I just got a new tablet PC and am loading it up for my upcoming trips to MIX, and TechDays in Lisbon, Portugal. When you load up a new computer you realize what you really need. So I figured that I would list them here, besides the common denominator of Windows, Office, Visual Studio, and SQL Server, here are the five pieces of software that I can't live without, software that I use on a daily basis:

1. Skype. I use Skype daily to drive the evil telcos out of business. For example I just loaded up Skype on my new computer today and had two conversations with people overseas for over an hour all for free. I pay for SkypeIn and SkypeOut and SkypePro, very valuable tools when I travel.

2. Netvibes. I use Netvibes to create a custom home page as my start page. It aggregates all of my RSS feeds as well as the typical sports, news, stocks, and weather.

3. Trillian. I use Trillian to have 1 IM client for all of my accounts: MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc.

4. Snagit. Great for screen captures, great for telling developers what is wrong with their pages.

5. SQL Data Compare and SQL Compare. These tools from Red Gate software keep your SQL Server databases in sync. Invaluable!

I got a brand new Zune for Christmas. Anyway, subscribing to Podcasts on a Zune has been, well challenging. Actually almost impossible for mere mortal. I have figured out how to do this and will explain it below. Before I do that, I have to tell you a story.

I found a great Podcast courtesy of my friend Robert Lazo. It is the Stanford University Educational Corner’s Entrepreneur Podcast. It has great content. (BTW, it this content interests you, here is the link.)

I downloaded it to my Zune and after I listened to a few of the Podcasts, I told Kathleen that she needs to listen as well. She has an iPod. But she was too lazy to download them to her iPod so she kept borrowing my Zune. After not finding my Zune where I left it the other day I suggested that she just subscribe to the Podcast. She did. Boom, just like that I sent her the link and 1.3 gigs of data started downloading to her device in a very organized manor.

Not so easy with the Zune. So here is what I had to do.

Step 1. Subscribe the RSS feed manually via Internet Explorer 7.0

After I paste in the link to the RSS feed into the browser, IE 7.0 allowed me to subscribe to it. Since I am running Vista and Office 2007, the RSS feed tried to show up all over the place, the annoying sidebar and downloading in Outlook. (As if Outlook 2007 isn’t slow enough.)

Step 2. Setting up the Feed to Automatically download the content

You have to then click on the “view feed properties..”  link to bring up the properties dialog. Here you have to check the box that says “Automatically Download Attached Files.”

Step 3. Finding where IE decides to put your files

Next you have to find out where IE will store the downloaded content. You can do this via selecting the “View Files” button. This will open the folder where IE stores your content. Copy the location from your Windows Explorer address bar. Here is where IE stores it on my computer: C:\Users\StephenForte\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\TemporaryInternetFiles\Enclosure\{620E20DE-0D04-449C-B2FD-B0E9B19C852B}

Step 4. Adding that Folder to Zune’s Library

Open your Zune software and select Options|Add Folder to Library from the main menu. At this point you can see what folders Zune syncs and you will have the opportunity to add the folder.

That’s it. Just four painful steps. There are also many other problems. If you clean out your temporary internet files, you lose your podcasts and have to start over with the downloads. Also once you listen to a podcast, Zune and IE have no idea that you don’t want it anymore.

Luckily there are some 3^rd party tools to help with this problem, like FeedMyZune. They basically do a version of what  I just did behind the scenes for you. You may want to try that.

Yesterday Microsoft released BizTalk Services CTP to the public. This one little CTP changes everything. Honest.

In the Beginning

It used to be very hard to build a distributed application. The pioneers in this field were Napster, Seti@Home and ICQ. To make applications like this work, you needed to have clients identify themselves and a message relay on the back end. Think of a switchboard for your applications telling user 1 how to communicate to user 2. If you wanted to build these connected systems, it would require a lot of infrastructure-a tremendous amount if you your application became popular. This has always been the barrier to entry. 

The Enterprise Service Bus

As time passed and web services came on to the scene, things got easier. A lot of the hard part of the pluming was taken care of; transport was easy via HTTP and speaking the same language was easy with SOAP. As time moved on and things got easier, people started pushing Web Services to the limit and the vendors started to really support building connected systems. After nearly a decade of XML and SOAP, most developers take it for granted. Enterprises now rely on this technology.

