Decoding the new economy

Businesses and the Windows 10 upgrade

Microsoft’s new operating system is impressive and free but should businesses jump at the Windows 10 offer?

Last night Microsoft formally launched Windows 10, the company’s latest desktop operating system.

A decade ago a new Microsoft operating system would have had people queuing at computer shops all night but today, in a world of cloud computing, what software runs on a computer has become less important to users.

To entice users onto the new operating system, Microsoft are making the upgrade to Windows 10 free for the next year to those using the earlier versions 8 and 7 and many will have noticed the messages appearing on their computers over the past few weeks.

Windows 10 is a good system, Microsoft has learned from the user unfriendly missteps of Windows 8 and added features that make the system smoother and takes advantage of the desktop computers’ power.

Microsoft have also continued with their philosophy of providing a system that works on all sizes of devices from smartphones to large monitor PCs and Windows 10 adapts to the needs and use patterns of the different screens.

That Windows 10 works on smartphones is less of a pressing matter given Microsoft’s attempts to crack the mobile market have been unsuccessfully and Windows phones languish with a tiny market share.

For business users, the question is whether to take advantage of the upgrade. The short answer is maybe if use cloud based services in your company and wait if you have desktop applications that rely on Windows.

Should you have applications that run on desktops and servers in your office then it’s essential to wait and see if your software runs properly on Windows 10. You’ll need to talk to the program’s supplier and your IT support person. Generally the advice is to wait a few months to iron out any bugs.

If you’re using cloud services then the operating system running on your computer is largely irrelevant as long as you have a modern web browser. Microsoft’s new Edge web browser that’s built into Windows 10 so far appears to be a fast and capable piece of software that’s an improvement on the much maligned Internet Explorer that still lurks on the system for backwards compatibly reasons.

Upgrading though isn’t without its risks, sometimes things go wrong and even the best planned transition doesn’t always work out and generally most cautious IT advisors will take the attitude “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

One other potential trap is in hardware. It may be that some printers, cameras and other hardware doesn’t have the right drivers for the new system so while the software upgrade is free, you may end up having to stump up a few hundred dollars for new peripherals.

For businesses users, if things ain’t broke and the existing computers are working well then the upgrade to Windows 10 is adding unnecessary complexity to the office and it’s probably best to hold off the transition until new computers are needed.

Five basic software tools for a new business

Setting up a business has never been easier. Here are five basic tools to get you started.

Last week I was asked by someone considering starting a business what I’d recommend in the way of software for a new company.

That’s a good question as cloud services have completely changed what a business should buy over the past five years when the answer back then would have been to buy a new PC with Microsoft Office preloaded along with a boxed accounting package.

More importantly for a cash strapped business, whether it’s a tech startup or a more conventional business, today’s cloud based tools don’t need new computers and most have free versions that suffice for those early days before a venture has established a cash flow or its viability. That radically changes the economics of setting up a new business.

Google Docs

This is the basic essential tool for a new business giving a basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation package. The free version of Google Docs is technically only available to educational or home users, but then you are running your new business from home aren’t you?

Paid versions of Google Apps are either five dollars or ten dollars per user per month depending on the features or storage you want. Again for most small business the cheaper version will usually suffice.

For power users, Microsoft Office is often unavoidable as the spreadsheet and wordprocessing features of Excel and Word are far more extensive than Google’s.

Email and calendar functions

Once upon a time your choice of email tool mattered, today it doesn’t as there’s no shortage of free cloud based tools or, if you’re a Mac user, Apple Mail. For most small businesses it’s easiest just to choose Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook.com. If you’ve chosen Microsoft’s Office 365 package than Outlook is part of the business bundle.

Also in the past having an online, shareable calendar was a nice to have but often expensive feature that required a server. Now almost all systems come standards with calendars although Google has the edge in terms of sharing calendars between workgroups.

Storage

Being able to store and share files into the cloud has been a boon for small businesses which in the past needed to have an expensive and clumsy inhouse server if they want to share information or even just to access it on the road.

Microsoft give unlimited storage for Office 365 subscribers while Google offer 15Gb for the free Docs service, 30Gb for the $5 Apps Plan and unlimited space for the $10 Apps plan if you have more than five users. Apple’s pricing is more complex with five different tiers although iCloud is a much more elegant solution for backing up iOS and OS X devices.

Two third party storage providers such as Box and Dropbox are also worth considering with both offering advanced tools and integration with other cloud services. Dropbox offers a free version with 2Gb of data, a Pro version including a Terabyte of space and a business version that is unlimited at $17 per month.

Accounting

One of the biggest mistakes a new business makes is skimping on accounting software. This is one of those areas where cutting corners early can be expensive later. The most popular cloud accounting service for small business is Xero which does a great job in integrating with other online platforms including Office 365 and Google Apps for $25 a month.

Xero though is not alone in this field with MYOB, Reckon, Quicken and others fighting for marketshare. It’s best to talk to your accountant and find what they work with as this will save problems when you come to do your books.

Website

Every business needs a web presence. If your new company is a local service, retail or hospitality outlet then you have to be listed on Google My Business which literally puts your company on the map. Listings on Facebook and signing up with all the main social media services is a must do as well.

The cornerstone though of an online presence though is a website and the easiest, quickest and no-cost way is to set up a website on Google’s Blogger platform. Once your business gets up and running then having your own web server running WordPress is the best long term solution but in those early days Blogger will suffice and the upgrade path between the two is surprisingly painless.

