Analysts say Vista will boost retail sales. Analysts say Vista won't boost retail sales. Analysts say Vista will kickstart corporate PC spending. Analysts say corporates won't buy Vista and hence it won't affect their budgets in the immediate future.

Click the links in the last paragraph to see four contradictory predictions, there are many more if you search on-line.

It would be an interesting research project to monitor these kinds of analyst predications and score individuals on the accuracy of their vision. Any takers?

Posted by Bill Bennett January 31, 2007 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

It seemed like half of Microsoft New Zealand was on Auckland's Queen Street this morning handing out lollipops, frisbees and free coffees to mark the launch of the Vista operation system.

The other half of the company was in Wellington for the formal product launch -- at a secret residential location -- along with the Reseller News Journalists Amanda Sachtleben and Jan Birkeland. You'll be able to read more about this when they return.

Serving coffee was an inspired idea. Many Microsofties were present at Dick Smith's Manukau store at midnight when the world's first official copy of the software was snapped-up by All Black Dan Carter and promptly sold in a charity auction.

You can read more about the vista launch in these stories:

Nice operating system, but it won't shift hardware

Sony launches Vista mini-laptop

Rivals slam Vista on antitrust grounds

Posted by Bill Bennett January 30, 2007 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

The IDG News Service reports that Rick Tsai , CEO of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) says Microsoft Vista won't boost PC sales.

His comments matter because Tsai's company makes the chips powering many desktop and laptop computers and the market is, at best, flat. TSMC conducts market research to determine where to invest and the figures don't point to a surge in sales. In fact, manufacturers are sitting on a glut of PC and mobile phone chips.

As this earlier blog points out, resellers wanting to earn a crust from Vista may get better returns from offering support and other customers services than from selling hardware.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 26, 2007 5:35 PM | Comments (0)

If it's not working on a plain vanilla desktop PC, you can rest assured it's not working on thousands of other systems -- make that hundreds of thousands. Cancel all leave in the support department and brace yourself for a tsunami of calls.

A copy of Vista was couriered to the Reseller News office on Monday -- or was that Tuesday?

Either way, there newspaper deadlines to deal with so installation didn't start until first thing Wednesday morning.

There's a drill to successfully installing new operating systems on soho computers.

First, make a full back up of all important documents. This took an hour or so. No problem.

Next, run a ruler over applications like Outlook that store in the Program folder rather than the My Documents folder. OK, everything is nicely locked down and safe.

Then insert the Vista DVD. It runs, it seems it runs slowly, but it does run. Up comes a low-resolution screen -- minor alarm bells ring -- maybe Vista hasn't correctly detected the video card. Nevertheless, it appears we are in business.

Working through the initial standard install steps takes about 15 minutes -- then another 20 minutes or so for everything to load, unpack and install. So far so good.

Then Vista reboots. Up it comes, a green bar on a black screen and, whoof, the monitor switches off. A little investigation shows there's no video signal. Presumably, Vista hasn't detected the card and hasn't fallen back to a default option.

Three additional installation attempts later, the problem hasn't gone away. The computer may be working normally, without a video signal there's no easy way to know.

This may be a trivial problem. It may be something that can be fixed in a jiffy. But rest assured, hundreds of thousands of users -- many without a lot of tech-savvy -- are going to experience something similar over the next few weeks. Customer support is about to go into overdrive.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 25, 2007 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

The world's second largest software company hasn't quite released its own Linux distribution. At least not yet. Maybe it never will, but the day when it could comfortably roll-out its own business-class version of the open source operating system has moved closer.

In October the company announced it would be providing full global support for Red Hat Linux. In recent weeks it has moved to dramatically undercut Red Hat's support pricing. Yesterday, Oracle announced its Management Pack for Linux. There's a pattern here.

Oracle could be preparing it's own-brand version of the operating system or it could simply be aiming to usurp the enterprise Linux market leader. Either way, it looks as if Oracle now has a well-rounded strategy to break free of other people's proprietary systems software.

But will customers be happy buying, maybe that should read sourcing, their Linux from Oracle?

