I have been working on Apple equipment since the Apple II+. I ran a Mac computer consulting company for ten years. I have seen much of the good and bad that has come from Apple over the years. I think that this Operating system version is the best Apple has ever released.

It was a long upgrade because I wanted to ensure that it went smoothly.

It involved:

• buying two of the five Leopard Take Control books ($15USD for the bundle - CHEAP and GREAT!) http://www.takecontrolbooks.com
• reviewing Macintouch reports (1/2 hour)
• running Diskwarrior 4.0 on my drive first (and on my backup drives); (1/2 hour)
• making two complete bootable clones of my machine; (2 hours) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper
• getting a VersiontrackerPro (http://www.versiontracker.com) membership ($50 for a year) and it helped me find, download, and install updates to about 40 applications. WORTH the price. (3.5 hours)
• making room on my drive (1 hour of cleanups);
• refreshing both backups again (smart updates using Super Duper - also a great little tool)
• running the actual OS (used archive and install) (at least an hour - went to sleep instead)
• ran Software updates (1/4 hour);
• read "Take Control of Customizing Leopard) and did all system tweaks (1 1/2 hour)
• tested out the newest applications (Mail, Calendar, Address Book);

First impression after reading both Take Control books (get them - they're worth it) is that Apple finally fixed many of the annoying things that had been in Mac OS X since the inception.

Pros:

• The Finder is WAAAAY better, smoother, more sensible, faster.
• Spotlight finally makes sense. They got rid of that sort of pseudo search window that was neither app nor utility nor modal dialogue - what the hell WAS that thing?
• The whole system feels faster.
• Spaces itch a scratch I have wanted to itch for a long time. I thought they'd be useless. I have used them for a half-hour and think I'll use them forever now.
• Mail finally has bulleted lists (and they work!)
• iCal finally put all three views (day, week, month) into the same window and it doesn't jump all over the place annoyingly like it used to (each window had its own place and they sometimes jumped around when you switched between windows.
• It feels cleaner, more consistent (thank god the brushed aluminum look is entirely gone!!), and somehow more solid.

Cons

• I have built at least a thousand backup scripts. Time Machine does what the best scripts in the world do.
• But it's not there yet. You can't control it's schedule and you can't make bootable backups with it.
• Use SuperDuper for that instead (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper) and use TimeMachine for incremental data snapshots over time.
• Safari is fast...but you can't load multiple home pages at start and it still doesn't work with Google Apps properly so it's not really an option for daily use;

General comments

• The dock is not as bad as people have been bitching about.
• The menu bar's transparency is not a problem as long as you have a background with a light bit at the top.

Great job Apple. I feel like I have a new, fast, clean Mac on my desk!

I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss' book which I highly recommend.

"
"The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver - to see if it's really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss' world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn't get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here's how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior - personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver - the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops - you can't plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila - my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, "OH! You're in Vancouver!" and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the "ACCEPT" button. In between rings, it didn't look "pick up able". Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL... Or maybe Costa Rica....

Here's what I (and many thousands of road warriors) want Google.

I want a local cached always up to date copy of my entire Google docs set of files. I want to create a folder on my local drive and it should automagically sync with Google docs without my ever thinking about it so that whenever I get on a plane, not only can I search for it using Google desktop or Spotlight (I'm on a Mac) and see the contents, but I can open and save files into it. And even drag word/excel files into it too. And when I get back online, it should auto-sync to my Google docs folder. I'm currently in chaos with a big batch of old files on my hard drive and a batch of new files on Google docs and duplicates in both places and frankly, it's becoming a nightmare.

Google, I have said it before and I'll say it again. As long as you maintain your commitment to privacy and security, I'm okay with giving you my documents and I'll pay you too. I need this functionality and so do others.

UPDATE: As I was about to post this, my friend Jonathan Lambert pointed me to this article about Google Gears - a toolkit for building offline apps. Looks like we're on the way.

