Category Archives: Uncategorized

My journey to a first marathon

October 21, 2024 Tim Anderson 2 Comments

Note: this is a rather personal post and probably not interesting for most people.

2023 was a year of running for me but what next? For runners the marathon always beckons; the most famous races in the running calendar are marathons (London, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, New York and Tokyo) and I felt that if I was ever going to run one, it should be soon as I am an older runner.

In 2023 I ran two half marathons but I knew that a marathon was a much harder challenge. In February 2024 I signed up for the Abingdon Marathon, 20th October 2024. I chose Abingdon because it was flat, and somewhat familiar as I grew up near there and it was my late grandmother’s home.

My son gave me a book called Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas and known affectionately as Pfitz in the running community. The preface says, “the runners for whom we wrote this book have goals such as setting a personal best, qualifying for Boston, or running faster than they did 10 years ago.” A bit ambitious for me but then again, I did want to run London one day and “good for age” looked like my best bet for getting in.

The book was excellent for me because it is science-based and the rationale for everything in it is explained in matter of fact terms. There are many ways to train for a marathon and our knowledge of how best to do it continues to evolve; but the schedules in this book are well proven. I picked the easiest training schedule which is called 18/55: an 18 week schedule in the which the maximum miles per week is 55. I counted back from my marathon date and put the mid-June starting week in my diary.

I had to pick a target pace since the schedule paces are derived from this. There were two factors. One, what was I capable of doing. Two, what did I need for London. I picked 8:30 per mile; somewhat arbitrary but I hoped it would work on both counts.

In a table of “sample long-run paces” on page 14 of the book, 8:30 is the slowest pace given for “marathon goal pace.” I felt therefore that I was picking the slowest pace which the authors felt was in scope for the book, though this is not explicit.

Incidentally I switched mentally from per KM pace to per mile pace because this book and many other marathon training guides and discussions primarily use per mile paces. The KM equivalent is always given but there is a bit of friction. I also came to prefer using the longer distance for my mental segments.

Note that you are not meant to start even the 18 week schedule from scratch. “These schedules are challenging right from the start and get harder as your marathon approaches,” say the authors. You need to be in what one might call half marathon fitness before you start.

Following the schedule

Although the schedule is 18/55 most weeks are fewer than 55 miles. The mean is about 40.5 miles. It is still a big commitment. Let’s say one averages about a 9:30 pace in the training; that is about 6:45 hours running per week, spread over 5 training sessions. Add on a bit of time for changing and showering and it is a lot to fit around a working week, and demanding for family and friends too.

When I trained for a half marathon I did so quite informally. A long run on Sunday and a daily jog, including parkrun on Saturday. I was sufficiently scared of the marathon that I decided to follow the schedule as closely as I could.

That said, I did not follow it exactly. For one thing, I carried on with parkrun and mostly ignored what the schedule offered for Saturdays. Second, I had races scheduled and these conflicted with the Sunday long runs. I worked around this either by adding a second run after the race (since the races were shorter than the scheduled long runs), or sometimes I just treated the race as the long run.

I did make sure to include four key long runs in the schedule. These were three 20 mile runs, and an 18 mile run with 14 miles at marathon pace. For most of these runs I actually did a bit more than the scheduled distance; it is quite hard to do them exactly unless you do the same route out and back and turn back home at half way. I preferred to do circular routes and in practice my longest run was between 22 and 23 miles.

I entered all the training runs as workouts on my Garmin. My “execution score” which measures how well I conformed to the scheduled pace was typically poor. One reason is that I live in a hilly area and it is hard to keep a pace. Second, I found it difficult to run slow enough for the recovery, warm up and cool down sections. Third, I found it hard to make the target pace especially early on in the training.

It sounds cruel, but the training runs often have you running at the fastest pace at the end of the run. The Pfitz “marathon pace” sessions for example get you to run say 5 miles at easy pace then 8 miles at marathon pace. The idea is to adapt your body to be able to maintain the pace when fatigued.

I was fortunate not to suffer much illness during the period. I picked up a bug when on holiday in July. I had to stop training for a few days but then resumed.

Core strength training and avoiding injury

Having suffered from plantar fasciitis and a second foot injury I was conscious of the risk during intensive training. There is a chapter in the Pfitz book called supplementary training and I regarded this as equally important as the training schedule. The reason is simple: if you do not do the core strength training you are likely to get injured, and if injured, you cannot train. A further benefit is that the strength training directly improves your running.

I followed the section called Core stability training and combined the exercises with others I had discovered, developing a workout that took around 40 minutes to complete, and doing this most days.

I did not experience any major issues with feet, calves or hamstrings during the training or indeed during the race and I feel that this is thanks to this exercise programme.

