Category Archives: windows 7

delphi, embarcadero, software development, windows 7

Delphi and C++ Builder 2010 are out

18 Comments

I’ve installed the new Delphi from Embarcadero. I want to enthuse about this product, as a long-time Delphi enthusiast, but a few things have dampened my zeal:

1. The install on Windows 7 64-bit was not totally smooth. First Avira Antivir claimed that a file installed during setup, called convert.exe, contained a virus (not the fashionable new one, something else called DR/Delphi.Gen dropper). I thought this was most likely a false positive. I tested the file with with Kaspersky which declared it clean, and I’ve emailed Avira about the problem.

I’m not sure why I bother at all with running anti-virus software. It is very little use. After all, what is the point of having it, if when it claims to find something you ignore it? On the other hand, what is the chance that this is a real virus on Embarcadero’s new CD, that Kaspersky does not detect?

None of this is Embarcadero’s fault, of course, unless it has shipped a virus, which I doubt.

2. Next, on running and quitting Delphi 2010 for the first time, the Windows Program Compatibility Assistant was triggered. See this earlier post for what this guy looks like and what it does. This one made the same change, ELEVATECREATEPROCESS.

A minor niggle perhaps, but it looks bad. At this stage, the Delphi team should have come to terms with UAC and made RAD Studio properly UAC-aware. I’m guessing most of the team run with UAC disabled.

3. Another UAC issue. When the IDE starts up, you get a message:

Error executing ‘C:\ProgramData\{BBD31133-40F8-4B57-9BA6-DB76C03D153B}\Setup.exe’: The parameter is incorrect

This does not occur if you run as administrator.

4. I ran up the IDE and noticed there is a new documentation wiki with user contributions. I think this is a great idea. It seems to be built with mediawiki. Unfortunately it failed with “A database query syntax error has occurred”. Update: it’s working now.

5. I’d understood that Delphi 2010 is somewhat Windows 7 ready. It has great support for multi-touch and gestures. That’s fine, but I was interested to see how to support the Windows 7 Jump Lists. A Jump List is the menu that pops up when you right-click a taskbar icon.

Well, if support for this is there I can’t find it. There is support for the Windows 7 Direct 2D Canvas, and as I mentioned for multi-touch, but that’s about all I can find.

It’s a shame because only a few people will be using multi-touch in the near future, and Direct 2D is not a feature visible to users, but the new Windows 7 taskbar and its features – there’s also the ability to add controls to taskbar preview windows – is the thing that every Windows 7 user will notice.

Of course you can easily call the Windows API from Delphi, and the community will figure out how to support these features before long; there’s already an alpha “Windows 7 controls for Delphi” that Daniel Wischnewski has come up with. But I’d like to have seen it in the box, and it would have been a nice selling point.

Don’t let me put you off. There are other new features – including Firebird support, integrated code formatter, better thread debugging -  and no doubt the core of Delphi is as good as ever (no 64-bit yet, but it will come eventually).

Still, my impression is that Embarcadero still has to work a bit on that last degree of polish. One final gripe: why is the discussion forum so darn slow? It has also been in beta forever.

More information here.

microsoft, windows 7

Getting picky about the Windows 7 Taskbar – real-world flaws?

22 Comments

The new taskbar in Windows 7 is for launching applications as well as showing what is running; and one of the first things you do with a new installation is to pin your favourites there so they are easy to start.

Very soon, you’ll run out of space. This is a problem that will get worse, too, because app vendors will discover that the notification area is no longer effective for getting the user’s attention and background applications will use the taskbar instead.

Unfortunately a scrolling taskbar is not much fun to use. In fact, it’s a disaster. The taskbar divides itself into pages, and a fiddly scroller lets you flip from one page to the next.

Further, if you activate a running application which is on a different page, then its page comes into view, hiding the other icons.

Now let’s say you want to launch an application which is on a page that is no longer in view. Instead of clicking one large target (especially nice if you are using touch), you have one tiny target (especially horrible if you are using touch) – the up or down arrow on the scroller – followed by a second click on the app icon. Maybe there is a keyboard shortcut for scrolling the taskbar, but the only one I know is Win-T which cycles through all the icons – tedious.