Posted by Bill Bennett January 23, 2007 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

When Novell cut its patent-sharing deal with Microsoft, it looked as if the for profit Linux vendor was running scared of the software giant. Novell's compare-to-Vista web site suggests otherwise.

Go to the site and check out the white paper and video. It probably won't change your view about which operating system is best, but it will update your knowledge.

Incidentally, the voice-over pronounces Suse as sue-say rather than suze. Presumably this is hangover from the software's German origins. Well whoop-de-doo.

Note to Novell's marketing department, giving your product a name that's pronounced unusually is a bad move. English speakers are a bigger market than German speakers -- get over it.

It's unlikely Microsoft will lose a single Vista customer because an annoying, patronising sales critter 'corrects' their pronunciation of that name. Can you say the same?

Posted by Bill Bennett January 22, 2007 11:37 AM | Comments (4)

It doesn't get sticky when hot, you can't bite into it, it doesn't taste very nice and there's very few calories involved -- so why did the company formerly known as Lucky Goldstar choose to name its smart new cellphone after an indulgent treat?

The answer's quite simple. To get noticed and to stay in people's minds. As LG's mobile marketing manager Carli Wilson explained, "Nobody can remember the names of the Nokia phones".

Well quite. I've used many Nokias and I never knew the model numbers of any of them -- tip, keep the box so if you ever do need to refer to the name you've got something to refer to.

Wilson had a hard task, to create noise for a new cellphone from a brand that, as far as Kiwis are concerned is new to the game. Launching in the wake of Apple's overexposed, but still virtual, iPhone probably didn't help her cause.

So, what did she do? She threw a big swanky party at Auckland's Opium restaurant inviting journalist, phone industry people and television celebrities, serving-up chocolate-flavoured cocktails.

Smart move. Smart phone. .

Posted by Bill Bennett January 19, 2007 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

... well that's not strictly true. OK, it's not true at all. What I have got is an iPhone skin for my Palm T|X.

You can't make phone calls or do much other than open Palm applications, but it is certainly an ice breaker at parties.

The skin is known as iPhoney 0.2 (what a great name!). Last week links to the download site were posted on popular Palm user forums, including my favourite: Brighthand.

Sadly Apple's corporate legal attack dogs had to move in and spoil the fun -- you'll find most of the links to iPhoney have been removed for fear of litigation. And the iPhony site itself was broken when I looked for it this morning.

This is yet another example of Apple's often overlooked bullying, aggressive nature.

Come on Apple, lighten up, iPhony is just a piece of fun. If anything its one of those viral marketing campaigns just about every other corporation in this quadrant of the galaxy would give its right hand for.

Get with the program, we're now in an era where consumer advocates can make or break a product. Alienating your fans this way is not smart marketing.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 18, 2007 10:41 AM | Comments (4)

It's nice to see the story on the front page of the New Zealand Herald's business section trumpeting "The Amazing Business Confidence U-Turn". But the real news for resellers lies in the eighth paragraph.

There's been a major turnaround in sentiment. The number of firms expecting business conditions to improve over the next six months outnumber the pessimists by 3 percent. This might not sound like much, but the same survey three months ago had the pessimists ahead by 19 percent. This time last year the pessimists were 70 percent ahead. So the change from one survey to the next has been significant.

That's all good. But there's even better news for resellers; a net 13 percent of firms expect to lift spending. Strictly speaking the story says they plan to spend on plant and machinery, but investment intentions are now at the highest level since 1995.

It's time to do a little selling.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 17, 2007 4:06 PM | Comments (0)

Talk about a herd instinct. After a few years of focusing almost exclusively on enterprise computing and small business, it seems the entire industry has now turned its attention to the consumer. Apparently, it can only manage one big picture vision thing at any given moment.

Ever since we got back to work after Christmas, there's been a deluge of product announcements aimed at individual buyers and tons of digital home initiatives.

