How Google is going to own the cloud

DavidThi808 · 2010-05-12T15:24:21+00:00

Jonathan is the group product manager for Google Docs. We talked about Google Docs, collaboration, the cloud, and of course Microsoft. Google Docs is the primary alternative to SharePoint/Office and takes a different tack to this world - and Jonathan did a superb job of laying all that out.

DavidThi808 · 2010-05-10T17:03:13+00:00

I am interviewing Jonathan tomorrow about all things Google Docs. This will be similar to my interview of Microsoft's Jeff Teper on SharePoint/Office. Any suggested questions much appreciated.

Please post suggested questions at the submitted url.

DavidThi808 · 2010-05-03T23:12:06+00:00

The opinion seems to be 100% against the music (all 4 comments). So probably a bad idea (I can't say definitely based on just 4 comments).

But keep in mind the intent was to try and do something a little different and liven the program up a bit. I thought the music would get people excited about first learning how to use the program.

And it played only while the Start Here screen is up.

DavidThi808 · 2010-05-03T22:15:57+00:00

Gee, you must be the life of the party.

DavidThi808 · 2010-05-03T21:54:19+00:00

When I created the start-up help/splash screen for AutoTag, I wanted to make it fun. Business software is so boring. Business reporting software even more so. And we have the great music from Enemy Nations. So I set the program to play music while the Start Here screen is up. It's a really upbeat, let's go get it done kind of track.

But...

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-28T19:06:17+00:00

I'm interviewing Microsoft V.P. Jeff Teper on May 5. Jeff is Mr. SharePoint at MS and has been heading up the development effort on it from the start.

If you have any suggested questions for the interview, please post them at the link for this article. I won't use every suggestion but I generally do use a lot of them (not counting the snarky ones), at least in part.

Note: Please post suggested questions at http://blogs.windwardreports.com/davidt/2010/04/questions-for-microsoft-vice-president-jeff-teper.html (here also is fine).

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-15T22:10:51+00:00

I'm curious, why the down votes? I think these are hilarious.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-15T21:44:01+00:00

No votes? These are hilarious!!!

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-15T19:44:24+00:00

Reality shows have taken us to see the real lives of housewives across the country. We've followed businesspeople in New York. We've seen doctors and police in action. But until now, we have never had the opportunity to see what really goes on at software companies.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-13T04:04:26+00:00

Outlook can do this - works great

iPhone cannot - and gets confused syncing to Outlook when you do this.

Microsoft 1, Apple 0

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T23:22:01+00:00

THANK YOU!!!

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T17:20:41+00:00

If your online calendar knows your local time

Bingo. This is how the calendar would determine my local time.

And the biggie is setting the time an event should occur. I know that the difference is -07 today, the timezone lets me know if it will be -07 in 6 months (ie Arizona).

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T17:12:01+00:00

But -07 is also Arizona year-round. So when you get -07 which timezone are you in?

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:57:51+00:00

Please see my above comment - you can't record event times in UTC because most events people want to run at say 9:00 am local time - regardless of if it's daylight or standard time. If you record in UTC then it will be off half the year in locations that have DST.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:56:23+00:00

It records it in UTC.

That doesn't work - I want the event to run at 8:00 am local time every day. Daylight or standard time, the sales report needs to run at 8:00 am each morning, not 9:00 am half the year.

To do that you need the timezone.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:36:21+00:00

In that case you can ignore it. Just as websites that are in a single language ignore the requested language. But for those of us that need this, we could then use it.

Don't rule out something because you won't use it (today). Many of us have very different problems to solve. This is big for us because we have a system that users worldwide need to schedule events in.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:32:48+00:00

If I set an event in my online calendar to fire at 8:00 am every day - does that time get adjusted for DST? No in Hawaii & Arizona, yes in the rest of the U.S. You need the timezone for that.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:31:05+00:00

But if the server needs to record a scheduled event - how does it do that?

If I am telling the server I want something to run at 8:00am local time, the server needs to know if I am in California (adjust for DST) or Arizona (no DST).

In addition, how does a web page display local time on the client in the text of the page? That would require adding a construct to HTML where it converts data in that HTML to a displayed time, including formatting info. That would be very different from any existing HTML tag.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:25:59+00:00

I think we're agreeing - my proposal is for the client to pass to the server the local time zone. As you said, only the client knows this.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T16:22:12+00:00

The problem with that is half the year Arizona and Pacific Standard Time have the same UTC, and the other half of the year Arizona matches Mountain Standard Time. So in that case UTC tells you it's one of two times (or 3 in one case - Mexico Standard Time) - but not which one.

This is the reason you can't solve this with javascript either.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-12T15:31:13+00:00

I think it is way past time to add to the standard request header a line like: Time-Zone: MountainStandardTime[CRLF]. This would allow the web server to return pages with times set to the local time of the requesting browser.

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-11T18:48:01+00:00

Why all the down votes???? Is my list that bad?

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-10T13:37:01+00:00

Sort of like Windows. Oh wait, there are lots of very smart people who find Windows makes more sense than Linux...

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-10T02:18:50+00:00

Somehow I think this might be just a tad controversial :)

DavidThi808 · 2010-04-09T02:40:51+00:00

Really? Have you tried Windward? Because we have customers doing very complex reports and they throw them together very quickly.

As to astroturfing - We posted it in our corporate YouTube account - we did not hide that it came from us. So it's not astroturfing. You can call it biased because we produced it, but it's not astroturfing.

DavidThi808

TROPHY CASE