Scratching An Itch

Author: admin

  • Humble in the presence of greatness (or how to feel inadequate really quickly)

    Last week I had the pleasure to attend a conference organised by Cambridge Wireless at Cambridge University Møller Centre, Cambridge. The event was free to attend and sponsored by EEDA, a UK government organisation that is due to be closed down due to the economic cuts happening in the UK following the election of a new coalition government.

    The conference was titled “Discovering Startups, Show us the Money!” with the topic being how to deal with Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists. Speakers included various successful entrepreneurs turned VC/Angel and a lawyer presenting his views on how banks think about lending money to startups.

    The speakers were very impressive in their acheivements and knowledge of this area. By the time Hermann Hauser had finished talking I was feeling rather humble and inadequate. I guess thats the difference between having been there, succeeded and doing it again and just doing it for the first time and not sure if you are succeeding.

    It was quite interesting seeing the variety of methods used to record and take notes during the conference. Some people recorded the session on their PC (good luck with that battery life!), a chap with a iPad with the whole screen converted into a ssh text session using the iPad and his htc phone a the same time, myself recording the session on a Edirol-R09 and most people writing notes with good old fashioned pen and paper (no batteries required!).

    The event started with a networking session which made me realise why I hate nightclubs so much. I really didn’t enjoy that aspect of the event, but I guess that is a personal thing. I’m sure some people loved it and others just think its business and get on with it. It was interesting after the talks realising that some of the others in the room that were not comfortable with the networking were actually some of the speakers! They may have insightful viewpoints and even forceful points of view, but they may still be shy.

    The speakers were introduced by Dr. Ir. Leo Poll of Phillips Research.

    (Edit: 2022 – the MP3 source recordings have gone missing. Sorry. If they are found I will reinstate the links.)

    Hermann Hauser

    Hermann Hauser opened with a keynote about what characteristics investors look for when contemplating an investment. I did not realise just how impressive his achievements are – the only European to found 6 startups each of which is worth in excess of £1 billion. Most of us would be happy with doing that once! Truly impressive. His fundamental point was don’t worry about the technology – in his personal experience he has only had a failure due to technology 1% of the time. Its the non-technology aspects that are important – the people, the team, the business model, the potential market.

    Some nice tidbits of the technology industry came out in his keynote. Did you know the ARM chip was invented out of necessity because Intel would license Acorn computers the 80286 core?

    Listen to Hermann Hauser.

    Listen to Hermann Hauser take questions from the audience.

    Jack Lang

    Jack Lang is a serial entrepreneur and business angel. He is currently Entrepreneur in Residence, Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University.

    Jack has also written The High-Tech Entrepreneur’s Handbook: How to Start and Run a High-Tech Company.

    Listen to Jack Lang..

    Alan Barrell

    Alan Barrell is a serial entrepreneur, business angel and is currently Entrepreneur in Residence, Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University.

    Listen to Alan Barrell..

    Matt Meyer

    Matt Meyer is CEO of Taylor Vinters a firm of lawyers in Cambridge that have been involved in many aspects of technology company investment deals.

    Listen to Matt Meyer..

    Jamie Urquhart

    Jamie Urquhart is a business angel, venture capitalist, self confessed geek and the implementer of the first bug in the ARM chip.

    Listen to Jamie Urquhart..

    Ray Anderson

    Ray Anderson is CEO of Bango.

    Listen to Ray Anderson..

    Mathew Mead

    Mathew Mead is Managing Director of NESTA Investments.

    Listen to Mathew Mead..

    Question and Answer

    After the talks, the panel answered questions posed to them via SMS during the various talks.
    Unfortunately I had run my Edirol-R09 with its screen at the brightest setting, thus reducing the battery life. The battery ran out part way through the question and answer session.

    Listen to Question and Answer session..

    Slides

    Full slides from the conference can be found at https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/resources/

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 2 March 2011 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • What will Visual Studio 2035 be able to do?

    Will Visual Studio 2035 exist? Will we design and write software the same way in the future?

    Read Bruce Eckel’s thought provoking article about “Programming in the mid future”.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 17 March 2010 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • The future of development environments is bubble shaped

    Researchers at Brown University have created a new way of interacting with source code and debuggers with their innovative Code Bubble based IDE.

    The link includes a video (8 minutes, worth watching the whole thing) and a written description of what they hope to acheive. If you are really keen, you can participate in the beta.

    Its an interesting look into the future. I think we’ll see some of these ideas sooner than Visual Studio 2035 though 🙂

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 17 March 2010 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • The Six Waves of Computing

    Last year I was lucky enough to be present in the audience when Hermann Hauser gave the keynote speech for the Discovering Startups talks presented by Cambridge Wireless. Later in the year, during the SVC2C event Hermann Hauser again gave reference to his Waves of Computing idea.