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn't be happier. I feel like I'm "home".

Now that I'm out, I'm taking on a few different projects. I'm working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area - helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that - sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best "job" in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It's going to be a crazy and fun year - I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn't changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven't spoken in a while and we'll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

Here are a few interesting notes from the opening sessions:

• Jeff Bezos
• a better question than "what's changing in the next five years" is "what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?" because that allows them to build a sturdy business.
  
• he talked about the current services: message queuing, storage, computing and fulfillment. They can take inbound data jobs, store your data, store your physical goods, and provide computing cycles. So what would they build next? He wouldn't say but he did say: "when you build a house, you build from the ground up."
• So what would they build next? I think that one of the next services they will offer is a billing platform for all of that so you can turn around and bill your customers for their usage of those services. But that's just my opinion.
• Battelle interviewing Mena Trott, Joe Krause, and Jay Adelson (Digg)
• Krause: It's relatively easy to find buyers who you can sell it to for $5M. Having a $10M business means having fewer buyers. Having a $50M business means that there are really only one or two potential buyers. This impacts whether or not you want to take VC money. Because if you are taking VC money, you need to go for much higher multiples (see below.)
  
• Joe Krause made an interesting point: You might want to sell and get a 5x or 6x return on the money which is good for you, and good for your employees. But your VC is thinking, "These guys might be the 100x opportunity." So they're not excited about your 5x return and can fight it. Interesting dynamic.
• Biggest mistakes: "What was your biggest mistake"?
• ****Krause: Not launching our business model at the same time as we launched our product. We launched the product and learned a lot about it for six months. But then we launched our business model six months later and had lost those six months - we didn't learn anything about how people valued our application. Because you can't have those conversations with people about value...until you are charging!
• Apollo / Kevin Lynch:
• COOL demo from Salescorce.com's Apollo desktop. VERY nice. Same with the eBay Desktop application.
  
• WOW. Awesome word processor that is online/offline called Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity. It does TABLES properly! For an HTML type text editor, that is unbelievable!
  

Many of you know that I was on the selection committee for "Why Office 2.0 Matters" - a one day conference being organized by the Dealmaker Media team in SF. The one day session will look at 32 of the most promising companies emerging in the Office-productivity-on-the-web category.

As part of the run-up to the conference, the team decided to hold a blog relay - "The Radar Relay" - where different writers would summarize the week's Office 2.0 news at the end of the week. This is my week. But you might want to start here first if you haven't been keeping up to date until now.

• Feb 23, 2007 / Richard McManus
• Feb 28, 2007 / Rod Boothby
• Mar 7, 2007 / Zoli Erdos
• Mar 9, 2007 / Stowe Boyd

 
Also, if you haven’t registered for Under the Radar yet, the readers of this blog can take advantage of a special price at this link. I’ll be there, to see what the judging panel think of the selections that our committee made, and also to give a brief talk about Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

On with the Radar Relay. Tthis week has been ripe with office 2.0 news. There is so much that I'm going to do it in point-form:

• A web application designed to help people through their bankruptcies was cited for "practicing the law without a license" and its creator was charged and found guilty. The case is currently under appeal. (thanks to Kurzweilai.net for the link).
  
