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According to the BBC News site, Bill Gates got up this morning, went to the toilet and had a cup of coffee. He then had several brilliant world-changing ideas for which we should all be grateful and the BBC love him. Just an average day’s publicity for Microsoft from the Beeb. Then he said some words of wisdom about the next version of Windows… Windows 7.  Bill said it could be released “sometime in the next year or so” although a spokeswoman (who is presumably more in tune with Microsoft’s success rate on delivery dates) later said the new version was scheduled for 2010.

Hang on a minute… Windows 7? Okay, we had Windows 3.0 and 3.1 - straightforward version numbering. Then we had ‘95, ‘98, 2000, XP and finally (eventually) Vista (or ‘Vaster’ as Pete Hampton calls it). If each of those is a new version, that means that Vista was version 8, and therefore the next version should be 9.

It’s possible that Microsoft regarded ‘98 as a sort-of half-release update to ‘95, but that still means the next version would be 8. How do they explain ‘7′?

While we at IBM Lotus have yellow as our brand colour, it seems that Microsoft are aiming for green. At CeBIT last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (yes, the guy who did the whooping monkey dance) claimed that Microsoft are at the forefront of environmentally-sound computing. Ballmer’s claims included the fact that Windows Vista’s idle mode consumes 33 times less power than that of Windows XP, and Windows Server 2008 consumes up to 40% less power than the 2003 version. Notice the mixing of measurements here, one being a factor and one being a percentage, making the second measurement seem more impressive than the first at a first glance… but when you think about it, it’s not.

Now, don’t get me wrong, making computers more energy-efficient is a wonderful thing and I applaud Microsoft for putting this into their strategy. However, let’s think about this in more detail. I can see that making desktop computers and laptops more energy-efficient while in idle mode will reap benefits, since people leave their workstations on when they go for lunch, go for a meeting, go to the toilet, go for a ciggie break, or (if you work from home) go for a quick game of Wii tennis. But Softchoice refute this claim, stating that Vista’s CPU requirements are 243% greater than that of XP, and this alone will knock out any idle time savings.

So how about the servers? Well, if it’s down to idle time the big question would be “why would your servers be idle?”… or “when would your servers be idle?”. And another thought springs to mind… if you servers are idle, is your server strategy wrong?

Taking this further, my thoughts go down two paths. The first is one that I do come back to quite often, the ol’ Domino versus Exchange argument. As I often say, I’m no Exchange expert, so by all means go and ask an Exchange expert about this. My understanding is that Exchange 2007 no longer supports active / active clustering… Exchange 2003 did, but not 2007. Why Microsoft decided to take it out of the product is a mystery to me - I’ve heard it said that no-one used it anyway, but that sounds like a reason to improve it, not yank it out. Domino does support active / active clustering (most Domino customers use this model), meaning that all the servers in a cluster are working and thus they need fewer servers to achieve 24 x 7 operation than an Exchange customer would. Fewer servers is a more green approach, whether they be working their chips off or sitting idle.

The second path is a continuum of the first (are you following this?) and comes back to the ‘fewer servers’ issue. Microsoft solutions run on Windows. That’s it, end of story. IBM solutions run on Windows, but also System i, System p and System z (and Linux, and a few other platforms such as Sun Solaris). Let’s take System i for example - anyone who wants to argue that System i doesn’t scale well beyond the capabilities of Windows either doesn’t know anything about the subject or needs their head tested. We have a Domino customer running 24,000 users’ mail boxes on two clustered System i servers. If they were to move that deployment to Windows servers, I’d say they’d need somewhere between eight and twelve servers (and if, to throw the thought in, they were running Exchange that would mean even more servers because of the clustering requirements).

Okay, it’s not as simple as saying it’s two servers versus eight (or ten, or twelve) because clearly the System i server is a different beast to a Windows server, in terms of both operating system and hardware. But System i servers are no longer the size of an American-style fridge-freezer so the difference in power consumption is not what you’d think. Server consolidation from many small-scale servers to fewer large-scale servers does add up, especially when you start to consider the whole ecosystem of a data centre in terms of cooling and peripheral devices. About a year ago one of my colleagues conducted a cost of ownership study for an Exchange-using customer with around 150 servers, and calculated that they could save about £300,000 per annum in electricity consumption by switching to fewer consolidated large-scale Domino servers.

And this isn’t just about Domino… take WebSphere Application Server - the same applies, you will have the potential to run many more transactions on one System p server than on a group of Windows servers.

IBM’s colour is blue, Lotus’ is yellow… mix them together and what do you get?

