Category: obsolescence

obsolescence

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Office365 – How Low Can You Go ?

It seems to me that a tipping point has arrived for businesses large and small, many of which after having drastically cut back on their IT spend over the last few years now find themselves coasting into 2014 on the fumes and vapours of Windows XP and Office 2003/7.

Andrew Beardsmore is a new contributor to trefor.net and this is his first post. He’s been obsessed by tech for two decades and has spent most of that time fixing everything from networks to netbooks. Now he’s sharing the knowledge, and the obsession.

I recently had a bit of a tweetup with @EvanKirstel regarding Microsoft’s amazing deal with Office365 (check it out at: https://twitter.com/andyosira/status/481463379383820288).

It seems to me that a tipping point has arrived for businesses large and small, many of which after having drastically cut back on their IT spend over the last few years now find themselves coasting into 2014 on the fumes and vapours of Windows XP and Office 2003/7.

Cloudy

Home users who extravagantly trotted off to Currys/PCWorld during their “hey, we’re going bust” sales and splurged on full versions of more recent MS Office software (though intending to only blow a few hundred quid on a chunky Windows 8 laptop) probably won’t have heard yet of Office365. They also may not have noticed those early ChromeBooks, or if they did they weren’t entirely convinced by the PCWorld sales folk when faced with what looked like Ubuntu. That is, Ubuntu without a hard drive…or apps.* Their new high capacity laptop hard drives, overflowing with growing photo libraries from flashy megamegapixel point-&-shoots, are already laughing at their puny free two gigabyte Dropbox accounts, and buying yet another discounted external USB hard drive ‘My Brick’ to backup and fill with all their pics and videos of school plays and homework projects, as well as every family member’s iPad/iPod/iPhone backup…well, it just seems so ‘2011’, doesn’t it?

Now these home users are included in this mini-cloud revolution also. (Not every household bought a NAS — though perhaps they should have — as they ARE expensive. Expensive, anyway, when compared to the wares peddled by Microsoft.)

In my opinion, the principles are broadly similar whether you are purchasing enterprise licensing or you are a home user “with a lot of stuff”.

  • Both need humongous space and/or backup and want a whizzy new version of Office.
  • Both want to be able to access it all whilst mobile (even if your mobile data provider hasn’t heard of your holiday home’s postcode, and thus offline editing is also needed).
  • Both want to share and collaborate.

With monthly offers that include an Office365 subscription (spanning multiple devices and user accounts) AND one terabyte of online storage now available for less than the cost of three lattes, just how cheap does it all need to be? And would you trust it if it got any cheaper ?

How does $7 a month sound? (In dollars because — Yup — stateside rollout first.) For this amount you can put Office365 on your PC and get a terabyte of storage thrown in. Make it $10 and you can install on five PCs and have as many as five user accounts (each with its own terabyte of online storage). A terabyte? That’s one thousand gigabytes for those of us with suntans and more interest in Wimbledon than “The IT Crowd” reruns.

Interestingly, Microsoft commissioned a recent survey and decided that about three quarters of us only have about thirteen gigabytes of ‘stuff’, so one thousand gigabytes should pretty much cover it. To be honest, though, this number sounds like it’s been picked more to justify their updated freemium offering of a fifteen gigabyte deal.

Many will forget about their Dropbox accounts, mothball their GoogleDrive accounts, lose the power supply plugs and mini USB cables for their ‘My Bricks’ (and never again dream of owning a NAS). They’ll take the plunge into subscriptions-based software purchasing** just for the great one terabyte ‘giveaway’ alone. Got a smartphone that you take pics on? How about letting it backup all those precious shots automatically to OneDrive (smile!).

Think about it. Never again will you need to go through a ‘fork-lift’ upgrade process between versions of Office — remember the advent of the blasted ribbon in Office 2007? — as your device will instead accept the more frequent but gradual improvements and changes in the same way your smartphone updates its apps whilst you sleep. It will backup and sync continuously, silently, all the time. If you’re a small to medium business, what this means is that the guy who takes the backup tapes home every night and puts a new one in every morning won’t have to continue to lie each time he forgets. Or you can rethink your price plan with MozyPro, or whoever. The AD-like control you get over the data it handles will sufficiently please both your sysadmin and your CIO/CISO.

Many will consider Microsoft’s new 1TB + Office365 $7 per month subscription a no-brainer. And, if you’re bulk buying for business, the deal gets even better, as according to the third link I offer below it is just $2.50 (yearly commitment). Such a huge saving is certain to ensure your continuing position with the company, that is if you can persuade your CFO. And if against all odds it turns out to be a rubbish idea and they fire you, well, they can just cancel your user subscription!

N.B. I wonder how many smaller partnerships and LLPs will be tempted to take the home licensing route on their mixed-usage mobile devices…pay the $10 five-user rate, out of guilt, and call it BYOD when it’s in the office?!

