My day job is at Red Gate. Although we focus on tools for SQL Server and .NET, I’m currently concentrating on making a fledgling Microsoft Exchange tool we’re working on a commercial success. Here’s a bit of background on what we’re doing.

I think most business software sucks. It’s buggy, poorly designed, unusable and expensive. It’s sold by complacent companies who do not care about their customers. If you’ve got an iMac at home, and use Google, Flickr and iPhoto recreationally, why should you put up with crap at work?

I think we’ve found a potential niche for a tool for Microsoft Exchange. I can’t tell you much about it, but if you’re an Exchange admin then your life is going to get better. This tool will you make you smile.

This creates a dilemma, and I’d like your advice:

How much should we tell people about what we’re doing? On the one hand, the more we talk about it, the more likely it is to succeed. On the other hand, we’re months away from even a beta and we don’t want to tip off the competition.

So what would you do? Post here.

Also, we’re looking for people to join the beta program and participate in user research. If you’re an Exchange admin and are interested then drop me a line. If you’ve never taken part in a usability trial then it’s an experience worth having. Plus we pay $100 (amazon vouchers) for an hour of your time. My e-mail address is neil.davidson@red-gate.com.

A couple of years ago Antonio, a good friend of mine, decided to open a bar in Pantelleria, a small island 70 miles off the coast of Sicily. Its turquoise lakes and volcanic landscapes are persuasive enough for Giorgio Armani to split his time between Milan and the island. Madonna and Sting are regular visitors too. But if you go to Pantelleria today you won’t find Antonio’s bar anywhere, and it’s not for the reasons you might expect.

Antonio had the foresight to produce a business plan. He used the structure of the plan to feel his way around the opportunity. Who were his customers going to be? He spent time on the island chatting to the locals and to the tourists. What was the competition like? Dedicated, late night partying in the handful of bars already on the island was the only way to answer that question. How much would it cost? He found an old villa, produced plans to convert it to a bar and worked out what the running costs would be. Once he’d been through the process he could see that his head clearly contradicted his heart. There was no way he could make it work.

I count this a success. The process of creating the plan helped Antonio make the right decision. Planning saved him months, if not years, of disappointment and misery.

It’s not the powerpoint slides or the twenty page document that counts. The colourful hockey stick graphs, quadrants and pie charts do not matter. It’s the act of production that is critical. A business plan provides a framework for thought. You’re standing on the edge of a chasm, in the dark, ready to leap. You need to know that a better place lies across the gap, and that you’ve remembered to tie your shoelaces.

Here are some more reasons why it’s the process that counts:

• Helmuthe von Moltk, the chief of staff for the Prussian army said no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. You need to think about different outcomes, and understand the lay of the land.
• If you’re setting up in business with somebody else – and I recommend that you do – then a plan has another advantage too. It’s a way of reaching a shared understanding about what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it. It will force you to check that you share common assumptions and goals, and that they hold true.
• Writing can be a good way to think. Putting your thoughts down on paper forces you to crystallize them.

Once you’ve written your plan, you’ll put it in a drawer and leave it there for twelve months. The next time you read it, it will be to have a good laugh about how wrong you were.

So write your plan – that’s important – and then burn it.

Bill Buxton is an astounding character. I’ve had the good fortune to chat with him a couple of times, and I always come away with my head fizzing with his ideas. Most recently, I persuaded him to join a few of us from Red Gate at the Pickerel in Cambridge for a quick pint. I’ll let some of his ideas ferment and I’ll write some more about them in the coming weeks, but here’s a quick taster of some of what I learnt.

Electronic paper is going to be huge. Bill had brought his iRex iLiad device, and the hardware is astonishing (the software less so). It’s about the size and weight of a thin hardbook book, and its resolution is way better than I’d expected. Its display is like a sheet of laser-printed paper, reflecting and absorbs light like ink on paper does, rather than emitting it like conventional displays do. Although there are niggles with the device, it’s utterly convincing that we’re all going to be carrying these things in the future. Of course, exactly which device we all end up carrying depends on factors other than the technology, just like Apple’s success with the iPod was due to software, the iTunes store, DRM, distribution agreements with record labels and so on. Amazon are on the right track with the Kindle though. As soon as they come out in the UK, I’m buying one.