    I’m going to cover what I remember of his Waves of Computing idea in this post. I think the basis of the Waves of Computing idea was that there have been five waves of computing. I’ve expanded this to six, as it makes a bit more sense to me. I think you could argue that a few other waves could also be added (analogue and valve computing at the beginning and home computing in the middle).

    I’ve recently read some incredible books about innovation (“Innovator’s Dilemma”, “Seeing What’s Next”), disruptive ideas (“Blue Ocean Strategy”) and alternative thinking (“Different”, Youngme Moon). The ideas in these books dovetail nicely with the Waves of Computing idea.

    The image is for illustrative purposes only. I’ve made approximate attempts to get date ranges about right, but you can argue about them either way. Likewise, the performance scale is relative. I’m not presenting on any particular performance metric (MIPs, memory, disk size, disk speed, I/O bandwidth etc), just the overall “is the consumer satisfied” metric (which is why the PC and laptop dates start so late compared to the technology, you could have a laptop 15 years earlier than I’ve drawn, but it wasn’t up to much).

    What you can see from the graphic is that over time the technology of the day is replaced by a newer technology. Mainframes get replaced by minicomputers. Minicomputers get replaced by workstations. PCs get so powerful they become workstations. Miniturisation allows laptops to go from being luggable (1980s) to portable, powerful and ubiquitous (2000s). Smartphones, introduced by the Apple iPhone in 2007, are starting to make inroads into the laptop market. Not as powerful yet and the software and compatibility issues are yet to be ironed out, but you can see it could happen. I’ve met people with a HTC Desire and when I’ve questioned them about their use of it, their answer is “I do nearly all of my work on this, hardly ever use my PC anymore”. Thats a pretty emphatic statement of where they are going with their usage.

    What is implied by the graphic is that after three decades of dominance by the x86 platform and its many variants, during which the x86 killed off nearly every RISC processor and also Motorola’s excellent 68000 platform, the x86 is under attack by what many people would have thought an unlikely attacker: The ARM processor. Its low power (by design, unlike the x86) and its very efficient (I’ve met several people in Cambridge that have told me about their RISC PC that could emulate DOS and still run faster than a real PC). Could it be that if this graph is drawn in 2020, the x86 is on the way out and the ARM is on the ascendent (after a very long wait).

    The irony is that Intel is indirectly responsible for the creation of the ARM chip. You’ll need to ask Hermann Hauser about that though. Its a good story.

    Smartphones
    Imagine if you could take your smartphone home, plug it into a dock and it can then display on a nice high resolution screen, has a keyboard, mouse, external peripherals (printer, DVD player, etc) and the screen is also a touchscreen (OK, so why do I need the mouse?).

    All you need for smartphones to replace PCs and Laptops is:

    • Universal docking standard to allow smartphone hardware to dock with a keyboard, mouse, high resolution touch screen and external storage.
    • Universal software standard so that smartphone software can recognise external hardware and use it when available.

    I can see with Apple, the above two conditions will never happen. With Apple, its the ‘i’ way or the highway. Thus we have to look to Android, Microsoft and RIM for this ideal docking solution for a smartphone.

    An early attempt at this future is the Atrix 4G (Android) smartphone and dock, available in the USA.

    Future
    After smartphones, what will be next?

    Some people are working on computing embedded in clothing. Others are working on computing embedded inside humans. There is already a miniture sensor that can be embedded in a patient’s eye to monitor eye pressure. But that is hardly personal computing is it? I think for computing embedded in humans you run into a variety of health related issues (cooling, radiation, toxicity of construction, rejection) and form factor issues. For embedding in prosthetics most of these issues go away, so perhaps that is a future for some people.

    Looking forward 10 years or more this poses some interesting questions for developers of processors, hardware, operating systems and software applications.

    I hope you found the graphic interesting. If you have any comments or think I omitted anything please let me know.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 2 March 2011 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • Did Clayton Christensen predict Twitter in 2004?

    Professor Clayton Christensen has written some very interesting books outlining his theories governing disruption in industry, where new entrants to a market using seemingly inferior technology carve out a niche the existing incumbents are not interested in. From this niche they then gain prominence to the point where it is too late for the incumbent players to respond. These are the reasons DEC and SGI no longer provide computing equipment to anyone. The workstation class PC killed them.

