Plan-B for Software Documentation

I’m a heavy user of Skype the VOIP telephony service, and it has trouble for the last 24 hours to allow users to sign on.

This made me realize how much I depend on Skype. I chat most days with my agent about work progress on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org and next tasks. I do most of my phone calls that are not local with SkypeOut and I chat almost every weekend with friends and family on Skype.

And I notices how little information the Skype Heartbeat blog is letting on. All they are saying is that they have problems with logon and that they are recovering now. I wished Skype was an open source project. In that case we’d know what the issues really were and how it worked and could help to bring back a vital service to our lives. this really disappoints me, that the company is so secretive about what is wrong and how one could help. Is it a system overload, a software error that can be remedied with an update? What is going on? What is EBay, the corporate mother of Skype doing?

This morning I read an interesting scoop in Mass High Tech about the Boston Seaport Hotel planning to offer OpenOffice.org in 80 guest rooms.

The Seaport Hotel is part of the Boston Seaport World Trade Center and frequented mostly by business travelers. It’s rooms are equipped with a Flat screen an a wireless keyboard and mouse. These PC terminals allow guest to surf the internet, read e-mail and do phone complementary phone calls without having to have their laptop computer.

Now John Burke the VP of technology at the hotel has identified another need of his guests. He is installing OpenOffice.org as a low cost way for users to read, edit and save their office documents. Guests can save their documents from e-mail or use a USB device as source and destination of the documents. I guess this comes in handy with last minute changes to a presentation or a contract.

Security and privacy concerns are addresses, by resetting the whole system for each guest, so that documents and browsing trails are erased after each check-out.

While Novell offers its own edition of OpenOffice.org in the Enterprise SuSE offerings, there are packages available for install in the open SuSE Linux project.

Look here for the stable package of Open Office Release 2.2.1 for Open SuSE Linux.

A recent post on the mailing list gives more details.

Simon Murphy does reflect in a recent article on how most of his recent work in spreadsheet programming has been connected to server data.

It reminded me to check up on the announced support for OpenOffice.org Calc by the Palo Spreadsheet server. Unfortunately no product announcements have been made. But it appears Jedox still pursues the idea, as they put it on the list of projects the Palo Server team wanted to apply for Google’s Summer of Code funding.

Google pack has added StarOffice 8 to its line of essential applications. StarOffice is the commercial version of OpenOffice.org produced by Sun Microsystems, adding non free elements such as fonts and spell check library. You can buy StarOffice for $70 for a single license from Sun Microsystems, while Google gives it away.

This addition of Sun products to the Google pack stems from the Multi Year Strategic Agreement between Sun Microsystems and Google, reached in October 2005. The installer includes also a Java runtime environment, used by some components of StarOffice and on the list of software components Sun likes to distribute.

I currently happen to be with my Laptop in Barcelona, Spain. However, my PC is set up en_US with US time zone, etc. Now for Google I seem to have become a Spaniard now. When I type in www.google.com I get redirected to www.google.es, when I search something in the Firefox searchbar I get results from www.google.es. When I go to websites that serve Google AdSense, I get served Spanish advertisements.

This is nuts, because I do not speak Spanish and I can’t read it and my browser is set to the languages en, en_US, ge and pt. So no Spanish. And the site I visit, the business network LinkedIn is only available in English. So why is Google serving me like I’m a native, just because my IP address is currently in Spain?

Can anybody tell me how this is useful for me (do NO evil) or for the advertisers (do NO evil)?

In my book this is evil. It breaks the HTTP protocol, because that says the browser does determine what languages it prefers to accept and not Google or its misguided idea of localization. If they want to show me advertisement that are local to my location, fine. But please in a language that I do understand. Otherwise Google is waisting its ad space.

The Linux distributer TurboLinux has announced it will participate in the project to convert ODF files into MS Office 2007 compatible versions. TurboLinux will offer its expertise in Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese for converting documents.