Tapering

The taper period in my schedule was the last three weeks. 20 mile run on the Sunday before, then a gradual reduction in mileage. Taper is known to be a difficult time and I had some little issues. One is that I had booked a half marathon race two weeks before, when the schedule said to do a 17 mile long run. I decided to run the half marathon as a training run, not at race pace.

The coach at my running club supported this, telling me an anecdote about a woman who missed qualifying for the commonwealth games after winning a half marathon two weeks before the marathon at which selection was decided. Her rival came second in the half, but won the second race and was duly selected.

I did not doubt the quality of the advice and started determined to run no faster than 8:15 per mile. With the race atmosphere and amongst the other runners I found myself running at 7:58. I slowed a little and did the second mile at 8:01. Then I was keeping pace with a friend from my club and chatting. He pulled ahead of me and I could not help myself, I stayed with him, then a few miles later passed in front. Mile 7 I did at 7:12. In the end I finished in 1:39:43 which was a half marathon PB for me – but what about the taper? What about my lack of self discipline?

After that I followed the taper schedule religiously, even skipping parkrun 8 days before the marathon because it was designated a rest day. It was a big change for me though, after 16 weeks of hard running. It felt like losing fitness.

In the week before the race, there was another issue. Weather. The forecast for 20th October was rain and strong winds, gusting up to 40 mph or so. The Great South Run in Portsmouth, scheduled for the same day, was cancelled. People signed up for Abingdon or the Yorkshire marathon (again same day) posted on Reddit about how to run in bad weather. It was hard not to be anxious. Perhaps the event would be called off, and all my training in vain. Perhaps a howling gale would make getting a good time impossible.

In the event, the weather was poor but not as bad as predicted. Phew.

The race

I did my best not to leave anything to chance. The day before, I ate a big spaghetti lunch before heading to the race hotel in Abingdon. Then a light evening meal with no alcohol, just a big glass of orange juice. On the morning, I got up at 6.00am and ate two bread rolls with jam. The idea is to go into the race well stocked up with the right kind of nutrition and well hydrated, but not to have toilet issues. Therefore one has breakfast three hours before the race.

I decided to run with minimum baggage. This meant leaving my smartphone behind, relying on the drink stations for water, and carrying only gels. I had running shorts with two deep pockets in which I stuffed 7 SIS isotonic gels, the same ones I had used in training – following the principle, nothing new on race day.

The course starts on the race track at Tilsley Park to the north of Abingdon. I arrived at about 7:45am and had a look round. It was somewhat bleak and the inflatable start/finish arch was not yet pumped up.

Tilsley park two hours before the start of Abingdon Marathon 2024

The venue was well organised though and complete with changing rooms. There was light rain but no gales. I got ready, and chatted to some of the other runners. The time slipped away; I had intended to do a short warm-up jog but a long queue for the bag drop meant I ran out of time. Headed to the track at around 8:45am; the sound system was not working very well and it was hard to hear the pre-race brief. The runners intending to finish in under 2:30 were encouraged to start near the front but any plans to sort other runners into pace groups seemed to be abandoned.

A few minutes later we were off. It is hard to describe but this was an emotional moment. I realise I am only a mid-pack club runner but 18 weeks intensive training leading up to this made it a big deal for me.

There was a little bit of congestion but this was a smallish race (fewer than 1000 runners in the end, some who had booked perhaps did not turn up because of the weather forecast) and it was not a big problem.

It did feel odd trying not to run too fast. Sam Murphy writes in her book Run your best marathon:

Research has shown that when marathon runners begin the race at a pace that is just 2 per cent quicker than their practised goal pace, they flounder over the final 6 miles. The reason this advice is so often repeated is because it is so rarely heeded.

Running a race induces something similar to flight or fight response where the stress of the occasion enables the body to out-perform. The race atmosphere and one’s determination to do a good time drives you to run as fast as you can; yet one knows that holding back is vital. It is a mental battle. “This feels peculiar, trying not to run too fast” I said to another runner and we chatted. A side-effect of deliberately slowing your pace is that you have more breath for talking.

But what was my target pace? I set it originally at 8:30. Calculators like VDOT said that based on my half marathon two weeks before, I could do 7:55 but I felt that was risky and over-optimistic. Nevertheless I had decided to try and go a bit faster than 8:30. I kept a close eye on my Garmin. If the pace went up above 8:15 I consciously slowed down. If it went below 8:30 I tried to speed up.

The race begins with a run east and then south into Abingdon. At about 5 miles I passed the house where my grandmother used to live, in the beautiful old town.