At this point, you have two further options. You can increase the height of the taskbar. Right click – Properties – untick Lock the taskbar – then drag the top border up. Now you have more space for icons, but you have also lost valuable working space on the screen.

The second option is to use small icons, which is another option in properties. When you do this, you can fit in a few more icons, though not as many extra as you might expect. It is easy to see why this is so unsatisfactory. Here is the Word icon in normal size, followed by the small icon version:

 

Two observations. First, the “small” version is not that much narrower than the large one. Second, if you look at the size of the icon versus the amount of background, the small version is mostly wasted space. The actual image on the small icon is roughly 25% the size of the large. You get a poor yield in terms of extra icons, but a severe usability loss in that the small size is hard to see.

I don’t know if this problem can be improved by tweaking other Windows settings, but would be interested to discover.

It is also a shame that the taskbar cannot be extended across a second display, if you are running two or more screens.

The conclusion, in my case, is that neither the double-height nor the small icon view is really satisfactory, though double-height is less bad.

I like the new taskbar, but this is a real annoyance. Any tips I’ve missed?

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apple, microsoft, windows 7

Hands on Windows 7 multi-touch – will Apple get this right before Microsoft?

I’ve been trying a Dell Latitude XT2 with Windows 7 as a way of exploring multi-touch with Microsoft’s new operating system. I have a number of thoughts on the subject, which I will do my best to organize, but this is work in progress and I welcome your comments.

Multi-touch has received scant attention in all the Windows 7 coverage for one very good reason: few of us have the right hardware. Even a Tablet PC won’t do; you need one with that supports multi-touch which is one of a very few PCs on the market.

Touch is nevertheless a key issue, because it is the future of how we interact with our computers, particularly portable computers. 

Touch computers should have no keyboard or stylus

This one takes a bit of argument. I’ve used a Tablet PC for years, almost since their first release, and I like lots of things about them. However a lot of the time I use them in old-style keyboard mode. Why? Because the stylus is a nuisance and text input too fiddly. When Microsoft designed the Tablet PC, it should have made “doesn’t need a stylus” as the number one constraint, and “doesn’t need a keyboard” as another. It did not; and that is why Tablet PC has more-or-less failed.

There are several problems with the stylus concept. They are fiddly, expensive, and get lost easily. They make interacting with the device less natural. They introduce new problems while solving others.

As for the keyboard, it is a disaster. Once you concede the necessity of a keyboard, you end up with a clam-shell, twist-screen design that is complex, fragile and expensive. It is neither one thing nor another, and can never be mainstream.

The chunky finger problem

The stylus is a compromise that solves a particular problem: the finger is a chunky pointer. Typical menus and icons are designed with mouse-precision in mind, and stabbing them with a finger results in frustrating errors. Still, this problem bears a little analysis. Does a finger have less precision than a mouse pointer? Not really; human fingers are highly evolved and easily capable of the necessary precision. The Windows Touch Pointer (available in Vista as well as Windows 7) illustrates this. It is an on-screen mouse which represents a large target for the finger, but controls a pointer of high precision:

Using the touch pointer, the finger is just as precise as a real mouse, though it takes some mental adjustment, gets in the way, and is off by default in Windows 7.

The text input problem

The other advantage of the stylus is that it simulates a pen, making it easier to write or draw. This is actually an excellent reason to have a stylus as an option; but it should not be necessary for normal operations.

Text input without a keyboard is a partially unsolved problem, and the stylus is not a complete answer. Handwriting recognition is now pretty good on a Tablet; but I can still type faster than I write, and the pop-up input panel is an interference, especially when you only need to type a few letters. Apple’s iPhone (no stylus) has a good stab at making touch input work for text, and though I still don’t like it greatly, I think it is along the right lines.

Windows 7 and touch

What about Windows 7? Well, Microsoft has gone half-way towards making Windows touch-friendly. Multi-touch is a major advance, and gestures are a powerful concept enabling touch-driven applications that are much easier to use. A gesture interprets a pattern drawn on the screen as a single command; there is a list of Windows 7 gestures here, and developers can create their own.

Microsoft’s aim with Windows 7 was not to build a special touch interface, but to make the standard UI easy to control:

A touch shell for launching only touch-specific applications would not meet customers’ needs – there would be too much switching between “touch” mode and Windows applications. Instead, we focused our efforts on augmenting the overall experience so that Windows works great with touch.

