BOOM: IBM Is Now Worth More Than Microsoft

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At first, this whole thing comes off as a company entering legacy mode. Microsoft reminds me of the RIAA, MPAA and the newspaper industry. They clearly feel the edge is blunted and their technology is dying. They are unable to adapt. As a result they are engaging in a strategy of sue and destroy.

Back to the blog post from the executive. One of the complaints is that Google purchased YouTube in 2006 and has made it difficult, if not impossible, for search engines to index the content. Apparently this is a progressive action.

I do believe that when you are as big as Google, you have a responsibility to allow openness of this nature. However, I’m rather disturbed by the complaint. Essentially, Microsoft is saying that if Google were to put in a robots.txt file on a website they own to block search engines from indexing content this should be illegal. Uhm, what?

A great many people have employed the use of robots.txt throughout the web’s history to prevent indexing of pages. Could Microsoft’s complaint set a precedent for companies complaining about the use of robots.txt to force the hands of web masters?

I’m just asking the question. Sometimes I wish Microsoft would just quit whining and get back to making great software like they used to. It seems more and more that will just not happen. When a big company out-innovates them or outsmarts them in business, their first reaction is to sue.

Reminds me of the RIAA, MPAA and the newspaper industry. Get back to solving hard problems, Microsoft. Stop wasting your time and money on lawsuits. Are you a software company or a whiny bitch?

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If the big three tech companies were characters in Back to the Future, they would be…

Microsoft == Biff
Apple == Marty McFly
Google == Doc Brown

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If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon.  What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

I brought it up in #morphix to Gandalfar, one of my trusted open source advisors.  We debated it shortly and he brought up several good points.  While this may happen, the scheme is likely to fall apart quickly.  The community is the resolver of situations like this.  If the community finds a bug and offers a fix for the problem, then the developer will find themselves in a political combat situation.  They would likely try to stifle the fix with some ridiculous excuses and/or start to censor discussion of the subject over mailing lists or on forums.  Speculation could be raised about the issue and ultimately, people could start to fork the project elsewhere, unless the license of the project disallows that.  In the long run, the community would resolve the situation by simply offering a new solution.

So while it could theoretically be achieved for short-term gain, in the long run the community makes the approach unsustainable.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, I think we all know that closed source entities often engage in this practice.  I could point out several examples that I have absolute knowledge of this happening, but I don’t think I have to.  I’m not completely absolving open source from this either – look at what “official distributions” do in some situations… Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell (SUSE) for example.  But in those situations, if you didn’t want to pay to upgrade the operating system and still resolve your situation, we all know that with the right application of effort and skill you could overcome it.

All in all, this whole thought process ends up with a positive note about open source.  If it’s broken, you can fix it yourself or work with others to make it happen.  The community – that incredibly large, global groupthink – keeps it all honest.

Or, you can put all your money and eggs into a closed source basket and find out you’re getting screwed when it’s too late.

It’s all about choice, right?

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One of the industry buzzwords that needs to go to the grave is the user “experience.”

Don’t quote me here, but I recall this buzzword being developed by Microsoft as part of the marketing campaign behind Windows XP.  XP was supposed to be “experience” or “expert” or “Xtra stuPid marketing,” I’m not sure.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an XP hater.  But I’m definitely a hater of the term “experience.”

The user interface is just that, an interface.  The term “experience” has its roots in the passive voice.  Somewhere in there you’ll find that the user “experience” for computing generally sucks.  It’s just a nicer way of saying “our user interface sucks, but it provides an experience.”

Whatever.  Drop it.  Look, other computing companies are just as guilty on this one (I’m looking at you RIM and Apple), but the fact is – everything great on the Internet is ruined by salespeople and marketers, period.

This is just one example of many.

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At WWDC 2009, I stood up in a session on Snow Leopard server and lightly rattled Apple‘s cage about its poor scaling guidance for the product. They were spending a great deal of time talking about the benefits of Wiki Server 2, but there was little to take away from the session on what to tell any prospective customers regarding cost.

I think in the Apple world, there’s this unspoken rule of “whatever’s good enough” to suffice for an environment. That’s fine, but what I’d really like to be able to do is recommend a solution that will do the job.

In the past, Microsoft was very good about providing specific scaling guidance. Around the Dark Ages (which I define as the day SQL Server 2005 came out and every product hence), Microsoft pulled back on several things. Most notably, they stopped providing specific scaling guidance on products and very clear documentation.

The documentation that was offered with each product varied and was mostly vague and notional. Once my Microsoft TAM asked me as part of some kind of survey if I thought that blog content provided by Microsoft developers and whatnot could be considered as official documentation. It seems like some folks within the organization believe this to be so, but Goddess forbid you end up in the India support organization… where only the script in front of them is official documentation.