Here’s Bill with his iLiad:

Here’s a close up:

Note how Bill is annotating the document he’s working on. The paper that Bill is reading is Engelbart’s 1968 Study for the Development of Human Intellect Augmentation Techniques. It’s worth a read.

Bill also talked about how people are underestimating Microsoft’s ability to design, and to innovate. Many (including me) have sniggered at the original Zune, but the latest version is actually quite good. Not as good as the iPod, maybe, but that’s not the point. Bill’s point is that you need to separate out the art of design from the craft, and that you must first master the craft before you can attempt the art. Microsoft are now mastering the craft, and they’ll soon be practising the art. Compare Bill’s original brown Zune with the sleeker one on the right and you can see how Microsoft’s design skills have evolved over just 12 months:

Bill has some other interesting ideas about innovation and invention. Just as Chris Anderson of Wired has his Long Tail, Bill Buxton has his Long Nose. The tip of the technology nose is 20 – 30 years ahead of the face. William Gibson said the same thing differently with ‘The future is here; it’s just unevenly distributed’. Take the mouse you’re holding. It’s been ubiquitous for a decade, ever since the launch of Windows 95. If you’re an original Mac user you’ll think the mouse is 20 years old. If you’re a real old-timer then you’ll know it was used on the Xerox Star and PERQ workstations in 1982. But it was actually invented by Doug Engelbart and Bill English in 1965. That’s a 30 year gap from invention to ubiquity, and it was the popularisers rather than the inventors who got the money and the fame. Similarly, if you’ve been wowed by the iPhone’s multitouch interface and the way you can stretch and squeeze photographs with your fingers then you ought to know that Bill Buxton was building multitouch interfaces in 1985. Don’t expect multitouch to hit ubiquity until 2015.

Bill also has much to say about sketching and design. For example, it’s way better to represent a handful of sketches to users rather than get feedback about a single, detailed, design. With a sketch, it’s obvious that you’ve not invested much time, so users will feel less awkward about giving feedback. Also, if it’s framed as a comparison between two designs, users are more likely to evaluate options and give opinions than if they’re focussed on a single design (‘I prefer the round widget to the square widget’ is easier for people to say than ‘The square widget sucks’). Bill expands on this in his book Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. If you’re at all interested in product design or development you should get hold of a copy.

Finally, here’s Bill with (from left to right) me, Stephen, Marine, Dom and Tom:

At the end of 2006, Claire over at Simple-Talk put together a book of recipes "by geeks for geeks". It’s only tenuously linked to the Business of Software but it’s a cool idea, and an example of how you can give away eBooks to drive traffic to your web site.

Besides, I’ve always wanted to have a blog post entitled "It’s a cook book!" and it’s the only way I could think of doing it. Award yourself a gold star if you get the reference without looking it
up in the characteristically overly explained wikipedia entry.

Here’s the link:

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/the-simple-talk-cookbook/ 

And what was it?

Post here …

I recently read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston. Jessica interviewed a whole bunch of really interesting people (Steve Wozniak, Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor and 29 other entrepreneurs) and has written up the interviews in this collection. It’s fascinating to read the stories of other people’s experiences as they make it big. The book has 53 reviews on amazon.com with an average rating of close to five stars.

I tried to give away an eChapter of Jessica’s book away on my conference web site, but for various reasons that fell through.

However, Jessica has published interviews with Steve Wozniak and Joel Spolsky online. You can go to the Founders at Work web site to read them.

Jessica is also one of the founders of Y-Combinator, which is early stage venture capitalism done the way it should be. It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of.

Jessica has kindly agreed to speak at Business of Software 2008. Other speakers include Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and Jason Fried. Registration isn’t open yet, but subscribe to the RSS feed if you’d like to be kept informed.

I love it when software just works. When you use it and it does exactly what it should do. When it’s obvious.