The ODF converter is a Microsoft sponsored open source project that wants to bridge the interoperability gap between the new ISO standard format ODF and the proprietary world of MS Office. Its development is behind the abilities of Sun’s MS Office plug-in, only supporting text documents at this time. However it supports Office 2007.

We reported recently on Dell’s move to reduce bloatware, the kinds of programs that are pre-installed trial versions with little value but high annoyance factor.

Chip Chick points out a nice donation ware tool to remove such bloatware from new and not so new computers. The tool is called PC Decrapifier and appears to worthy of a donation.

According to the latest Consumer Reports Tech support Survey (subscription required), independent technical support is better than the offers by manufacturers.

While manufacturers’ free support on average were able to resolve only 53% of issues, the same organizations increased their hits to 59%, when paid. Notable exceptions where Apple (80%) and Lenovo (80%), the former IBM Consumer PCs. However the support services affiliated with major retail chains did solve 84% of issues and other independent tech support organizations solved 93% of tickets. Independent and paid services were also more responsive to pick up the phone and had more knowledgeable staff.

Lets speculate, this could be a phenomenon of “I get what I’m paying for” and users of paid services are more satisfied than if it is for free. On the other hand this could be a real observation that independent tech support is better and more qualified.

I guess there are multiple effects in play. First, an independent shop can’t point the finger to some culprit outside of their jurisdiction. It is so common that the hardware manufacturer blames the OS and the OS blames the application and the application blames the driver from the hardware manufacturer. If you are independent you need to focus on solutions and not on blame.

Also, if you are paid by incident, you need to pick up the phone before the customer walks away, resulting in faster response times. In addition, if the client needs to pay for every incident, he will only bring up the really important issues, cutting down on perceived issues that a customer might have. Some folks have the attitude, “lets ask, it doesn’t cost me any extra” and in reality they ask the impossible. It would be interesting to filter out from the survey the group of people that has used both, manufacturers and independent tech support. These answers would be the best to decide who is better. For the moment I’ll give independent the benefit of the doubt and the survey results. I guess if you need to compete for each incident, you got to deliver some value.

Dell Computers is further responding to its customer’s public request. After offering some of their PCs pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux, they now offer an increasing number of PCs with only a minimal set of pre-installed software packages. Gone are the AOL installers, the music players, the DVD player programs, if the customer wishes and specifies so at the time of order.

However three programs remain:

• Google Tools - for correcting misspelled URL’s
• PDF Reader - To read documentation delivered in this format
• Anti Virus Software (trial versions) - “Because customers expect their computers to be protected at first boot”

To me only the Acrobat Reader makes sense, as not being able to read the documentation is not very helpful. Although one could offer the documentation either in MS Help format or in HTML, both being universally accessible with the plain operating system. Although HTML could be debatable, once IE is stripped. but in most cases some kind of browser would be installed.

The utility of Google Tools just for mis typed URL’s strikes me as odd. I don’t like this kind of technology, because it tries to guess what I want and the guesses are more often than not correct.

Last, but not least, trial version of Anti Virus Software, because customers expect it to be installed? You must be kidding me! Doesn’t the current versions of MS already include such protective software? So why need another trial version installed? I don’t like and use any of these resource killers. But this argument does not hold water for me.

So I guess Dell simply has long running contracts with these vendors and it can’t easily bail out of them. With Dell’s responses to its customers wishes, I’m hopeful, sooner or later these things will be gone as well.

It will be interesting to see how this will change the landscape. Removing such programs from PC’s will certainly be not too good for Dell’s bottom line in the short run, as the vendors of these pay a hardware manufacturer to install them. It also should have impact on the companies that use these methods to market their products. One option we might see, is that Microsoft, the still predominant player in this market either needs to lower its prices to make up for the lost revenue or it will integrate these into the OS upfront and make up for its shrinking share of business. However, Microsoft is expanding the OS functionality into anything that has successfully be developed by others. MS included web-browser, anti virus, firewall, multi media player, video creation, and much more and bundled it as part of the OS. We all know what followed.

I’m still waiting for OpenOffice.org as optional install.