5 miles in, running past the house where my grandmother used to live in East St Helen’s St, Abingdon

Then you run out of town, and start a two-lap section where you run through a village, on into Milton business park, and back through a pretty village called Sutton Courtenay (where Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, is buried).

The first 10 miles were a breeze. I chatted to another runner who said he was targeting a similar time to mine, around 3:40. Had he run a marathon before? Oh yes, he ran Manchester marathon in April in 3:18. You will be well ahead of me then, I said; but he thought he had not kept up his fitness. We ran together for bit, then he went ahead as expected. However he told me that I looked fit which was nice of him!

As it turned out I met him again in the latter part of the race and ended up finishing a minute or two ahead.

During the two lap section you see mile signs for the second lap as well as the first; that is, you see a sign for 16 when you are really on mile 8 etc. I do not know if this was part of the reason but miles 10 to 13 seemed to take ages and I was beginning to feel a bit of fatigue. I was keen to get half way, telling myself that it was downhill after that.

Mile 13 appeared eventually and I entered what Pfitz calls the “no-mans land of the marathon. You’re already fairly tired and still have a long way to go.” The book says that this is where you can easily lose pace; but I did not. The reason was that I was keen to pass 20 miles – the moment at which, some say, the marathon really begins.

I am not sure what it is about 20 miles but it is the point at which many runners find themselves having to slow down. Often they say they “hit the wall” though what runners mean by this varies. Sometimes it means literally being unable to run any further, more often it means losing pace or entering a run/walk phase.

Pfitz brilliantly calls the last 6 miles “the most rewarding part of the marathon … this is when your long runs, during which you worked hard over the last stages, will really pay off. Now, you’re free to see what you’ve got … this is the the stretch that poorly prepared marathoners fear and well prepared marathoners relish.”

I think this is brilliant because it sets you up mentally to look forward to the last 6 miles, if you have followed one of the book’s schedules, making it less likely that your pace will fail.

In my case mile 22 was my fastest mile, the only one under 8:00 according to the Garmin. In general though, while I did not really speed up, I did not slow down either.

The last two miles though were tough. I was extremely fatigued. Then again, I knew I was within reach of my goal time and determined not to stop now. I was also concentrating on not falling over. The Abingdon marathon is run mostly on open roads and you have to move between road and pavement, it would be easy to trip over a kerb when fatigued and your running form is slipping.

I passed the 25 mile sign. Then I was on a half-closed road and the marshalls were saying “not far now.” I entered Tilsley Park and then back onto the track. 600m to go. Tried to put in a little burst of speed at the end though there was nobody to overtake, or trying to overtake me. Then it was done, and a boy scout apologetically handed me my medal, not being tall enough to reach up and place it around my neck.

I placed 485 out of 995 finishers, and was 14th out of 44 in my age group 60-69. My time was 3:37:16 which is a pace of 8:18 per mile; however I feel a sense of achievement which is out of proportion to the actual result.

It may also be true that keeping pace right to the end means that I could have gone faster; it is difficult to know but perhaps, next time, I will risk holding back a little bit less in the early miles.

microsoft, tech, Uncategorized, windows, windows 7

What is an operating system for? A friend’s Windows 11 rant shows disconnect between vendors and users

February 23, 2024 Tim Anderson

What is an operating system? The traditional definition is something like, the system software that manages computer hardware and provides services for applications.

This definition does not describe what you get though when you install an “operating system” such as macOS, Windows, Android or ChromeOS – or more likely, receive hardware with it pre-installed. What you get is an operating system (OS) plus a ton of stuff that can only be described as applications. In practice, the reach of what we call an operating system has extended over the years. Even in the early days, an OS would come with utilities, including a command line, a command line editor, perhaps a C compiler, file management tools and so on. Then there was a change when pre-installed graphical user interfaces arrived. Windows came with Notepad, Calculator, Write and Paint.

What is a commercial operating system today? We can add to the traditional definition at least the following:

A vehicle for advertising
A means of lock-in
A vehicle for data collection

On Windows, advertising is everything from the pre-installed trials, to the nagging to upgrade OneDrive, to the mysterious appearance of Candy Crush on the Start menu.

The lock-in comes via the ecosystem. Apple is worse than Windows for this in that more of its applications work only on Apple operating systems. On Windows though Microsoft hardly has to bother since a huge legacy of Windows-only applications keeps users from changing, especially in business.

Data collection is via near-enforced login and telemetry. An Apple ID is not required for macOS but it is strongly encouraged and necessary for the App Store. A Microsoft or Entra ID account is not required to use Windows, but the setup points you strongly in that direction.

