The Decline and Fall of the Microsoft Empire

If you read the technology press even occasionally you'll have read at least one article in the past twelve months lamenting (or trumpeting) the decline of Microsoft. One of the better recent examples of the kind is here, but the general thrust of all the articles is that Microsoft is stagnant, overly reliant on revenues from "yesterday" technologies like the Windows desktop OS and Office application suites and that it has missed the boat in essential areas like web search, mobile computing and smartphones. The recent news that Apple's market valuation has overtaken Microsoft's for the first time only seems to highlight the situation.

Is there a real issue here, though, or is this just a case of bandwagon-jumping? What does it mean for those of us who run our businesses on Microsoft software, or who, like myself, have built their careers on their expertise in understanding and implementing Microsoft-based solutions?

The answer is, of course, yes and no. It depends. Microsoft is simply not a player in any meaningful sense in the technology spaces that make newspaper headlines. When Windows Phone 7 ships, I doubt there will be any shops opening at midnight with queues outside. The present and future of smartphones lies, for the time being, with Google's Android OS and the iPhone. The iPad, despite its essential limitations, may prove the catalyst for a new generation of tablet devices that actually do change the way we access digital data (and what a shame it is that the truly innovative Microsoft Courier concept device will never see the light of day).

The charge is also levelled that the desktop OS paradigm is a thing of the past, that the next generation of Windows will be the last. Disk-munching memory hungry function and framework-heavy operating systems will supposedly disappear to be replaced by light shell systems capable of little more than launching a browser, which won't matter because application functionality will be online and all our data will reside in the cloud anyway.

The truth is that while Microsoft has missed the boat in a number of important areas, the company and the Microsoft ecosystem isn't going anywhere in our working lifetimes. The businesses of the Western world run on Windows servers and use products like Exchange Server and SQL Server to manage their information storage and flows. These fundamental processes don't make for glamorous presentations and product launches and newspaper columns, but they're the backbone of everyday commercial IT. The development tools and environments provided by Microsoft and the depth of technical documentation supporting them are unmatched by any other vendor.

Again, these aren't the sort of concepts that get pulses racing in the technology press. I think that Microsoft is going to assume a position roughly analogous to that of IBM; few magazine covers in the future but a large behind-the-scenes player in the enterprise and the back-office, with (probably) a reduced presence in the consumer and small-business marketplaces.

Gloating over the death of Microsoft is misguided and misplaced. A strong and healthy Microsoft is good for everyone in IT, in the same way that the return of Apple and the rise of Google have forced everyone else to raise their game.

Back again

There are a number of good reasons why there hasn't been much posted here of late. Being just plain old-fashioned busy is one of the reasons, but never a good one: there's always time to be found somewhere if something matters enough.

The more important reason is a site revamp that's in the works for 360data.nl. The site as it's currently constituted is not doing the job I'd intended it to do when setting it up. It doesn't properly explain what it is that I do or how I go about it, and it's not reaching the people it was meant to reach.

This means that I've been spending time recently plotting and scheming with my technical, artistic & spiritual advisor Mr. David Quinn of Avenir Design and discussing how to reboot the site and make it more accurate and relevant. The plan is to retain those elements of the message that work, but to include and highlight case studies or examples of work I've done, coupled with the customer requirement that prompted the solution. It's an interesting process, and all the more so now that there are successful projects to explain and promote, rather than the empty pages that faced us when we first created the site two-and-a-half years ago.

Once that's complete, I plan to post more regularly again. There's enough to discuss, what with SQL Server 2008 R2 just gone gold, the rise of SQL Azure and cloud-based database services, the .NET Framework 4.0 and plenty of less technical topics also.

Executing a list of SQL scripts using SSIS

The redoubtable Jamie Thomson has made a simple and clear video demo of how SSIS can be used to execute a number of SQL scripts automatically. You can find the video here.

New application version

We went live today with a new version of Rijk Zwaan's custom-built BAS (Basiszaad Administratie Systeem) application. 360Data developed major new functionality for analyzing large data sets of gene test results automatically, thus saving many hundreds of man-hours of painstaking manual comparisons annually and making scenario and what-if analyses possible.

The implementation involved not only updates to the desktop application, but also setting up and configuring a new SQL server and interfaces to other systems.

360Data wishes Rijk Zwaan every success with the new functionality.

Things To Come

This week I attended a Microsoft TechNet session on the new and improved BI features that will arrive this summer in SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010. The presentation was interesting and informative, but the products being presented were something of a mixed bag.

