It's been great to spend the holiday weekend out and about with the family, and I spent Saturday evening been playing with the pictures I'd shot - I can't say much about the software involved but it's very, very cool. I set my laptop to record Dr Who and the qualifiying for the Malaysian Grand prix (yes I know I've still got to write part 2 of moving to ultimate. ).  

I was watching the Motor Racing in a Window while I was playing with pictures and reading blog posts.  One of the them was Darren's which has a link to a peice in the Grauniad about the Apple's Ads - here in the UK they star David Mitchell (PC) and Robert Webb (Mac). A favourite bit reads

[Mitchell and Webb] are best known for the television series Peep Show... ..  in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

These ads do get under the skin of a few people. Dell have responded in kind; when I was at Tech Ready I reported that someone asked Steve Ballmer about them - his reaction "Given their market share..."   Funny enough that report linked to the same article - or at least to "the wonderful-if risqué Belle de Jour , who has an interesting take on Dr Who using a PC not a Mac" which stemmed from and linked to it. I wonder if Darren reads me, Belle, or if he's taken to reading the Guardian since he became a marketing luvvie. 

That Tech Ready report focused on the shirts we had with Hugh MacLeod's Blue Monster on them - the event felt like "Fly in, change the world a little, Fly home"  hence the title Change the world AND go home instead of the original "Change the world OR go home". It's interesting to look at Steve Clayton's peice on the traction this is getting inside Microsoft.  And this Thursday Hugh announced he had a new client in Microsoft. 48 hours later he was telling us Why his client is dead -  which must be some kind of record for the PR industry. I think I know when I see someone giving the pot a stir, and I'm seeing it here (Hugh went back with a bunch of updates for why this is false - which might have been what he was after). He'd picked up on a post by Paul Graham which said Microsoft was dead due to

1. Google.
2. Ajax.
3. Broadband Internet.
4. Apple

I'm not sure about responding someone who makes it a plank of his argument that he lives in a different world from Microsoft, but lets look at these 4.

There's no denying Google's rapid profits growth and that they're the darlings of the media and of Wall Street. We'll see if things get harder for them. Google's growth depends on taking more advertising away from TV and other media. In the UK we used to have a lot of great TV but now a shrinking pot of advertising to pay for more channels means there's less worth watching. Google may mean the death of quality TV. But not a large scale replacement for desktop applications.

Ajax certainly means you can build decent web applications and Broadband means you can deliver them to consumers. But no one has ever shown me a side by side comparison between an app running in Browser and app running locally where the Browser app was better. Communicator Web Access is an Ajax app. It can't kick off an e-mail, do voice or video, or remote call control, give you presence data in web page or your mail client, or do search-as-you-type for contacts but in other respects it's as good as communicator. Apps where you want data off line or need to show legal complaince or meet freedom of information rules, or mine a collection of shared documents accross large teams don't work so well in an on-line model - so "Road warriers", Governments and large businesses won't store their data in the cloud. Small business and small office/home office users might, do but if you need a Mac, Linux or Windows PC to on which to run the browser, the local application is better. Interesting to wonder how those who work in and around IT view a move of everything into to colossal internet data centres: I don't see the Open-Source community embracing that.

Consumers have grown more demanding than business users. They run games (local processing isn't negotiable), and music, photos, and Video. Music is geared to downloads. It would be quite possible to host the music you own on a server in the cloud, stream it to your PC, or download to your portable player; it would simplify a lot of DRM issues. The songs on my PC total about 800 MB - I can shoot 5 times that volume of photos in a day, so storing photos in the cloud is a big storage and bandwidth problem issue. But every photographer I've ever met wants their own storage. Adobe are dipping a toe in the water with an on-line editor (which presumably will still cost much more in Britain), but it's rudimentary and designed to show people they need a proper editor on their computer. Since I mentioned recording TV: even at 480 line resolution this uses about 1.8GB per hour - you can do the sums for the storage this would need. Giant, free-to-access libraries of broadcast quality TV would reduce the storage requirement, if they existed (which the don't) and who's leading the delivery of TV over IP.