    One of Clayton Christensen’s books is Seeing What’s Next, published in 2004. The final chapter of the book “Breaking the Wire” is about the possible future of the telecoms industry. The last section of this chapter, section 4, “Competitors from strange places” outlines possible threats to incumbents from Instant Messaging and from Microsoft’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Hindsight shows us that Microsoft didn’t use SIP to enter the telephony market. The interesting text are the comments about Instant Messaging – how the ability to do instant messaging provides an adequate service even at low quality. The hallmarks of a potential disruptive idea.

    “Once operational, user can type a message (often littered with acronyms such as LOL, TYl and AAMOF) press enter, and almost instantly transmit the message to friend’s computers and their portable devices. This is disruptive growth. IM brings real-time communications into a new context.”

    Later on Professor Christensen writes

    “IM’s growth and improvement is worth watching because companies that play in the IM market could develop business models that just don’t make sense to telecommunications companies”.

    I couldn’t help thinking of Twitter as I read these few paragraphs. SMS text messaging is not instant messaging, but for me the parallels are there. Its restrictive and inadequate (140 characters!), but it does the job. A few years later Twitter was born.

    OK, I have the benefit of hindsight as I read this book. But those words I quote were written in 2004, maybe 2003. If you want to read some interesting books about business, backed with lots of case studies, I recommend Innovator’s Dilemma and all the books that flow from it by the same author.

    If you are a software developer or run a software based business, you can hear Professor Clayton Christensen speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston this October.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 14 March 2011 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • User experience, alcohol and Buddhism

    Last Thursday I attended an event hosted by Red Gate Software with the topic “User Experience in Software Development”. I also met with Roger Atrill at the event – we used to work together at (the now defunct) Laser Scan. After the event, I went swimming, swam 1km (physiotherapy) and while getting changed chatted with another swimmer about my evening (two bottles of Grolsch provided by Red Gate, 3 and a half talks – had to skip half the last one to get to the swimming pool) and the swimming. We were both surprised my swimming was still quite rapid despite the 1 pint(ish) of Grolsch I had drunk. It was during this chat I realised a connection between Buddhism and user experience testing.

    The event consisted of four talks about user experience.

    Council

    The first talk was about the challenges of creating a website for a council and balancing the conflicting desires of many council service providers and a useful user experience finding your way to the right part of the website to find out if (for example) your local school is closed because of the snowfall overnight (no big deal where you live, but snow is rare in the UK and a heavy snowfall causes chaos here because we are not equipped to deal with it).

    Red Gate

    The second talk was about how Red Gate managed the challenging task of going from their 1500-page hard-to-navigate website to a smaller 750 page easier-to-use website. Some of the techniques they used were one room for all the work, complete transparency, post-it notes for everything, anyone (even non-ux team) could walk in and annotate prospective design changes, allowing people to comment on work when the ux team were not present. Don’t put colour in your mockups because then people argue about incorrect branding rather than looking at the ux. Don’t create real webpages, keep it on paper or using mockup tools like Balsamiq, but even Balsamiq can be “too realistic”.

    Scientists

    The third talk was about user testing from the perspective of someone whose users are mainly scientists and for whom computer use is only 10% of their daily task – the software needs to be easy to use and obvious. Simple things like naming items “Literature” is not helpful – too obscure. Choose a more useful name. And don’t use two tabs, tabs only work well when you have more than two tabs. Post it notes (super sticky, not regular) for everything and colour coded by topic to make things easier for analysis afterwards. Don’t talk too much. Everyone knows that one, but it still needs to be said.

    Remote Testing

    The fourth talk was about remote testing. I didn’t see much of this talk as the first three talks had overrun and I had to leave at a given time. Fortunately for me as I think this would have been the least useful of the talks (as I had already used some of the tools they were going to talk about).

    Being Present

    One of the key aspects of user experience testing is being able to observe without influencing the test. You can do this with isolated rooms and one-way mirrors, but there is still influence at work – the fact that this room (and possibly this computer) is not the room the user normally uses. Or you can test at the user’s site in their normal room using their chair and desk. But you will need to be present and there will not be a helpful one-way mirror (unless you are testing inside a police interview room!). Your presence may influence the test. In fact, it probably will. You will be tempted to offer the user helpful hints when they get stuck. Or maybe they are thinking and you ask them a question and break their train of thought. After all, you thought they’d gone quiet because they were stuck. It’s a bit of Schrodinger’s Cat. You don’t know if it’s dead, but if you look it will be dead. Hmmm.

    But there is another part to user testing. Separate from you, the tester, influencing the user. And that is being present in the moment. Actually watching the user, observing what they are really doing, not what you think they are doing. Not drifting off into some other train of thought, whether it be able why they clicked there five minutes ago, or what they’ll do on the next page (which you know really sucks and does need work), or about something unrelated like Star Wars or your girlfriend. You need to be present in the moment. Noticing what is happening, why it happened and noting it down.

