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Gary Edwards's List: Compatibility matters

  • Sep 19, 12

    Best forum i have found for solving CableCard issues!  Excellent.  Highlighted below is the best solution in the forum. ......

    "You and I were working through the same issues some time back. I have no doubt that there is something to the "rebuild, re-provision, and/or reauthorize the account" fix for some of these problems. It certainly worked for me. To reinforce your point, I am repeating my previous post on this topic below. Good luck!

    Repeat Posting from March 2008:

    Given the history of our account, a service manager came out to our house to fix the problem personally -- a very high caliber, technical guy with obvious experience with CableCARDs.

    He had a new CableCARD up and running within a couple minutes -- used the same Motorola card (MediaCipher P/N: 469140-003-00 -- not the M-Card) which I referenced above. He made a couple other comments which may be useful to others:

    1. He claimed that in his considerable experience with CableCARDs, the problem is rarely a malfunctioning TV or even a bad card. He has found that it is normally in the provisioning / activation actions of the cable company. In particular, he stated that the newer Motorola M-Card is an advanced multi-stream card designed to operate with multiple devices simultaneously and, as a result, is extremely sensitive to how the provisioning data (what channel packages you have paid for) has been entered into the cable company database. Often the fix is simply to delete this information in a given account and to rebuild the data in a certain sequence and manner, and then to reauthorize / reactivate the card.

    2. He also said that since technicians have no way to check the operation of a particular cableCARD in the field, the swap-out mentality for troubleshooting cableCARD issues is very common. He claimed that there were many cards in operation in my area -- most with no problems.

    Bottom line, his quick resolution of my problem was further confirmation to me that some cable technicians understand this technology and many do not. As someone who changed out our new TV twice in the troubleshooting process, I would not again jump at the idea that the TV is malfunctioning without a lot more work by the best tech my cable company had to offer.

    Regards, Ted

    Mitsubishi 46" LCD TV (LT-46244)
    Motorola CableCARD
    Charter Communications, Gwinnett County, GA"

  • Feb 03, 11

    Think mobile data demand is big today, with 94 million smartphone shipped this year and 5 billion mobile subscribers? Well, Cisco ( s csco) says it’s going to get a lot bigger by 2015, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month. That’s 75 exabytes annually by 2015 [MIGHT WANT TO THROW IN AND/OR LINK TO A DEFINITION OF EXABYTE]. Last year, I called it the mobilpocalypse, but this year, I’m going to say it’s a looming tsunami, driven by everyone’s favorite bandwidth hog, web video, and the proliferation of mobile devices. In short, we can blame this wave on Netflix on the iPad.

  • Jul 14, 09

    Another good article form Michael Hickins, this time linking the success of Google Wave to the success of Microsoft OOXML. Rob Weir jumps in to defend , well, i'm not sure. I did however respond.

    Excerpt: Developers hoping to hitch a ride on Google’s Wave have discovered that Microsoft may have unwittingly helped them resolve the single greatest problem they needed to overcome in order to challenge the dominance of Office.

    When Microsoft set out to create Office 2007 using a brand new code base — Office Open XML (OOXML) — it needed to accomplish two goals: make it compatible with all previous versions of Office, and have it accepted as a standard file format for productivity tools so that governments could continue using it while complying with rules forcing them to use standards-based software. .....

    Depending on your perspective, either Microsoft has sowed the seeds of its own undoing, or international standards bodies succeeded in forcing Microsoft to open itself up. Either way, Microsoft has given away the key to compatibility with Office documents, allowing all comers to overcome the one barrier that has heretofore prevented customers from dumping Microsoft’s Office suite.

  • Jun 30, 09

    Knock me over with a feather. Now comes news that Cisco wants to challenge Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

    Paul Smalera of Business Insider questions the wisdom of this initiative, insisting that Cisco must know it can't beat either MSOffice or Google Apps.

    Maybe Cisco is fishing for help? Where is that wave-maker application Jason and Florian are said to be working on? :)

    Excerpt: Cisco VP Doug Dennerline told reporters, the company is "thinking about" adding document drafting and sharing to WebEx, which already features instant messaging, online meeting and email services.

  • Jun 30, 09

    Gary Edwards's List: Compatibility matters - The lessons of Massachusetts are many. Application level "compatibility" with existing MSOffice desktops and workgroups is vital. Format level "compatibility" with the legacy of billions of binary documents is vital. And "ecosystem" compatibility with the MSOffice productivity environment.

  • Jun 30, 09

    Article discussing the importance of office suite alternatives having a high level of comaptibility with MSOffice, the MSOffice binary formats, and the MSOffice productivity environment. ComputerWorld's Randall Kennedy has done exhaustive work comparing the conversion quality of MSOffice documents from two alternative office suites: Softmaker Office and OpenOffice.

    • Frankly, from Microsoft's perspective, the danger may have been overstated. Though the free open source crowd talks a good fight, the truth is that they keep missing the real target. Instead of investing in new features that nobody will use, the team behind OpenOffice should take a page from the SoftMaker playbook and focus on interoperability first. Until OpenOffice works out its import/export filter issues, it'll never be taken seriously as a Microsoft alternative.