*Company-wide Chromebook deployment: Great way to to upgrade to a modern OS, get a new office productivity suite, AND equip your workforce with mobile devices for less than the price of a desktop refresh. I want to know more about the experiences of companies who have ‘gone Google’ in this manner. I like what I have seen so far with Google Appcare. However, having recently dropped their cloud offering’s pricing, I wonder how they feel about Microsoft’s new deal? To quote mine host, it’s “certainly warming up in the cloud wars”).

**Just quietly say ouch and forget it’s happening.

Chase the following links for specific details and price plans for Office365 and OneDrive:

https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/

http://time.com/25107/chart-cloud-storage-services-compared/

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/

Thanks for reading. You can find more on the subject of Office365 and similar tech at twitter.com/@andyosira.

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competitions End User events fun stuff H/W internet media Mobile mobile connectivity Net obsolescence piracy

Watching the Football

Yesterday a friend of mine in the UK asked me if I was “going to watch the football”, stating his own excitement over the soon-upon-us 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil (the official label of the event, if the website is any indicator), and then asking “Have you converted a little? Soccer to you, I guess.”

Sigh.

I actually converted 20 years ago as a direct result of the excitement surrounding the 1994 FIFA World Cup. Of course, the football punditry out there will immediately assume that this American finally clued in that year due to the tournament being held in the U.S. for the first (and so far only) time, however that assumption would not only be disingenuous but wrong too. No, my sports imagination was finally captured by International football in 1994 not because I was swept up in host country hoopla, but because I was living/working/traveling Europe that year and found myself instead swept up in the remarkable national enthusiasm and spontaneous celebrations I encountered in England, Scotland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany as the tournament played out. Walking around Namur, Belgium, for instance, on a Tuesday night in early July, seeking out a priced-right-for-a-backpacker dinner, I was left aghast and delighted by the string of cars going by with horns a-blarin’, people hanging out the windows hooting and hollering and waving the Italian flag. The people of one country so unabashedly showing their colors, whooping it up on the streets of another country…what is this International sporting thing, anyway? And then five days later, being fortuitous enough to be in Germany to witness first-hand the crashing out of the Germany team1…I was hooked!

1994. The world turned its eyes and ears to the most commercial country in the world to watch “The Beautiful Game” on television and radio, and only on television and radio. And not a single URL in sight.

When my pal asked me whether I was going to tune into the 2014 FIFA World Cup my knee-jerk first thought was “Will it be available via the Internet?” to which my second thought instantly responded “Are you kidding? Of course.” Sure, I know the games will be broadcast on television, and I am relatively sure the one we have in the main room still works (The Boy watches it from time to time…I think), but it wasn’t until long after I answered my friend’s oh-so-rhetorical question that I even paid a thought to the idea of actually using the device to watch a match.

Football TV

Naturally, the picture the Chez Kessel television delivers is plenty sharp (as so many are these days, we are Triple Play kitted), and something prompted me long ago to wire the sound to come through our stereo speakers (think it was the 2006 FIFA World Cup that prompted that…friggin’ Marco Materazzi, sister-and-mother-insulting classless b*stard), so it isn’t a poor viewing option that had me defaulting to the Internet as my top-of-mind football entertainment resource. It’s just…well…you see…c’mon, you know…it is so much easier to simultaneously Web-out with ⌘+Tab (Alt+Tab for the Windows-fettered readers out there, and whatever-equivalent for UNIX deities and whichever others) than it is via some lap-bound or hand-bound device supplementary to the television.

Addiction. Always lurking, eminently humanizing, and available in oh-so-many forms.

1994. When to the layman “Internet” meant email and bulletin boards and nothing more. The World Wide Web was just starting to poke its head up, and “streaming” was a word relegated to tape data backups.

Without admitting to anything (and there will be no Q&A), I will cagily say here that a long time has passed since I last watched a television program at the time of broadcast (other, that is, than hypnotized channel-surfing-and-staring borne of jetlag). This is not to say that I am accomplishing the impossible, foregoing television entertainment in what is unquestionably a golden age for the medium (too many programs to list, but suffice it to say that I can speak “The Wire”, “The Sopranos”, “Breaking Bad”, “Mad Men”, and this Millenium’s “Battlestar Galactica” reboot with anyone…buncha great UK-produced programs, too!). I do, though, manage to forego the starchy advertising that comes with all of the good TV meat on offer, and without littering my shelves and floorspace with DVD sets gathering dust.