Back to Apple. They provide documentation and it’s usually quite good. They provide fairly extensive documentation. Sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s still documentation. It’s something to point to and say, “See here, it says this should function this way.” That’s a nice level of comfort. What they do NOT provide is scaling guidance. They will never ever tell you, “It will take x amount of Snow Leopard servers to run Wiki Server 2 for 10,000 users doing y amount of data.” Why not? I suspect it’s because they don’t know.

As Apple becomes more and more relevant in the enterprise, this has to change. If I’m going to propose an Apple-based solution to any of my prospective customers, I have to have something to work from. It cannot be “we’ll just throw some servers in there, watch it, then buy more.” Most customers… at least the government for sure… do not like that approach.

Ironically, I started this post as a complaint against Microsoft for providing not just vague information on this… but a box full of vague smoked up with an opaque fog on the glass.

That sucks, guys. Stop contributing to the failures of the IT industry and fix it.

I’m looking at you too, Apple.

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Paul Thurrott posted a nice attaboy to the MSN folks today for releasing a wallpaper product that will check Microsoft for updates to your operating system.

Get ready folks, I’m about to show my ass again.

Are you KIDDING ME?  Paul Thurrott has obviously never had to manage a network beyond his own house.  Microsoft commonly releases updates through Windows Update and if you’re a Windows admin worth your salt, you’ll know that it’s wise to wait on many of these updates until you’re sure they’re not going to fry your systems.  Indeed, many enterprises flat out block Windows Update and only deploy them when they’re ready to support any mishaps.

Any of you who think Microsoft cannot commit mishaps in an operating system update is just a fracking idiot.  Period.  Don’t even bother talking to me.

So now these MSN goons have released software that lets you bypass your enterprise security measures on Windows Update?  THANKS ASSHOLES.  If you’re running an enterprise network, please take a look at this software package that your users are RUSHING OUT THERE TO DOWNLOAD before they gank up your network.

This is basically WALLPAPER that can update your OS?  Great.  Another background app.  Another systray app.  Another useless waste of time and resources from a company that should be spending its time fixing Exchange 2007 instead of releasing useless garbage that grants enterprise users free license to bypass their IT department.

THANKS AGAIN, MICROSOFT!

You have so jumped the shark.

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Let’s face it.  Documentation sucks.

I’ve traveled around this country and seen many an IT environment.  All of them have one thing in common: the documentation about the environment sucks.  It’s in such a sad state that should anything happen to anything, nothing would be recoverable.

We’re guilty of it in our own environment.  I’m not going to sit here and disparage everyone else’s IT environment without realizing that it’s a problem where I work too.  I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why this documentation is in such a sad state and come to a few conclusions.  I suspect these conclusions aren’t a surprise to anyone.

• The staff is overworked.  They have no time to sit in your meetings, listen to the managers and customers rant and rave about how nothing works right (funny how that not-listening thing travels both ways), or get all of their assigned work done to begin with.
• Documentation is boring.  There is nothing glamorous about writing a Word document about how you configured a paging file.
• After writing the documentation, maintaining it is a real bear, especially in an age when the corporation that owns 90% of your data center farts a new patch daily.  What?  Tuesdays?  Oh man, that’s just for OS patches.  Try running some enterprise software sometime.  (NOTE TO SELF: Bitch about Exchange 2007 more, because that obviously hasn’t sunk in yet).
• Too many fires to put out.  Remember that not-listening-is-a-two-way-street crack?  Yeah well, since management didn’t listen about your needs, you’re working 70 hours this week to fix all the crap that broke.  Oh yeah, don’t forget to document what you did to fix it.  (Now it’s 90 hours).

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

So, now that I’ve listed reasons why you do not have the documentation, let’s talk about what happens when you do not sit near the data center and have questions about what’s what out there.

• Need to find out what port a server is hooked up to?  Scan through your endless amounts of PSTs on the file share (haha!) to discover what port was assigned two years ago.  Fail.  Look for the document.  Oh!  Wait.  Fail that too.  No docs.  Ask someone who is sitting in the data center.  How the hell should they know?  They’re busy and don’t have time to help you.  Oh, by the way, that cable isn’t labeled anyway.  Look it up in the docs, dumbass.  Yeah, what docs?  Time to get in the car and drive over to look for yourself, cursing all the way that you have no documentation.
• Need switch zoning information for that fabric?  See above.  At least you can login to the switch remotely… until Java fails.  Drive over.
• Time to build a server.  Time to put it into production.  What do you mean it’s got a bug we fixed two years ago?  Oh, shit.  We forgot that NoServerTimeZoneComp registry key.  It’s always the Mac users that make your Windows admin lives hell, right?  No, buddy, it’s because you didn’t follow the documentation.  Uhh, what documentation?

I think I’ve stated my case.  Now then.  I want software that can overcome the burden of writing this documentation and I want it available in damn near real time.  So, here goes.