A blinkered desktop-only world is limitting.  So is an only-at-the-server world. The best combination brings together servers - whether local, hosted, or in the cloud - with Personal computing power, graphics and storage.  The best place for the server varies from case to case. There will always be an argument about what form Personal Computing should take. Which brings me to Apple. They've dropped computer from their name and are now about selling designer electronics (Phones which cost $500 with a contract for example) - a space traditionally occupied by the likes of Sony and Nokia. Apple punch above their weight, and their success since Steve Jobs came back proves that "Dead" isn't forever (not a bad theme for Easter). But you can't cite meeting a lot of Apple users - and then argue that Personal computing is dead, which Paul Graham does. 5 paragraphs in he says he lives in a different world to Microsoft - he's a venture capitalist who deals with Californian start-ups who need to prove they "think different". Sometimes the line beween thinking differently and being a "smug, preening tosser" is a fine one.

So here's a list of 10 things which people thought kill Microsoft and haven't

• SCO open Desktop
• Local Area networks
• OS/2
• Client/Server computing.
• Linux
• The Internet
• The Millenium bug
• Netscape
• The NC
• Wishful thinking

Happy easter

On Friday the Windows Server virtualization (WSv) team opened nominations for the Technology Adoption Programme (TAP) for Windows Server virtualization  aka Viridian. The nomination process closes on May 16th

I should explain that a TAP is designed to be an opportunity for collaboration between customers and Microsoft to validate a new product.  This is achieved through product feedback as a result of deployment of pre-release builds in non-production and production environments.  Customers have an opportunity to validate the design and direction of the technology, through discovery of bugs and by submitting Design Change Requests (DCR’s) for the product development team to consider.

The WSv TAP is distinct from any other Microsoft TAP - although it has links with the longhorn server TAP. The WSv TAP is not a marketing or relationship programme: it is strictly an engineering validation programme focused on scenario testing and bug discovery/submission.  There are a limited number of places and it is expected to be over-subscribed - nomination does not guarantee acceptance. Participants will be selected to get the mix of characteristics (planned deployments, LHS experience, location, technology, scenario coverage, etc.) needed by the product team. 

Participating in any TAP requires a significant level of commitment.  The nomination questionnaire, will ask for likely deployment scenarios.  If accepted, it is expected that the customer commit to these deployment scenarios.  In addition, Microsoft asks that participants test, deploy, and provide timely product feedback for each of the major milestone releases; TAP Participants get 24x7 production support for these releases. Other builds may be  be provided for non-production use only and support will not be provided. 

If you would like to be involved please contact me (or your Microsoft Account Manager, if you have one) for the next step.

I sometimes tell the following Joke

"When people ask me what I do for a living, I say 'I work-to-bring-about-the-Kingdom-of-the-anti-christ-on-earth' and they say 'Pardon !' and I say 'I work for Microsoft' and they say 'I thought for a moment you said you worked to bring about the kingdom of the anti-christ', and I say 'Yes that people often think that when I say I work for Microsoft"

OK. with material like that I'm not going to get many bookings on the Comedy circuit. But there is a truth about it. King Charles I said "Never make a defence or an apology until you are accused." Hmmm..

Today in "Why am I working for Microsoft" Hugh MacLeod highlighted a comment from a reader. "One thing you should try and get Microsoft people to do is "STOP BEING SO APOLOGETIC". Whenever you put a Microsoft person on a platform - they always feel the need to apologise, or make awkward jokes. Do Yahoo people apologise for being from Yahoo? Likewise Google? Is this what the Blue Monster thing is about (could it become part of it)?"

I responded to the  "Microsoft is dead" meme on Sunday, Mary Jo Foley linked to it, saying 'Make no mistake: Microsoft is still The Evil Empire. And if my arguments don't convince you, check out Softie James O'Neill's list of the "Top 10 things people thought would kill Microsoft and haven't." ' She called me the Blog Police before. A chap could get a complex about this...  

Hugh also furnished me with a link to this story. Here's a quote.