Every business though is unique and your business might need more than these five basic tools. If you’re in hospitality and retail you’ll need a Point of Sale solution while if you’re a tech startup products like Slack and Basecamp may be needed as well.

The five basics though are common to all businesses regardless of the industries they’re in and regardless of the aspirations of the owners. The fact you can set up a business for almost nothing is one of the reasons why it’s worth giving it a go.

Shifting Microsoft’s culture

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continues to grapple with changing the company’s culture

“What would be lost if we disappeared?” is the question Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims is driving the company’s direction in his latest memo to employees.

In the email obtained by website Geekwire, Nadella told his staff redefining the company’s culture is key to success, “we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively.”

That culture though is not static and Nadella is describes how the company needs to focus on helping its customers through its cloud and Windows based products.

For Microsoft this is not new, the change from a desktop and server based licensing business to one dependent upon cloud subscription services has been a huge change for the business since the iPhone was released nearly a decade ago.

The challenge for Nadella however is to keep revenues coming in as the river of gold that was Microsoft’s Windows licenses slowly dries up.

One of the biggest changes to Microsoft’s culture could be in coming to terms that it isn’t such a huge and powerful corporation any more.

How software defines the Industrial Internet

The Internet of Things is a fourteen trillion dollar opportunity for industrial companies says Bill Ruhe, the head of GE Software

The Internet of Things is a three legged stool of the consumer, enterprise and industrial applications says Vice President of GE’s software division, Bill Ruh.

“It’s about connecting machines, connecting people and driving a new kind of experience. For the consumer it’s a social experience, for the enterprise it’s a whole new way of how their IT departments running, in the industrial space it’s a revolution where we get to rethink how we operate.”

Ruh sees the IoT as being worth over 14 trillion dollars to GE over the next two decades, making it bigger than the other two legs combined.

Eliminating downtime

Most of that value comes from three areas; improved resource utilisation, operational optimisation and eliminating unscheduled downtime.

“The fact is downtime is expensive, for airline 41% of all delays and cancellations are due to mechanical errors. If we get rid of those your life gets better, my life gets better and the airline’s lives get better.”

“Zero unscheduled downtime doesn’t sound sexy but it’s one of the most profitable and sexiest topics ever.” In this Ruh agrees with Salesforce’s Peter Coffee that eliminating outages is a key part of delighting the modern customer.

Ruhe sees that the industrial sector hasn’t used IT and the internet well in the past, “RFID was going to change the world and it didn’t, we saw smartgrids were going to be the biggest thing and it didn’t achieve a lot of the hype that people saw.”

“Now the technology is aligned not just with technology for technology’s sake but to an outcome that leads to growth for an industrial sake.”

An example of the operational efficiencies that Ruh is particularly proud of is GE’s PowerUp technology that promises to improve the output of wind turbines, “it is a series of technologies used to analyse information about every wind turbine on a farm and to dynamically adjust each and every one to optimise the wind speed.”

“When you do that we’ve found we can generate up to five percent more electricity per wind farm because of software, which adds twenty-five percent more profitability.”

“In the next generation of wind turbines all this kind of software is going to be embedded in it from the design phase through to the operational phase,” Ruh says. “It’s going to change how our customers are going to operate wind turbines.”

Building digital twins

Another aspect Ruh sees with the changes is how machines and data will work together where equipment or parts are shipped with a ‘digital twin’, a software representation of the device that lets the customer test scenarios on their computers.

“I can now do ‘what if’ analysis on that machine using its data and that’s going to change how things work. That takes everything from 3D modelling, to manufacturing, to maintenance to operations.”

Building on domain knowledge

Ultimately Ruh sees GE’s strength with the Industrial Internet being the company’s domain knowledge, “this world is different and you cannot come from outside and pretend you’re going to learn it as you go.”

“The way people buy equipment is totally different, we have equipment that’s eighty years old and we still support it. That’s totally different from the software world.”

Google joins the IoT operating system race

Google joins the vendors looking to power the Internet of Things

Later this week Google will announce an Android based IoT operating system later this week at their I/O Conference, Netimperative reports.

In doing so they’ll be joining Microsoft, GE, BlackBerry and a host of others in looking at providing the software that runs the Internet of Things.

The carving up of the IoT continues.

Seven flavours of Windows

Microsoft’s latest Windows roadmap may well be the last hurrah of the old software licensing model

In a post on Microsoft’s blog the company’s VP for Windows, Tony Prophet, yesterday laid out the final line up of the upcoming Windows 10 software.

As previously, Microsoft have decided to spoil the market with choice, offering Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education versions of the operating system along with two different versions of the mobile package and a stripped down product for Internet of Things devices.

In many respects this is Microsoft desperately holding onto the old model of operating systems where a consumer version bundled into a commodity PC offered less than an Enterprise version supplied as part of a lucrative corporate license.

That model still works – Microsoft’s licensing revenue was $19 billion last year – although it is in slow decline although the problem is operating systems are now commoditised and the old position of dominance in the PC industry doesn’t work in a world of cheap, lightweight devices interacting with cloud based services.

One theory running around the tech industry at the moment is that Windows 10 will be the last Microsoft operating system, if that’s true then today’s seven flavours of the software is the last grab at the old licensing model.

Tag: software

How software defines the Industrial Internet

Eliminating downtime

Building digital twins

Building on domain knowledge

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