Enter the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB is an acronym (we always need a TLA, don’t we?) that is hot right now. The notion is that you have a set of shared services in an enterprise that act as a foundation for discovering, connecting and federating services. This is the natural evolution of the technology, as enterprises rely on the technology and themselves grow more federated, enterprises will standardize discovering, connecting and federating services.

Internet Service Bus

As Clemens argued yesterday, the release of the BizTalk Services CTP creates the first Internet Service Bus. Clemens says:

Two aspects that make the idea of a "service bus" generally very attractive are that the service bus enables identity federation and connectivity federation. This idea gets far more interesting and more broadly applicable when we remove the "Enterprise" constraint from ESB it and put "Internet" into its place, thus elevating it to an "Internet Services Bus", or ISB. If we look at the most popular Internet-dependent applications outside of the browser these days, like the many Instant Messaging apps, BitTorrent, Limewire, VoIP, Orb/Slingbox, Skype, Halo, Project Gotham Racing, and others, many of them depend on one or two key services must be provided for each of them: Identity Federation (or, in absence of that, a central identity service) and some sort of message relay in order to connect up two or more application instances that each sit behind firewalls - and at the very least some stable, shared rendezvous point or directory to seed P2P connections. The question "how does [MSN] Messenger work?" has, from an high-level architecture perspective a simple answer: The Messenger "switchboard" acts as a message relay.

Changing Business Models

In order to build distributed applications (and make money!) you have to scale to support the load your users and customers will add. This forced businesses to spend a disproportionate amount of money on hardware and too much time building the plumbing software.  Let’s take my business Corzen for example. Corzen collects specific data from the internet via spidering (like Google.) Corzen then crunches the data: we de-dupe it, aggregate it, match it with Dun & Bradstreet and US Govt data, and then apply some statistical models. We then deliver this “crunched” data to customers on a weekly basis.

The value add is the “crunching” of the data. Where do you think 75% of my technology budget goes to? You guessed it, the spidering infrastructure. We spider 24X7 and collect between 4-10 million records each week from spidering. As you can imagine our customers want more and more sites to be spidered and more frequently. We spent a year building an amazing XML based, queue and batch based, distributed application with WCF.  We can load URLs into a queue and then go to a web page where we can send that job to several spider servers via WCF. Our spider servers are low cost Virtual Private Servers on ISPs around the world running a simple spidering engine that uses reflection to dynamically compile C# code instructions and apply RegEx patterns. When Corzen was young, we manually started these engines via RDP. As we scaled, we had to build this system.

How does an Internet Service Bus change the Corzen business model and cost structure? Every few weeks we get new requests by customers to add more sites to our list of sites and we have to add spidering capacity. Since spidering is so basic, I have always wanted to have our customers spider for us (or fan out the spidering to 3^rd parties for a small fee). I can then offer our customers a discount on their monthly fees based on the amount of spiders they will run for us.

This is win win win, they get more data faster, and I lower my overhead and pass that savings on to the customer. This drastically changes my focus. I spend 50% of my time managing the spidering, worrying about capacity, and expanding the spidering infrastructure. Corzen’s cost structure changes as does the relationship with our customer-we become partners in the data acquisition “plumming” and Corzen can focus on the analytics-what the customers really want us to do. In other words we get out of the raw material business (spidering) and focus on the manufacturing of the product (the analytics.) Corzen was recently acquired by a company that does spidering as well, but not the analytics. This is an exciting move since we can join forces with the spidering capacity and Corzen can focus more on the analytics.

Today, the problem with having our customers do spidering (or paying you on your idle time to do some spidering for us) is simple. With over 100 customers, you try getting our WCF application to work on all of their servers through our firewall  and their firewall. BizTalk services solves this problem. BizTalk services will provide a globally addressable name for Corzen’s service and securely expose that service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT as shown here.

As Dennis argues:

Use the Relay at http://connect.biztalk.net. We’ve shipped an SDK with a few samples showing you how you use the relay and identity services together. If you’re familiar with Windows Communication Foundation, you’ll find this trivial to use (by design!). Basically, your service opens at a URI on the connect.biztalk.net machines. Then a client connects to that URI and can start sending messages. We don’t want to be in the way of your app, so our relay will immediately try to establish a direct connection between clients. More details on this how this all works in a later post. Here’s a quick diagram that describes it at a high level.