It must be lovely being a Microsoft Exchange customer. All your users are happy because they have a nice shiny Outlook client and don’t know any better. However, you have to wonder if the boys in the back-room view it the same way.

I get a lot of mileage out of Exchange’s roadmap (or lack of it). I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject - why should I be, I don’t work for Microsoft, do I? No, I just tell customers to go and ask Microsoft the right questions.

Over the years we’ve been told that we have a slim window of opportunity to tackle Exchange customers. Exchange 5.5 upgrades (upgrades?) to Exchange 2000 for example - the absolute requirement of Active Directory and an upgrade that was really a migration made a lot of customers stop and think. Although there are still a few Exchange 5.5 customers around, that window of opportunity has all but closed, but Microsoft kindly open another. An ‘upgrade’ from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 cannot be carried out in-place… mail boxes have to be physically moved from one server to another. And the server hardware has to be 64-bit-compliant (maybe no biggie these days) and the Windows operating system also has to be 64-bit. All this hassle and then you find out they removed active / active clustering. No wonder Dell where pushing migrations to Exchange - they knew they’d shift more hardware.

Here’s the latest - Ed Brill, as usual, beat me to it. According to Network World and based on advice from Microsoft themselves, “it is impossible to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2008 on a server running Exchange 2007 SP1″. Hang on, haven’t these people just moved big chunks of data from one server to another? Or many servers to many other servers? Now they have to do it again?

Microsoft also has said “rolling upgrades” of failover clusters for Exchange are impossible.

Ed noted that Microsoft say “in-place upgrades are not considered a best practice and that most large IT shops do thorough testing before deployment”. Yes, most IT shops (large or small) do carry out thorough testing before deployment. That’s almost a “duh!” moment. However, I’m sure many thousands of Domino customers would disagree on the other point. While it’s true that many customers would take an upgrade as an opportunity to look at the server estate and potential for consolidation, if you told a Domino customer that they had a mandate to move server code and data from one box to another they’d want to know what the f*** was going on. Exchange customers may accept that kind of stuff as business as usual, but Domino customers don’t.

If all this sounds like great fun, you might do well to consider two things. One is an article on eWeek, Exchange Equals Profit, which discusses the fact that services organisations are going to make a lot of money out of Exchange customers because of all of the above. And it contains one of my favourite quotes from 2007…

“Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations.”

Secondly, what about the future of Exchange? As yet they have no published roadmap beyond Exchange 2007 (other than spending time and money on a Windows 2008 upgrade). The smart money is on a version of Exchange which utilises SQL Server under the hood. This raises all kinds of questions… like what’s the matter with the current architecture, does this mean the architecture Microsoft want me to upgrade to is already dead, and (here’s the biggie) is this going to be a simple in-place upgrade or a migration? We’re talking about Exchange’s current object store (which is a bit like the Access database format) versus SQL Server - do you think that’s going to be straightfoward?

But like I said… don’t listen to me, I’m no expert on Exchange. These are just my observations. Yes, I’d prefer to spend time talking about Notes / Domino and how great they are… there will be blog posts on those topics in the coming weeks. I believe that it actually shouldn’t matter what Microsoft are doing, we at Lotus have better solutions for e-mail and collaboration. Period. In the meantime, make sure you understand the implications of the Exchange roadmap - talk to your Microsoft rep and demand answers.

Poor old Microsoft. In their defence, I sometimes think they get a raw deal - they’re like the first men on the moon, no-one has ever been in the position they’re in with Windows. Who can say how they should proceed? If they stagnate, people will condemn them. If they go too far and push Windows beyond the reach of the common man, people will condemn them. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Then consider this quote from Linux head-honcho Linus Torvalds…

“An operating system should be completely invisible”

Linus actually started off the discussion having a pop at Apple’s OS X Leopard - as the article says “he poured scorn on the modern trend to treat a new version or update of an operating system as a cause for major celebration and marketing.”

And I suppose he’s correct - an operating system is just plumbing, albeit complex and requiring careful handling. This started me looking for an analogy - you wouldn’t have the water pipes in your house on display and so richly decorated, they’re just doing a job and shouldn’t be noticed. Pete Hampton then chimed in with the prospect of Microsoft Pipes needing patching twice a month, and the fact that Apple iPipes would look great but would only connect to an iRadiator and an iTap. Most amusing.

With this in mind, it seems that the knives are still out for Vista (or Vaster as Pete calls it). Ten months ago Dell reconsidered it’s policy of Vista-only on new computers and re-instated XP as an option. All these months later things don’t seem to have changed much. Today it’s 143 days until Microsoft stop selling XP, and it comes to something when someone launches a petition to keep the operating system in the market. That’s what InfoWorld have done.