Is any of this good for the user? A friend is disappointed with Windows 11 – mainly because it is less familiar than Windows 10. His central points are that Microsoft makes irritating changes that disrespect the learning users have invested in Windows, and has left behind the notion of the operating system as a blank canvas waiting for applications to make it useful.

Personally I put up with Windows 11; it is not that different, though there are a few things that I particularly dislike:

The taskbar icons in the centre. I routinely move them to the left. Settings – Personalisation – Taskbar – Taskbar behaviors – Taskbar alignment, no registry editing required. This single change makes Windows 11 feel much more familiar, and it is better since left-aligned icons are easier to target.
The Start menu. This was great in Windows 95 and improved up until Windows 7. Windows 8 replaced it for … reasons. Windows 10 reinvented it but badly. I have trained myself always to click All apps as a second step after clicking Start. Click on a letter for the letter menu, select a letter, start the app. It works reliably, unlike Search which is a usability disaster when what you want is to start an application.
The File Explorer. You right click a file, and instead of a single menu of options, there are three sets of options, one in a row of icons, one in a mysterious subset of options, and one under Show more options. A poor user interface for a common task.

There are other things, of course. I always turn off the distracting Widgets on the taskbar. I always show as many of the “additional System tray icons” as I can, with the exception of consumer Teams. I always open Edge, reflect on the cheap ugly mess that is the default home page, and set about disabling it.

These annoyances are mainly design errors by Microsoft rather than an a direct consequence of the changing role of the operating system; yet they would be impossible without that change.

Imagine for a moment if Windows were optimised for installing and running applications. Oddly, Windows 8 (which most hated for more or less the same reasons my friend cites for disliking Windows 11) did have that vision. Install from the Store, with clean setup and easy removal. Run full-screen with no distractions. Before you say it, yes there were issues, the UI was not good enough, the apps were not there, we missed multiple overlapping windows, and more. There was a good concept in there though.

book reviews, books, reviews, tech, Uncategorized

Reimagining Collaboration by Phil Simon

July 29, 2022 Tim Anderson 2 Comments

This is a book about collaboration in the new era of Zoom, Teams, Slack and other such tools – not that they are completely new, but the pandemic and enforced remote working caused a huge boom in usage and some permanent changes in the way people work together. Author Phil Simon is a US specialist in business communications, and associated with the Agile methodology of software development – quite appropriate for this book, since collaboration is at the heart of Agile.

There are a few themes here. Simon believes that organisations need strong collaboration in order to thrive, and personally I think that is spot on. He spends some time distinguishing between collaboration and other related but different things like communication (a pre-requisite but insufficient on its own), or co-operation which can be a passive relationship; people can co-operate without actually collaborating.

Despite all the this, the main topic of the part 1 of this book, I am not sure that Simon ever nails what collaboration really is, at least not in this book. He has a go at it and there are many examples given of what it is not, but it remains, in my mind, a bit elusive. I did like his metric of organizational health: “The ability to rally around a common vision, execute effectively, and create a culture of innovation.”

Simon does show a good understanding of the human factor in productivity. He talks about managers versus makers, and how managers feel the need to communicate often with many people, while makers need to reduce distraction and focus on a task; I am not sure if he had software development in mind but this is a good description of what developers need.

Part 2 then gets to the heart of the book: better collaboration through technology. The key concept Simon uses is what he calls a “collaboration hub,” meaning any of a number of tools which form a central internet-connected space where users can interact with one another. This includes what the author calls the big three, Slack, Teams and Zoom, as well as other applications such as Expensify or Canva.

The author is a user of Slack and of Google Docs and while he shows a commendable neutrality in the sense that he considers other tools such as Teams equally effective, adding that “It’s fair to call the similarities around today’s internal collaboration hubs remarkable,” his greater depth of knowledge of the tools he mainly uses does show. There is really much more about Slack than about Teams, and that is something to be aware of. Teams users can still benefit from the book but less so than Slack users.

There is a big theme here though which is that the author considers email, especially internal email, a blocker to collaboration. He gives reasons, including that inboxes tend to die when an individual leaves the company; that email is gaffe-prone since a careless email, or a careless reply-all, cannot be unsent; and that emailing attachments like spreadsheets leads to multiple forks of the same data. In fact, toward the end of the book Simon remarks that “Effective, long-term collaboration cannot take place via email. Period.” He also recommends ditching internal email completely.

While I have some sympathy with this view, I think it is overdone. I reminded myself that one of the most successful collaborative projects of all time, the Linux kernel, is based on email lists.

Still, Simon is quite correct, a collaboration tool with channels for team members has lots of advantages over email, gathering all the communications in one spam-free place and making search much easier.