This sounds good, but has Microsoft succeeded? My test was simple: start up in Tablet mode and see how easily I could work, without using the stylus.

I found using Windows 7 touch-only possible, but not always enjoyable. You can pump up the text size to make targets larger, but applications like Microsoft Office are still hard to use. The new taskbar is designed to be touch-friendly, and generally speaking it is, though not so much in the notification area. The Start menu is less good; and despite Microsoft’s concerns a touch-specific replacement may well be a good idea. Some applications, like Windows Media Player, seem fine with touch control; others, like Control Panel, awkward. Internet Explorer is relatively nice to use, and so is Apple’s Safari; I can well believe that it is designed with touch-control in mind.

One of the issues is that the on-screen keyboard does not always appear when you want it. It pops up automatically when you focus on standard text boxes; but for some reason it does not show up if I tap on a Sticky Note, for example; I have to drag it out manually.

The awkward truth: applications do need to be designed for touch in order to shine.

I do not know exactly what Microsoft and/or its OEM partners are planning for Windows 7 touch, but suspect we are going to see a few more high-priced niche items like the Dell Latitude XT2 – lovely hardware though it is – that essentially continue the Tablet PC theme and will not greatly impact the market.

The kind of device that might work, to my mind, would be:

1. Without keyboard or stylus

2. Priced keenly

3. Small – 12” screen at most

4. Bundled with excellent touch-friendly applications that are a pleasure to use – not just a collection of samples like the Windows 7 touch pack. Basic actions like web browsing, email, note-taking, and entertainment (games, media) should all be covered.

5. Preconfigured so that your first experience of Windows 7 multi-touch is not a frustrating one

Question: if that is right, is it likely that such machines will appear soon? Or is it more likely that Apple will deliver its rumoured tablet and severely impair Microsoft’s potential market?

microsoft, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 tip: use Group by to merge and manage library views

25 Comments

I’ve been looking forward to the libraries feature in Windows 7. For example, on my desktop PC I keep some downloads in my personal download folder – under c:\users\[username]\Documents\Downloads – while others are in a download folder on drive E. It makes sense to treat this as one location, rather than two. Libraries let you view these two folders together, without physically merging them.

That said, Windows 7 tripped me up. I created a new library, called Downloads. I added the two folders. I was annoyed though to see that I had two separate lists of folders in the new library, not one. I wanted a single, merged list.

I clicked around to see if there was a way of merging the lists. I tried the Arrange by menu. If you arrange by Name, you get a single merged list but without folders at all – in my case, thousands of files. Arranging by folder got me back to the separate listings. I tried the Organize menu, but that didn’t help. I tried right-clicking, with promising options like Expand group and Expand all groups, but these were simply different ways of viewing the location groups.

Then I noticed that the default Documents library had exactly the view I wanted, merging the personal and public Documents folders. Had Microsoft included some magic for the built-in libraries, or was I missing something?

I was missing something. I found out what when I clicked Organize – Layout – Menu bar. Of course this is off by default, because someone at Microsoft has a religious aversion to menus; they have been removed entirely from most of Office. But once I had the menu bar, I found the View – Group by option. If I select View – Group by – None, then I get the merged folder list that I want.

In fact, all the Group by options seem to work on a merged list, which leads to strange fact number two: once I had the merged list, it was not obvious how to get back to the non-merged list. It is as if there is a Group by Location which is not on the menu. I did eventually work it out. To get back to the non-merged list, choose View – Arrange by – Clear changes. Obvious, eh?

Incidentally, there is a way of using Group by without displaying the menu bar. You have to right-click in the left margin of the right-hand pane of the library listing. Easy when you know how.

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windows, windows 7

Memory leak bug in useless NVIDIA Windows service

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Rafael Rivera reports on a severe memory leak in an NVIDIA service that gets installed and auto-runs by default with many GeForce graphics cards. It consumes ever-increasing numbers of handles while running.

The service is the NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D Driver service – nvSCPAPISvr.exe. I investigated on my system (now Windows 7) and was suffering from the problem. The silly thing is, if I try to explore any of the 3D features (even with the service running) I get a message: Your graphic card does not support 3D Vision.

Well worth disabling the service if you have an affected driver.