I love it even more when software redefines obvious. Before you use the software, you have one idea of what obvious is. Once you’ve used it, your mental model has changed, forever. Your world flips, and you can’t flip it back again.

Google maps is like that. Of course online mapping should let you pan and zoom by dragging the map. It’s obvious: how could anybody think otherwise? But others – multimap, for example – failed to see the obvious.

Apple’s iPhone is like that. Of course you should be able slide your photos with your fingers, and of course your photos should rotate as you rotate your phone. But it took Apple to spot the obvious.

The Nintendo Wii is like that. Of course gaming shouldn’t be restricted to joysticks and controllers with lots of fiddly buttons.

Amazon is like that. Of course you should be able to buy a book with a single click.

Redefining obvious is hard though. It doesn’t just happen: it requires a lot of hard decisions, and a lot of hard work. It can be thankless too: once you’ve redefined the obvious, it can be trivial for others to copy.  Everybody told Jeff Bezos that one-click shopping was dumb (his developers wanted to put in a ‘Are you sure?’ confirmation screen). He did it, and then everybody told him it was obvious.

At Red Gate, I think we’ve done a similar thing with a product we’ve just released. On a lesser scale than Apple, Google, Nintendo and Amazon, but I’m still proud of what the team (David C, Lionel, David L, Ben, Marine and Heather) have achieved.

SQL Data Generator generates test data for SQL Server databases. It’s a task ripe for automation, but it’s deceptively difficult to do. Many people – including Microsoft – have tried and, I would argue, failed.

Here are a few of the things that I think make SQL Data Generator special:

• If your column is called FirstName then of course you should populate it – by default – with data like ‘Bob’, ‘Alice’ and ‘Chuck’, and not ‘QRICg’, ‘WKOlg%’ and ‘ERgaU*’.
• Similarly, columns called email probably contain e-mail addresses, country will contain countries, and so on. Of course.
• If you have a constraint OptOut =’Y’ or OptOut=’N’ then of course you shouldn’t try to fill it with As and Bs and Cs.
• You should be able to run it out of the box. Of course you shouldn’t have to fiddle around with lots of configuration details just to get going.

In their modest way, I think these features redefine obvious.

If you’re a SQL Server professional I hope you’ll download the tool (you can find out more at http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Data_Generator), try it out and then think to yourself "What’s the fuss? That’s obvious."

Exactly.

My toaster caught fire a few weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about getting a new one. I’ve read the Which? consumer reports, and know that the cheaper ones are actually better than the more expensive ones. That was reinforced by one of Seth Godin’s recent blog posts, where he describes the world’s worst toaster in all its microprocessor glory. I’m not quite ready to make a decision yet though. I’ll do a bit more research, ask some friends what toasters they use, and then buy one on Amazon (I don’t like shopping and I don’t like crowds).

Hopefully you’re getting a feel for the type of consumer I am. Spontaneous is not my middle name.

So how the heck did I come back from town on Thursday afternoon with a shiny new MacBook Air?

The Grand Arcade, Cambridge’s new shopping centre, opened on Thursday morning. I was in town, and thought I’d take a peek. I wanted to see what they’d done in the 8 years it had taken to plan and 3 years to build. Besides, it was on the way to my car.

It’s an impressive place. A cathedral built of stone, glass, steel and timber. A different class to the misguided 1970s shithole of a shopping centre it abuts. Most of the shops were empty, or not yet fitted.

And then I saw the Apple store. I’m not sure what drew me in. I’ve managed to walk past Apple stores in London, San Francisco and Newport Beach without succumbing.

The store was packed, but buzzing rather than heaving. People were playing with banks of iPhones, iMacs and MacBooks. I’d already read about the MacBook Air. With its missing ports, low capacity hard drive and lack of horsepower it simply isn’t a serious laptop. Only hardcore Apple fanboys and poseurs would be gulled into paying double the price of a proper laptop for such a toy. Sure, it fits into an envelope, but who carries their laptop around in an envelope?