We first got a good look at PowerPivot, the Excel pivot table-local Analysis Services hybrid formerly known as Project Gemini. The performance, functionality and ease-of-use were certainly impressive given multi-million record datasets, but there seems to be no good reason to confine the functionality to Excel 2010. It's an add-in, and Excel 2007 supports large datasets, so there would seem to be no insurmountable technical reason to confine it to the new version. The MS take on the issue is apparently, "give Excel 2010 to a few power users, and the other users can access the workbooks thus created from SharePoint/Excel Services". Which may work fine for organisations that have implemented SharePoint, but leaves a lot of other companies in the cold. I'm not at all convinced that many firms are interested in upgrading to Office 2010 any time soon, and this smells like a marketing-driven decision to force upgrades in the absence of other compelling new features.

We saw the newest version of Report Builder in action, and to be honest it was a let-down. I was discussing it with another attendee afterwards, and we both felt that Report Builder is neither fish nor flesh. It's not full-featured enough to compete with professional reporting applications, and not simple enough to provide to users for basic or personal reporting needs. It's certainly better than the reporting tools included with the SQL 2005 BI Studio, but that's hardly the most ringing endorsement.

The biggest disappointment, though, was the first look at the long-awaited Master Data Management solution. This turns out to be little more than a data modelling tool with a very poor interface and a data store on the back-end. Populating the data store was out-of-scope (the sensible suggestion was that SSIS be used, but I'd expected at the very least some rudimentary wizards for building the pipes) and there was no mechanism whatsoever for enforcing the business rules defined for and in the central data model in the host applications and data stores. The idea is good and a market exists, but the execution, in this iteration at least, seems to leave a lot to be desired.

The last new product we got a look at was StreamInsight, an event response platform that will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2. The idea is, instead of checking for the existence of data meeting particular criteria in large volumes of fast-changing data, you define sets of criteria and filter your data through them. It sounds at first like the answer to many prayers, until one considers that SQL Notification Services did exactly the same thing in SQL Server 2005, only to be unceremoniously dropped with little explanation or apology less than three years later in SQL Server 2008. It's very difficult to expect customers and partners to invest time or money in technologies if they can't be confident that support and upgrade paths will exist in the future. Most businesses simply don't work with the three-year version cycles of Microsoft, so StreamInsight will be very much a wait-and-see proposition. Which is something of a pity.

It brings me no pleasure to complain about Microsoft; I've earned a living for many years on the back of their efforts and am always interested in seeing what they come out with next. The new crop of BI technologies don't seem to cut the mustard, though, in many essential aspects.

Sparklines (2)

Last September I wrote here about sparklines, their uses and the upcoming implementation in Excel 2010. By now I've had the chance to try out the sparkline functionality in the Office 2010 preview release and I'm pretty positive about the experience.

I downloaded a set of daily averaged exchange rate data for the last three months. This gives me a table with 279 data points (most are hidden in the example below for readability's sake), all of which are decimals with tiny variations. Not very readable, then, and certainly difficult to interpret without careful study. If I add three sparklines though, I have an instant, in-context overview of the general trends: it's clear that the Euro has taken a significant fall in value in the past three months.

The value of these small but intensely data-rich graphs should be clear (though if you're still not convinced I'd urge you to read Prof. Tufte's writings on the subject), but how does the Microsoft implementation stack up?

Firstly, it's extremely simple to use, more so than the regular Excel charting tools. The presentation options are necessarily much more limited, but there's a choice of three formats (line, as shown here, column, and win-loss) and lowest and highest points can be highlighted. I've done so in this example, with a green dot showing the minimum data point and a red dot indicating the maximum value. Resizing the sparkline cell resizes the graph automatically, and it's easy to change colours and the likes.

There are some minus points too, though. It appears to be impossible to combine sparklines in a cell, so you can't have lines from two different data sets overlaid on each other, or show (for instance) expected or normal values/value ranges together with the sparkline. I had expected that saving a sparklined workbook in Excel 97-2003 (.xls) format wouldn't preserve the sparkline, but I was surprised when I opened a sparklined workbook in Excel 2007. The .xlsx file format hasn't changed, so I figured that my sparklines might be saved as images, or displayed as miniature line charts, but instead the cells just showed up blank.

I'm not sure if this behaviour will also show up in the final release, but it would be a real shame if one couldn't share sparklined workbooks with Office 2007 users. That apart, it's a very creditable effort from Microsoft and a valuable addition to the Excel toolbox.

New version

PER Plus Logistics of Zevenbergen have implemented the newest version of their workflow system, including changes to invoicing to reflect the new EU intracommunitaire VAT regulations, additional interfaces to their bookkeeping software and layout changes to documentation.

Invoicing from the system is now fail-safe: an invoice can't be completed, printed or posted if the customer's full address details aren't known. If the customer is an EU customer, the VAT number is mandatory and warnings are displayed if it's not present. Again, the invoice can't be completed, printed or posted if this is the case. No VAT is charged if the customer is based in an EU country (other than the Netherlands).

All this decision-making takes place behind the scenes, meaning that staff don't need to decide in each case how VAT should operate and preventing mistakes from being made.

360Data wishes PER Plus continued success with the application and looks forward to the next challenge.