Quite frankly, we of the Lotus Notes religion are fed up with the great uneducated having a pop at the product. Okay, in past versions there should have been a bit more time spent on the user interface and usability (as opposed to unimportant things like security, business applications, mobile working, backwards compatibility, ease-of-management… all that stuff no-one cares about). The answer to those who bad-mouth Notes is “take a look at Notes 8, and don’t make any more comments until you have”. I know of some people in the media who should take note of that.

Then there’s Microsoft Outlook… everyone loves it, everyone uses it at home (so I’ve been told, although the evidence is strangely elusive when I ask for proof). Outlook is gorgeous and easy to use. It’s slick and secure. Okay, I was taking the piss on that last point. So, given Outlook’s obvious greatness, why would Stan James publish a blog entry covering ‘67 reasons that Outlook sucks‘? I’m sure he’s doing something wrong. 67 things wrong to be precise.

#14 is my favourite, and #22 reminded of a recent blog entry here on dadams.co.uk which in turn talked about Outlook’s “ultimate inbox“. And I’ll trot out my fairly witless comment once again… copying all your sent e-mail into your inbox? I’d call that the “ultimate nightmare”.

Thanks to Ed Brill for passing on this info. Okay, final point, there may be a few things in here which Notes is guilty of too. Stan talks about Outlook taking up 162 mb of RAM. Notes 8 can swallow up a bit more than that… but then Notes 8 does a hell of a lot more than Outlook does. Just enjoy the list.

Earlier in January I commented on the fact that the BBC’s news site was giving Bill Gates and his company (the name escapes me for the moment) a lot of air-time, and seemed to revere Gates as the saviour of the universe. So I was very interested when the following headline popped up in NewsFox (an RSS reader extension for Firefox).

‘MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft’ - as featured in the site bookmarked by every good IT professional, The Register.

“At last” I thought, “someone has noticed”. However, the story isn’t about the BBC giving so much airtime to Microsoft (oh yeah, that’s the company name I was trying to remember) or worshipping Bill’s every move (or movement) - it’s about the BBC’s iPlayer service. iPlayer allows you to catch up on programs you might have missed… a bit like Sky Plus but cheaper and more reliable.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP accuses the BBC (a public body) of “handing a commercial advantage to that company [Microsoft]“. The problem is that the iPlayer is only fully-supported using Internet Explorer on a Windows operating system. Well yes, that does seem a tad Microsoft-centric, doesn’t it?

Pugh continued “What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.”

Visit the iPlayer in Mozilla Firefox and you’ll see the message “Sorry, downloading BBC iPlayer programmes is currently only available in Internet Explorer”. You can actually play the content in Firefox, but you can’t download it. A link takes you to a page which explains the issue further:

“ActiveX, an essential component in making the BBC iPlayer Download Manager communicate with the BBC iPlayer website, only functions in Internet Explorer which is why you must use this browser.”

Well, balls to that - no-one is going to tell me which browser to use. The Register article goes on to discuss the fact that Linux and Mac users don’t have the option of begrudgingly opening Internet Explorer. If they’d used Java, then all three communities would be given a chance to use the technology.

But remember, the BBC are impartial.

This is something I’ve never done before… posted an entry and then changed it completely later the same day. The following is a re-thought entry about the same topic, but a bit more balanced.

I like to peruse the technology news page of the BBC’s news site as I find it one of the best ways to find out what Microsoft are up to and how it’s being positioned to the public. I do subscribe to a couple of Microsoft-centric newsfeeds, but the BBC’s news site is one of the most read on the planet, so it’s important to see what’s going on there.

We’ve had several heated conversations in the office about the fact that Microsoft seem to get a lot of coverage on BBC News… too much, way too much in my opinion. Around the time of the launch of Windows Vista it seemed that BBC News was like Microsoft’s own PR agency and news service rolled into one. To be fair, some other companies get a lot of focus… Apple for example, and I’ll admit to double-standards and say that I don’t have a problem with Apple getting a lot of airtime. IBM get very little coverage in comparison to Microsoft, and the Lotus brand get next to nothing (do a search on Microsoft and IBM and compare the results).

I took this conversation further on a couple of occasions. Shortly before the launch of Sametime 7.5 there were security restrictions and all kinds of problems at the airports in the UK, and I considered how relevant real-time collaboration was. Surely the market leader in real-time collaboration bringing out a new version and tackling some of the issues of business travel was news-worthy. Well, apparently not, yet at that time Internet Explorer 7 was getting a lot of coverage.