This is poor practice from the vendor, and to make matters worse, the driver had apparently passed WHQL verification – a Microsoft certification which is meant to ensure quality. Well, possibly Microsoft only checked the core driver, and not ancillary services like this one, but nevertheless the user has been falsely reassured.

Posted to help spread the word.

microsoft, vista, windows, windows 7

In-place upgrade adventures with Windows 7

16 Comments

I have just done Windows 7 RTM in-place upgrades on two systems, one running Vista Ultimate x64, and the other running Vista Business x64. Why do an in-place upgrade? Simply because it is much less time and effort than a clean install. Actually, the “less time” bit needs qualification. The in-place upgrade takes several hours; I left one running overnight. However, most of the time is spent leaving the setup chugging away. It does not take much effort from you.

By contrast, a clean install involves finding all your application setup disks or downloads, serial numbers, and patches, then installing and configuring them. In some cases – Adobe Creative Suite comes to mind – you might need to de-authorize an existing installation first, or be faced with a call to support on reinstallation. Drivers are another issue; you will likely need to visit the vendor web site for your PC and any added devices and download the latest drivers. Overall, not a trivial task.

An in-place upgrade is not optimal. Doing a clean install gives Windows the best chance of running with full performance and stability, without inheriting legacy problems. Still, there is no harm in doing an in-place upgrade now, and a clean install later when you have the time. That way, you get Windows 7 goodness immediately.

Although there has been some fuss about the complexity of Windows 7 upgrades, it is not merited. In a nutshell, you can in-place upgrade from Vista to the equivalent Windows 7 edition or higher. You cannot go backwards, you cannot in-place upgrade XP, and you cannot move between 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Simple.

Here’s how it goes. For an in-place upgrade, you run setup from within the running version of Vista. If you click Check Compatibility Online, you are directed to the beta upgrade advisor. I wouldn’t bother if you’ve got this far; the setup does the same job and does not require a download. So click Install Now.

 

Of course, you’ve backed up stuff that matters to you, and appreciate that there is some small chance that Windows will be broken beyond repair and never boot again.

The first thing setup does is to check compatibility (see!).

 

Then it will inform you of any issues. This is what I got:

 

Apparently Windows 7 does not like Civilization 4, iTunes or Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1. On my x64 box it also objected to SQL Server 2008, Daemon Tools, and an IDE storage controller. You are advised to cancel setup (which you do by closing the window; there is no Cancel button), remove the problem software, and try again.

You can fix the SQL Server 2008 issue by installing SP1. Daemon Tools is a low-level utility and could easily trip-up a Windows upgrade, and has only recently come out in a Windows 7 compatible version, so I removed it. iTunes was not being used so I removed that too. I also uninstalled Windows Mobile Device Center.

How about the storage controller on the x64 box? This one made me nervous, since if Windows cannot find a compatible storage controller, nothing will work. However, I knew that the storage controller which matters was the one for Intel Sata RAID, not IDE, so I ignored it.

Once I had tidied up the system, I re-ran setup. This time, I hit Next. I got the Big Decision dialog box:

 

I wanted an in-place upgrade, so I chose Upgrade.

The next task is to wait a long time. Go and do something else. While it would be nice if this part went more quickly, it does not bother me that it takes hours; it is a one-off task. In my case, setup transferred nearly 600,000 “files, settings and programs”.

The aftermath

All going well (and it did) the next action is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del (strange how that ugliness survives the years) and log onto your shiny new Windows 7 OS. There were just a few issues to resolve.

First, the upgrade tinkers with the Start menu, and one of the oddities is that Microsoft Office (version 2007 is installed) in effect disappears from view:

 

I am not saying it is hard to find. Desktop shortcuts remain, if you have them, and you can always type a search or burrow down into All Programs. Still, this could be jarring for some users. Among my first tasks with Windows 7 is to find the applications I use frequently and pin them to the taskbar (right-click, pin to taskbar).

Second, Internet Explorer 8 opened for the first time with odd dimensions. Easily fixed, though it is annoying that you have to go through Welcome to IE8 wizards that you have seen many times before.

 

Third, Lego Digital Designer (don’t ask) failed to run. Apparently the upgrade messed up OpenGL, even though setup correctly detected my NVIDIA graphics card. I downloaded the latest from NVIDIA, bumping up the version from 8.15.11.8593 to 8.15.11.9038. This fixed it. I suspect it was not the driver version as such, more that the NVIDIA install added additional components including OpenGL support.

