In a recent post on Ars Technica,  Emil Protalinski gets Microsoft’s take on this phenomenon:

“Overall we are finding our call center volume is down significantly more than we expected,” Barbara Gordon, vice president of customer support for Microsoft, told CNET. The drop in the number of calls doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Windows 7 has fewer problems than Windows Vista. Microsoft added two online resources leading up to the operating system’s release that may have made the difference. “What we have found is we are seeing far more take-up of self-service…forums and Twitter to get responses.”

I have converted all of my office computers and laptops (except the Macs of course) to Windows 7 (saving one Vista Ultimate and XP SP3 for specialized apps). My own experience was generally less installation headaches (except finding certain drivers).  Where I was pulling my hair out with Vista issues, I am wasting less of my small company resources and finding more outlets with answers.

What has your experience been?

By George M. Tomko

Many cloud computing boosters use the selling point that establishing large amounts of storage or computing requires no “up-front capital investment”.  Pleading before the gods of capital within corporations has been a bane for IT and business operations functions forever. All those appropriation request forms and cash flow analyses – not much fun when you want the servers installed and the software loaded.

What has always been interesting to me is that more thought, analysis, decision-making and accountability goes in to managing the capital investment portfolio than you often see in managing operating expenses. The irony here is that “op-ex” is very often many multiples larger than the “cap-ex” spend in any given fiscal period. If a $400 million company (in terms of revenue) has an operating profit of 20%, then the company managers spent $320 million with likely much less oversight than the $15 million that they might have spent on projects.

At the  end of the day, there is no free lunch. Just like leasing became the way to ensure “technology refresh” every 3 years, let’s make sure that cloud computing and all something-as-a-service offerings don’t wind up costing your company more or that the standards of decision-making are usurped by being able to fly more stuff under the financial controls radar.

The saying “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” became a “tag” line in old oil filter commercials where the idea was that you might pay more now for a premium filter but you would be avoiding the cost of replacing the entire engine later.  Of course, the assumption is that you would own the car long enough for this to pay off.  This was in the era when the majority of people traded-in and bought new cars in 3 or 4 year cycles.  Not long after, 3 year leases perpetuated the cycle.

The reality, then, was that most people wound up paying now and they got to do it over and over because later never came!

Another myth that is related is the 3,000 mile oil change. Again, another marketing bonanza because it got people to pay to replace their oil and filters twice as often as the auto manufacturers recommend in the owner manuals.

So back to op-ex and cap-ex and buying infrastructure/software/platforms as-a-service. If I take the op-ex view, it is almost always an incremental view as in year-over-year budgets and the dearth of zero-base reviews. If I take the cap-ex view, everything is an investment and is evaluated as cash-flows over a defined “economic life”. This takes rigor and commitment and the potential for more eyes to see and more ears to hear.

It is not a bad thing to have the option of paying for something as a service. However, it is a bad thing if the selling point is that you get to relieve yourself of the burden of evaluating and justifying the all-in costs of doing it one way or another.

Remember, you can pay now or pay later. Some times, it is nice to get to pay later.

What do you think. Please leave a comment.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

This is about the 20 millionth blog post or article that has been written with some reaction to last week’s *new* Google Chrome OS announcement. For the most part, it was a surprise announcement – mostly because it was not leaked to the press.

I have posted about Google in a mostly positive light (“Google: No brag, just fact”; “What’s the Thing with Bing?”) but I do not own any Google stock or have any financial interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly. And, my point-of-view is going to be widely different than most of what is out there. Since I am not wedded to any particular technology, all I have to ask is, why would or should I care (as a CIO, consultant, consumer, etc.)?

I have read some great posts (PC Mag’s Michael Miller; CIO.com’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) that have really thought out and carefully presented the author’s arguments in the following major categories: 1) Microsoft killer; 2) Linux killer; 3) gives Google the keys to the world; 4) is it really ‘open’;  5) is this really ‘new’? All good questions and perspectives, but the answers don’t really mean much.

So, to the fundamental question: why would I (or you) care? I guess I would care if it changed my (or your) life in some way or another, positively or negatively. So, if I am a CIO, I might be concerned about this throwing a monkey-wrench into my carefully thought out strategic technology plan.