Microsoft vs. Google

Everyone always likes to compare the “war” between Microsoft and Google. Maybe it is Google’s stock price or the popularity of its search engine or Gmail system. I look at the companies as light years apart. At its core, Google is an advertising company (highlighted by its recent acquisition of DoubleClick.) Sure Google will expose some APIs for developers, however, everything it does from Gmail to search is to gain more eyeballs for its ads.

Microsoft is a company about selling Windows. What has made Windows so popular is that Microsoft gives developers amazing tools to build applications around Windows, Office and the Internet. The strength of Microsoft is the developer community surrounding its products. You always hear about the next great thing that is going to “take Microsoft down.” The only thing that will take Microsoft down is a company with a compelling platform that also provides tools for developers to create applications on that platform.

The latest thing to come to take Microsoft down is Software as a Service. Think Google Spreadsheet. Businesses will all use the Spreadsheet in the sky and store its data on Google’s servers. Ditto with Gmail, why bother with Exchange?

Microsoft does have a cool differentiating factor: its hybrid approach. Microsoft is offering Software + Services.  As I said in eWeek, with such a huge commitment to the OS and other installed software already, Microsoft is actually in a position to deliver software and a service on top of it.

The marketplace wants a hybrid solution and Microsoft is the only one who can deliver it in the short to medium term, giving Microsoft a competitive advantage. Everyone thought Google Docs would kill Office but in reality, Google docs are cool but Enterprises have issues today with using it offline and inside of a browser (copy and paste is strange, so is right clicking in a cell). Personally I use Google Spreadsheet to keep track of simple things but Microsoft Excel to do the more processor intensive operations.  In addition, I work offline a tremendous amount as well don’t trust Larry and Sergey to store my very sensitive documents.

Think of Excel as software + services. Excel can be sold and run on your computer. You can store your documents locally or up in the cloud. Processor intensive operations can utilize your local super-fast Pentium 1million Processor and your 2 GB of RAM. Collaborative efforts can be handled by the cloud.  Additional services like statistical number crunching or anything that needs to be distributed can be handled by the cloud. Multiple editors and viewers, in the cloud. You get the point.

This is where BizTalk Services come in. It is an early way for developers to deliver Software plus Services.

The Future of Business

As I said, this changes everything. We can all agree that distributed applications are the future. In order to make money you have to scale to support the load your users and customers will add. This forced businesses to spend a disproportionate amount of money and focus on technology (and pay CTOs way too much!)

We are so focused on technology that CEOs and Venture Capitalists are desperately trying to learn about the basics of technology-time they should be spending working through business models and looking for competitive advantages.

BizTalk services and ultimately all of the Software plus Services (including other vendors, not just Microsoft) will change the way we do business in 5-10 years. Imagine if we had to run a switchboard to run our phones in the office? So an oil company or a bank would have to develop the technical expertise to run the phones. This infrastructure is solved by the phone company (and now VoIP!) In the future, businesses will only have to focus on their core businesses and most software will run locally with services up in the cloud, drastically reducing the investment in core IT infrastructure internally. It’s a brave new world out there.

As published 10 years ago in Advisor:

Forte’s Hierarchy of Technology Adoption

Whenever a new technology comes out it goes through phases of adoption.  When the new giga-wiz bang techno gadget comes out it follows a predictable pattern. The same is true for technologies such as XML and other Java.

The hierarchy is this:

·         Porn

·         Black-market

·         The Geeks

·         Gadget Men

·         Mainstream Society

·         Mom and Grandma

Porn

The Porn industry adopts technology first. If you are a uber geek, you need to get into porn. When I was CTO at Zagat during the .COM boom, a dirty little secret of all CTO’s was that we watched the Porn industry very carefully. Porn is responsible for every technical innovation on the internet in the last 10 years. Credit Card transactions, micropayments, high speed access, chat, video conferencing, just to name a few.

Black-market

Next (and sometimes simultaneously) comes the black market. They are the next to adopt. This is not just crime syndicates or terrorists like al Qaeda using the latest IP blocking technology, this is kids downloading movies on bit torrent as well.

The Geeks

After the porn and hackers cut their teeth, the Geeks pick up the new technology. These are the guys that understand the fundamentals of technologies and want the new toys and tools and are willing to risk the blue screen of death to get it.

Gadget Men

You know who you are, the early adopters. You must have the plasma TV or new Bluetooth PDA. You will spend anything to get it, no matter how much you are already in debt.

Mainstream Society

After the Gadget boys have worked through the kinks, Apple or Sony will make it easy for the rest of society. This is usually when the wives of Gadget men stop complaining. Prices come way down at this point as well.