Fourth, the Movie Maker problem. Your old Movie Maker 6 is removed, and if you try to run Movie Maker, you are invited to download Windows Live Essentials from the Web. The new Live Movie Maker is in beta, and after installation you get a message saying it has expired and offering an update (I imagine this will be fixed by the time of full rollout in October). Eventually it runs, but it is not as good as the old one. Solution: install the Vista one.

Fifth, the upgrade reduces your UAC protection level without asking. My first move is to put it back to the highest level, for reasons explained here.

Sixth, Windows Live Writer is slightly broken under Windows 7. When inserting a picture, the “From Web” option no longer appears; and even if you type in an URL in the file dialog (which used to work), it still tries to upload it. Some incompatibility in the common dialog API, or risky assumptions made by the Live Writer developers?

Overall, these are minor issues – so far, so good. Even Visual Studio 2008 appears to have survived the upgrade.

I need to run Windows 7 for review; but I’d recommend it anyway. It is an excellent upgrade from Vista, even more so from XP.

google, internet, microsoft, windows, windows 7

No more Windows E – Europe will get full Windows 7 plus upgrade editions

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Microsoft’s Dave Heiner has announced that plans for a separate Europe-only release of Windows 7, without Internet Explorer, have been abandoned at the last minute. This follows a new proposal to include a menu of browser choices instead:

In the wake of last week’s developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I’m pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world.

Did Microsoft ever intend to ship Windows E, or was the whole thing some sort of bargaining proposition? Heiner even threatens to re-introduce it:

… if the ballot screen proposal is not accepted for some reason, then we will have to consider alternative paths, including the reintroduction of a Windows 7 E version in Europe.

Although Microsoft is making a significant concession by promoting other browsers, its proposal does mean that some users will still get IE by default. These are the users who either install Windows 7 themselves by purchasing Microsoft’s standalone package, or who receive a PC from an OEM that has chosen to leave IE as the default. In this case, here’s what happens:

Shortly after new Windows PCs are set up by the user, Microsoft will update them over the Internet with a consumer ballot software program. If IE is the default browser, the user will be presented with a list of other leading browsers and invited to select one or more for installation. Technically, this consumer ballot screen will be presented as a Web page that can be updated over time as new browsers become available.

There will be a proportion of users who have a “don’t bug me with this” reaction and just close the screen, in which case they will keep IE.

However, if the OEM supplies a PC with a browser other than IE as the default, the ballot screen will not appear, so Microsoft is at a disadvantage in that respect.

I am not sure how this will be handled in corporate environments. IE is arguably more attractive in a Microsoft-centric business environment, because it integrates with network management tools and should work properly with other Microsoft products such as SharePoint or Outlook Web Access. If IE is the corporate standard, I doubt admins will want users to see a ballot screen offering other browsers, and I imagine there will be some way of blocking it.

One final observation. Personally I have never felt locked into using IE or had any problem making choices between different browsers, email clients or other applications on Windows. That’s not the point of course; owning the defaults gives a vendor a substantial advantage because of inertia or lack of technical confidence among a certain proportion of users. It is still worth noting that users have always been able to install alternative browsers, and that the adoption achieved by Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and others would not have been possible if Windows were truly a closed platform.

internet, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Microsoft’s new EU Windows 7 proposal – will IE now be the default?

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I’m trying to figure out exactly what Microsoft is now proposing to the EU in order to satisfy its concerns about the “tying of Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser with Windows”.

The EU says:

This followed extensive discussions with the Commission which centred on a remedy outlined in the January 2009 Statement of Objections (see MEMO/09/15) whereby consumers would be shown a "ballot screen" from which they could – if they wished – easily install competing web browsers, set one of those browsers as a default, and disable Internet Explorer. Under the proposal, Windows 7 would include Internet Explorer, but the proposal recognises the principle that consumers should be given a free and effective choice of web browser, and sets out a means – the ballot screen – by which Microsoft believes that can be achieved.

Microsoft says:

Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world. As requested by the Commission, we will be publishing our proposal in full here on our website as soon as possible.

The difference I’ve noticed between these two statements is that Microsoft talks about “a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser.”