I want data center management software that:

• …is object-oriented like C.  I want to be able to instantiate a new instance of a Dell 2950 and define its properties – like what rack it’ll be in and what U numbers it occupies.
• …can perform discovery on that new Dell 2950 and figure out the rest of the properties for the object (a la service tag number, CPU, RAM, maintenance left on contract, etc.)
• …can allow me to connect the network to a specific switch port by dragging and dropping a line like Visio.
• …can allow me to connect it to a storage area network like the network connection above.
• …can produce a 3-dimensional rack drawing (the rack itself should be just another object, since we’re object-oriented and the server objects are just properties) that details every network connection, fibre hookup and power connection.
• …can, upon sensing a failure from SCOM 2007 or NetIQ, label each server and cable that has failed to look for common properties in an anomaly (because it’s always the network’s fault).
• …is able to produce a server installation document by right-clicking on it and selecting “current state documentation.”  I want it in PDF format so I don’t have to open fracking Microsoft Word ever, ever, ever again.  I want it to be able to spot every piece of software that is loaded on the server.  I want it to be able to tell me every patch and registry tweak that has been applied to that server since I racked it and installed the operating system.
• …is able to alert me when servers are about to run out of maintenance.
• …is visual enough that the customers can use a dashboard of sorts to view some of the same properties and elements that I need to see.

I think you see the challenge here.

Now I ask you…

…why doesn’t this software exist?

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So, I don’t mean to continue to rail on Vista like I did about a year ago, but something absolutely ridiculous happened to me today.

I’ve been doing some hard drive recovery for my dad’s old NEC Windows 98 system. (I had to do some recovery on another system as well, but that one didn’t go so well).

So I finally get the hard drive extracted via the handy dandy Newer Technology Universal USB 2.0 Hard Drive Adapter… which took about 5 hours to copy a little under 4 gigabytes. This is after I had to research why “Program Files” and “Windows” would not copy… only to discover that User Account Control prevents *any* copying or manipulation of *any* Program Files or Windows directory on *any* media. Instead of doing the copy, it would just stop without warning or dialog. Okie, whatever.

Anyway, so I get the 4 gigabytes extracted and onto the desktop. Now to burn it. I slip a dual-layer DVD into the drive and drag the folder to the drive location. It proceeds to do what seems to be another copy process. Only this time it says it’s going to take another damn 5 hours. For WHAT? To move the same goddamn files from my Desktop to a temp folder so you can burn it? Give me a fucking break.

So, I go away and finish watching Iron Man. When I come back, that 5 hour counter has now moved up to 1 and a half DAYS. Are you KIDDING me? Just to move files from my Desktop to a temporary location to burn to a disk (which is a stupid endeavor anyway)?

Screw that. I reboot into OS X, copy the files off my Vista64 partition and burn it to a DVD disk in minutes.

Really, Microsoft. What should have taken a mere few hours has literally taken me all day.

Fail. In a big way. Not just did it fail with the UAC issues on two directories I’m trying to rescue, it fails trying to even rescue data onto a DVD disk.

I’m so irritated with it, I’m surprised if that partition will even remain on my system.

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Anyway, I’ve had something nagging at me for a while now and I think I’ve just figured it out. Powershell is Microsoft‘s answer to having a dumb command line through the Win95 – Win2003 years and it’s quite powerful, as the name implies. Microsoft likes it so much that they makes most of the Exchange 2007 administration efforts in the Exchange Management Shell, a derivative of Powershell that contains Exchange-specific cmdlets.

I’ve long bemoaned to our internal support personnel… and… well, probably my Microsoft contacts too… about how discombobulated Powershell actually is. It’s like it was designed with no standard in mind for the commands – each developer wrote their own cmdlet with their own switches and methods to do things the way they saw fit.

But it’s actually worse than that. Now I’ve come to realize that the problem with managing Exchange from the shell is not only because of the lack of standardization, but because a great deal of this SHOULDN’T be done in a shell command. I’ve heard that Powershell was designed to attract Linux admins who prefer the command line and that’s fine. But I do not know of a Linux admin who would type a command to set a disclaimer on the entire Exchange organization, but rather he/she would edit a config file of some kind. That way, not only would the disclaimer setting be readily apparent and visible, but it wouldn’t take some obscure command to be executed to show me the meat of the option.

What tripped this realization was this “power tip” when I just went into the Exchange shell on one of our servers:

Tip of the day #58:

$Condition = Get-TransportRulePredicate FromScope
$Condition.Scope = "InOrganization"
$Condition2 = Get-TransportRulePredicate SentToScope
$Condition2.Scope = "NotInOrganization"
$Action = Get-TransportRuleAction ApplyDisclaimer
$Action.Text = "Sample disclaimer text"
New-TransportRule -Name "Sample disclaimer" -Condition @($Condition, $Condition2) -Action @($Action)

Why am I not looking in a config file for this information? Fail.

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