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Greedy Bastards

March 27th, 2009 | by matt | micro$oft

Mar
27

I’m not a windows mobile developer. And why would you want to be. Seeing this latest article from CNet News, I can’t think of a reason I would want to play in the Micro$oft world of endless, confusing licensing agreements.

Microsoft plans to charge mobile-application developers $99 to release upgraded versions of applications they submit to the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and will also charge them for minor updates unless they are released within seven days of the application’s debut.

When Microsoft announced plans for its Windows Mobile Marketplace application store earlier this month, it said it planned to charge developers $99 a year to participate in the program as well as a $99 fee per application submission–although as part of a promotional offer developers who registered this year could submit up to five applications for free.

The goal of coarse is that you will spend extra time developing your application for a higher quality product. OR, what will probably happen is, there will be bugs, developers won’t give a rats ass if it is a minor bug and they’ll never update their code. So you’ll have a marketplace filled with shitty, un-maintained applications.

Apple has it right on this one. Sure, charge a fee to distribute the app, take some of the money the developer charges for the app seeing as you are serving it up for them. But let them continue to develop and enhance their application as much as they want for free! Higher quality apps, happy programmers.

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Exchange 14 – Service First, Server 2nd

March 3rd, 2009 | by matt | micro$oft

Mar
03

I’m thinking that Microsoft is finally starting to realize that the hosted model ‘works’. Seeing this article on cnet is starting to make me feel a lot better about the future of Exchange. As a hosted exchange provider, I can tell you that making Exchange a multi tenant environment is not the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of thing that Microsoft has had to hack in in order to get things to work properly. From the sounds of this article, they’re taking a different approach with 14. Thinking about the service providers first which then easily integrates with the Enterprise. This way, it doesn’t matter if you have 50 organizations on the platform or 1, it simply works.

Now, if I could get someone at Microsoft to give me some bits to play with, I would be much happier. hint hint

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First!

February 10th, 2009 | by matt | in the news, micro$oft

Feb
10

There are very few times that a company gets to claim that they are first to do something. But today, my project is launching and LightEdge Solutions gets to claim that we are the first service provider to provide this integration. Today we are announcing that we are rolling out our Hosted Office Communication Server 2007 service. The real kicker for this is that we have been able to successfully tie together the hosted OCS system with our hosted Broadsoft phone system. So now when you are on a call, it automatically updates your status so everyone in your company will know not to bother you at that time. This is taking the presence integration to that next level.

I’m pretty proud of my team and the work that we have put in. We had a few obstacles in the road that we had to deal with but the guys came through in a huge way. It wasn’t easy, but the good stuff never is.

Links:
Full Press Release

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The need for speed

January 28th, 2009 | by matt | design, devdog, micro$oft

Jan
28

As I’ve written before, the main engine that we are using to provision users on our Exchange system is Microsoft‘s Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) framework.

I’ve had a few issues with it and various hoops that I have had to jump through. Many of which I have not had a chance to document on this blog. Those will hopefully come out in the coming months.

Today, I was dealing with a speed issue that we have been having in our customer portal that hits HMC. The page is pretty basic, it gives a listing of all the users, the name, login address, what package they are assigned and then some actions that can be taken on the user such as edit, delete, disable. This is all in house code that shows this information with calls being made to HMC to get the data.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake in my initial development. Originally, I got a listing of all the users and had 90% of the information that I needed. Another call was needed to get the assigned package for each user. If you have 5-10 users, this isn’t a huge deal. Try it with 100, or 1000. It gets really ugly really fast.

On one particular customer that I was looking at, they have 120 users. Their page was loading in 41 seconds. 41 freaking seconds!!! 7 seconds for the AD search to grab the users with mailboxes. Then somewhere between .1 and .3 seconds per user to equal 34 seconds of the page load.

The solution, remove the package display code.

What? But doesn’t the user want to see this data?!?! Maybe. But seeing as they have to go to the edit page anyway to change the package, it really isn’t needed on the account listing page. So why display it there. It slows down the user experience which is more of a negative than having it on the page.

It wasn’t an easy decision to remove this information. I thought of a whole bunch of ways where I could tuck that data away so I could grab it more efficiently. But in the end, less is less. Removing that data cleaned up the look of the page and vastly improved the load times. Its only been in the wild for a for hours so we’ll see what the users have to say about the change.

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Microsoft cutting 5,000 jobs on weak results

January 22nd, 2009 | by matt | in the news

Jan
22

Microsoft said Thursday its sales and earnings for the December quarter fell well below expectations and announced a series of cost-cutting moves, including its first-ever companywide layoffs

The software maker said it will cut up to 5,000 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce, over the next 18 months. About 1,400 jobs were eliminated immediately. The software maker is also paring other expenses, such as delaying salary increases and cutting back on vendors and contractors.

Amid slow PC sales, revenue for the quarter came in at $16.63 billion for its fiscal second quarter that ended December 31, up just 2 percent from a year ago and roughly $900 million less than the company previously projected. Per-share earnings came in at 47 cents, also below forecasts.

Sales in the Windows unit were down 8 percent, amid not only a drop in PC unit sales but also a shift to lower-price Netbooks, for which Microsoft receives less money. The drop in Windows sales was partially offset by strength in the company’s server and Xbox divisions.

source

You know things are bad when even Microsoft, with billions on hand, is cutting back its work force.

It can probably be said that most companies could cut 5% of their work force right now and not notice a loss in productivity. While it would be tough, it would probably be good for the company in the long run.

I can still recall some of my early days at my last job. After being there for 9 months, we had black tuesday. 1/2 of the company was let go. We went from 5 full time devs to 2.5. It was pretty rough to see those guys go. But in the end, we came out a smaller, leaner, profitable company. We were able to get through the tough times, add a few more people and continue to do more with less. Was it tough? Hell yeah! But in the long run, it was the right decision.

I have to give my former boss a lot of credit. He took us through some tough times but kept the company a float. There is a lot to be said about that.

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