Maybe I was planning on rolling out Windows 7. But, now, I might be worried that I am going to be playing the IT version of the game “52 card pick-up”.

Now, as a consultant, I might welcome all of this uncertainty. Consultants get rich when there is a lot of head-scratching going on and someone has to come in and tell the folks what to do.

As a technologist, I might be fuming (or celebrating) that this is going to be marginalizing the good work of the open source community and related foundations that have coordinated and sponsored projects to get some cohesion in a smaller set of more robust Linux distros. Why might I be upset? With Google “branding” and financial might, they might be a force that pulls from, rather than nurtures, the continuing development of mainstream (read Ubuntu) Linux. On the other hand, I might now have many more opportunities to work on the newest of the new things.

As a consumer, I can already get a netbook with Linux and OS X on a Mac, will there be something magical that happens with new product capabilities?

Naw. Bottom line is that the CIO will move forward, as planned.  The technologists will have spirited debates like they always do and groups will splinter off – as they always do. As a consumer, I’ll just be wondering what new feature I will get to pay for in some new gadget.

At the end of the day, it is all about innovation, competition and all the things that need to keep happening to advance the state-of-the-art and either create new value or steal more share of what is already there. Microsoft still stands out in the ‘crowd’. Of course, that ‘crowd’ is becoming one of more or less equals.

And I never, ever, thought that Java would be an Oracle product.

So things change.

And that is exactly what we want. Without it, we still might be running Windows 98 SE. There is so much stuff out there, it will be decades of disruption before the things we talk about now are as ho-hum and boring as telephones, flushing toilets and electricity.

Until then, it will be like Al Bernstein once said, “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

As Twitter becomes more mainstream, it is tantalizing to think about what could be a powerful component of Enterprise 2.0. And, before anyone thinks that I am against such tools, think again. My purpose as a leader is to drive the dialogue that leads organizations to flawless execution of change. This is what most people would consider “doing the right things right”.

But, anyone who is even moderately social on Twitter can easily become impeded by what I would call the three “S’s”: “Scam”, “Spam” and “Slam”.

“Scam” would be loosely defined as the dominance of “multi-level marketing”, success coaches, “law of attraction experts”, follow-me follow-you services and get-rich quick snake oil. It can also take any other form of human frailty-fraud, abuse, theft, misrepresentations, malware, trickery and all other forms of maliciousness.

“Spam”, closely-related to, and a key tool of the Scammers, clogs up the timeline with auto-generated inoccuous inspirational messages, timed bursts of 5 or 10 tweets, incessant direct messages to your e-mail accounts, and all other ‘junk’ that floats into otherwise fruitful conversation.

“Slam” is, for now, a catch-all term for the impact of living in a social media world. For the individual, it may be dealing with the potentially addictive and distracting time sink of being social with an ever-increasing network of friends and follwers. It takes time to fall in line with learning the lingo and understanding the norms, following the trends, etc.

For an enterprise, “Slam” will be the tidal wave of dealing with establishing policies, legal implications, regulatory compliance i.e. SEC, confidentiality, intellectual property, employee rights, training, security, user support, integration with other communication channels and methods.

At the end of the day, “Slam” will be the biggest headache of all. Why? Because it involves linking the outside world to the inside world in ways that have, to this point, been rudely rebuffed by the corporate firewall.

If you want to think about it another way, what will the new meaning become to this well-known phrase: “what’s said in this room, stays in this room”. Consider that within the last few weeks, Twitter became the voice of a country (Iran) as it was experiencing wrenching social change. It was able to take us to places that no other medium was able.

Now, consider a multi-national enterprise. Are they ready to go totally social – all ‘books’, meetings, presentations, hallway conversations, strategy sessions, pricing discussions, competitive intelligence gathering – flung open, total transparency? No way. Controlled ‘experiments’ and gradual learning, perhaps.

I saw a really great blog post that documents one company’s attempt at opening-up Twitter at an all-employee meeting. After they conducted the meeting, they evaluated what had happened:

“The after-action review surfaced one of the primary concerns about using Twitter in the enterprise: security.  While most employees are and will be sensitive to providing sensitive information about the company on Twitter, it’s always a risk.  In this case, the corporate IT security folks had raised a (very big) red flag about using Twitter for the employee forum, but the CEO decided that, for this short duration experiment, the risk was manageable.”