But seeing it – and touching it – was a different experience. It was sexy, sleek and cool. But there was more to it than that: it was a social experience too. In the same way that horror films are scarier, and comedies funnier, when you’re surrounded by strangers in the darkness of the cinema, playing with the MacBook Air in public, surrounded by like-minded strangers in the hubbub of the store, somehow heightened the emotional experience. And then there was an element of nostalgia, the evoking of long-buried memories of being ten years old, programming the BBC Micros on display in high street shops – the only place I could get my hands on them.

So I bought one. I had to.

The whole caboodle – the shop and the computer – have clearly been designed with one thing in mind. They’re built to bend your mind; to anaesthetise the rational, logical, decision making apparatus of your brain and place it at the mercy of the irrational, emotional, animal bits you cannot control. Derren Brown and L. Ron Hubbard are amateurs in Steve Jobs’s shadow.

And if Steve Jobs can perform this mind trick on me, he can weave his spell on you too. So beware.

There’s another lesson here too. Most people have already got enough stuff. They’re not going to buy even more stuff because they need it. They’re going to buy it because they want it. To stand above your competitors, it’s not enough to compete on feature lists. Provoke an emotional, visceral reaction. Make people yearn for your products.

PS I bought the 1.6GHz version. No way was I going to pay an extra £850 for 200 more megahertz and an underperforming SSD drive. I didn’t go that weak-kneed.

A few days ago I mentioned that Seth Godin’s is one of the few RSS feeds I subscribe to. That begs the question: what are the others? Here is my list:

Seth Godin (http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/sethsmainblog)
Simple-Talk (http://www.simple-talk.com/feed/)
Bruce Schneier (http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.xml)
Larry O’Brien (http://www.knowing.net/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss)
Guy Kawasaki (http://feeds.feedburner.com/guykawasaki/Gypm)
Slashdot (http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/eqWf)
Wired (http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml)
Xkcd (http://xkcd.com/rss.xml)
Boing Boing (http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag)
Joelonsoftware (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml)
The unofficial Paul Graham feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/PaulGrahamUnofficialRssFeed)
The BBC (http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml)

Andrew Clarke has got a great post about setting up on your own, over at Simple-Talk. Here’s an excerpt:

I knew from experience that this was something that any good programmer
had to get out of his system. There is a deep-set fallacy that if
software is well-written, and full of features, then it will sell. This
is like saying that a well-performed song will get to the top of the
singles chart by sheer merit. The analogy is fairly close, because in
both cases one has to hit the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Quality
helps one’s chances, but is, by itself, insufficient.

You can read the rest at the following URL:

http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/opinion-pieces/selling-software/

Geeks – the good ones, anyway – get passionate about the smallest things. Should braces sit on a line by themselves, or be next to the if clause? Is dynamic SQL better than stored procedures? XSLT – good or evil? I’m often reminded of this Emo Philips sketch:

I was walking across a bridge and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don’t do it. There’s so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well, are you religious?"
"Yes"
I said "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
"Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant."
I said "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
"Baptist."
I said, "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God."
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."

I said, "DIE. HERETIC SCUM!" and I pushed him off.

When Simon and I first set up Red Gate eight and half years ago, neither of us had a clue about marketing. We had to learn fast. One of the first books I read about marketing was Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. Here’s how Seth explains introduces it in his blog:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering
anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want
to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore
marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best
way to earn their attention.

Seth has gone on to write a total of 7 books, and has released the most popular eBook of all time. I only subscribe to a handful of RSS feeds, but his is one of them. If you want to get ahead in the Business of Software then you should subscribe to Seth’s RSS feed too.

So, I’m really chuffed to announce that Seth is going to speak at Business of Software 2008.I’ve been wanting to hear him speak ever since I first came across Seth back in 1999, and it looks like my wish will finally be granted.

I’ve had quite a few people e-mail me to ask if they can speak at Business of Software 2008. Unfortunately, most of the main speaking slots are either full or I’ve got somebody in mind for them.

However, it would be cool to give other people the chance to speak too. Last year, we had a Software Idol contest, which worked quite well. This year, Joel suggested that we do a Pecha Kucha contest.