Who has the right to tell the Microsoft story? Is it the Steve Claytons and the Robert Scobles? Is it Gates and Ballmer? Is it we, the users? Is it all of the above? And what happens when the story diverges? It seems to me that Gates and Ballmer tell one story — that of Microsoft domination at all costs. Clayton and Scoble tell another story — that of an emerging openness and a thirst for innovation. And the users tell a range of other stories, from “Microsoft is still #1″ to “Microsoft is dead.”

To me, the answer is that everyone tells the story, but at the end of the day it’s the story told by the top leadership that will matter

The last point is obvious. What Messers Gates, Ballmer et al say has more weight than an O'Neill, Clayton or Scoble. (A Scoble could be a unit of influence. Not to be confused with the Scoville, unless the poster is very fiery. I probably rate in the 10s of milliScobles. The impact of a Gates or Ballmer would put them in the KiloScoble range.) 

"Who has the right to speak for Microsoft ?" is a tougher question (so are "Where does it stem from ?" and "What duties come with it ?"). Employees have been given the right to tell the story, by management from Bill Gates downwards, with only one duty: Blog Smart. And as Steve points out there 4500+ other bloggers exercising that right. My father believes PR shouldn't allow ordinary employees to speak for the company. Hugh's reader , Richard Stacy has a follow-up post to the "Microsoft is dead" one called PR is dead. It is as my father's generation knew it. We are all in PR now.
I don't see that "divergence" I've never heard Gates and Ballmer calling for anything "at all costs", though I was stunned by what I called "the streets will run with the blood of our enemies" rhetoric at my first big Microsoft conference in 2000 . One senior Microsoft exec taunted us "Do you want to be the ones who put the fuel in Larry [Ellison]'s Jet ?". Ballmer used the story of Muhammad Ali and the Rumble in the jungle and the "rope-a-dope" - Ali spent most of the fight on the ropes soaking up punches before coming back with a decisive punch. A great story, until we got the bit about the fight audience chanting "Ali bomaye!", which means "Ali, kill him!" I can stile remember Ballmer yelling "Microsoft boom-aye-ay " and Microsoft people yelling it back. (Shouting Kill him ? KILL ?? )  But I haven't heard it in 5 years and that pleases me. Gates never spoke like that: Ballmer's fire has not gone out, but he was the one who started this change in tone, these days his metaphors are of building not killing.

Rights and duties aside, other people do tell the story.  Some are neutral, others biased (not always against us), some call us the evil empire. Who's comfortable being called Evil ? We're engineers and marketeers, not mass murderers. Our business isn't based around polluting industrial processes, we don't make landmines or use child labor. People expect us to take it (cushioned no doubt by what they imagine we're paid).  to laugh it off . We "always feel the need to apologise, or make awkward jokes" ?  To get an idea of how we feel, think of Steve Martin in Roxanne doing 20 Jokes about his nose (sorry I don't know if that scene was in Cyrano De Bergerac). "Hi... yeah... SO ... I a work for a Microsoft, you know , the evil empire, We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. Ha ha etc" - <hand wring><awkward laugh>. "Do Yahoo people apologise for being from Yahoo? Likewise Google?"  Try calling them Evil for 10 or 15 years and see.

Microsoft isn't staffed by saints and there are things we should apologise for; the fact that we aten't dead isn't one Here's an additional 
6 things for which we shouldn't make a defence or an apology

• Our products
• The talent outside the company developing on our platforms
• Our market share
• The Money we have to invest developing new products.
• The talent inside the company to develop new products and bring them to market
• The passion we have to keep doing it

And yes those form a cycle. And yes if squander the advantages that the Talent, the market share, and the Money give us or lose the passion to Change the world, we may as well go home. Which is where the blue monster came in.