Mom and Grandma

When technical neophytes adopt a new technology, or have even heard of it (my mom knows about RSS) then it has truly been adopted and is as standard as a telephone.

Let's follow MP3s.

MP3s are “motion pictures group level 3” files. Digital audio to go with digital video. Porn was first to adopt this over 10 years ago!.

Then came the illegal-Napster comes to mind!

Then the geeks like me, we encoded MP3 manually and had the first players. This was about 1999. A few years later with Creative and others we got the Gadget men on board.

When the iPod (with its mini, shuffles, etc) and ultimately iTunes the mainstream society adopted and the price points came down and the attention was huge. Lastly, my Dad has an MP3 player, so even Mom, Dad and Grandma have adopted!

One of the smartest database computer scientiests, Jim Gray is missing at sea. Please have your thoughts and prayers with him.

BarCamp is coming back to New York City for a second round!  I'm happy to announce that BarCamp NYC will be hosted at the Microsoft office in midtown Manhattan.  (The first round of BarCamp in NYC took place last January.)

What is BarCamp?  BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.  It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.  Check out BarCamp.org for more information. 

I'll post more details about the event as it draws closer.  However, watch the BarCampNYC2 site for the latest information.  In the meantime, if you're interested in helping out by speaking, please visit the site and add a session to the Proposed Sessions list!  The session schedule gets hacked together on the morning of the event. 

Do you know what pisses me off more than the French falsely accusing Lance Armstrong of doping in the 1999 Tour de France? People who litigate, not innovate.

I would like to draw your attention today to Adobe. Adobe is trying to prevent Microsoft from implementing the File| Save As PDF feature of the next version of Office. (Office 2007.) But wait, it gets better. They want Microsoft to charge more money to customers who use this feature, even though it's a feature in both Wordperfect Office and Open Office! So it is free to use in Wordperfect and OpenOffice, but not MS Office!

The use of the PDF spec has ALWAYS been free for everyone to use, Adobe says that PDF is an open spec. So Microsoft should be able to implement this feature for free. Adobe is considering suing Microsoft for anti-trust reasons in Europe as well is a cheerleader for others who have sued Microsoft for antitrust.

Microsoft is not perfect. But this is the pot calling the kettle black.

Tomorrow is the 12th annual Technology Enterprise Forum here in Manhattan.

I was a judge this year in the outsourcing category. It was fun to judge the submissions, you can submit yourself for a best practice award next year here.

Bill Gates yesterday announced that Microsoft will ship an update to Internet Explorer, IE 7. It will focus on Security and Features and only run on Windows XP SP 2. In addition, IE 7 will include Microsoft’s AntiSpyware technology for free.

This is all good. FireFox has been gaining market share since it is newer, more secure, and has better features; I was dreading waiting until Longhorn to have a new version of IE.

Looking forward to installing it...

I stated using Google proper (www.google.com) since it was faster (and still is) to type in DataReader.Read() into Google and get to the MSDN page than search MSDN itself. This was back in about 2000 when Google released the www.google.com/microsoft.html page that indexes all the Microsoft specific sites (including blogs and 3^rd party sites besides MSDN content).   

I installed the Google toolbar as well as the Yahoo, A9 and MSN toolbars and played with them the best I could, but I always came back to Google. Until after its IPO, it removed the “search Microsoft” from its drop down list and I had to bookmark www.google.com/microsoft.html.

I was very excited about Google Desktop and installed it right away. I was marginally impressed. I did not like the web interface-why bother with creating a web server on the user’s machine, if you are going to install custom software why not something easier to manage? That said I started to use it anyway. After some time of using it I came to notice that all I was really concerned with was email and attachments in email, so on the advice of Adam Cogan (gulp) I installed Lookout (which Microsoft has since purchased) and used that extensively-as it is better than Google Desktop for email searches and it integrated into Outlook, I even uninstalled Google Desktop from machine.

So when Microsoft yesterday announced the new MSN toolbar that also performed Desktop Search I was not immediately excited. Like the curious cat that I am, I installed it anyway.

I was surprised! MSN Toolbar/Desktop Search is a far superior product than Google Desktop (and Lookout). Here is why:

The toolbars have the same functionality but Google took about 3 days to archive and MSN about an hour.

MSN search has English Questions Ask it: “What is the capital of the Netherlands” and Encarta will come up along with the answer as well as web links below it. Google just has links.