So what did they learn. You can view the entire article: “Twitter in the Enterprise”,  by Patti Anklam.

In my opinion, you’ll someday see a ‘corporate’ version that is sanitized, monitored, partitioned with strong ID and credentials management. But, the ‘door’ to the outside world will, for the foreseeable future, remain closed.

What is your opinion?

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why would I care?

I already have a hammer in my toolbox – Google. If Bing was there first, perhaps it would be in the box instead of Google.

Every time I open a browser window, Google greets me with little fanfare, an occasional art curiosity to add a subtle touch to the spirit of a holiday or some other social theme.

I even switched my default home page to Bing, to see how it felt. In a day, I was back to Google.

There is a lot of money to be made with every point of share of the search engine pie. Bing is a curiosity, at the moment, and has picked up a few points. Maybe that is a good thing. Market leaders should always feel the hot breath of a competitor from time-to-time.

But, this is Google’s ‘turf’. Live Search with a new paint job just isn’t enough innovation for me.

To be fair, I have a potentially opposite situation with browsers. I have been using Google Chrome to see if it can pull me away from IE8. Say what you want about IE. But, like Google search, IE was in my toolbox first. I have built my online existence around it. IE8 is nice, although IE7 almost lost me.

So, what’s the thing with Bing? For me, interesting, but not worth trading.

As the hype continues regarding “Cloud Computing”, there are now tales from those who have recently experienced the current offerings of these services.

Also, there are more and more seasoned, veteran practitioners of information technology (“IT”) that have been at conferences, had prosepctive suppliers call on them and, in a number of cases, carefully “dipped their toe” in the water on a self-contained project.

But, at the end of the day, does anyone really know what cloud computing really is? I am sure this video with a number of well-known names will clear it up for you:

Further evidence that the hype is doing little to clarify or capture the mind share of IT leaders, except, perhaps for curiosity, comes from Tim Anderson and his recent post “Cloud Computing Survey: More Fog Than Cloud” :

“…the survey was undermined by the fact that most of those surveyed admitted to not knowing what cloud computing is. The reason is not ignorance, but the many and various ways the term is used. The common strand is that it is something to do with the internet, but even that is undermined if we describe virtual on-premise servers as a “private cloud”.

Looking at it another way, as James Urquhart recently posted: “Cloud computing is an operations model, not a technology”.

And, for now, we need to leave it there. Rather than being dazzled with the details of the underlying technologies that are being strung together to form new product offerings, we should be focusing on what this means for fundamental computer operations.

The first thing that people seem to be realizing is that the vendor-supplier relationship has some new (and perhaps re-ignited old) dynamics that are now highly-sensitised. One of the first that comes to mind is the issue of “trust”.

For IT people, trust is built on a number of foundational elements. In some ways, there is an unspoken knowledge between technically-oriented individuals about whether the person they are dealing with has been-there, done-that, in terms of delivering the “goods” on a project or two. More respected are those that have had to live with their “creations”. That is, they had to stick around and live with the results by supporting things post go-live. In other words, the solution had to work. It is great when it happens that the person(s) you are dealing with on the other side know what they are doing and can back it up with the real-world cuts, scrapes and bruises of putting these solutions in place.

When it comes to something like cloud computing, though, you are not only reliant on others to deliver something (like a product or solution). You are going to be entrusting some very valuable assets (i.e. data) behind the unknown bastions of the cloud sourcer’s world. [I think I just "coined" a phrase: "cloudsourcer".]

As Bruce Schneir put it in his recent blog post:

“IT security is about trust. You have to trust your CPU manufacturer, your hardware, operating system and software vendors – and your ISP. Any one of these can undermine your security: crash your systems, corrupt data, allow an attacker to get access to systems. We’ve spent decades dealing with worms and rootkits that target software vulnerabilities. We’ve worried about infected chips. But in the end, we have no choice but to blindly trust the security of the IT providers we use.”