    In that respect, I think user testing and Buddhism have more in common than most folks realise. Buddhism is all about being present in the moment. Not off on some fleeting journey somewhere else. Not in the past, not in the future, not in some drunken haze because you got blittered last night. Many folks think Buddhism and Islam ban the consumption of alcohol. They do not. But they do ban the consumption of such quantities that cause you to lose your focus on the moment.

    Next time you find yourself drifting off in your user experience testing, think about changing your focus. Be present.

    And if you find yourself too agitated to focus on user testing, you may want to consider some meditation classes (Buddhist or otherwise) to learn how to be calm and in the moment.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 7 March 2011 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • Windows 8 Start Screen disaster

    Over on the MSDN blog there is a series of articles about Windows 8. Among those articles are three articles about the Windows 8 Start Screen which replaces the Start Menu.

    Some background

    I’ve been a member of MSDN since late 1994 when I first heard about MSJ magazine and then heard about MSDN. I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies for the vast majority of the time since then and pretty much exclusively since 1998. I’ve hated the backwards steps the Start menu took from Windows XP to Windows Vista/7 but the Windows 8 process – well that is such a change that I think this will debut so badly that this will be worse than the reception Vista received.

    The Vista machines we purchased we got rid of. We have Vista as virtual machines only. We do like Windows 7 though. That works.

    So far, despite repeated trials of Windows 8, all I can say is that it is awful. It is not productive, not for how we work. I don’t care how good it is at touch or how well it does web related home-consumer tasks. None of that helps me be productive in my day job. That is what counts. It is, more importantly, also what counts for my customers.

    I want Windows 8 to be a success. That is why I am pushing back so hard against the Windows 8 start screen.

    MSDN Blog articles

    The first article Evolving the Start menu explains what they did and why they did it. It received a lot of negative criticism. They followed up with a second article Designing the Start screen which completely ignored all the criticism and tried to steamroller the Start Screen as superb. This duly received a lot of further criticism.

    There is now a third article Reflecting your comments on the Start screen which is full of information, insights and analysis on how they came to arrive at the Start screen and why they think the Start menu should go away. The problem is the arguments are not convincing.

    Menus are inefficient

    The first argument is that the Start menu is inefficient. That it requires dextrous control of the mouse to find and select an item (this is true) and that it is slow to do so (also, reasonably true).

    Therefore they introduce the start screen which is a 2 dimensional grid of tiles that you can easily find with your mouse etc. The problem is, this is not true. They boast that on screens of 1900 x 1080 resolution you can have 80 tiles.

    Whooppee! Er No.

    I have a screen of 1900 x 1200 and it has 72 icons on the desktop. Can I easily find the icon I want to launch a program? Yes, sometimes. But most of the time I have to scan the whole thing to find the one I want. And I organised that group of icons. It is not efficient. Sometimes despite knowing what I want is in my list of 72 icons I can’t find it and I give up and go and find it from the Search menu anyway.

    And Microsoft want all of us to work this way in future. Yikes!

    And of couse when you can’t find it you then have to use the new Search functionality. Which I’ll tell you about now…

    Search

    The old Start menu had a search function on it. In Windows 2000 and Windows XP this was really efficient – you could tell it where to search, what to look for in a document all before starting the search. No time wasted.

    In Windows Vista and Windows 7 this was awful, very inefficient. You had to start a search you knew would fail, then bring up the search widget, choose custom and flail around in that awful user interface then get the search (with no progress indicator showing which directory was getting searched – we had that in W2K and XP).

    The new Windows 8 search function – there isn’t one. Wait, there is. Just its invisible. Which is why I didn’t know it exists. Its that discoverable that an MSDN member of 17 years could not find it.

    Yes, I know I know, I must be an old fart, but seriously. If I can’t find it can my parents, can my girlfriend, can the people working in the Vetinary surgery down the road? No they can’t.

    To use search in Windows 8 you have to switch to the start screen and then type. That’s right type into nothing, just type. Apparently this nonesense is inspired from mobile phones. Thats great. Except it isn’t. I’m happy with that metaphor on a phone. But I want my PC to behave like a PC. What is efficient for one device is not efficient for another. If that were true we’d control aircraft the same way we control submarines. Unsurprisingly we don’t.

    Furthermore when you switch to the Start menu to make your search you lose the context of your work – so god help you if were hoping to read some text from a website or a document to type into the search widget. How efficient is that? They just made you add an extra step – you now have to copy and paste the text from the website or document. What? The text isn’t copy and pastable? Oh dear, no you’ve got to copy the text off the document onto some paper, switch to the Start screen and then type what you’ve written on paper into the invisible search widget.

