Sharing the Risk

iPad - Long 60 days!

First off I am excited about the upcoming iPad from Apple. You can view the press event here. And to be honest I was not going to blog about it as I did not have that much to add to the content that has already been published about it. But then there was this article at CRN about MS partners not feeling the tablet love.

Now as it would have it, I have had two (2) Microsoft Tablet PC's. They were both Toshiba and good laptops but they were terrible tablets. Too cumbersome and nothing overly special about them other than you could write on the screen with a stylus. I REALLY wanted the Tablet PC to be my only mobile computing device but it was nothing more than a laptop that I could turn landscape and write on the screen. Battery life was marginal. So I eventually abandoned both of them as there was nothing that special about them. I found that I type faster than I can write and it is more legible.

Now I have seen some great implementations of Tablet PC's. The best was when our company signed up with PayChex. The sales guy whipped out his tablet with a InfoPath application that allowed for me to fill out the form and sign it with out any paper. Then when the sales guy got back to his office, he could just dock his tablet and then it would automatically submit the application and sync everything to the backend. So definitely a great use of a Tablet.

But the iPad will rule the tablet space and not because it will have limited exposure. The iPad pricing is perfect for widespread adoption and has a lot of great potential. It was interesting to hear that some believe this to be niche product when I have talked to many a non-technical person who is excited about the iPad. 

Steve Jobs said it best when he discussed their vision for the iPad in that it had to be better than anything already out there. It could not just be a better Netbook because he was right, NetBooks are terrible! They are limited in everything except that they are cheap. Seriously what does a NetBook do that a decent small laptop does not?

So what needs to happen for MS to compete in the tablet space? They need to work with one hardware vendor extremely close and develop something completely innovative that is NOT tied to Windows 7 or anything else they have devised to date. They need to look at how to integrate it with the upcoming Office 2010 Web version and integrate with some Cloud Storage service but have some options for it to integrate into other web services. Make it work fantastically with hosted CRM and Hosted Exchange. Not to mention Sharepoint. 

Me, I will be standing in line the day that the iPad is available and trying to think about what I am going to use my MacBook Air for now!

NOTE: eMonarch (my company) is a Microsoft Gold Partner and make a great living working with Microsoft products. I love what MS does in the business space and the XBox 360 is the best consumer device I have ever seen!

The Cloud Continues . . .

Could not sleep so was reading some news and came across a piece that IBM has now signed the largest cloud deployment with the move by Panasonic with 100,000 users initially and then moving to 300,000. Panasonic will be replacing MS Exchange with IBM's LotusLive.

So the Cloud continues to get adoption as more and more companies realize there is a better way to manage the technology instead of deploying it internally and managing it internally. What I find fascinating about this is that technology is finally becoming just a tool as it was originally intended. 

No one goes out and makes their own hammers or saws these days. We just go to Home Depot and pick up hammer so we can do whatever job we are doing. And the same will continue to happen with technology. Instead of making or managing our own infrastructure, business will continue to look for ways to outsource those tools and reduce their costs by not having huge teams to manage the environment.

Future of the Desktop - Part 2

Back in April of last year, I wrote about the future of the desktop with respect to a battle between Apple, Microsoft and Linux for the desktop operating system that seemed to be brewing as more folks were not happy with Vista and Apple was becoming more common in both the home and the business community.

Well it appears I was sleeping on the job as I never considered a fourth alternative, Google! I remember talking to many of my peers that Google would not create OS as it did not make much sense to me. Boy was I wrong on that one.

On 7/7/2009 Google announce Google Chrome OS (Announcement from Google). That was a surprise to me but really it should not be as the future of computing really appears to be where applications are offered via the Internet (or Cloud) especially for the consumer space. 

So what is interesting about Chrome OS?

Google is targeting it for a very specific use, Netbook computers and for people who spend the majority of their time on the web. So for example, users of applications like Google Apps, Zoho, Salesforce, and NetSuite to name just a few of web-based applications. This is really compelling even if you agree with Steve Ballmer from Microsoft who last week said "There’s good data that says 50 percent of the time that someone’s on their PC, they’re not doing something with the Web browser" at the MS annual partner conference.

Ok but what about the other 50% of the time where we are using the browser? What was that percentage two years ago - 25%? So maybe in two more years that number will change again to 75% and then who knows where the future will go with it.

I think back in the days of the browser wars between Microsoft and the others, that Bill Gates was worried that the browser would replace Windows as the platform and so they invested so much in IE and other web technologies.

Regardless of the posturing of the technology companies, the Internet is not a fad (I had a friend once refer the Internet as the CB of the 90's) and Software as a Service is not a fad. 

There are a lot of other factors that I am beginning to see even in our neck of the woods with respect to businesses becoming more comfortable with the idea of data living in the Cloud and not having servers,etc. 