The drivers behind what the BBC decide to cover have been explained to me - basically what the BBC think their readership would be interested in and what has a broad appeal. Microsoft and Apple are news-worthy. I was told that “the BBC don’t do product announcements” but I blatantly disagreed with this. Have a read of this article and see if you think it’s tantamount to a product announcement. And to be fair, Apple get the same treatment. Think about that idea of what the BBC’s readership would be interested in… are they given the opportunity to be interested in other options when other software vendors aren’t granted an equal shout? Lotus Symphony, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, should be of interest to consumers and businesses - not just because it’s free but also because of the importance of the Open Document Format. However, there has been no coverage of Symphony.

The one that really had me ranting (I know, hard to believe) was a few years ago when the Beeb ran a story about Microsoft outlining the future of e-mail. They mentioned that Microsoft would introduce e-mail which couldn’t be forwarded or copied to another recipient. At the time of that article that capability had been in Lotus Notes for a few years already, yet Microsoft were getting the credit for a future vision. Microsoft the great visionaries? No, just a case of Microsoft getting the airtime.

So, with this in mind (and here’s the point of all this), they’re offering you the opportunity to post questions for Bill Gates, “one of the most important men in technology over the last three decades”. The man who invented oxygen, food, television and, of course, the internet.

The BBC deliberates your line of questioning… “Perhaps you have always wanted to know what the inspiration was behind Windows. Maybe you want to know what it is like being one of the world’s richest men. Or maybe you are more interested in the philanthropic career he has planned after he steps down.”

I know the answer to what was the inspiration behind Windows… it was the Apple Mac operating system. And as interesting as all those other questions sound, I’d just like to know about the roadmap for Microsoft Exchange (as it’s clearly too big a secret to share with the world). And actually I asked that one (can’t see it being selected), and just for fun I also asked “how many Zunes have you sold and when will you admit that Apple are just completely kicking your backside in that market?”.

The BBC have a charter which includes impartiality, so surely this means that Sam Palmisano will be next week’s guest question-answerer, followed by, oooh, perhaps Larry Ellison the week after. Maybe Steve Jobs (well, that wouldn’t surprise me). But probably not.

One thing I try to avoid is the fairly pointless feature war between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook… not because I think Notes will lose (far from it) but because it detracts from the true business value of the Notes client (collaboration, security, off-line usage, etc).

However (do you know where this is going?)… one thing sure to spark off at least fifty comments on Ed Brill’s blog is any entry that pitches Notes against Outlook. Whether it’s feature comparisons, usability, look ‘n’ feel or the fact that “everyone likes Outlook and uses it at home” the debate becomes heated.

So, with that in mind, I was interested when Ports informed me of an entry in the Microsoft Outlook Team blog. The article describes how an Outlook 2003 user could configure Outlook so that all messages, even those that were sent by the owner of the inbox, could be seen in threads in the inbox. Now, you’ll note it specifically says “Outlook 2003″ so I’d be interested to know if the same procedure is necessary in Outlook 2007 (answers here please).

The solution to this dilemma is to take all of the messages you sent and throw them back into the inbox folder. They call this the “Ultimate Inbox”. Personally I think this sounds like the ultimate nightmare. Your inbox is for incoming e-mails. Good e-mail management says that you should deal with e-mails, place them in folders, mark them for follow-up, archive them, or delete them. A clean inbox says you’re in control and can focus on your real job. An inbox with hundreds of e-mail means it’s out of control. Why the hell would you want to add more e-mails to your inbox?

Okay, perhaps I’m spoilt with Notes 8. The message threads in Notes 8 will draw the e-mails together regardless of where they are, whether they’re ones I’ve sent or ones I’ve received and placed in a folder. And it doesn’t matter where you look at the thread - you could start in a sub-folder or the ‘all documents’ view.

Finally, consider the fact that many people say Outlook is easier to use. Then take note of part of the instructions from the Outlook Team’s article:

“This rule makes copies of outgoing messages so you’ll end up with two copies, one in your Inbox and another in your Sent-Items folder. If you have a small mailbox quota you should prevent Outlook from keeping a copy of outgoing messages in the Sent-Items folder, clear Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder in the dialog below (screenshot omitted). Now you have the Ultimate Inbox!”.

The Ultimate Inbox which is potentially storing two copies of every e-mail. Personally I think Notes 8 offers the ultimate inbox. And we haven’t even started on the subject of searching yet.