    Sound exaggerated? Perhaps. But I can see this happening. Especially with less au-fait users like the aforementioned people at the Vetinary surgery (I am actually thinking of some people I know – good with animals, not so with computers – just things to use, on the Desktop!).

    But I don’t know what I’m looking for

    You don’t know what you’re looking for? So how will you know when you find it? Well, I can kind of remember its name, but not really, but I’ll know it when I see it.

    Its like being in a library in the philosophy section and you’re not sure what you’re looking for then all of a sudden you hit the section of Thoreau books and out pops the one you’re looking for. How could I have forgotten its name? Silly me.

    Well indeed. And its the same with programs. Often I can’t remember who wrote it (so I can’t select by Vendor) or what its exact name is. My developer machine has 94 menus on the Programs section and most of those have submenus with between 5 and 10 items on. Some have more and some have more submenus. That is a lot of program names to rememeber. Unsurprisingly I don’t rememeber them. I have better things to devote my memory to. But I can browse those menus relatively easily and with reasonable speed.

    The main reason I can do that, browse between 450 and 900 items is because each menu only exposes the data under it when I look at it. If I had to look at all 450-900 items at once it would impossible. Most of the items I never look at the submenus, I just have to read the main menu entry and then move on or occasionally check the contents.

    It is an efficient compromise between having to use search to search for all executables and then dig through the ridiculous number of results (very slow) and the other extreme where I have to remember them all.

    The problem with Windows 8 is that there is no Start menu to browse. I have to use search to find what I want. How can I find what I want when I don’t know its name? Answers on a postcard please (or leave them in the comments section).

    Live Updates

    A few of the comments in support of Metro in the MSDN blog comments indicate that the poster of these comments thinks that people with views like mine are dinosaurs that can’t see the value of having updating live tiles. What a limited and narrow view.

    Such live tiles were previewed in Vista with the gadgets on the screen. Sure they are useful. I haven’t said they are not useful. I have said I don’t wish to work that way. These are different concerns just as some people wish to drive manual cars and others don’t want that chore so they choose an automatic car. In fact that is not a bad analogy, Metro would be the automatic car (less control) and Start Menu users would be driving a manual car (more control).

    I have no need for an email tile keeping me up to date with my email. Why? Because I work with 2 computers and three screens. One computer is dedicated to handling email and browsing the web. The other one is for development work. The email machine has an email browser open all the time. Even if I had one machine I’d have the email client open all the time. An email tile is a waste of CPU time for me.

    Also, if you know anything about productivity the last thing you want is a screenful of animated tiles doing their thing in your peripheral vision. Nice eye candy for the easily impressed. Boring annoyance for those of us that want to get stuff done.

    Ubuntu One

    Linux? Who cares about Linux? Why suddenly talk about Linux?

    Well they’ve already done this particular experiment for you. The most recent release of Ubuntu comes with the Ubuntu One interface as the default. This is a user interface that makes you access everything via tiles (admittedly more restricted than Metro) and forces you to work with single screen applications.

    I first tried it on my netbook. My initial thoughts were that it was good. Web browser and email clients come up full screen (all 800×600 of it!) and I could browse the web OK.

    Then a few weeks later I thought I’d install Ruby On Rails on it and take a toy project away with me for a bit of tinkering while on a break. What a disaster. Totally impossible to get anything done in these single whole-screen environments. I spent a good deal of my time in the task switcher moving one window to the front, finding another, then moving that to the front and so on.

    That installation of Ubuntu got replaced with the standard Ubuntu classic and all future installations are setup deliberately to exlude Ubuntu One. If you read around the web you’ll find lots of power users also hate Ubuntu One. Just like the power users complaining on the MSDN blog about Metro. You’re taking control (and thus productivity) away from your best customers.

    Multi-Screen

    The Windows 8 Start Screen covers all your screens. Not user friendly at all. Completely stops any context. As far as I am concerned losing even one whole screen is way too much, especially when you consider how efficient and non-context losing the start menu is.

    If the start screen could be encompassed in a resizable window so you could move it whereever you want, or minimize it out of the way that would be useful. This in addition of course, to actually having a proper functioning start menu.

    Multi-Tasking

    Many complaints have been made about the inability to kill tasks in the Metro interface (all you can do is suspend them). Also the lack of support for multi-tasking windows is a real productivity killer.

    These complaints remain un-addressed by the Windows 8 developer team.

    No Compromise

    The Windows 8 developer team seem completely unconcerned that those of us that want to use their PC to do work do not wish to work in a fashion that is dictated by the needs and desires of those whose only use for a PC is to consume the web/youtube/facebook/email on their tablet or gaming PC.