Of course, the simple recognition that trust is a key factor is not enough. Those of us who have put together and been responsible for large-scale outsourcing contracts know a bit about how bad things can get on the inside of these service delivery “factories”. It is simply a nightmare management issue.

Anyone who thinks that taking out your credit card and ringing up Amazon to stand up some servers real quick probably feels pretty good about not having to traverse the enterprise gauntlet for capital or project funds and their project is well on its way.

But, unless you are a start-up or other entity that has little to no legacy applications, integration issues, highly-sensitive data, multi-national compliance issues, customer service level requirements that you can guarantee to your own customers, etc., cloud computing is going to be something that you nibble around the edges on for a long time. After a while, there will be settling of standards and the market will judge the winners and losers.

But making a full-blown decision now to put it all on the line is simply out of the question. It is not about the paint not being dry. The wall hasn’t even been sanded and primed and is not even ready for paint.

To continue Bruces Schneier’s thoughts:

“Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we’ll get this right, but you don’t want to be a casualty along the way.”

Is the tide turning against cloud computing? In its present form, I think “Yes”. Already, we are seeing new morphing of the idea of the cloud computing construct known as “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service). Now, of course, we see “CaaS” for computing-as-a-service as a new marketing spin.

How many names can we give to the old idea of time sharing, network computing, etc.? The answer is probably “endless”. The bottom line is that customers are currently dealing with a curiosity that will someday have to be a bulletproof, industrial strength for of outsourcing. For that, it has a long, long way to go.

I have a lot more to say on these matters as you will see in future posts. Our companion blog, CIO Rant, is also full of some deeper discussion into some of these issues. I invite you to take a look.

In any case, I would greatly appreciate comments, which are easy to post.

In this age, 4 years is like a thousand eternities. Since then, Google has only gotten better — way better.

They have an impressive record of producing not only the user-facing eye-candy, cool widgets and very useful, quality applications, but they are world class in mundane-but-important functions like data centers, networks, accounting, project management and support.

And now comes Google Wave. Hyped — Yes. But as famous character actor Walter Brennan said in his signature line in the 1967 movie “The Guns of Will Sonnett”: “no brag, just fact”. Currently in its “alpha” release, it already has working functionality built-in and it is only going to get better. Consider this quote from Ben Parr from his Mashable review post:

It really seems to focus on contacts – on people – which we feel is the direction communication is taking. Email applications currently focus less on people and more on the content of the message. We think tools like Facebook and Twitter better balance the need to know the person behind a message and the message itself. Google Wave moves in that direction…… Overall assessment: It’s already got certain aspects, like navigation, absolutely right. With some great 3rd party apps and greater customization, Google Wave could actually match its hype.

So, Google Wave will be launched soon and will unify web communications in such a way that it will be the container for everything else. It is being built on open source technologies which will create huge developer interest and many add-ins and extensions.

I don’t own Google stock or am associated in any way with the company. But I have to say that I truly believed 4 years ago, and feel much stronger about it now, that they could make certain large software, hardware and services companies irrelevant in just a few more years. And, when that day comes, I would hope that the company stays true to its values. And, when they say that they are the best, all they will have to do is immediately follow with that famous line, “.. no brag, just fact.”

But, of course, many questions remain as this is an unfinished canvass and the paint is not yet dry. Large software suppliers have a lot at stake in preserving their revenue streams in licensing, true-ups (unfortunately not true-downs), shelfware, maintenance, services, hosting, etc. Customers also have a lot at stake in terms of their customizations, integration, security and a well-developed and understood cost model.

At the end of the day, what will make this worth doing for suppliers? Obviously, the opportunity to generate incrementally more revenue and profitability. In other words, how can I charge you more for a service that costs me less to provide? For customers, it is obviously how can I operate more efficiently in terms of cost and flexibly meet the business needs in an increasingly dynamic environment?

To the extent that innovation is introduced, the market will reward those suppliers. Money-grabbers might “win” in the short-term but will lose-out in the long run as the value proposition becomes more obtuse.

For customers, cavaet emptor (“let the buyer beware”) has never been a more appropriate guiding principle. For IT Leaders, CIOs, CTOs get on board quickly and understand how you are going to handle this tidal wave. For some thoughts, read-up on implications of these technologies on your role.