• The Office 2.0 Database tipped the scales at over 450 Office 2.0 startups. 95% of those will be gone in 36 months but who cares? As Paul Kedrosky says, "It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp" when you want to get to the other side.
• Gianpaolo gave us an 8-floor, 3-bullet point "Why SaaS for the Enteprise" pitch. I would add to his points the ability for users to pilot-test without IT involvement (which really rolls up to shorter time to value though). I think his 3 bullets are absolutely awesome. Concise, and to the point.
• The world continues to twitter about Twitter. Millions of people pinging each other with little tidbits of information on what they are doing at the moment. I know that many of the things that take off seem to confound people but you have to realize that deep down in biological and spiritual cores, we are social creatures. We are designed to be social from the ground up. But as people leave organized religion, and as fewer people get married, and as fewer people have kids, and as fewer people live in multi-family homes, there becomes a vast social vaccuum waiting to be filled - hence the explosion of blogs (find your community), photo-sharing (meet people with an appreciation for art), SMS'ing silly messages to each other, or signing up for Twitter - these are all manifestations of a desire to find and stay connected to a community in an ever more disconnected world.  I don't doubt that we will develop a bunch of these tools along the way and will eventually be in partially aware, partially connected states to our communities at all time - but will be actually be social or have any friends? It reminds me of the quote I read the other day, "I unsubscribed from all of my social networks so that I would have time to invite friends over for dinners!" Also, here is a shortcut to using Twitter.
  
• Google's diabolical plan to plant people in Microsoft is paying off. Microsoft has managed to make Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 both slow and destructive to data at the same time as Google has launched their applications with a service level agreement (that they breached already.) Lots of notes here on Zoli's blog.
• Anne Zelenka posted "Ten Things I Hate About You, Web 2.0". Funny list. Anne, how about Office 2.0? I'll start with my top four most annoying things about Office 2.0:
• NOT ONE COMPANY has managed to make a text editor that doesn't completely suck.
• Do we really need 50 spreadsheet apps? Are we really that lacking in creativity?
• Web 2.0 was about wasting time. Office 2.0 is really about being productive with your time. We need more web 2.0 in office 2.0 or the conferences are going to be REALLY dull.
• Just because you have an Office 2.0 company doesn't mean you have to forget about: customers, pain points, revenues, or long-term viability.
• Phil Wainewright has a good post on the Saugatuck report showing that SaaS has hit the knee of the curve or as he writes: "SaaS hits the hockey stick." I'm sure he meant the curvy part near the bottom of the stick near the big flat part that hits the little round thing-a-ma-jig. Go, Beavers, Go. As you can see, I'm not a hockey fan so I prefer the knee of the curve story a bit more. He writes: "Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this
  year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical
  applications." I think it's instructive to look at internet banking. People didn't want t o use it either because they were afraid of the web - until seemingly overnight when everybody's Grandma joined web-banking.
• Harry McCracken over at Slate wrote a decent review of the Zoho office tools suite. I agree with Harry that their suite seems pretty advanced. However, I have tried to use them for real work and have still found enough holes that I couldn't use them. Particularly Zoho show which was nearly useless. The other apps seemed somewhat better. But they have achieved a heck of a lot and I wish Raju Vegesna and his team the best.
• AvenueA-Razorfish's new Digital Outlook Report 2007 was released (thanks Guy Kawasaki for the heads up). Some highlights:
• "In retrospect, the massive digital disruption we’ve experienced over the last 12 months should have been anticipated. But it seems few were fully prepared for the speed and depth of the changes. Perhaps it’s because the changes weren’t just about what Web sites became popular or what new technologies were introduced. Rather, it was a broader cultural change. Consumers’ expectations of their media evolved. The places they trusted to provide information and entertainment changed. New outlets for consumers to express themselves emerged."
• "“Great service. Creativity. Flexibility. A passion for their product and for finding ways to push innovation within their organization. A desire to understand clients’ objectives and not to retrofit them into their own. The hallmarks of great Web publishers are obvious, yet subjective and elusive. Those who are focused on delivering real solutions are best positioned to become partners to agencies and advertisers.” - Sarah Baehr, VP Media, New York.
• "Information seeking equals entertainment: Once upon a time, play was more deeply integrated into our daily lives, but that changed with the introduction of industrialism. Then came the Internet, and with it, a reemergence of play in new ways. Information as entertainment was a core concept we heard from our study participants, and one that we can see around us as well....Any way you look at it, play is back, and it’s here to stay."
• "Mobile phone use will grow—but not for talking, according to our participants. Phones calls are considered to be invasive in this hyper-culture, to be used only when necessary. For ordinary use, a quick text message will suffice, and many of our respondents didn’t see themselves reversing this trend in the future."
• Overall, this is a fantastic report. Get it. Read it. Take action on it.
• Dick Costolo wrote a great post titled Too Many Companies? where he addresses an entrepeneur's question about whetehr or not he/she should go out and try to capitalize on a maket opportunity. I agree with Dick. You can't know anything really when you start. It's all a best guess. Once you have done the basics of identifying whether you are entiering what could be a high-growth market, something that you are passionate about, and that you have (or can soon have) a great team to build something with, then get out there and do it and adjust on the fly. Not wait until you "have it figured out".
• Cisco bought Webex. For 64x earnings or  8.4x revenues. ($3.2B for 2006's $50M earnings on $380M revenues). I agree with Michael Arrington who questions the value of such a deal when Webex is being disrupted SERIOUSLY by a lot of light, fast, cheap, and frankly much better competitors. Of course, Webex has real revenues that will accrue to Cisco's bottom line and can actually "move the needle" on Cisco's income statement. Hopefully they were buying the revenues and not the technology. I also agree with Paul Kedrosky who says "While this is not your father's Cisco, it's not clear just whose Cisco it is becoming either." When they bought Five Across, it could have been an aberration. Adding Webex to the mix means it is definitely a trend. For it to make any sense, there would need to be some follow-on acquisitions that signal a clear shift in corporate strategy and a redefinition of what and who Cisco intends to become in the next few years.
• Darren Barefoot did a nice little review of three new-to-him Web apps: Harvest for simple time tracking, Buxfer for moving money easily, and WhosOff for tracking holidays in the office. Very fitting for the Office 2.0 Relay!

