Author: Bob Martens

Categories
Business Technology

WSJ, HP, and Me

This is a pseudo follow-up to yesterday’s post on HP’s new firmware support policy, and has the benefit of also including a quote from me on a Wall Street Journal Digits post titled H-P Says It Will Clarify Controversial Server Software Policy by Spencer E. Ante.

Mr. Ante reached out to me over Facebook and asked for some comments. Shockingly (to me, at least), he included one of them in the linked post.

Besides the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it abbreviated H-P before and my positions as “webmaster” really is an old position (but still the official one), I think it is kind of cool.

However, as to the remarks made by the HP executives, I’m not assuaged at all. The fact that they announced the change at all is an indication of where they are going in the future (or at least, where they are considering going in the future).

As a campus that relies on HP ProCurve networking gear, HP portables for faculty and staff, and was considering HP servers for a needed storage solution that is worrying. They’ve fallen down the line as far as vendors are concerned and I’ll be looking elsewhere for our server needs in the future.

Update on 2014/2/11 @ 11:49am – HP has clarified its statements from a couple of days ago with another blog post. While it does leave it open for security updates and some other issues to be available to everyone, it still creates a barrier between users and HP. While it might appeal to some, I’m still highly skeptical of the move and it hasn’t changed my stance at all.

Categories
Life

HP and Forever

In Customers for life, HP’s Mary McCoy tries out outline why HP is making a rather large change to how they handle firmware updates for their line of servers. ZDNet’s Ed Bott was the one who brought it to my attention via a retweet on Twitter and I chimed in with the following tweet:

Today I stick by that. While I can’t speak for the whole of Martin Luther College, I know that I will not and cannot recommend that we purchase HP servers. Luckily, we don’t have anything in our server room at this moment from HP besides their ProCurve network solutions, but now I’m starting to worry about losing access to that firmware in the future as well.

That doesn’t sit well with me.

I understand that HP is probably looking for new revenue from existing customers as it seems the while PC industry is shifting to who-knows-what, but this will hurt HP in the eyes of many.

This One Podcast Announcements

Some exciting things are happening to This One Podcast!

For starters, we just finished Episode 100! Pretty crazy that our little show has continued to plug along for so many episodes, so the three of us hosts are very pleased to have the milestone behind us. I guess next would come Episode 1000, right?

TOP LogoAlong with that, we’re announcing a few changes not to the format or anything, but to our hosting. From the inception we have hosted This One Podcast on a local WordPress installation and Amazon S3. We switched to using YouTube to host the video recording and then Simplecast for hosting the audio not too long ago and today we’re announcing that we have switched everything (but video) over to Simplecast.

Simplecast just rolled out their website hosting for podcast sites and we have gone through and cleaned up the descriptions for our old episodes and now everything is being hosted over at Simplecast. We are really pumped about this because it will just make things easier for us in both the long-and-short terms.

Because of the change, if you have subscribed to our RSS feed with your podcast client, I would recommend re-subscribing just to make sure you are getting the up-to-date feed. I’ll be turning off the old site later today.

We are going to be changing the format of the podcast a bit as well … by introducing a book club of sorts. We don’t have a book chosen yet, but we will let everyone know when the time comes.

Thank you everyone for listening!

Categories
Technology

Limited Computing

Here’s a quote from John Siracusa from Episode 50 of Accidental Tech Podcast about his reason for the “iPad Pro” to be both bigger and more complex (some time in the future):

It can’t be the thing most people use for computing and remain as limited as it is now.

That quote is from about 5:29. The discussion then moved onto whether the iPad will ever actually gain the things Siracusa was talking about or if people actually even want that.

That statement above is, I think, key. It really is a look into the minds of current desktop users and what they are looking for in a computer replacement. That’s the rub, looking for a direct replacement to what they currently have. I hear, see, and read this sort of thing quite often when talking about the iPad in general as well.iPad Air

I think there are assumptions being made that our current workflows or the way we currently do things is somehow innately better than what might be coming. It is the idea that our usage (thinking of power users or long-time desktop computing users) is somehow better than everything else.

I would challenge that idea. The workflows created today are tailored for windows-based computing. Trying to pry apart our current workflows and shoehorn them into a touch-oriented systems is going to be painful and, possibly (or probably) fruitless. So far, no one has cracked that and Apple has admitted as much by not adding touch screens to their Mac lineup and stating time and again that OS X and iOS are going to be separate and complementary operating systems.

However, even more than the above (that our assumptions are holding us back), I think that the limitation of an operating system like iOS is the very thing that allows many people to finally be able to use a computing device without constantly muttering “I’m not a computer person”. Every time you add complexity of any type, even when you hide it (like the multitasking switcher), it is going to bite users in some unknown way. When you added multitasking and a switcher, all of a sudden people thought they needed to police their device and clear themselves of all of those icons in the multitasking switcher (for the record, no you did not).

Being able to have more than one app on-screen (which has been discussed when thinking of the future of iOS) will ultimately mean that people will abuse that feature and cause them to get into trouble. People can’t handle multiple applications on desktops computers and we’ve been working with this for decades!

I don’t disagree that iOS is going to get improvements, that much is inevitable. What I DO disagree with is the idea that complexity is needed to make iOS more powerful. I think that the power of iOS is actually housed in its simplicity. If you chip away at the simplicity, you’re going to have a substandard product.

Categories
Technology

Novell Continues Investing

While I haven’t seen anything on the site yet, a PR release titled Novell Increases Investment in ZENworks Portfolio was linked to from the ZENworks Twitter account, so I’m considering it legitimate.

fdeBasically, Novell has purchased the underlying source for their ZENworks Full Disc Encryption offering. Along with having the source they are increasing their investment in the development of that product, which also means the development of the ZENworks product line.

That all sounds like good stuff to me. We are looking at rolling out portions of ZENworks right now and ZENworks Full Disc Encryption is a part of those plans. Seeing Novell invest heavily only makes me more confident that we are making a good decision.