I hadn’t heard of this, but it’s a great idea. The rules are strict: you show 20 slides, speak for 20 seconds on each slide, and then sit down. According to this Wired article on Pecha Kucha the result is to ‘transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.’

If you’d like to take part then follow the instructions on the Business of Software 2008 Pecha Kucha page.

The date and venue for Business of Software 2008 have been finalised.

It’s going to be held in the Seaport hotel, on the Boston waterfront. This is a fantastic, independent hotel in a magnificent location. We’ve negotiated a special rate of $239 / night for the conference. You can find out more about the hotel at www.seaportboston.com

The dates are September 3rd – September 4th.

The full price 2-day pass will be $1,795, but early-bird price tickets will be $1,395.

Last year’s conference was great (94% of attendees gave it a 4 or 5 star rating), but this year’s is going to be better. The speakers so far include Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Richard Stallman, Dharmesh Shah and Jason Fried. I’m hoping to announce another *big* name speaker shortly.

The conference is going to sell out quickly. If you came to Business of Software 2007 then you are guaranteed a place if you book before April 12th. Plus you’ll get a special price of only $1,195 as a token of my appreciation for taking a bit of a risk and supporting the conference last year. I’ll e-mail you separately about this in the next few days.

If you didn’t come to last year’s conference then general registration will open on April 14th.

The best way to stay up to date with announcements is to  subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, you can sign up to very occasional e-mail updates at www.businessofsoftware.org

I hope to see you in Boston!

Today’s guest post is by Heather Johnson. Heather is a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards, a site for business credit cards and best business credit card offers. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com

If you are planning on going freelance, starting your own company or investing in any other kind of business opportunity without help, you may be feeling apprehensive… and rightly so. There is no such thing as a risk-free moneymaking opportunity, so a little fear is healthy. However, you will never gain anything without sticking your neck out, so it’s best you face your fears head on and plan accordingly.

Below are the top five worst-case scenarios for solo entrepreneurs:

1. Your Business Flops – You may find that a business just completely dies right out of the starting gates. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should give up immediately. Depending on your situation, a lackluster beginning could indicate that a) you need an overhaul in your business plan or b) this isn’t going to work out and you need to cut your losses.
2. You Are Sued – Your newfound entrepreneurship could be doing gangbusters, but that success can be easily threatened when someone gets litigious. Be sure to cover your bases on the business end of things before this happens. In other words, you need access to both a trusted attorney and accountant.
3. You Lose a Major Client – Some businesses draw a majority of their income from one or two major clients. Having your eggs in one basket could be a dangerous thing for an entrepreneur, so be sure that you keep your clients happy and that you have a plan in case they ever decide to end your working relationship.
4. You Incur Massive Amounts of Debt – Everyone has debt, but a business owner can really rack up the balance when operating a startup. Don’t rely on credit cards and don’t get involved with business loans you can’t handle.
5. You Go Bankrupt – Ouch. That could be the worst possible scenario for anyone, not just those who are starting their own business venture. As I mentioned above, however, you need to make sure you don’t get in way over your head with loans and debt.

What is the best defense against these worst-case scenarios? A shrewd business sense and a practical business plan. It takes a certain type of rebel to venture on your own, but don’t be foolhardy about it. Treat your business like a business, remain honest and don’t take on more than you can handle. That way, even a substantial bump in the road can be one you will take in stride.

A cool video of Aibo dogs playing soccer, as part of the Robocup competition. The ultimate aim is produce a robotic team of humanoid robots that can beat the human world soccer team:

In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks likened shipping software in time with customers’ expectations to cooking an omelette:

An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices–wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.

The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save–burned in one part, raw in another.

I’m going to stretch, and maybe strain, the analogy. Sometimes you’re about to serve the omelette and you realise that something’s wrong. It’s not seasoned right, or you’ve forgotten to put the peppers in. Or perhaps your customer actually ordered a cheeseburger.

So what do you do?

You can serve it up and hope the customer won’t complain, at least not loudly enough for others to hear.

You can insist that it’s fine: you’re the chef, you’ve been cooking omelettes for twenty years and the customer wouldn’t know a decent omelette from his elbow.

