Happy New Year

So yes I'm still here, yes I'm still much the same, and doing much of the same as usual.

So why the 'Happy New Year'? Firstly to apologise for the oversight of missing to say so on Jan 1st (I blame too much work), but also to usher in a new finance year for the UK (and many global corporates) on April 1st.

So the new-FY always means chaos at the end of the previous finance year, from tidying up asset registers, receipting orders, ensuring old budgets are spent correctly, ensuring new budgets have been secured.  Oh and of course there's always the end-of-year deals to close, vendors selling their first born to hit revenue targets, negotiations to secure the renewal of license & support deals to ensure we don't have to switch off tens of thousands of servers today etc.

Naturally some weeble in Human Resources also decides that this is a great time to key many annual HR processes & events around. So just to add to the mix we normally have reorgs, holiday years, head-count & cost centre mngt, performance dialogues, performance grading calibration, rewards & recognition to sort out.

All in all, lots of 7 day weeks, a few over-nighters and frayed nerves during the corporate grind of the new year - much like quarterly stock market reporting, I do think that there has to be a better way.

My New-Years resolutions :-

• Less time on work; much more time with family & friends
• When I am at work, to raise the bar higher, firmer & quicker than ever before

So I hope you had a good new year, I'm having a few hours off in order to work out which way is up and recharge the weasel-word detector, before the next year on the treadmill commences.

Oh, and I've updated the bar at http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html :)

(oh and I promise to post some of the 120+ draft blog posts soon!)

Amazon - Can we gift it?

So to the sounds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD0vHZxAmso&feature=related 

I have to ask the question to @KindleUK , @AmazonKindle & @Amazon "Can we fix gift it?"

Of course, what I'm referring to is the ability for customers to purchase gift eBooks for other Kindle users...

Now as per previous blog entries I'm a big fan of the Amazon Kindle - and last week was my father's birthday, so my mother purchased him a "Kindle Keyboard 3G". Naturally my brother & I both then planned to gift him a number of good books to read - perfect as he had a couple of long haul flights in the week after.

So on I trundled to the mighty www.amazon.co.uk and went to the Kindle store section - only to find that the only to manage this process in the UK is to buy a gift credit voucher, send that to your intended recipient, have them go shopping for the ebook and use the voucher... Not exactly simple, rather painful and most certainly a DIY present :(

Now of course if I'm a gun-toting, burger eating, economy trashing, redneck American this function has existed on the Amazon.com site here for a long time - but for some reason the mighty largest e-commerce site hasn't be able to enable this trivial feature for their international customers...

Honestly, does it really need to be this hard?

Android - improvement needed?

OK so I'm a massive fan of Google's Android platform, but naturally there are a good few areas that improvement is needed in :-

• Memory - yes my 16GB microSD is great but the 0.5GB internal RAM in my phone (Google Nexus One) is driving me insane, I'm certainly looking forward to the full OS support of app2SD for all applications AND 2GB+ of RAM in devices.

• System Apps (1) - the applications Google bundle. Frankly most of these I don't want and need to be able to uninstall them to free up RAM.

• System Apps (2) - the fact that its possible to optionally download an application but then not be able to uninstall it

• System Apps (3) - that I can't 'force app2sd' these bloated applications drives me mad

• The fact that MMS picture messages save the MMS images in internal RAM that consumes large chunks of RAM per image drives me mad. Its daft to have to manually save each image to SD and then delete the MMS attachment (& no Chomp can't work around this)

• Quality control - 2.3.6 broke a number of new things rather than fixed them :-
• Browser cache now seems to behave oddly after 2.3.6 with it consuming RAM regardless of settings or cache cleaning apps running
• Pinch to zoom for pictures no longer works
• 'Preparing the SD card' after a reboot now seems to take much much long (ie 20+ minutes for 16GB card)

Yes I know I can select a different firmware, but these really should be in the standard build...

Now that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has been finally unveiled there are a couple of other points :-

• Google need to look at making it easier to move between phone devices - transferring settings, desktops, data etc

• I really hope the latest version of gMail application allows native label & folder managment

Right, off to grab a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for a play...

The G-Spots

So time for some more positive commentary - a new page on this site here now highlights the 'Grumpy Spotlight' awards for great quality or service.

Naturally this is an entirely personal and subjective list, based on my experiences - but I hope it goes to highlight some places / things that really deserve all the recognition they can get.

I'd welcome any of your recommendations or comments on the items I list.

That time of year....

Well it's that time of year again.

When tens of thousands of fanboys (& fangirls) flock to the west coast of the USA to watch, listen to and worship a benevolent dictator, regarded by the fanboys as almost a messiah, impart the golden missives that will fuel their blinkered direction for the next twelve months...

Now of course, this is either the latest #EvilFruitSeller product release or #CrazyIvan's SnoracleWorld marketing branwashing fiction fest...

