Oh no. Not again.

MS Office file formats change.

Didn't they learn the last time? Yes XML is great and all, but yikes!

Begs the question: if a switch to XML reduces the file sizes by 75%, what sort of junk were they putting in there before?

Categories: XML, Office 12, Office.

Bad, Richi, bad

Yes, yes, it's true, I wilfully mischaracterised (or at least oversimplified) what Curt Monash said. But the nature of IT Blogwatch is to be short and punchy, even at the risk of being "cavalier."

Here's what I think about Curt's later points:

1. I don't see that hosted anti-spam providers justify their fees based on bandwidth costs. It's a factor in their stated benefits, but by no means a primary one. Simply, hosted providers mitigate the TCO of running your own anti-spam and AV setup. Also, their customers get the benefit of their expertise and economies of scale.
   
   
2. Full email outsourcing didn't take off a few years back because Exchange is too expensive to scale up. It's really hard to get the economies of scale using Exchange. Alternative technologies weren't available. The closest the industry got was HP OpenMail, which became "unavailable" at just the wrong time. Nowadays, we have Scalix, which seems like it would be a great solution for an Exchange-like hosted solution. "Outlook Dialtone," as I used to say.
   
   
3. IMHO, false positives need to be 0.01% or less. For a typical user, that equates to roughly one "lost" message every couple of months.

Obviously, I didn't achieve a PhD at age 19, but I still manage to con David into paying me to talk about this stuff ;-)

Categories: spam.

Haloscan trackbacks have been added to this blog.

Nokia 770: flame on!

Hello, Slashdot readers. If you're coming here to find out what I think of the 770, you'll want to read this post first. I got one or two negative comments about my mini-review. Rather than hide my thoughts in another comment, I'm going to play them out front 'n' centre...

I'm told that I've misunderstood Nokia's positioning. I disagree. I sat in the press conference next to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and we both thought the positioning was askew. IMHO, the positioning is one of the key things that's wrong with the 770 right now. If Nokia's going to market this thing as a home-based device, it's just not going to take off as a mass-market success.

I'm told I didn't check my facts. The facts aren't really in dispute here. I've seen one in the flesh. Two, actually. I doubt there something drastically crippled with the two units I exercised nine hours ago.

Us geeks may love the concept of the 770 (like I said, I wanted to like it, I really did). We may revel in its "revolutionary openness" as one anonymous commenter put it. We may even think that US$350 is a chump-change-cheap impulse buy (although I reckon that's stretching it a bit). Unfortunately, geek-lust does not a successful product make. Look at the Treo 600/650 line. A huge proportion of geeks have these, but is PalmOne a huge success?

One final thought: items of consumer electronics very, very rarely become successful despite poor marketing. Don't forget: marketing is more than just the "outbound" art of advertising, PR, and so on——it's also the "inbound" art of setting user requirements, positioning, and planning. It seems to me that Nokia has the positioning wrong.

Categories: Nokia 770, Nokia, 770, Linux.

Nokia 770 Platform Sucks

[Updated: clarified my position on the lack of cellular connectivity.]

Today at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York, Nokia announced its new tablet PC platform, the Nokia 770. It's a pocket-sized handheld tablet computer, with WiFi and Bluetooth support, running on Linux. Here's a photo.

There are several things about it that Aren't Quite Right.

• Historically, Nokia hasn't been successful selling devices with no carrier relationship. Nokia operates best when the purchase price of its devices are being subsidised by a phone contract.
• There's no cellular modem. It relies on an additional Bluetooth mobile phone. Which is fine for a home-based device, except...
  
• It's being positioned as a device for the home, but it's surprisingly small for a home device. It's not much bigger than a remote control. A home device ought to be bigger, say 10"/25cm diagonal.
• Conversely, it's not being positioned as a nomadic device. Its size implies that it's much more suited to being a highly-featured laptop replacement.
• The performance is very poor. The demo devices were extremely slow.
  

Shame. Much of the industrial design is very compelling. It's been let down by sucky execution.

But don't stop there. Read more thoughts on the 770 in the next post.

Categories: Nokia 770, Nokia, 770, Linux.