    Both groups of people can be accomodated.

    • Business users. Leave our Windows Desktop alone and give us the Start menu we know and love.
    • Home users. By all means give them the tablet UI you have designed Metro for.

    Why can’t this be a configurable option? A powerful Start menu option for folks like myself and the Metro interface for people that think search is a useful replacement for the Start menu.

    User Experience

    The user experience that I have had with Windows 8 Developer Preview has been extremely poor. Open source operating systems like Haiku give you a better experience out of the box.

    Dog Food

    I really do wonder if the Windows 8 Developer team is using Windows 8 to develop Windows 8. And I mean everyone, the management team, everyone that has to use office, powerpoint, email, MS Project, all the development team, including people using WinDbg and Visual Studio. I can’t believe they are because the loss in productivity would be huge.

    I have to conclude the only people eating the Windows 8 dog food are the home consumer testing group that want a tablet/phone/home-user user interface.

    Productivity

    I hope that having read this far you realise that the problem with Windows 8 Start Screen is not the start screen itself. It is the drop in productivity and the horrible context switch from Desktop to Start Screen (which itself is a productivity issue) that are the issues. We know what is productive for us. And, although you think you know best for us Microsoft, you don’t.

    I’ve already experienced Windows Vista/7 search and hate it. I don’t want to have to use Windows 8 search even more than I already have to use Windows 7 search.

    Keep search as what it is good for and allow me to browse for my files, productively, using the Start menu.

    Windows 8 #fail

    I hope that when Windows 8 finally debuts people can look back at this article and think “Thank God, it didn’t happen, Windows 8 is still productive”.

    Otherwise we’ll all be walking around in T-Shirts with the slogan “Windows 8 #fail”.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 13 October 2011 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • The unintended consequence of not paying sick pay

    Setting the scene

    I wrote this several years ago but it never became published. Reading it now it still seems to be valid. Even more so with coronavirus in the news.

    Odds are that if you are reading this and you are an IT professional this situation doesn’t apply to you. You are either employed in a full time permanent position (you receive sick pay) or you are a contractor (you provide your own sick pay – it’s a risk you take). This article is the result of a discussion with a friend. We are both based in the UK. In your country the legal aspects may be different but the principle remains.

    However if you are a part time employee you may not be paid sick pay. I found this out when chatting with a friend of mine about one of their part time jobs (they have several, one main one to provide an income backbone and two others to ring the changes so they don’t do one type of work all the time).

    I know this person really well. Conscientious, hard working, honest, caring, won’t accept jobs they can’t do well, etc. The type of person you want working for you. A string of events have happened to them recently that make them doubt their current main employer. First the employer won’t delegate and gets over stressed as a result. This then leads to the employer bad mouthing the staff to other people (which it turns out have been friends of some of the staff and in one case a customer – ooops!). This gets back to the staff and is seriously demoralising, especially when it’s unjustified.

    Then recently my friend was ill for about a week. When they received their pay their pay they found out that they had not been paid for the days they took sick. You can imagine how this made them feel – not very valued by their employer. This has caused a lot of upset (and financial harm) to this person.

    This raises some interesting questions.

    1. What do you gain/lose by paying sick pay?
    2. What do you gain/lose by not paying sick pay?

    I’ve posed the questions in this way because this is surely the reasoning behind choosing not to pay sick pay. That paying it is a cost to be avoided and not paying it saves you money. Let us examine this:

    What do you gain/lose by paying sick pay?

    There is undoubtedly a risk that some of the people you employ are not going to be as honest as some others. Some put the hours in they are required to do and go home. Some do that and also do more and also do personal development. And some put the time in but take every opportunity to shirk off their work, be lazy and take sick days even when they are not sick.

    It’s an unfortunate fact that some people will game the system to their advantage. If they know they’ll get paid for being ‘ill’ while they are really at the local cinema watching the latest flick on the first day of opening then they think that is a risk worth taking and they “pull a sicky”

    But on the flip what you gain is loyalty from those staff that don’t fall into that group. They value the fact that you will look after them when they are ill. These people rarely abuse the sick day provision.

    What do you gain/lose by not paying sick pay?

    So there are pros and cons to paying sick pay. All reasonably obvious. But what about the consequences of not paying sick pay?

    Let’s start with the obvious consequence: By not paying sick pay you save money not only by not paying for illegitimate sick day claims, but you also save money when hard working staff are ill too. Ca-Ching! Well, not really as you’ve just demonstrated to the hard working staff that you don’t value them. Pretty stupid move.