Yes, packaged up nice-and-digital and stripped of its impurities, television for me has come to mean the Internet. And I find it a richer and far more satisfying experience for that, too.     ==>Twenty-three minutes into the sixth episode of Season Two of “The Americans” a reference is made to an earlier plot point that I skied past. Pause. ⌘+Tab to Google Chrome. Type “The Americans episodes ” into the Address/Search field. A quick click and read. ⌘+Tab back to VLC. Un-Pause. Good to go.<==     Of course, certain television events practically demand in-progress viewing — cannot-turn-away news events and, yes, some sporting events (though "condensed" recordings can now be acquired after the fact, such as three-plus hour American Football games boiled down to 58 minutes!) — but these have not kept that really big monitor in our flat's central room from looking more and more novel with each passing season. 1994. Televisions were definitively three-dimensional, whereas the scripted programming they delivered to the quivering and drooling masses was two-dimensional at its very best. Which inevitably brings me back to "watching the football". I imagine that as was the case the last time around, La Famille Kessel will ease slowly into 2014 FIFA World Cup action, eventually ramping up interest as the meaning of the games increases (and if France makes a move, as in '06, getting downright rabid about it all). And as that happens our somewhat dusty black Samsung-emblazoned flat-panel Living Room window into the Global Village (clichés flowing thick and furious here at the end) will no doubt once again find its purpose.   1Is there anyone who isn’t German that likes to see Germany win at anything? 🙂

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Bad Stuff End User fun stuff media obsolescence travel

Two Hours and 55 Minutes

I have 39 versions of the song “April in Paris” in my digital music library. The earliest recording is an Artie Shaw track from 1940 and the most recent is by Wynton Marsalis from his 1987 “Standards, Volume One” release, with many seminal versions threading in-between, delivered by a staggering array of artists that range from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald to Nirvana (OK, that isn’t true…just checking wakefulness out there)…er, Blossom Dearie. Of course, considering “April in Paris”‘s status as a 20th Century classic and the size of my jazz collection, I shouldn’t be surprised that I have 39 versions of the song, and yet seeing them all before me on my monitor (the result of an iTunes search) is really just a couple of steps shy of astonishing.

April in Paris x 39

If 14+ years ago someone had asked me when I first moved to Paris in 1999 (August — not April) “How many versions of “April in Paris” do you have in your music collection?”, I could not have answered the question with any kind of accuracy or authority. Not without taking hours to thumb through my 2000+ CDs with a notepad and pen at hand, anyway.

I never knew the charm of spring
I never met it face to face
I never new my heart could sing
I never missed a warm embrace
Continue reading “Two Hours and 55 Minutes”
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Business ecommerce obsolescence

Windows XP ATM failure

There’s a Post Office down the road from my mam and dad’s place with a Barclays ATM. Yesterday I strode up to said ATM with a view to extracting some cash. Totally legally of course.

Imagine my surprise when I was confronted with a screen showing what appeared to be Windows XP booting up. Wow I thought and reached for the gun in my holster phone in my pocket to capture the moment in pixels. I was too slow. I’d never have made a good cowboy.

By the time I had unlocked the phone and fired up the camera (checked the film, taken a light reading, adjusted the focus etc) all I got was a curt apology stating that the cashpoint machine was currently dysfunctional and would I mind awfully trying the one at the Isle of Man Bank down the road.

Disappointed I turned my back on the machine and walked dejectedly towards the IoM bank. I thought that might have been a scoop. “XP brings down global banking system”. Wasn’t going to be the same without the photographic evidence.

I parked the thought whilst we spent the afternoon enjoying the delights of Onchan Park on its opening day of the season. Crazy golf at its best. The pitch and put and the bowling were closed due to waterlogged greens but that didn’t spoil our fun.

This morning my thoughts returned to the global banking crisis but research suggests that nothing untoward had happened. No doom laden headlines. Shock horror probe. Must have been a local issue.

I did find a few timely articles discussing the fact that all the world’s ATMs appear to run on XP. Speculation as to whether this was a ticking time bomb together with quotes from Microsoft suggesting that a move to Windows 8.1 would be very sensible from a security perspective. No news at all really.

One does wonder what the next generation of ATM o/s will be. Microsoft doesn’t exactly feel right but there again it would probably be easiest from a backwards compatibility perspective. I’m not that interested. It’s Sunday morning and I’m typing this post with my thumb on my droid. There is bacon to be cooked.

Easy like Sunday morning…

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End User obsolescence

Poignant phonebox photo

There is something about a photo of a phonebox taken using a mobile phone camera. It’s almost gloating. An icon of the past captured by the technology that rendered it obsolete. There should be an air of dereliction about the picture. Sadness. There isn’t. I’m smiling  though the photo is not helped by the fact that it’s a cloudy day.