 MSN has superior local search, but Google is catching up fast.

**Google does have that super cool autcomplete in beta and announced today that it was scanning in textbooks and university libraries.

True Google has Newsgroup archives, but I rarely ever use that-old Newsgroups are not as interesting to me as current ones which now MSN can do via indexing Outlook Express (you have to subscribe to them first though)

Using MSN Toolbar on the desktop is great. I usually don’t have this sort of reaction to software. It has autocomplete and immediate feedback as you type. I typed in “Clem” and it knew I was searching for Clemens Vasters.

It is super smart and real fast. It even indexes data better than Google. It even picked up an XML file of some old sample data from a Conference-Google Desktop did not.

It is still in beta and not perfect (why not index .CS files???), but I am already using it as my main search for the web and desktop. I had been hard code Google user for 4 years-it has not come to an end. 

No.

But bloggers are better fact checkers than Dan Rather, so I guess you can say that bloggers are other forms of news sites, opinion sites, and technical resources.

I have a Motorola MPX 200 SmartPhone. AT&T sucks-ass and will only sell the phone with the SmartPhone 2002, quite possibly about as good an experience as airplane food. The next version is out, but AT&T refuses to sell it until its MPX 200 inventory is all sold out.

I got one anyway on eBay figuring I can flash it to SmartPhone 2003 at TechED or the MDC. Wrong. AT&T told Motorola to stop flashing the phones so people won’t upgrade. Well someone got pissed off and put the software to flash the phone up on the internt and my buddy the Toy Boy Richard Campbell downloaded it and gave it to me before it went away.

I pluged in my phone to my laptop and ran the software. It flashed to SmartPhone 2003 without incident.

Now I have two illegal phones that I did not buy from AT&T Wireless.

There was a party for the Regional Directors and the Microsoft Developer Evangelists on Friday night and let me say that it was epic.

It was on a boat. This was no ordinary boat. After they fed us and opened the bar, a DJ and go-go dancers started to rev us. Clemens and I pulled up chairs and pretty much held court.

Then they announced there would be a belly dancer. They started to play Turkish music. Then building on the RD belly dancing traditions (me in Cairo and Clemens in Casablanca), Goksin Bakir decided to get up and dance. He was GOOD. Unfortunately they asked him to stop and the real belly dancer got up and started.

While that was all fun and games (and Clemens and I still holding court, but now about 8 or 9 beers later), the DJ decided to play some awesome Punjabi remixes and that got fellow RD Sanjay Shetty and I on the dance floor pretty hard core. (It has been almost a year since I learned to dance to Punjabi music in India.) We danced our brains out. SQL Hera also got down with Goksin, Michelle and I.

Richard Campbell did his weekly Toy Boy bit for .NET Rocks via Cell Phone on the boat as we passed Bill Gates house. I was too drunk and drooling over the belly dancer to participate.

Hours later (and buckets of sweat later too), the boat docked (and I headed to the airport for a redeye back to New York.)

See the team at TechEd in Kula Lumpur in a few weeks!

 I installed Windows XP SP2. It ran without issue. Many people complain (most recently the Wall Street Journal) that SP2 does not include as part of the offering anti-Spam, anti-Spyware and anti-Virus. These are the same exact people who would complain that Microsoft is putting these independent third party people out of business. You can’t have it both ways.

XP2 is good enough. It automatically puts on your firewall and adds a pop-up blocker to IE, even though I run the google and msn toolbars, now I have three pop-up blockers. My  system seems stable and they have worked on the WiFi dialogs, lets see if it is any easier to connect to a local access point. The new “Security Center” may not be perfect but at least is a step in the right direction and future versions of Windows I am sure will build on top of this.

As for programs not working, we all knew this. If you are doing remote debugging with VS .NET or SQL Server you may have to tweak your system to accept the client requests, etc, but most non-developer and non-admin stuff will run fine. Microsoft has a list here.

So go install the damn thing.

Ok sorry you can’t have it both ways. The industry has been bashing Microsoft for the last 5 or 10 years about being soft on security. Then when Microsoft releases the Windows XP Service Pack 2 which is a security focused SP, people whine about it breaking apps and being a chore to deploy to large corporate users. Stop the whining, just install the damn thing and make your system more secure. You can’t have it both ways. If you want Microsoft to respond to your security complaints, you have to make some sacrifices. I think these people have been bashing Microsoft for so long on security that now they are not sure what they will do with their newly found free time. (I am not saying that SP2 fixes very single hole but it does an amazing job. XP will be secure by default and much more focused on Security as a priority.)