Technorati tagsMicrosoft, Apple, Google, blue monster 

In a couple of hours I fly off for week working in Athens. I've been talking to prospective evangelists this week and I've been saying we have a better work/home-life balance than some other parts of Microsoft. .I've already spent 20 nights away from my family for work already this year but I'll spend 20 away scuba diving too. This trip should be worth while (I had the option to say "No" so if it turns out otherwise, I only have myself to blame), but 'planes and hotel rooms and the packing and unpacking of bags hold no attraction for me. I've mentioned before, that packing up all the gadgets can be a chore. Hopefully my new Orange SPV E650 will arrive soon after I get back. With it's slide out Keyboard, my Freedom keyboard becomes redundant – I never got in the habit of carrying it which is shame. Steve picked up on a post of Jason's about internet connection sharing, I've been doing this the hard way since I first had GPRS in 2002 (configure phone as an Bluetooth modem, and tell the PC to dial *99#) and it did make wonder if I should wait for a 3G version but I haven't felt the need for 3G so far. Orange's page for the E650 says it IS 3G – I have the details on that page to be right, but Jason has confirmed that it doesn't have UMTS and I'll need to buy a new memory card for it. I'll probably treat the memory card a permanent fixture as I do with my diving camera. It still annoys me that the 4 windows Mobile devices I've owned all use different memory. I've mentioned previously that my current C500 phone doesn't charge from a standard USB charger – it needs the normally unused pin 5 on the mini USB connector shorted to the neighbouring Pin 4, and I soldered my own adapter together. It also needs a 2.5mm-3.5mm adapter to plug my headphones in. The C500 is an HTC design and game of "guess what connectors they'll slap on this one." has been going on since they did the first iPaq for Compaq. The E650 (a.k.a HTC S710) delivers audio from a proprietary USB connector needs a Y cable to output to headphones and charge from a standard cable. I've more-or-less ruled out Bluetooth headphones as a solution to the connector problem. I don't know if can listen to music on my laptop and then take a call from the mobile. They don't seem that great for travel, The C500 turns Bluetooth off in flight mode; even if the E650 turns WiFi, GSM and Bluetooth on or off separately, using Bluetooth in flight is a bit of a no-no. Using one in car doesn't seem very smart either. I dumped my Bluetooth earpiece after a road accident, a call didn't come through when I pressed the button, I looked down at the phone to figure out what had happened, and looked up to see the back of another car closing at about 50 Miles per hour. I've recently gone back but my current Bluetooth setup is more dangerous than holding the phone. The earpiece won't turn off any more, and it beeps it's incoming call beep when the phone finds "NO SERVICE". So old, wired, headphones and a new earpiece looks like the way to go. Hopefully any new earpiece will charge from USB – or failing that at 5 Volts- I put a USB connector onto the "tail" from an old universal transformer to power various 5 Volt devices (primarily my GPS Puck). I've been carrying a USB A-Male to A-Female extension cable -I can plug a memory stick or my Hauppauge TV-Stick in for flexibility or use A-Male to B-Male, Mini-B Male or Camera adapters to avoid carrying 3 different leads. (Incidentally for any Pentax users, K10D connector that the I-USB17 cable plugs into is known as a Sanyo connector at Direct USB). Then I have my home made power adapters for the C500, and universal 5V supply. Unfortunately the USB B and Mini-B adapters both came apart. The Dell D820 had a tighter grip on the A end of the mini B adapter than the body did, and the two parted company. My WD external drive pulled the outer sleeve off the B adapter. I decided I'd get a travel kit with a retracting cable and direct replacements for the broken connectors. I found one from Lindy which had the bonus of connectors to turn a USB cable into a phone or Network (RJ11 or RJ45) lead. I can pop my headphones and extra connectors in a pack which takes the same space as the LAN cable I had in my bag. It comes with 10 year warranty, which is just as well because the first time I plugged in the phone connector it pulled apart. Lindy were very good about replacing it, but there do seem to be a lot of badly made connectors out there.   I'm taking the SLR camera on this trip. It's battery charger can share a mains cable with the Laptop's power brick, but I'll just take the spare battery – I'm getting about 750 shots to a battery and I won't shoot that many this week. Camera, lenses, laptop, cables all fit into one carry on bag with 5 days clothes and toiletries . Who says I can't travel light ?

Update: I had to leave the SLR behind - for the stupidest reason - no body cap. It only fits in my carry on luggage if I take the lens off the body and the body cap is off leading a life of its own. So I took the "diving" camera ad its charger. The Lindy USB kit has proved its worth - there have been huge problems with the wireless network here, but plenty of wired ports - providing you have a cable. I do - for once.

