September 2007 - Posts
I was in the San Francisco Bay area during the last days of the DotCom bubble. I saw it crumble before my very eyes, I saw vast swathes of office blocks with empty car parks where once they were full of software engineers trying to create the next killer application. I saw my stock options evapourate into nothing more than the cost of my plane ticket home. It is interesting to reflect that San Francisco was built on the back of the California Gold Rush. Someone said to me that the only people who make money in a Gold Rush are the guys who sell picks and shovels - infrastructure to support the prospectors. Sure enough, in the DotCom Gold Rush of the 1990s, it was the infrastructure companies like Cisco Systems who made the nuts and bolts, cables, fibre optics, switches, hubs and routers who got mega-rich. History repeats.
Joel Spolsky is such a good writer. He's just published an insightful post about how history is repeating itself in Information Technology and on the web in particular. Stop what you are doing and go read it. Now. Then in a couple of years when Google is history, you can look smug and say "I knew that was going to happen". For bonus points, who can tell me who the next Microsoft is going to be...? We'll keep it just between ourselves and let's buy a few shares. I think it should be an infrastructure company, though.
One of the coolest things I've seen from Microsoft in a long time is something called Photosynth. The basic idea behind Photosynth is to take a pile of photographs of a location, which it then analyzes and places each image in 3D space, so your photo collection becomes a 3D model of the location you photographed that you can then move around and view in 3D space, seeing how all the photos relate to each other and where the camera was when the photo was taken. It's still being developed and isn't quite ready for use by us at home yet. You can't use it with your own photos at the moment, but you can get a preview of it using some of Microsoft's pre-built photo collections, like the Space Shuttle in the screen shot here, Britain in Pictures, Gyeongbokgung in South Korea, Gary Faigin's art studio, Piazza San Marco in Venice, some lakes in the Canadian Rockies and Piazza San Pietro in Rome. Check out the sample collections and stew in anticipation of the day when this technology is ready for us to use at home! Obviously Photosynth needs a bit of raw grunt and it works really nicely on a TiGra Networks Power User Desktop PC with its Core 2 Duo 64-bit processor and integrated graphics accelerator and of course Windows Vista Ultimate.
I've been tinkering with Groove 2007 a fair bit lately and I've slowly grown to appreciate its virtues to the point where I think it is the hidden jewel in the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Then when I installed it on my shiny new Core 2 Duo x64 system, I was stunned to discover that Groove 2007 doesn't support file sharing workspaces on x64 systems. Watch out for this if you sell Groove to your customers - you need to manage expectations in advance! File sharing is an important aspect of Groove, so I wondered why Microsoft had released the product with a chunk of the feature set apparently missing. With a bit of insider help courtesy of David Overton (thanks, David!) I discovered the reason. Groove file sharing relies on a Windows Explorer shell extension which isn't compatible with x64 systems yet. As there is no version of office specifically for x64 systems, the 64-bit version of the shell extension hasn't been written.
I'm not sure I really buy that explanation. I can't see why the shell extension couldn't be written, even if release schedules meant that it had to be released as an update post-RTM. Core 2 Duo and x64 is only going to become more ubiquitous over time so more and more Office 2007 users are going be bitten by x64 incompatibilities. This is a problem Microsoft is going to have to address sooner or later. I was unable to get a definitive statement about whether the missing functionality would be added in a service pack or update. I hope Microsoft doesn't make us wait until the next version of office.
All is not lost, though. It is still possible to share files within a standard Groove workspace, or a custom workspace that includes the file sharing tool. Those types of workspace don't rely on the Windows Explorer shell extension, so they work just fine. One of the features that I initially liked about Groove was the automatic synchronization of Internet Explorer Favourites across my multiple computers. Unfortunately, that neat and convenient feature is the first casualty when you move up to 64-bit.
By the way, despite my disappointment with the above, I still think Groove is a fantastic tool. I've always felt that file sharing was way more difficult than it ought to be. Groove has solved that problem for me and it does a lot more besides. If you haven't tried it out yet, I highly recommend it. Microsoft Partners have a copy in their Action Pack; other users can obtain a free trial version from the Groove home page.