    Any not so obvious consequences? Yes. If you are not going to be paid when you are sick, how is that any different to unpaid leave? Apart from the chances of dismissal if caught being dishonest, it’s the same. By not paying sick pay you remove any incentive to be honest about why you were not at work (were you ill or you just couldn’t be bothered or you thought tarring and feathering the local tramp was a better idea?).

    “I fancy doing some decorating today? I’ll pull a sicky. I won’t get paid, but I will get this annoying job done. Which is more important to me today? My life is, Decorating it is then.” And to hell with the business today. Instant holiday. No permission asked.

    This one could leave some businesses in the lurch when they find out with no notice that someone isn’t coming in and the only reason is “I’m sick” (but what they don’t know is this person doesn’t care because they know they are not valued).

    A lot of businesses employ part time staff. Many of them are businesses that start early in the morning and close late at night, resulting in a day longer than the typical 7.5 or 8 hours. The last thing these businesses need is to find out at 2pm as the second shift starts that a key team player isn’t coming in today. And by not paying sick pay they increase the likelihood of such a situation.

    Working ill

    The other unintended consequence of not paying sick pay is that people that are ill and should not attend work, may well choose to attend work because they need the money more than they need to stay in bed recovering. This is especially true of people on zero hours contracts and low pay contracts.

    Coronavirus is in the news these days, and to stem this pandemic we really need ill people to do the right thing. But the right thing for society is in competition with the right thing for an individual on a low income who probably has negligible savings. They’re going to come to work with their illness as the short term gain for them (pay) outweighs the long term harm to others (some people may get ill). Humans discount future events, so that harm is in the distance and also not to them, as they’re already ill.

    This latter scenario is seriously reduced as an outcome if people are paid enough to be able to take time off work when they are ill.

    My friend – their choice

    I’m not sure what they are going to do. What is clear though that having realised this unintended consequence and how their employer feels about them (despite customer comments to the contrary) their loyalty to the business has evaporated. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find some unpaid “sick leave” happens to allow my friend to do various things they need to do in their personal life at the expense of the business they would otherwise be working for.

    I guess some people are going to read this and think WTF? But the point is this consequence only happens when you have good conscientious staff and then you don’t value them. If they were paid sick pay they wouldn’t feel unvalued or even think of pulling a sicky, let alone an unpaid sicky (which is in this situation the same, but more wilful).

    The really sad thing? My friend likes to do a good job. Wants to work where a good job and good attitude is valued. But it seems that for the types of work they do such employers are rare beasts (not like the IT world where to keep staff you have to be a good employer).

    I’m not really sure if my words have done justice to what I’m trying to explain here.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 6 March 2020 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • How to sell your company to Microsoft

    The business leaders network has an excellent post by Eric Sink about how he sold Teamprise to Microsoft.

    Great read.

    Eric is the author of the Business of Software book. Good book. If you are thinking of setting up a software company, read it.

    Eric was also one of the Spyglass team (first version of Internet Explorer) and has been involved with a number of other successful software companies. Go read all about selling your company to Microsoft.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 5 October 2010 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.

  • How to be more productive

    A few weeks ago @BobWalsh asked on twitter how to be more productive.

    I dashed off a simple reply about turning various things off. I thought I’d expand upon this topic.

    Productivity isn’t just one thing. It’s many things and they all need to be aligned to allow you to be productive.

    Know your topic

    Seems obvious, but how many times have to tried to do something that you aren’t that good at and it’s taken forever? And the result was OK, but you know it could have been better. Would this particular task have been better delegated to someone else or even outsourced to a trusted third party?

    Willpower

    You have limited willpower. Concentrating on a task, or many tasks requires effort. You only have so much energy available for that effort before your energy reserves are depleted and you either need to eat, rest or sleep. Choose what you spend your energy on wisely.

    Don’t multi-task

    There is this myth that some people can multi-task and some people can’t. In particular this myth is biased in favour of women. However in neurological terms, humans are not wired to multi-task. We can appear to multi-task (just as single core CPUs did) by context switching. Context switching in humans is slow and consumes energy. If your blood sugar is low you will not be good at this. This StackExchange question discusses the penalties associated with context switching.

    Remove distractions

    Every distraction is a request to context switch to attend to that distraction. And then context switch back to the previous distraction or on to a new distraction. This is why the job of receptionist in a hotel, a hospital or a veterinary surgery is not as simple as it seems. Each micro task isn’t hard. But it’s the sheer volume of them and often multiple balls in the air at the same time – this takes energy.

