtech’s headquarters in Palo Alto last month. Robert Scoble interviewed Robert and me about Digipede, then shot a video of Dan doing a demo of our software. Most of it turned out well; trying to show code by aiming a video camera at a laptop may have been a trifle ambitious, but the ideas come across.

What the hell am I doing waving my hands around all the time? Probably had too much caffeine….

Editor’s Choice: highlights from Digipede’s interview and demo

Demo of building a grid with Digipede

Talking about Digipede’s grid technology

This blog has been quiet lately because I’m on vacation with my family on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Our condo has good internet connectivity, and I’ve used it a few times to keep up with email late at night, but mostly this has been a pretty relaxing week.

The least relaxing thing we’ve done so far was to hike across miles of barren lava flows to see this:

OK, it’s not the greatest picture in the world, but when you’re standing on the edge of a crack with 2000-degree lava inside, your mind may wander away from camera settings.  Or at least mine did. 

It’s a long hike, and not well marked, and the terrain is pretty nasty, and we ran out of water in the heat, and still — it was worth it to see how the Big Island is still growing every day. 

Oracle is on the march again — buying grid software company Tangasol. 

http://www.crn.com.au/story.aspx?CIID=76604&src=site-marq

Oracle may be coming to its senses about the grid space, and the importance of application performance and scalability.  Following up on its aquisition of Sleepycat last year, its interest in in-memory solutions continues.  This is more validation from a (very) large company that true innovators in the grid space are having a real impact on mainstream software providers.

I was also impressed with Nati Shalom’s analysis over on the GigaSpaces Blog, which (while understandably a bit one-sided) relates Oracle’s history in this area better than I could.

Once again — a big congratulations Cameron and company! 

Oh, Robert.  I had hoped, since this blog is relatively lightly read, to escape this — but I’ve been tagged by the Five Things meme, and will not shirk.

Five Things You May Not Have Known About Me:

1. I am teaching my 15 1/2 year old daughter to drive.  Nothing at work is stressful anymore.
2. I worked three summers during college as a telephone solicitor.  I earned a year’s worth of “spending money” in two months each summer.  By the time I was 20, I was possibly the best telephone solicitor in the state of Utah.  I sold circus tickets, season tickets to a professional volleyball team, light bulbs, garbage bags, and I forget whatall else — sometimes for charity, sometimes not. 
3. I am known at Digipede as the guy who does NOT program, and I was never a professional software developer, but earlier in life I was definitely paid to program.  As a significant part of my job as an economist at PGE, I wrote FORTRAN for money.  I liked it, and I was good at it, but not great — fast, clever, but sloppy.  I learned to do other things.
4. I have an almost unbelievably poor sense of direction.  Despite carefully reading a simple subway map in New York this week, I got off two stops too early — and it was 15 degrees outside and blowing hard.  Today, I could not find Page Mill Road in Palo Alto — and I have been on Page Mill Road three million times in the past 21 years.  I have learned to work around this near-disability, but it’s damned inconvenient (and frequently amusing to passengers in my car). 
5. I can do this:

I will respectfully decline to pass this on; I think we now know five too many things about way too many bloggers.

I use a password manager and form-filler-outer called RoboForm.  It is by far the best solution I’ve found to creating and remembering multiple non-trivial passwords.  (Like much of the reliable technology I use, this was recommended to me by Robert Anderson, who is almost as good at finding technology that works as he is at building it.)  RoboForm is simple to learn, works flawlessly, and is published by people at Siber Systems who clearly care passionately about quality, customer service, and security.  I have two licenses — one for my laptop (my “work computer”) and one for my home desktop.

As my patient readers know, my home desktop recently melted down (see other recent posts), and was replaced by a new one.  Like other software, RoboForm licenses need to be “activated,” and I’ve used up my license activations.  I verified this by trying to activate a license on my new machine — nothing doing.  So I went to the RoboForm support page, explained the issue in plain English, and got a response from a human by email within 40 minutes saying “we’ve added another activation, it should work now.”  And it did.

I did not have to “prove” that my computer had died, I did not need to wait on hold, I just told them my problem and they solved it.

Go and buy their software now.  You  will be very glad you did.