That's a heck of a week!! Lots of interesting things happening and I'm sure we'll have another crazy week next week as we get close to the actual Dealmaker event.

Have a great week ahead everybody!

Over the past month and a couple of conversations, I have had the opportunity to speak with Ross Mayfield, CEO for Socialtext. Ross has very rightly pointed out that there have been major changes since July 2006 when the original posting went up and I agreed that since I'm keeping the post up, that I should be current with where Socialtext is today. They have done a lot of work since my July 2006 post, including:

• updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
  
• releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
  
• they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
• they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven't tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we're building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
• Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
• They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I'm not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I'm all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.
  

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It's time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think.... Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I'll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

• Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I  recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
  
• Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad - tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc - too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
  
• Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, "These guys are "coooooooooooool" so I'm intending to check them out soon.
  
• Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I'm just reviewing the product now but haven't made any final determinations at this time.
  

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we're about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

My friend Debbie and her team at Dealmaker Media are running the "Under the Radar: Office 2.0" conference in Mountain View, CA on March 23, 2007. Aside from having been on the selection committee with some fine folks (Rod Boothby, Richard McManus, Zoli Erdos, Ismael Ghalimi, Stowe Boyd, Ori Weinroth, Brad Feld, and Rafe Needleman), some of whom I know, and others whom I have admired from a distance, I will also be presenting a customer perspective on why it's imperative that we employ and deploy social software in the enterprise.

It should be an exciting day. We have a fantastic slate of presenting companies, Sean Wise and Rafe Needleman will be moderating, and we have a full panel of judges that will vote on the companies that have the most compelling businesses and offerings. Should be fun!

I have the good fortune of speaking on March 21, 2007 at AJAXWorld and have chosen as my topic, "Maximize Your Revenue From Your Web 2.0 Venture". The event "blurb" is here:


Resourcs: Event site, Powerpoint (not yet available)

Ean Jackson and I will be presenting on Web 2.0,  Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 to a group of communications professionals at the High-Tech Communicators Exchange on April 30, 2007. Location is TBA. (Event site, [Powerpoint not yet available]) The purpose of the talk is to explain how the Web 2.0 principles are migrating from the "consumer web" into the office, bringing more collaboration into the workplace.