    In terms of your working life, if you are working in tech then the chances are you have these things around you:

    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Smart phone
    • Text messaging
    • Wired phone
    • Email
    • Other productivity tool
    • Work colleagues
    • Open plan work environment
    • Office politics
    • (and possibly minority/sexist micro-aggressions)

    But you’re actually trying to workout how to write some software for your company to meet the company product release deadline. Or you’re trying to debug someone else’s software and you need to get your head into their software space to understand what’s happening, or it’s a code review, or you’re examining the DNA of this interesting cancer, or something equally taxing. In short what you really want to be putting your energy is this interesting task but you are constantly pulled away from it by all these other sources of distraction.

    Twitter

    Turn off your twitter client. You don’t need to be on twitter all day, every day. You can always check in when you have a break or at the start/end of the day.

    Facebook

    Log out of facebook. Same as twitter, but it’s even less realtime so you definitely don’t need this open in your browser all day.

    LinkedIn

    Log out of LinkedIn. Same as twitter and facebook.

    Smart phone

    Turn it off. Completely off. No notification pings, no vibrates, no calls, nothing. So many apps on your phone to distract you and pull you away from work.

    Text Messaging

    Seriously. I know people under 25 seem to live in their text messaging world but I have news for you. If you turn off your phone the world will keep spinning. And your friends will still be there when it comes to lunch time and you can check up on what hasn’t happening in the (gasp!) last 4 hours.

    Wired Phone

    Unplug it. Turn off the ringer. Turn down the volume on the answerphone.

    Email

    You don’t need your email client open all the time. Check it once per hour, or once every two hours. For an extreme take, do it like Noah Kagan. Twice a day – once at the start of the day and once at the end of the day. OK, so some conversations won’t go as fast but everything will get attended to. And you might even focus on those emails a bit more because you’ve dedicated time to them rather than trying to time slice them with everything else in the day.

    Trello / Other productivity tool

    There are loads of planning/scheduling tools out there. Trello has taken off in a big way. Great. I have nothing against them. But you don’t need to fixate on it all day. Close the browser page. You can check the status of something when you actually need the information, not just because something has moved and you need to know, RIGHT NOW, what that was.

    Work colleagues

    Not a lot you can do about these. They need your help. You need theirs. If you can’t interact nothing will get done. But you can give strong hints as to when it’s OK to talk to you and when it’s not. Some folks put a red flag on their desk (or something equally unusual) to signify “I’m busy, don’t bother me”. Try it.

    Open plan work environment

    Yes, these are great. And they can be awful. Good for fostering openness and communication. Bad for controlling noise. For some tasks you may be better trying to get an office for an afternoon or take the work home.

    Office politics

    Er, not sure how to turn this one off.

    Go for a walk

    I’m serious. If you can’t get your head around a problem. Go for a walk. Preferably in the countryside. I live in a small country village. An average house on a housing estate. But I’m surrounded by farmland and the largest wetland in Europe (The Ouse Washes). Lots of the engineering problems at Software Verification have been solved while walking on this farmland enjoying the scenery, letting my brain wander and then out of nowhere a solution or partial solution appears. Back to the office and usually have a working demo by the end of the day.

    Alternatively, a long soak in a hot bath (optional bottle of wine) often does the same job. Don’t try this one at work!

    Alternatively, learn to meditate.

    If it’s not obvious the key thing is getting your mind to relax and wander. Turn off the concious problem solving part of your brain and wait.

    Caffeine

    Get Caffeine out of your life. I really enjoy Caffeine (when provided by Tea, but not by Coffee) but I’m glad I stopped consuming Caffeine. It’s a myth that it makes you better at your job. I should probably also do the same with alcohol, but I have considerably reduced my consumption of that as well.

    List

    Make a list of all the things you need to do today. Identify the order of importance and how big/small a task it is. If you have lots of short tasks that are easy to do, do them. This reduces the list size and gives you a sense of progress, which is a good emotional boost. Then tackle the important and big tasks first. Cross each task off the list as you complete them. It’s trivial stuff to do, but this is emotional recognition of progress. Surprising what such simple tricks can do to your inner sense of “getting stuff done”.

    If you find that you are not comfortable with the list on any given day that’s a good indicator that the tasks on the list – you haven’t fully decided how each task will be completed. So work on understanding each task a bit better. This may mean breaking the task into subtasks, or it may mean you just need to think about the task a bit more.

    Summary

    The days when I feel the most distracted, the least at ease, can’t decide what to work on it’s when there is nothing on the list that interests me and I have all these distractions turned on. The solution is to remove the distractions and then work on the contents of the list.

    I’m not saying twitter, facebook et al are bad. I’m saying that they need to be used with care. So turn them off when you are working and turn them on when you need to plug in.

    Guest posts

    No, we’re not interested in having a guest post about unrelated topics like gambling or pornography.

    Original post

    This post was originally published 30 December 2014 on the softwareverify.com blog. We moved this post to this dedicated domain 21 April 2025.