Citrix is doing some interesting stuff with their Service Provider program that will enable technology firms to provide traditional applications via the web as well as seeing more and more applications being written solely for the web.

The Google Chrome OS is not done yet and so we will have to take a wait and see approach but I believe that the Google Chrome OS will find its place and also drive a heck of a lot of innovation that will determine the future of the desktop OS.

The real question will be what is MS going to do in response if anything and what will the next OS out of Redmond have for us? Windows 7 is right around the corner (September for business customers under a MS licensing program) and it holds some promise as well.

So what does the future of the desktop hold for us? No answers here but it will be an interesting ride for sure.

A Vision Transformed to Reality

Ten years ago, I wrote a vision document for eMonarch that outlined my vision for eMonarch and what I believed the future of technology would hold for small business. It revolved around a concept/business model called Application Service Provider (ASP), whereby  a small business would no longer buy servers, software, and other applications but would rather "rent" them from an ASP.

The first attempt at this vision is what got eMonarch going and I still remember sitting in my living room with a lot of HP servers with my little brother trying to get it all put together so we could make it real. But eMonarch was not ready nor was the market. So eMonarch ventured down other paths but I strove to keep the vision going in my mind as I developed our offerings.

This vision became a reality this month at eMonarch with the signing of our first hosting infrastructure client and the actual turn-up of that customer. It was a big day for me to see a vision that I had outlined 10 years ago to finally come to fruition. And nice to know that I was not crazy but just a little early.

Our offering is based on a business being able to get almost all of the software they need to run their business (MS Office, Email, IM, CRM, etc) all without buying the hardware or even the software to run it. Instead, we host the infrastructure in our data center and the customer accesses everything via a remote terminal session.

What makes this really exciting for me is that our transition to a managed service model was a step along the way to the hosted infrastructure that we are know offering.  We package it all together to create a rich environment for our customers.

Another great part about this solution, is that when a customer tells us they want to go hosted, we can typically have them up and running in under 2 hours. Everything ready to go!

But to be honest, the major story here is that for every business to not give up! As a business owner, we are often thought to be crazy with our ideas and visions. But sometimes you just may be early or the market you are in has not caught on to the idea. Stick with it and look at ways to take baby steps to lead to the realization of your dream. In my case, it took many years to watch the market change and to carefully plot the course along the way to make sure I never lost sight of my vision.

Sure there were weeks,months and even a year or so when I thought "That vision is dead, need to come up with a new one" but I worked to kick that thought out of my head and drive forward always looking to see if the technology and the market was ready.

It has and exciting times are ahead as eMonarch drives this vision into the market and also looks at how to further develop the solution.

Does the Desktop have a Future?

Does the desktop have a future or is the day of the desktop operating system as we know it coming to an end?

Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald (both from Gartner) describe Windows as "collapsing" in their presentation last week that was titled "Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve". This all comes on the heals of a very slow adoption rate of Vista on business desktops. Now there are a lot of reasons for this that may or may not be the fault of Microsoft. (For more on this take a look at this article)

Another interesting article came from BusinessWeek with regard to Apple and it's recent gains on the desktop space in the business world (article can be found here). The article talks about how easy it is to switch between Apple and Microsoft by using Apple OS X and the new version of it's OS with the release of Leopard. The article talks about an application called Spaces but what is really at the core of the interoperability is some virtualization technology. Either running Windows on Parallels or Windows on VMWare Fusion.

But the meat of the article brought me to really start to think more about what is the desktop really about. Why do we buy a computer? To get a job done! Period. We buy a tool to do a job but is the desktop operating system the tool? Nope, the tool is the application running on the desktop.

So if I want to communicate with my customers do I buy Vista or a Mac? Who cares! What I really want to know is what application helps me communicate the best with my clients. The desktop OS is really irrelevant and will continue to become less of a consideration as more and more of the applications (tools) we use begin to be pushed out "The Cloud". Applications like Google Apps or Salesforce.com or any number of other web-based tools will really make the decision of which desktop operating system less of decision point.

Adobe recently further blurred the lines of the desktop by releasingPhotoshop Express. Photoshop has dominated the image editing world for years and this new application moves the job of editing photos off of the desktop and onto the web.

Companies like Zoho have an entire offering of web-based applications that any small business could almost do everything without every "installing" an application other than a web browser. Zoho has everything from a Word Processor to a Project Management solution all delivered via your friendly web browser.

In one of my earlier posts I wrote about cloud computing and how I really believe that it will be the biggest game changer for business and technology. But this expands even beyond the desktop to the server. What will happen when the IT investment of a business is in a device to connect their office to The Cloud, some printers, and thin clients that essentially have a web browser? One of the stumbling blocks will be connectivity issues and how to maintain the connection to the Internet but even today if the connectivity is compromised, the productivity of the business goes down.

So who is going to rule the desktop? Will it be Microsoft, Apple or maybe even Linux? No answers here but it will be an interesting path to travel on for the next few years.