Back in February I wrote about IBM and their attempts to throw a spanner in the works for the Open XML used in office 2007

The key bits of the story are

• IBM has long campaigned for Microsoft to open up it's file formats - which we have done in Office 2007 with the Open XML format.
• IBM thrown its weight behind Open Document Format, and against Open XML.
• ODF has been ratified by ISO
• IBM lobbies governments to use de-jure standards (e.g.from ISO) for document formats,
• Despite opposition from IBM the other 20 members of the ECMA standards body ratified Open XML and passed it to ISO for their adoption
• IBM is actively trying to persuade governments that only ISO standards count and ECMA standards are somehow not truly standards.
  Anyone who accepted this would - at the moment - be locked out of buying Microsoft Office, or the products from Novell and Corel .
• IBM is trying to prevent ISO from adopting Open XML as a parallel standard to ODF, by lobbying ISO voting members like the British Standards institute.

We have launched an on-line petition which we will present to the BSI to show there is support for Open XML. If you think it would be better for Open XML to be approved by ISO  please consider signing it

Technorati tags: Microsoft, office, OOXML, ODF, ECMA, IBM, FUD, ISO

The Serendipity fairy has been at it again.

Earlier this week we sent out the Welcome messages to some new MVPs . Although I don't work that closely with Nathan Winters, it's still nice to see his his work with the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility user group (next meeting April 19th) acknowledged. Arthur Pounder who works more closely with me was recognized for his work too, as was Andy Malone

Last week Mary Jo Foley posed a question "Will Microsoft attempt to extend any kind of blogging/transparency crackdown to its Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), featured communities and other constituencies, claiming that it's for everyone's best?"

To put that quote in context she paid the 4,000 a compliment - she told us we're achieving what we want to with our blogs

I read the thousands of Microsoft MSDN and TechNet blogs... ...many of them have been invaluable in helping me — and, I'd wager, Microsoft partners and customers — better understand Microsoft.

But, she went on,

The real question, to me, is whether Microsoft employees will be encouraged to continue being transparent.
With many of Microsoft's old management regime retiring/quitting/moving on, will Microsoft employees be allowed to keep blogging as openly as they have been? Will self-policing set in? Or, worse, will bosses start cracking down on employees who dare to acknowledge the existence of a service pack, a manager's resignation or a shift in strategy?

(The link in there is to a post where she quoted me before. Self policing won't set in. It's there now. )
Let's hit this one head on. Will we be allowed, let alone encouraged to be keep helping journalists, partners and customers better understand us ? If we turn into the kind of company that worries that people might understand us then I (and many others) will want out. Some would think we're deluding ourselves, but most people here think the better we're understood, the more we'll be liked and the more product we'll sell. There are many people who want the unvarnished truth - not beautifully crafted PR. The occasional gaffe is the price of transparency, but I don't see "any kind of blogging/transparency crackdown " The mantra BLOG SMART will be repeated many times and people who aren't smart will suffer the consequences.

Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity. Robert Heinlein

What if our MVPs and communities can't BLOG SMART ? Would we attempt to extend this mooted crackdown to them ? There are things that one can say or do which aren't compatible with being an MVP - I don't think anyone's compiled a list, but if your status gets you access to confidential information and you make it public, you'd expect to lose that status. I wouldn't want to  manage what Andy, Arthur or Nathan say - not that we could anyhow : an independent who just parrots the Microsoft line isn't independent or valuable. Can you imagine ... MVP writes "Feature X sucks". Microsoft says "You said something Bad, you can't be an MVP" - what a fantastic way to turn allies into enemies !  

Mary Jo has also picked up on the Open XML petition which I mentioned a couple of days ago. And she suggest that there may be a lack of transparency on that. But I'll make that my next post.

I'm back from in Athens, we had a 2 day evangelism summit (a synod ??) followed by after 3 days of Longhorn training, and those of us who will be out talking about Windows Server "Longhorn" got to spend time with a top presentation skills coach who works a lot with our US staff. It meant listening to a lot of different presenters and seeing a lot of Powerpoint. The Longhorn stuff used the Microsoft learning templates which were familiar to me from my past life as a trainer in the 1990s; the summit slides were a bit more of a mixed bag, and one of my colleagues mailed us this the link to this page on "Presentation Zen"  - which in turn has some interesting links ("How Yoda and Darth Vader would present" is well worth a look) . This video by Don McMillan is the pick of them.