Part three of the book is called “moving from theory to practice” and contains lots of discussion about how organizations can move towards using collaboration hubs and what can go wrong. Then part four peeks into the future and envisages smarter collaboration hubs which use AI to book meetings for us, automatically transcribes meetings and sends automatic alerts to Slack channels.

There is plenty of wisdom though I could have done with more on practical questions about how to get the most from Slack or Teams. How many channels or Teams should you have? When should you have a video conference versus a message chat? Should we have our collaboration hubs always open or sign out sometimes? Who should be able to create a channel, or should anyone? And what more advanced or intricate features of the products are worthwhile?

I enjoyed Simon’s willingness to be blunt at times, as well as some amusing reflections like “In my consulting days, I often saw project managers call meetings essentially because they were bored.”

Towards the end of the book we also get this: “Just because the discussion or task takes place in a hub doesn’t mean that it’s truly collaborative.” I agree. What then is the magic that enables an organization to be collaborative? In the end it is corporate culture rather than tools that matter most. I think the author recognizes that, but after reading the book, I am still not clear about the best way to get to the collaborative culture to which we should aspire.

Thanks to Netgalley for an electronic review copy of this title

apple, microsoft, professional, tech, Uncategorized, windows

Using an M1 Mac after a lifetime of mainly Windows

July 9, 2022 Tim Anderson 3 Comments

So I got an M1 MacBook Pro back in April and it is time for a quick brain dump on my experience. I am not travelling as much as I did pre-lockdown, so although I got the Mac as a replacement for an ancient Windows laptop it gets used at home too. My usual desktop PC is a few years old but a decent spec gaming PC withCore i7-7700 3.6 GHz, 16GB RAM and Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. I have been happy with it; but I do find myself thinking “why not just use the MacBook” when needing to fire up a computer, a subconscious preference that bears examination. Most of my work is writing, web browsing and coding.

I do not particularly prefer the macOS UI to that of Windows. It is more consistent because Apple managed iOS vs macOS sensibly whereas Microsoft made a hash of Windows desktop vs Windows CE vs Windows Phone vs Windows 8 and has now settled on a thing called WinUI but scratch the surface of Windows and you still find UI that has not changed for decades.

I digress though. I do not mind the Windows UI, I am used to it. What I do mind though is annoyances like the always-broken Windows search, and the way certain actions cause lengthy pauses that make me wonder what my PC is doing. In my case, sorting a large directory in Windows Explorer takes an age. Another little issue is that creating a new folder works fine, but renaming it causes a long pause. There also seem to be some focus issues. I create a new folder, I rename it and press Enter. Eventually it renames, but half the time the focus mysteriously switches to a different folder.

I realise that these problems do not occur with a new install of Windows and that I could pop out and buy a Surface laptop and it would be fine. For a bit. Windows, it seems to me, still suffers from the cruft problem beautifully described by Verity Stob 20 years ago. I do not think Macs are completely immune (I had a Mac Mini where I upgraded the OS once too often and it crawled) but does seem to me more resistant.

There is another thing that I like about the MacBook. You close the lid and it sleeps. You open the lid minutes, hours or days later, and it wakes. This has never worked well for me on Windows, though it is meant to do the same. I can believe that it is hard to implement, but when it works it is a huge benefit.

There is also the unwanted advertising that has crept into the Windows UI especially since Windows 11. Working on the MacBook I do notice its absence; I can better focus on what I want to do.

From a developer perspective, the performance of the M1 Pro is a delight. I work mostly in Visual Studio Code on both platforms; even on Windows I have come to prefer VS Code for most types of work. There is also the fact that Unix-like operating systems have won in server and web applications, so there is less friction there.

Launchpad: reminiscent of the Windows 8 Start screen?

Microsoft came up with a great application launcher in the Windows 95 Start menu – and improved it until it reached its peak in Windows 7. I also like the Windows 8 full-screen version. Windows 10 and 11 are not so good though. You get inadvertent web searches, as well as the problem of apps that you search for not appearing for strange reasons. The Mac Launchpad, which reminds me of the Windows 8 full-screen Start menu, seems to work well. You type what you want and all the matches appear.

What do I miss when not using Windows? It is mainly a matter of working out new ways to do certain tasks. I do miss Hyper-V and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) though I have had success with UTM for running both Windows and Ubuntu on the Mac. The integration of WSL with the desktop OS is great though. Microsoft Office still works best on Windows though not to the extent of a few years back. There is no Paint or Notepad, and favourites like Notepad++ do not run natively, but Preview works for cropping images and alternatives to Windows utilities exist.

Sometimes you are pushed towards the command line which is not a bad thing. No WinSCP for example, so use scp instead, and do some helper scripts for common tasks. You end up saving time. (I realise you can script WinSCP as well). And no need for Putty; just type ssh or script the command line you need.