I may have asked this one before but it’s worth asking again: when did you last use a phonebox?

phoneboxOther posts containing images of phoneboxes:

HTC Desire HD review
What to do about automated spam calls to mobile
Non internet use > neo-monsaticism

Categories
Engineer gadgets obsolescence

The ghosts of computing past

I have a large plastic box with a lid (you know the type you can buy from the local DIY ‘shed’ or independent hardware store) filled with various cables, adapters, a backup ADSL router, an old US Robotics dial up modem that connects via good ol’ RS-232, and — most interestingly of all, I think — two Iomega zip drives (a 100 MB drive that connects via parallel, and a 750 MB USB drive).

Along with the goodies mentioned, I also have an opened box of 100 MB disks and an unopened still-in-shrink-wrap box of 750 MB disks. At the time I bought these disks USB flash sticks weren’t so prevalent and neither was broadband. I bought them as a backup solution for the Pentium 166 PC I had at the time but never really got round to setting up a backup procedure. And y the time I retired that machine I had USB sticks bigger than its hard drive (a whopping 2.1 GB) so data transfer was no problem.

So I feel I am holding an important bit of computing history in my hands, but I am also wondering what is best to do with the Iomega zip drives considering that the company is apparently no more and that these days the drives only appear on eBay.

All suggestions welcome, and I’ll get the camera out tomorrow and add a picture.

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Business obsolescence

Yellow pages officially declared dead

yellow pagesThe powers that run the Davies household (ie Mrs Davies) have officially declared both the Yellow Pages and the BT Telephone Directory dead.

The two tomes, grown increasingly lightweight in recent years, now reside in the log basket next the fireplace in readiness for further processing as the scrunched up bits of paper you use to start lighting a fire.

No remorse, no wistful gazing over the shoulder as we leave the room. The publications served a purpose and enjoyed their long day. Now they are of no use to us. Technology has consigned the printing press to a museum curiosity. What would Gutenberg have to say? “Alle Dinge geschehen, eh?”.

Whomsoever decideth where to deliver these publications have my permission to remove the Davies’ from their list and save the trees. They are no longer required.

Read here about “Yellow Pages Shock“.

Thank you and goodnight… the sound of the telephone going dead at the other end of the line…

Categories
Engineer obsolescence

Now gather round people wherever you roam

trefor_150This morning as I walked to work I passed the Lincoln City Council offices. My thoughts were “Lots of people work in those offices. I bet many of them could be replaced by software.”

It’s an interesting point. In one sense a City Council is very much a social business. Historically someone who was getting too old to work to work in private industry, a builder’s labourer for example, might have got a job on a council road gang once his fitness levels and usefulness on a building site waned. I’m sure there must be many other examples of this.

Also what would someone who has spent most of their life working for the council in the rigid structure of public service do if they weren’t doing that job? Is that my problem? I’d be quite happy if

Continue reading “Now gather round people wherever you roam”

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Business obsolescence UC

Voicemail is for the dead – discuss

I had a meeting with some guys yesterday afternoon to discuss their use of Microsoft Lync in different businesses. More of that anon but one thing that stuck in my mind was a quote by Paul Hardy of Informa:

“Voicemail is for the dead”

He is right. Why use voicemail then you have so many other direct means of communication. My daughter hates voicemail because it means she has to call up to retrieve it. We have been trained never to leave her voicemails. Instead I usually resort to sending an sms or more likely an IM on Facebook. She usually then replies with her availability. I do find it funny that I have to schedule telephone calls with my daughter buy hey, we all have busy lives:)

We don’t let our customer care teams at Timico have voicemail – customers need to speak to someone, not a mailbox.

As I write I have remembered I need to change my own mobile voicemail from the “vacation alert” it currently has. I am no longer on holiday you see 🙂 . Might think about switching it off…

Whaddaya think?

Categories
Apps End User obsolescence

lost vehicle registration certificate #digitalbritain

I lost my vehicle registration certificate! I know I know it is my fault. I should look after these things a bit more. Fortunately it is quite easy to replace, as long as you can remember you vehicle registration number (obviously) and you haven’t changed your name or address.

A quick look online told me all I needed to know about how to replace it and I called the DVLA.  This isn’t a complaining post really because I now have a new certificate winging its way to my home address. However the number of levlels I had to go through in the DVLA autoattendant made me wonder if it was a world record.

Having called the number I pushed numbers 1, 4, 5, 1, 1, 1. It took me 2 minutes 33 seconds to get to that last number 1 at which point I got music on hold. At 3 minutes 26 seconds (OK I realise it might have been anal to write all this stuff down but I do have a blog and it does need constant feeding 😉 ) a person came on and by 4 minutes 55 seconds I had a new registration certificate on its way and I was £25 lighter.

I wasn’t unhappy with the experience and the chap at the other end of the line couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful.  I do however wonder when they are going to push all of this onto a self help web portal and let him find something more interesting to do with his life other than replacing car registration documents.

PS I am happy to open up the competition to find the longest auto-attendant tree in the world. It should be in the Guinness Book Of Records.