I also picked up a link to Seth Godin's "Really bad Powerpoint and how to avoid it", to summarize one a key passage, Instead of communicating, Powerpoint is used 

• As a teleprompter  - "Did your audience really have to come all this way to a meeting to listen to you read the slides? Why not just send them over ?". In such a session I think about how getting there ate into my personal time.  
• As a record of what was presented - "The presenter is avoiding the job of writing a formal report".
• As memory aid for the audience.  "if you read your slides, and then give the audience a verbatim transcript of what you read, what could be wrong with that?" - actually we're constantly under pressure to do this.

Another page on "Presentation Zen" - not the only one there critical of how Microsoft people present -  says "Leaders use speaking opportunities to communicate their vision in a crystal clear fashion (otherwise, what's the point of getting on stage?).  You read it and you think, "well surely anyone uses speaking opportunities to communicate (whatever it is) in a crystal clear fashion ..?" and then to the sound of smacking your own forehead you realize that they don't - and you're left asking "why did they get on stage ?"  And that leaves a couple of interesting questions. "Does leadership depend on the ability to make things crystal clear ?"  and "Does technology hinder communication rather than help it"

Bonus link Interestingly Presentation Zen is critical of Bill Gates' presentations, but I find his e-mails are a model of clarity. I find Steve Ballmer isn't quite as good in e-mail, but is the better of the two on stage. Jason Langridge has some comments on the whole "Death by Powerpoint" thing and the advice he got from Steve B. He also has the obligatory link to Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 session. If you've never seen it, you should.

Update / Bonus link 2. Darren's thinking about this (not for the first time) - he must have been writing today's post at the same time as I posted mine.

As we get closer to the public beta of Longhorn, it might be a good time for me to start talking about it.

I've got a ton of good Longhorn information in a Groove workspace on my laptop. They chap behind that is visiting Europe – I'm spending a most of next week with him, but if you are a Technet subscriber he is presenting THIS THURSDAY EVENING at the Institute of Directors Hub, London EC2M 1NH If you want to go don't hang about, Register for the event now . Yes I know it's short notice.

Over the next few weeks I'll drill into some of the areas below but here is a very high level (and non-exhaustive) view.

There are 3 "Pillars" to the work we're trying to do - most of the improvements fit into one of these:

• Improving control over your server and network infrastructure. Which means less firefighting and more focus on business needs.
• Protection for your environment; Continuing the process of Hardening the operating system, to provide a solid foundation on which you can run and build your business
• Providing the flexibility to create an agile and dynamic datacentre to meet your changing business needs.

The changes are concentrated in 7 technical areas.

Anywhere application access; we have a Gateway to provide access to Terminal Services from outside the corporate network without the need for a VPN. Terminal services can now make individual applications available rather than a whole desktop.

Sometimes it's useful to fit Terminal Services into a broader virtualization picture; it virtualizes the presentation of applications. Softgrid virtualizes the whole environment applications run in. And then we can virtualize either the Desktop PC (with Virtual PC) or the Server – which brings us to

Windows Server Virtualization : I'm already meeting people who think less about "Servers" – as physical boxes, more "workloads" – the services they provide. In a "lights out" data centre it doesn't matter much if the server is physical or virtual, you manage it in the same way, but consolidating to fewer boxes saves cost. It's easy to put virtual servers (workloads) on different machines, either to bring new services on line or for resilience

High availability is another theme – we'll see greater use of clustering with Longhorn

Branch office Scenarios – this builds on the work we've done with Windows server 2003 R2, and includes things like the Read-only domain controller and the Bit-Locker technology from Vista to help with sites where the server may not be physically as secure. Changes to the TCP/IP stack allow servers to get much better throughput on WAN links.