I do expect though to use Windows less in future, and for me that is a big change.

tech, Uncategorized, xbox

Fixing an Xbox controller broken by Elden Ring

April 17, 2022 Tim Anderson

I have been enjoying Elden Ring on the Xbox but not so much when my controller broke. I recall the same thing happening with Dark Souls. Maybe it’s the way I play, but the problem is that the right bumper is used for a quick attack, which I use constantly. The bumpers seem to be less robust than the triggers, so after a while it breaks.

Fortunately the current Xbox controllers (I have a Carbon Black) are easy to fix. The hardest part is getting the textured panels off the controller handles; like so many modern electronics cases, these are a press fit and have to be levered off while trying not to break or scratch them. Then you undo two screws each side using a Torx T8 security screwdriver and another screw under the label in the battery compartment. Then you can carefully remove first a central rear panel and next the rear bumpers.

This revealed the problem: a small plastic tab had broken.

Gluing the tab back probably would not last long; but fortunately compatible bumper parts are available for a few pounds on eBay. I bought two (one for next time) and everything is fine.

tech, Uncategorized

Google’s Digital Garage, hosted by UK City Councils

November 29, 2017 onlyconnect

I have recently moved into a new area and noticed that my (now) local city council was running a Google Digital Garage:

Winchester City Council is very excited to be partnering up with The Digital Garage from Google – a digital skills training platform to assist you in growing your business, career and confidence, online. Furthermore, a Google digital expert is coming to teach you what is needed to gain a competitive advantage in the ever changing digital landscape, so come prepared to learn and ask questions, too.

I went along as a networking opportunity and learn more about Google’s strategy. The speaker was from Google partner Uplift Digital, “founded by Gori Yahaya, a digital and experiential marketer who had spent years working on behalf of Google, training and empowering thousands of SMEs, entrepreneurs, and young people up and down the country to use digital to grow their businesses and further their careers.”

I am not sure “digital garage” was the right name in this instance, as it was essentially a couple of presentations which not much interaction and no hands-on. The first session had three themes:

Understanding search
Manage your presence on Google
Get started with paid advertising

What we got was pretty much the official Google line on search: make sure your site performs well on mobile as well as desktop, use keywords sensibly, and leave the rest to Google’s algorithms. The second topic was mainly about Google’s local business directory called My Business. Part three introduced paid advertising, mainly covering Google AdWords. No mention of click fraud. Be wary of Facebook advertising, we were told, since advertising on Facebook may actually decrease your organic reach, it is rumoured. Don’t bother advertising on Twitter, said the speaker.

Session two was about other ways to maintain a digital presence, mainly looking at social media, along with a (rather unsatisfactory) introduction to Google Analytics. The idea is to become an online authority in what you do, we were told. Good advice. YouTube is the second most popular search engine, we were told, and we should consider posting videos there. The speaker recommended the iOS app YouTube Director for Business, a free tool which I later discovered is discontinued from 1st December 2017; it is being replaced by Director Onsite which requires you to spend $150 on YouTube advertising in order to post a video.

Overall I thought the speaker did a good job on behalf of Google and there was plenty of common sense in what was presented. It was a Google-centric view of the world which considering that it is, as far as I can tell, entirely funded by Google is not surprising.

As you would also expect, the presentation was weak concerning Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Facebook in particular seems to be critically important for many small businesses. One lady in the audience said she did not bother with a web site at all since her Facebook presence was already providing as many orders for her cake-making business as she could cope with.

We got a sanitised view of the online world which in reality is a pretty mucky place in many respects.

IT vendors have always been smart about presenting their marketing as training and it is an effective strategy.

The aspect that I find troubling is that this comes hosted and promoted by a publicly funded city council. Of course an independent presentation or a session with involvement from multiple companies with different perspectives would be much preferable; but I imagine the offer of free training and ticking the box for “doing something about digital” is too sweet to resist for hard-pressed councils, and turn a blind eye to Google’s ability to make big profits in the UK while paying little tax.

Google may have learned from Microsoft and its partners who once had great success in providing basic computer training which in reality was all about how to use Microsoft Office, cementing its near-monopoly.

.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft, Uncategorized

Try RegBot

March 24, 2017 onlyconnect

You can try RegBot here:

Or with the following Skype link:

Or on Facebook Messenger.

Uncategorized

Last thoughts on Windows Phone

May 31, 2016 onlyconnect 1 Comment

Microsoft’s Windows Phone disaster lurched further towards oblivion last week, when Windows boss Terry Myerson emailed employees with the news that “Today I want to share that we are taking the additional step of streamlining our smartphone hardware business, and we anticipate this will impact up to 1,850 jobs worldwide, up to 1,350 of which are in Finland.”