Is Microsoft winning the right to continue making IE the default, in exchange for offering the user an easy way to switch browsers?

I guess we will discover when the full details appear.

It is not yet a done deal. The EU is only considering the proposal; and in the meantime customers will still get the browserless Windows E.

Another question: if the change is agreed, will the full Windows 7 be available in time for launch? Microsoft implies it may not:

We currently are providing PC manufacturers in Europe with E versions of Windows 7, which we believe are fully compliant with European law. PCs manufacturers building machines for the European market will continue to be required to ship E versions of Windows 7 until such time that the Commission fully reviews our proposals and determines whether they satisfy our obligations under European law. If the Commission approves this new proposal, Microsoft will begin work at that time to begin implementation of it with PC manufacturers.

My reflection: if the EU had done this twelve years ago, it might have changed the history of the Internet, probably for the better. Today, this manoeuvring is unnecessary.

See also: EU responds to questions on Microsoft’s plans for Windows 7

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microsoft, windows, windows 7

Microsoft’s limited Windows 7 offer a lesson in how to annoy customers?

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I’ve returned from a few days away to discover that Microsoft’s special Windows 7 offer, which was meant to run from July 15th 2009 until August 9th 2009, has already in effect expired. This was the deal for UK customers (already less generous that that offered in the USA):

You can pre-order Windows 7 Home Premium E for £49.99** or Windows 7 Professional E for £99.99**.

The double stars are merely a reference to the odd decision to supply Windows without a web browser in Europe – a strategy to counter the EU’s monopoly concerns.

However, if you go along to Amazon.co.uk, for example, you can order Windows 7 Home Premium for £69.98 or Professional for a distinctly un-special £159.99.

I clicked all the links on Microsoft’s offer page and could not find any retailer still offering Windows 7 at the special price.

If the offer was intended to achieve a flurry of pre-orders, I am sure it succeeded. If on the other hand it was a reward to beta testers, as claimed by Brandon LeBlanc:

A special thank you to our beta testers is needed for their time and effort in helping make Windows 7 a solid release. The special pre-order offer we did offering Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional at almost 50% discount was done with our beta testers in mind.

then I am puzzled. First, it was not restricted to beta testers; and second, if you were a beta tester who happened to be away at the wrong moment, then you missed out.

Will customers who are aware that they have missed the offer for arbitrary reasons now be happy to pay 50% more? From a marketing perspective, that is the interesting question. I suppose most users will not allow pique to influence their OS choices; but they will be understandably annoyed.

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cloud computing, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Windows 7 will build the global IT economy, says IDC/Microsoft, or will the Cloud kill it?

Microsoft has sponsored an IDC report on the economic impact of Windows 7 [pdf]. Among the claims:

  • For every dollar of Microsoft revenue from launch in October 2009 to the end of
    2010 from Windows 7, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap $18.52.
  • 19% of the global IT workforce will be working with Windows 7 by the end of 2010
  • IDC expects that employment related to client operating systems will grow by more
    than 300,000 new jobs or more than 30% of total growth in global IT employment in
    2010 solely because of the launch of Windows 7

There is also a forecast that shows Windows 7 taking the majority of Windows client sales in 2010, and which appears to assume that Windows 8 will not be available before 2014.

Realistic figures, or some kind of fantasy? While I expect Windows 7 to take over rapidly from Vista, and to stimulate demand for PCs and laptops somewhat, I don’t believe this steadily rising graph. Cloud computing, software as a service, and growth in mobile devices, will all exert downward pressure on PC sales – even though some of those devices will still run Microsoft’s OS.

I had a conversation with Ian Osborne at Intellect while researching a supplement on software as a service. He made a good point about the unwillingness of the IT industry to embrace change. Although he thinks the cloud is changing everything, he remarked:

You’re dealing with the social phenomena of people working in ITdepartments and data centres who have invested their careers in learning how to make the other stuff work. You tend to want to cling on.

These look like “cling on” charts to me. It is an excellent point though: if the traditional IT industry is being turned on its head by the cloud, that has implications for the shape of IT employment around the world which I’ve not seen spelt out anywhere.

I don’t know if the 20-1 figure quoted by IDC/Microsoft is correct, but it is a useful reminder of how much IT ecosystem revolves around Microsoft’s platform.