Security and Policy enforcement – The Windows Vista client already has the support for Network Access Protection (NAP) Longhorn provides the server side. We have Auditing for Active directory and some improvements to the PKI and Rights Management Services

Web and applications Platform – we've made it easier to develop and especially deploy web applications

Server Management Power shell is now part of the OS, but a lot of the GUI tools have been rewritten. We have a new installation choice "server core" which pares the OS down to the absolute minimum - No GUI shell, minimal services etc.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Windows, Longhorn, Beta

Update. Thanks to Stephen spence for pointing out I had the wrong registration link.

Teething troubles with the new phone have proved to be pretty minor. I'm finding more things to love about this phone.

I've got one major annoyance: on the C500 with Mobile 2003 I could go to Settings/Phone/Call options and program the Microsoft voice mail number with my account code and Pin as +44118909xxxxPyyyy#Pzzzz# (where xxxx is the voicemail number, yyyy is my extension and zzzz is my pin, so dials , P inserts a pause and then it enters my number followed by the hash sign, pauses for the password prompt, enters the pin and another #).
On the E650 with Mobile 6 only + and digits are allowed.

I'll forgive the device this for a four of it's mail features. Here are the first three, I'll save the other one for another post.

 On the left we can see a Rich Text mail ... I like the way Exchange 2007 does these mail notifications - and I let deleted items build up it had got to 5660 items by this afternoon.
In the middle - I've gone back to the tools menu at my inbox: notice I can set my Out of Office from my phone. The number of times I've set off for a trip and realized I've forgotten to do it doesn't bear thinking about.
I selected Empty deleted items from the tools menu and on the right you can see the warning I got. It was interesting to watch the deleted items folder in Outlook as the messages drain away. About this time of year 2 years ago, I was on holiday, without my laptop checking (and deleting) mail from my phone and my mailbox hit its limit. I had to pay to clear my deleted items from a cybercafe.

I'm not quite sure when it appeared, but this evening I noticed a link on the restore dialog box in Vista "Learn how to restore from backups created on Older versions of Windows", there are 32 and 64Bit versions. I considered using a Virtual Machine on Vista to read .BKF files made under Windows XP ... no need any more.

I'm tapping this in from the qwerty keypad on the E650 - which may turn out to be a masochistic thing to do.... My notes go into OneNote Mobile and are all bback to OneNote on my laptop. I can then hit "blog this" in OneNote: like Darren I love OneNote - it's a change-the-way-you-work thing. Obviously tapping things out here doesn't do everything - links go in later and only a few symbols (/+!@?*#-_:;',.) are accessible without diving into the 'insert symbol' menu.

I've put Voice Command onto the phone: this isn't a new application but it didn't work on the C500 - so it's been a revelation to me. It's supplied with the kit we give OEMs to build the phone software but it is not on the E650 as supplied, which is a shame. Out of the box the phone supports voice tagging contacts like the C500, but it's a pain. The tags aren't sync'd back into Outlook/Exchange, so I was never going to record tags for everyone in my address book: and Voice Command means I don't need to. I say 'call Jackie at work' or 'call Eileen on mobile'. And when I add a new contact on my PC they're voice dialable right away.

Of course other mobile phones can do voice recognition even the awful Ericsson I had back in 2002 had voice tagging. It reinforces my posts about how stupid desk phones are for the money and how keypad-driven voice-mail is an anachronism.

I expect to use voice command's media controls in the car - for now they are the phone's party trick - the child in me sees great fun to be had issuing play commands by Bluetooth from another room.

Here's a quick map of what you can say to voice command:

Bias declaration: I've been a fan of Windows Mobile since before we started using the name. But having picked up my new Orange E650 aka HTC S710 codename “Vox” I'm left thinking "Boy oh boy Mobile 6 devices are a jump forward". You could dismiss some of the changes as cosmetic, but I find they really help readability especially with the new screens – as with my new camera, small screens seem big step in the last couple of years. Jason’s got a run down of the changes in mobile 6 and a demo on youtube. Instead of repeating his work,here's a run down of my first few hours with the E650