You can cover it with a large sprig of parsley to make it look nice.

Or maybe you follow it up quickly with an omelette 2.0 which corrects the deficiencies in the first omelette.

Or, possibly hardest of all, you accept that the omelette isn’t right, slide it into the bin, and start again. That’s hard to do though. You’ll disappoint your customer, it means acknowledging that your first omelette wasn’t up to scratch, and it can be expensive in both time and money. But sometimes it’s the right thing to do.

Releasing new products is hard. Releasing major upgrades can be harder, but for different reasons. On the one hand, you want to persuade your current customers to upgrade; on the other you don’t want to strongarm them, bleed them for cash or leave them resenting you. From your perspective, supporting older versions of products is time consuming, but from your customers’ perspective there are often diminishing return to upgrades.

The more mature a product is, the harder, the riskier and the more expensive it is for customers to justify an n+1 product upgrade. And from your perspective, your n+1 version product has stiff competition: your version n.

This is truer for some products than others. It’s relatively easy for you to try out, and then upgrade to, the next version of SQL Compare, say. It’s a third party tool that you can evaluate with little impact, and uninstall if necessary. If you judge the benefits outweigh the few minutes of evaluation time and the upgrade cost of a couple of hundred dollars then you buy it. If you don’t, then you don’t. Easy.

That’s not true for other products though. The hardest are mature, server-based, enterprise-wide, critical systems. If you’re a SQL Server customer, for example, then you’ve got a difficult decision ahead of you. Should you upgrade to SQL Server 2008 when it’s released? The upgrade costs could be enormous, so the benefits need to be huge. You’ll need to retest your current applications, evaluate the software and plan a roll-out. And that’s before you even consider the direct costs of upgrading. At up to $25,000 per processor those can be significant.

Two and half years after the release of SQL Server 2005, our stats show that only around 50% of people have upgraded from SQL Server 2000, a platform that is now eight years old. So what will the adoption of SQL Server 2008 look like?

According to SQL Server Magazine, somewhere between 10 and 15% of people will move to SQL Server 2008 within about a year of its release. Somewhere between 60 and 70% have no plans to move to SQL Server 2008. Back in 2006, the top reason for not upgrading to SQL Server 2005 was because there was no compelling business reason to upgrade. If that was true for the SQL Server 2005 upgrade back then, it’s doubly true for the move to SQL Server 2008 now.

There’s another reason I think uptake will be low. A lot of us have been stung by the latest versions of Microsoft Office and Windows Vista. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton uses the example of the typewriter keyboard. Say you’re a keyboard manufacturer and you find a way of re-arranging the keys of the standard keyboard. Usability tests show it’s easier for beginners to get to grip with, and it ultimately leads to a 10% increase in typing speeds, both in novices and experts. You still wouldn’t release the new keyboard: the several billion people who are comfortable with the current, inefficient, keyboard would find it irritating, confusing and slow to use. They would never upgrade. I put Office 2007 and Vista into this category, with their arbitrary new ways of doing standard tasks.

Although SQL Server 2008 has no equivalent to the productivity-destroying ribbon bar in Office 2007, I do think that Microsoft’s recent history with product upgrades will make people wary and skeptical. It certainly won’t push them to upgrade quickly.

On balance, people will upgrade to SQL Server 2008 very slowly. Clearly, that isn’t in Microsoft’s interests though: they, logically, will be trying to persuade people to move from previous versions. In particular, they’ll be trying to persuade people to leapfrog SQL Server 2005 and move straight from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2008.

One strategy they might use is to withdraw active support for SQL Server 2005. SQL Server 2005’s second service pack was released about a year ago. Microsoft currently have no plans to release more service packs for SQL Server 2005. This  might make short-term sense for them, but it’s not the right thing to do for their customers. If I’m right, and the uptake of SQL Server 2008 is slow, then Microsoft should be looking after customers who are unwilling, or unable, to upgrade immediately. People are going to be using SQL Server 2005 for another five years at least, and they need to be supported.