So which should you go to? well would it surprise you if I said - "neither, spend your time with your friends & family". Frankly speaking both are about as little value to the average enterprise customer...

Whilst of course both operate an artificially dominante position in certain segments, and certainly market above their stations, they do clearly set certain parts of the IT agenda - BUT frankly as far as I can see there's little point in attending as whatever happens will happen just the same regardless.

Some assorted personal thoughts about both companies :-

• neither is worth trying to engage with dialogue in as neither empowers their staff to have any meaningful dialogue
• neither entity listens & changes their ideas or directions easily
• both companies are most certainly driven strongly with clear internal direction
• both entities are driven by a singular personality - undoubtedly clever & focused, but one that makes decisions in a seemingly random & emotional fashion
• both companies will have to undergo major changes in the public view & internal structure of their senior management teams
• both companies will this week announce new instances of their proprietary lock-in technologies
• both companies trade on emotions & subjective reasoning in the customer base, with little challenge by the fanboys to their cost models or purported benefits 
• both companies are aggressive & arrogant in their manipulation of perceived position in terms of creating lock-in, eroding open standards and attempting to eliminate competition
• both companies specialise in competing with their partners
• both companies have made significant direction changes with their strategies and technology offerings
• both companies have the attention of senior management in their customer bases, and will most certainly drive a number of key areas in the near future

There's plenty more, but let's see how the announcements play out first :)

NDA Briefings - the content lap-dance?

So those who follow my twitter profile, or know me in person, will understand that one of my major annoyances in life is the topic of NDAs.

Now I fully understand what an NDA entails (I've spent enough time with lawyers in my life to know this area very well), and understand why anything more than 2 way NDAs are a genuinely terrifying concept. I also personally know what it means for all involved to 'tear-down' and NDA in 'an aggressive fashion'.

Naturally in my line of work, probably 70% of the external discussions I have are of a confidential content nature, with a high % being purportedly related to NDAs.

So why do they annoy me?

http://twitter.com/ianhf/status/9569522994
Why the hell don't vendors trust customers when under NDA with a copy of the slides? either respect an NDA or don't bother at all..#Annoyed

Well as far as I can see they are increasingly used as a way to restrict the content, or method of delivery of the content, provided to customers. With phrases such as "can't give you to document or presentation as it's NDA" being uttered on a weekly basis - the concepts of trust and respect being lost forever.

A common use of the NDA is to cover future roadmap discussions - naturally enough as for any supplier this is a very sensitive are. But my position is that roadmaps should change, and that's fine. The key is to ensure that there is regular communication & dialogue about the changes. The customer of course needs to have some reference artefacts for a point in time to use for their own decisions, after-all we have to create our own 6/12/18/36mth internal strategies.

Clearly if we can't have a secure & trusted copy of information from a point in time, then we can't reference the information - as my memory is such that I could very easily get information very wrong. In short - if a copy of the information isn't provided that we have little choice but to 'strike it from the record' and ignore it - making the whole 'NDA' exercise worthless all round... As far as I'm concerned this just shows that many vendors simply don't trust or respect their staff or their customers - these are not the vendors I'm interested in working with.

How often are NDA pitches one-way presentations? Sadly all too often :( There are still some good people out there that do genuinely have the sessions as NDA discussions and will influence their roadmaps and/or decisions based on dialogue & requirements - but these are most certainly in the minority.

Whilst I accept some customers may leak NDA information, either consciously or unconsciously, my thoughts are that people should have the courage to penalise those that breach NDA clauses, make an example of them don't penalise those who understand & respect them. But, surely we also need to address the information moving between competitors in the increasingly incestuous IT sales & engineering industry job shuffle (or are lobotomies standard practice in changing jobs between IT suppliers? well now I mention it that would explain many things...,)

A major irony of this is that at least 3 suppliers (eg EeeMSee, SumNotech & SnOracle) all sell commercial IRM/DRM products, but yet they refuse to use these with their own customers for protection of NDA content. Now if this doesn't fit a perfect target use case for IMR/DRM tools then I don't know what would! If partners won't use these products to protect their own content then I sure as heck won't be buying their tools to protect mine! You'd think their own sales teams would be pushing use of the IRM/DRM tools to 'spread the word' so to speak... Either way they should use & trust their DRM tools or kill them...

All of this sadly leaves me to the conclusion that 'NDA briefings' are often now little more than than marketing meetings wrapped in a 'special legal secret sauce' to puff, fluff & massage the ego of the invitees - the "I've been somewhere special" & "I know something you don't" playground taunt factor...

There are words for those who are paid to say & do nice things purely to boost a customers ego - and candidly, I think we'd all rather be with partners than whores!

The Bar

So I thought I'd do a quick summary of the drinks in the home cellar / bar - wine list will be added when I find time :) http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html