Orange activated my existing number on the new phone less than an hour after I collected it - about 12 noon. Vista’s Mobile Device Centre set itself up automatically when I plugged the phone in. That walked me through setting up Server and let me get the certificate needed for corporate WiFi access (a bit of a fiddle), and I installed OneNote mobile and Communicator mobile: both worked first time (although communicator was wrongly configured).
I had to do a telephone interview at 4PM – when I was sorting out a problem with my car. I needed the other interviewer to set up a 3 way call. I tried to IM him (and discovered the configuration gremlin). So I used the (new) GAL look-up to find his phone number and call him. The candidates CV was in a word document in my inbox, so I downloaded that and was able to view it on the phone while we were talking to him. I wanted to make some notes, so I switched to speaker phone, slid out the keyboard and tapped them into onenote. Fantastic. When I got home I setup the Bluetooth pairing with the laptop, syncing my interview notes into OneNote on my PC, and put together my own home screen layout, finally I tried to charge the phone with a standard cable and my Swiss Word Adapter – success! no more special cables. I picked up mail over the home WiFi network – including one from expansys saying they’ve shipped my memory card, Y adapter – which will live in the car with a double USB car power adapter (which will also power my GPS puck with the lead pictured here), and. All I have to do now is sort out a satisfactory Bluetooth hands-free solution – the result of an unsatisfactory one is pictured here

I compared the amount of stuff I used to carry and what I have now. So I’ve taken 4 points.

• What I had the day after I got my original iPaq in 2000
• What I had the day before the first Smartphone arrived in 2001 
• What I've had for longest (the C500 – functionally not much different from the original SPV, but worked better)
• What I have now.

So is anything wrong with the new phone ? I don't like having to buy an adapter to connect headphones or changing my memory card again – what was the point of mini-SD? At 140g it is a shade heavy (conventional wisdom says the optimal weight and size for a phone is about 100g and 100cc) . Installing communicator doesn't enable IM functions from Contacts or Mail. And Mail doesn't support voting buttons ... not much really.

Hugh's Cartoons seem get straight to the heart of the matter. Service functions like Accounting, IT, Personnel, PR and Purchasing don't deliver product and they don't influence customers to buy it. They are there to help the others to do get on with their jobs.  How do you assess whether they're delivering or not ?

When I first heard about "Corps I/O" I had no idea what it meant or why I should be interested. I learnt that it wasn't I/O in the sense of input/output but "Core-infrastructure optimization". Still: who cares it's just a Buzz-phrase... isn't it ? I've talked before about confusing language making people switch off. Late last year Eileen got someone to explain it in plain language for the whole our team. If you're work in IT, this model is about how well an IT department does its job, whether your job is worth doing and will it be there in a couple of years. It came up again last week in Athens. So here's my take on it....

The ideas in our model aren't new, we've used other work in the field - notably by Gartner. However some of documents are still written in "Gartner-speak."

1. It's not about the brand or version of technology you use. Buying the latest from Microsoft isn't optimization. Old technology, can be done well and new technology can be done badly.
2. Looking at an organization's skills and the ways it uses product features (its processes) we can assess how well IT is optimized.
3. We have 4 levels of classification "Basic", "Standardized" ,"Rationalized" and "Dynamic" - personally I find these names unhelpful. Our infrastructure datasheet puts more helpful labels on them.
   Basic="We fight fires",
   Standardized="We're gaining control",
   Rationalized="We enable business",
   Dynamic="We're a strategic asset"
4. A worrying number of companies are stuck at the "Basic" level.

We have an on-line self assessment, but here's a "pop quiz" way to see where you sit. Complete the ten sentences below; the more your answers come from the right the more "basic" your level, the more they come from the left the more Dynamic.

When the subject came up in Athens, one of the other evangelists said "Our IT professionals don't like to talk about it - they see it as a stick to beat them". To me that sounds like saying "Sure we could deliver a better service, we just hope if no-one talks about it we'll keep getting away with the status-quo".

More information here.

I don't normally get involved in rumours, preferring to keep to facts, but news seems to be out at a big new area of communications. As you might have seen on Eileen's blog we kept the last big communications thing (response point) quiet till the last minute.

My Colleague Kevin Remde has the news ...