Perhaps you might expect this from Microsoft which has its roots with personal computing. But even companies with a traditional enterprise focus, such as Cisco, have joined the consumer feeding frenzy. It's like every CEO wants to be Steve Jobs and wear black polo shirts in front of fawning acolytes.

Of course January is always a big month for consumer gear. For a start, it comes directly after the Christmas spending spree where the spectacle of Santa stuffing digital gadgets into stockings has tech company bean counters salivating. It's also the month where there are two huge consumer-focused launch-fests: CES and MacWorld.

But usually, somewhere between the jingle bells of cash registers and the gasps of excitement over Apple's latest geegaws there's a little something in the news wires to tease corporate tech-buying tastebuds.

The industry focus regularly shifts from one target market to another, perhaps we're at one extreme and the pendulum is about to swing back. Let's hope so.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 12, 2007 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

Cellphone makers are rushing to deliver handsets capable of displaying TV. Why?

The colour screen on the Nokia 6235 mobile isn't bad. Physically it measures roughly 27 by 27 mm. That's 128 by 128 pixels. It's more than adequate for navigating the cellphone controls and OK-ish for reading TXT messages.

There's a pretty, animated screen saver that cuts in if you leave the phone for more than a minute or so. It's possible to view low-resolution still photos and, if you squint, you can just about watch short movie clips.

But that's about it. The display is more than enough for standard cellphone tasks, barely adequate for pictures and downright lousy for video. It would make a very poor TV screen. Watching a rugby game on this screen would be an appalling experience.

On the other hand, the phone's compact size means you can carry it everywhere you go without a second thought. It even fits in a shirt pocket.

Although phone-makers have the technology to shove TV electronics into a handset, there's a need to strike a balance between portability and screen size. Make the screen big enough to deliver a decent viewing experience and you've got a clumsy handset. Make the handset portable and you've got a lousy screen.

Sure, it's technically impressive and yes there are clowns (sorry early adopters) who'll buy any old rubbish if it's marketed properly, but the current TV Phone format is a likely to be a dead-end. There's already evidence that most people hardly ever use their existing phone's picture sending capability. TV on a phone? Don't make me laugh.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 9, 2007 10:25 AM | Comments (2)

Disc manufacturers are readying media to work with Blu-ray and HD drives as well as introducing new DVD media. This is supposed to be the start of a new era in optical media and there's plenty of excitement in some circles. Major corporations have made substantial investments in the technologies and are looking for a return.

But are they barking up the wrong tree?

Here's a prediction. The new high density optical formats will get a lot of press this year. Millions of customers will purchase devices, mainly games consoles, that use the formats. The players and discs will sell in large numbers. There will be talk of a replay of the Betamax versus VHS format wars.

And yet, the new optical formats will not repeat the success of CD and DVD discs. At least not in the long term. They will quickly become niche products servicing a limited range of applications.

There are a number of reasons for this. DIgital rights management, loved by music and movie companies, hated by consumers, has a role to play. Format confusion is also significant, it's not just Blu-ray and HD, there are different sub-formats.

But let's focus on the main reason: other technologies, particularly solid state memory, but hard drives also fall into this category, are accelerating past optical media. They are often generic, open systems. You don't need special software or to make additional payments to use them. And they are relatively trouble free.

It's no accident that Apple chose these technologies for its, admittedly non-generic, unopen iPods.

These days you don't often see people slipping a disc into a personal music player -- in the near you won't see people slipping a disc into a player to watch a movie. You can already buy low cost open source media playing devices that use a hard disc to store huge amounts of video. About NZ$400 (US$300) will give you enough storage for days of video.

Hell, you can plug an iPod into the back of your TV to watch a movie.

Over Christmas I struggled to burn some DVDs with old (copyright-free) videos on them so we could watch them on the big screen. It took a number of attempts to find a combination of PC, burner, media and software that could actually work (yes, it would probably go first time on a Mac) -- even then, I struggled to put more than an hour of video on a single DVD. That's about 1GB of data -- which would fit on a $23 SD memory card and transfer first time in less than a couple of minutes.

Posted by Bill Bennett January 8, 2007 11:40 AM | Comments (0)