The people who don’t install it and get hit with a virus or bug that is fixed by it are in my book like people who don’t vote but complain about the government.

And come on now developers. Quite a few applications will break under the new security-focused service pack. Many shouldn't have been written that way, and developers have had plenty of warning that things would change. Let me see, I personally delivered this message twice, once at DevDays in February and once at TechEd US in May. Combined over 50,000 people attended those developer conferences. Plus all the MS warnings on the web and in the press. SP2 will force you to develop more secure applications, so why not just get started…

So my trusty Dell Inspiron 4150 is just over a year old. It has flown 157, 403 miles (thanks aa.com). It has been to strange places like Alaska and Mt. Everest. Egypt twice, Morocco, Tunis, all over Europe and Asia. I have delivered countless Tech*Ed sessions and the like on this trusty thing.

It has revolted against me! I think it is sick of flying. (Or of the TSA thinking it is an evil terrorist bomb.) Two weeks ago I had to replace the power supply. Then the screen went pink (I blame Kathleen, girl's like pink.) and the keyboard was all shot. So Dell came and gave me a new screen and keyboard last week.

As of Friday I can't turn it on. So Dell is coming today to give me a new motherboard and power button. Stay tuned. Before you know it I will have a whole new computer!

It was a long night, but the rack is all set up and installed. I did some heavy lifting and even got my hands and clothes dirty. This is a new side of IT for me.

RAID all ok. I've got app servers talking to the SQL Servers. Only problem left is the VPN router. Stay tuned.

In the process of installing Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on three Dell Power Edges. Quite simple actually. Just wait the blog post when I have to install the RAID controller drivers. :)

Today I get to start playing with my new toys. Who said that Richard Campbell is the only one who can geek out and build a rack. (But he has helped me pick out my rack and given me good advice.)

So I got three PowerEdges from Dell, one big momma database server with RAID 5 and all the works and two thin ones. They are all redundant power and the processors are hyper threaded. So this is going to be a fun task setting this all up, getting the UPS power supply to the correct amps. Installing the correct rack rails. The router. VPN/RDP. RAID. And of course I have to install Windows 2003 on each server. I think I will use the Dell Open Manage Assistant for help with that. See you soon…

Forget Iraq, the real thing that happens on June 30^th is the Microsoft ends support for Windows NT. There are over a million NT 4.0 clients out there. Good, the world need to upgrade to at least Windows 2000.

I am not a fan of big companies forcing upgrades down your throat, and nobody is forcing anything at all, you can still use the produce Microsoft will just not support it, but this technology is over 7 years old. Time to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Upgrading is a no brainier. Microsoft got it right with both Windows 2000 Server (2003 server is pretty rocking too) and Windows XP Client. I bet the people who “hate” Microsoft and complain most about the “crashes” are the ones running the oldest software. Well starting June 30^th you can’t complain anymore. If you don’t want to upgrade try the “free” Linux. Please report back to me how that works out for you. :)

Please end the trial of Oracle. Let them merge with PeopleSoft. Right now SAP owns the largest market share of ERP/EAS systems with 34%, if the merger were to go through it would create an Oracle of 38% market share.

For starters Oracle is losing market share in the database field and needs something else to survive. If not it will dwindle in importance and IBM and Microsoft will own the database market. Second, in the ERP/EAS field SAP would face stronger competition and the customers would benefit from more innovation and better prices. The market works-only if you let it.

Besides are you going to let a German company be the market leader? Aren't they against us in the war on terror? (Sorry Clemens, couldn’t resist!) :)

My pal Tom Howe always seems to be reformatting his computer at conferences the day before he speaks. I always mock him. As I leave for the most important conference of the year, TechED US in San Diego on Saturday, I am reformatting my laptop and reinstalling the OS.

I had some major issues. Boot sector issues (Richard Campbell gave me a few ideas, including messing w/ my BIOS). Video driver problems in XP. WiFi problems in Longhorn. The drive not being NTFS. SHall I go on? I seem to be in for a long night.

Thankfully we are doing our TechED demos off Ricahrd's laptop!! I usually follow my own advice, but the machine really needed a reformat. How many Dell laptops have been to Mt. Everest? I guess like me it just wants to go back.