I think Microsoft are persuadable – there’s a poll running on the Microsoft connect site where they’re gauging feedback. If you use SQL Server and don’t have plans to upgrade immediately to SQL Server 2008 then I urge you to make your voice heard and push for SQL Server 2005 service pack 3. Here’s the link:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=326575

Microsoft will eventually do the right thing. They’ll have to. Either they’ll do it now, or they will backtrack and do it later, much like they’ve had to extend Window XP’s life. They don’t even have to write a single line of code or test a single function for now. All they need to do is commit to doing it, some time in the future, to keep their customers happy.

Go on Microsoft – keep us happy.

Last October I visited the San Jose Tech Museum with some other people from Red Gate. We stumbled across a mechanical arm-wrestling machine. Here’s the twist though: the mechanical arm that you wrestle is connected with other, similar, machines across the USA. There’s a webcam too, so you can see who you’re wrestling. In California, Theo, Ross and I all cheered on as Anna slammed the arm of some jock over in New York against the table.

This is an example of a haptic interface: you interact with the device via touch, pressure and movement, rather than sight or sound. It’s an interesting example because it’s not just about you, the user, interacting with a device. It allows two people, separated by a large distance, to interact as if in the same place.

The arm-wrestling machine is a crude example of how physical gestures can be transmitted over large distances. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could transfer more complex gestures?

Well, it turns out you can. Almost. There’s a company in London called CuteCircuit who have prototyped what they call ‘The Hug Shirt’. The idea is that you buy two shirts: one for you, and one for a friend. You both put on your hug shirts. Your friend then travels off, to California, or Scotland, or wherever. You think your friend might be lonely and you want to send her something beyond an e-mail or an instant message. You hug yourself, squeezing your hug shirt. The shirt digitizes the exact form of your hug and sends the data to your mobile phone via a bluetooth connection. You text it to your friend. Your friend receives a message saying "Bob just sent you a hug. Do you want to feel it?". Her phone sends the hug to her hug shirt, and the hug shirt hugs her. Your hug – its strength, its pressure distribution, the warmth of your skin and your heartbeat – is replayed exactly the way you created it.

There are other people working on similar projects. Ben Hui at Cambridge University has a plan to send hand-squeezes via mobile phones. This is similar to a project that researchers at MIT’s European palpable machines research group were working on before the lab was shut down. Rather than a shirt, this could be built into mobile phones themselves. You could squeeze the phone and your friend would feel it, in some form, at the other end.

The value of these haptic devices is based on the idea that physical touch is important to human interactions. By transferring and replicating the physical touch you are, in fact, transferring and replicating the emotion.

I’m not sure that this is true though. The emotion you feel depends on more than just what you’re sensing. It also depends on the situation that you’re in: what your physical environment is, your mental state and your expectations. Here’s an illustration.

Also at the San Jose Tech Museum, there’s an earthquake simulator. You stand on a platform and the simulator replays the seismic data from an earthquake that’s actually happened. We re-experienced the earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999. In the real thing, 14,000 people died. In our simulation, the platform juddered for a bit and then we walked off, a bit disappointed.

Two days later, I was eating at The Grill at the Fairmont Hotel, just opposite the Tech Museum. At 8:04pm, the whole room starting shifting. It jumped left, right, forwards and backwards. The stack of wine bottles by the wall teetered, but didn’t fall. This real earthquake, an order of magnitude tamer than the simulated one, only lasted a few seconds, but it scared the shit out of me. Because of its unexpectedness, my mental state, its context, and its reality, it provoked emotions of fear, awe and wonder that the simulation didn’t and, probably, no simulation ever could.

So will the hapticon kill the emoticon? I’d like to think so, but there’s still life in the smiley face for now.

When PG Wodehouse was asked what the secret of writing was, he replied that it’s to apply the seat of your trousers to the surface of your chair.

In software, the secret is the opposite. It’s to remove the seat of your trousers from the surface of your chair. At least, remove the tips of your fingers from the surface of your keyboard. Go out and talk to users; get a pencil and paper and sketch; take a long walk and think. But don’t code.