“Streamlining” is exec-speak for further withdrawal from the mobile phone business.

Microsoft is at times a dysfunctional company and nowhere is this better illustrated than in its mobile devices adventures. The failure of Windows Phone is a self-inflicted wound. Mis-steps include:

Aiming the first release of Windows Phone 7, in 2010, at the consumer market despite Windows core strength being in business computers
Launching Windows Phone while failing to do the spadework with operators and retailers to ensure that it was actually widely available
Using Silverlight as the development platform for Windows Phone and then abandoning Silverlight on Windows and releasing Windows 8 with a different and incompatible development platform
Promising that Windows Phone would be updated by Microsoft so users could stay up to date, while in fact leaving this to operators who did not care – this applied until April 2014 when the Developer Preview program kicked off, allowing users to update by signing up as developers, subject to hardware constraints
Long dormant periods while Microsoft went through one of its, “let’s pause while we make huge changes that will be great eventually” phases, such as before Windows Phone 8.0 which introduced the NT kernel and before Windows Mobile 10 which introduced the Universal Windows Platform

Despite all the above, the arrival of a former Microsoft executive at Nokia meant that Windows Phone was adopted by a company that actually understood how to develop and market smartphones. Visibility of Windows Phone at retail greatly improved and technology such as Nokia’s PureView photography gave it an edge in some areas. Windows Phone was also strong for turn by turn driving directions with Here maps.

It was an uphill battle against iPhone and Android, and with Microsoft’s too-slow platform development, but Nokia made some impact and built significant market share in certain territories, though in Europe rather than the USA.

Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices business in 2014, along with CEO Stephen Elop, and it was here that everything went wrong. Specifically:

The transition period along with the coming Windows 10 resulted in not much happening in terms of new phones or announcements

Steve Ballmer was replaced as Microsoft CEO by Satya Nadella, before the acquisition completed. Ballmer had a strong belief in “Windows everywhere” and the importance of Microsoft not conceding the mobile space to competitors. Nadella came from a server background and believes everything will be fine as long as Microsoft’s server and cloud products are strong.

There was no consensus at Microsoft about whether Windows Phone was a key strategic asset or a waste of time and after running around in circles for a bit the inevitable happened: in June 2015 Nadella cut back the Windows Phone staff, cancelled some forthcoming devices, and parted company with Elop, who presumably had no appetite for presiding over the death of the business he had nurtured.

Myerson’s memo still presents the illusion that Windows Phone has some kind of future. “We’re scaling back, but we’re not out!” he writes. However you cannot be a little bit in the mobile phone business any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. The reason, as Elop announced when Nokia chose Windows Phone, is that you need an ecosystem. No, Continuum (the ability to use a phone like a desktop with an external display) is not an ecosystem. Maybe there will be some specialist business cases where a mobile device running Windows meets the need, but it will be a tiny niche.

This is also the reason why June 2015 was really the date that Windows Phone died, at least in public. Once it became obvious that Microsoft no longer believed in its own mobile platform, there was no hope, and sales suffered accordingly.

Could it have been different? Of course. The Nokia acquisition was not necessarily a bad idea: in theory it gave the hardware the backing of Microsoft’s deep pockets and brought to the company the skills that it lacked in how to make and market phones.

The saga has not been pretty to watch. In particular, the destruction of value in acquiring and then disposing of Nokia is distressing, as is the destruction of value in the Windows Phone operating system itself.

I have used a Windows Phone as my main mobile device for several years, and yes, it has a lot going for it. Navigation is easier than on Android or iOS, performance is good, and the integration with social media was for a while excellent. The camera on a Lumia 1020 remains superb. The development platform is strong, with Visual Studio and C#.

The subject of operating system design is another story; but there is another take on this narrative which looks like this:

Old world: Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6

Lurch towards mobile: Windows 8, Windows Phone 7

Lurch back towards desktop: Windows 10, Windows Mobile 10 with Continuum

Windows 10 is not as good as Windows 8.x on tablets, and Windows Mobile 10 is perhaps not as good as Windows Phone 8.x on mobile. I say perhaps because I don’t hate it; but there is a trade-off with performance and touch-friendliness worse while the capability of the operating system and its apps has improved.

In this way of reading Microsoft’s strategy, the death of Windows Phone is a consequence of the unravelling of former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky’s strategy to make Windows a secure and mobile-friendly platform.

The new Microsoft

That is it then; Microsoft is exiting mobile and trusting in server and cloud, plus a large but declining desktop Windows business, plus applications for other people’s mobile platforms. It is a software company after all.