       

      More troubling (for Microsoft) is the challenge from the SoftMaker camp. These folks have gotten the file-format compatibility issue licked, and this gives them the freedom to focus on building out their product's already respectable feature set. I wouldn't be surprised if SoftMaker got gobbled up by a major enterprise player in the near, thus creating a viable third way for IT shops seeking to kick the Redmond habit.

      • This quote is an excerpt from the article :)

      Add Sticky Note
    • Finally! Someone who gets it. For an office suite to be considered as an alternative to MSOffice, it must be designed with multiple levels of compatibility. It's not just that the "feature sets" that must be comparable. The guts of the suite must be compatible at both the file format level, and the environment level.

      Randall put's it this way; "It's the ecosystem stupid".

      The reason ODF failed in Massachusetts is that neither OpenOffice nor OpenOffice ODF are designed to be compatible with legacy and existing MSOffice applications, binary formats, and, the MSOffice productivity environment. Instead, OOo and OOo-ODF are designed to be competitively comparable.

      As an alternative to MSOffice, OpenOffice and OpenOffice ODF cannot fit into existing MSOffice workgroups and producitivity environments. Because it s was not designed to be compatible, OOo demands that the environment be replaced, rebuilt and re-engineered. Making OOo and OOo-ODF costly and disruptive to critical day-to-day business processes.

      The lesson of Massachusetts is simple; compatibility matters. Conversion of workgroup/workflow documents from the MSOffice productivity environment to OpenOffice ODF will break those documents at two levels: fidelity and embedded "ecosystem" logic.

      Fidelity is what most end-users point to since that's the aspect of the document conversion they can see. However, it's what they can't see that is the show stopper. The hidden side of workgroup/workflow documents is embedded logic that includes scripts, macros, formulas, OLE, data bindings, security settings, application specific settings, and productivity environment settings. Breaks these aspects of the document, and you stop important business processes bound to the MSOffice productivity environment.

      There is no such thing as an OpenOffice productivity environment designed to be a compatible alternative to the MSOffice productivity environment.

      Another lesson from Massachusetts is that "rip-out-and-replace" is both costly and disruptive. If it can be done. Amazingly, the City of Munich has been working on the rip and replace of MSOffice for over six years, and they are reporting that the project is only 60% complete.

      There are alternatives to rip and replace. The Massachusetts choice was to re-purpose MSOffice using an ODF plug-in approach - a clone of the Microsoft Compatibiltiy Pack if you will.

      Another alternative is to design from the ground up, a highly compatible office suite that can slide into these MSOffice bound environments without show stopping disruption. Softmaker Office is not alone in this approach, with Evermore Office and ThinkFree Office also proving that a very high level of compatiblitiy with MSOffice, the MSOffice binary formats, and the MSOffice productivity environment, is possible.

      Excerpt: "In the kingdom of business productivity, Microsoft Office reigns supreme. Its dominating position atop the word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations heap seems virtually unassailable. Its file formats define an industry, and its component applications are often synonymous with the underlying tasks they perform. ......"

      "There's no doubt about it: Office's roots run deep -- deeper, even, than its host OS, Microsoft Windows. People talk about switching Windows versions all the time. However, few souls are willing to walk away from their current version of Office for fear of losing interoperability with their peers, a fact that makes dislodging this sprawling, well-entrenched entity all the more daunting -- though many alternative productivity suites and SaaS offerings continue to try......"
      - Gary Edwards on 2009-06-30
  • Jun 30, 09

    This article compliments the previous publication, "The better Office Alternative - Softmaker Office". Good stuff!\n\nExcerpt: "It's the question that vexes free open source software advocates and commercial competitors around the globe: Why is Microsoft Office so difficult to dislodge from its perch atop the IT heap? Is it the exclusive bundling deals? The deep Software Assurance entrenchment? Steve Ballmer's backroom deal with the devil?"\n\n"The answer, of course, is none of the above (though some evidence of a Microsoft-Hell alliance exists). Rather, it's the Office ecosystem -- the vast library of third-party add-ons and vertical solutions built (with copious encouragement from Microsoft) on Office's extensive programmatic model -- that makes Microsoft's suite so hard to kill."

  • Jun 25, 09

    Microsoft to the world: Outlook's not broken and we aren't 'fixing' it!

    Mary Jo has an interesting article over at ZDNet. She points out that Microsoft is refusing to restore support for HTML editing in Outlook. Instead, Microsoft intends on using the MSWord editor. I think that means a Microsoft desktop future based on Office OpenXML (OOXML). We shall see. But if this is the case, then i also think we are looking at how Microsoft will break the Web.

    I've left an extensive comment to Mary Jo's article in the Talkback section, linked to above.

    ".... This is for all the marbles. The future of the Open
    Web is at stake. If Microsoft is successful at carving
    out and encoding an MS Web based on a document format
    specific to their platforms, applications and services,
    the Web will break. " <br>

    "Looks like a plan to me."<br>

    continued <a href="http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12558-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=66060&messageID=1242881">here</a>

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