It is too early though to say whether or not Ballmer was wrong and Nadella right in steering away from Windows everywhere. For sure Google will continue to do all it can to push Android users towards its own cloud services. Apple’s is a more open platform in this sense, because the company has no real equivalent to Office 365 or Azure, but Microsoft is vulnerable here as well. There is also Amazon Web Services to think about, the dominant cloud player, with its own offerings for email, cloud database and so on.

Still, this is the new Microsoft; and from a customer perspective there is good news in that both iOS and Android should be well supported for Microsoft’s services, and that Office 365 and Azure have to compete on technical merit, not just on the basis of integrating nicely with Windows.

Uncategorized

Microsoft Financials: steady, but a turning point as on-premises server business declines

April 22, 2016 onlyconnect

Microsoft has announced its latest financials, and I have made a quick table summarising the year-on-year comparison for the quarter. See the end of this post for what the confusing segment categories represent.

Quarter ending March 31st 2016 vs quarter ending March 31st 2015, $millions

Segment	Revenue	Change	Operating income	Change
Productivity and Business Processes	6522	+65	2994	-210
Intelligent Cloud	6096	+193	2188	-345
More Personal Computing	9458	+89	1645	+596
Corporate and Other	-1545	-1545	-1544	-1352

A few observations.

Overall the figures are flat. That is not a bad result if you think of Microsoft as a PC company, considering that the PC is in decline; disappointing if you think of Microsoft as a cloud company. The answer is that one is offsetting the other, which is not too bad.

Microsoft says that revenue and income would be up, were it not for currency fluctuations. Of course there is that big hit in “Corporate and other” which is “net revenue deferral related to Windows 10 of $1.6 billion,” according to the earnings statement.

On-premises server business is in retreat. It is not possible to migrate customers to the cloud while at the same time growing on-premises business. That truth finally showed up in Microsoft’s figures. CFO Amy Hood referred to a “larger than expected decline in our transactional on premise server business” in the earnings call.

Margins are not so good in cloud. Selling software license is almost all profit, once you have developed it. Not so with cloud, which requires data centres, networking, and ongoing maintenance. “Our company gross margin percentage declined this quarter driven by our accelerating mix of cloud services in our Intelligent Cloud and Productivity and Business Processes segment offset by higher gross margin percentage performance from products within More Personal Computing,” said Hood.

Office 365 continues to grow. CEO Satya Nadella said that “Commercial Office 365 customers surpassed 70 million monthly active users and we grew seats by 57 percent” year on year. This is key to the company’s health. Customers in Office 365 are hooked to the platform and more likely to buy other services such as Dynamics CRM, Enterprise Mobility Services MDM (Mobile Device Management), or applications hosted on Azure. “Dynamics CRM Online seats more than doubled this quarter with over 80 percent of our new CRM customers deploying in the cloud,” said Nadella.

Windows 10 is being taken up. The nagware is working according to Nadella, who said that “The number of Windows 10 devices is twice that of Windows 7 over the same time period since launch.” Nevertheless I still hear a lot of caution out there, with people advising one another to stick with Windows 7. Windows 10 pushes users more strongly to Microsoft services than 7, with Cortana driven by Bing. “Over 35 percent of our search revenue last month came from Windows 10 devices,” said Nadella.

Windows Phone is dying fast. “For phone we expect year over year revenue declines to deepen in Q4 as we work through our Lumia channel position,” said Hood.

Linux is growing. Nadella made a few comments about SQL Server on Linux and Linux on Azure. Why SQL Server on Linux? “We look at that as an expansion opportunity,” he said. Over 20% of VMs on Azure are Linux, he added. Microsoft made Linux “first class” on Azure in order to be able to host an enterprise’s “entire data estate across Windows and Linux.” People don’t move between operating systems, he said, but “now they have a choice around database.”

I’d add that we are now seeing scenarios where Linux is ahead of Windows on Azure. The new Azure Container service is currently Linux only, for example, though a Windows option is planned.

What Microsoft does with Linux in the coming years will be interesting to see. Office on Linux? Microsoft Android?

A reminder of Microsoft’s segments:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, both commercial and consumer, including retail sales, volume licenses, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Skype consumer, OneDrive, Outlook.com. Microsoft Dynamics including Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, both online and on-premises sales.

Intelligent Cloud: Server products not mentioned above, including Windows server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, as well as Microsoft Azure.

More Personal Computing: What a daft name, more than what? Still, this includes Windows in all its non-server forms, Windows Phone both hardware and licenses, Surface hardware, gaming including Xbox, Xbox Live, and search advertising.

Tim Anderson's IT Writing