Author: Rick Hallihan

The guys that run HOT or NOT are running a public awareness campaign. Sign up and refer friends and you could win $100,000!

I woke up to another six gmail invites today, so I distributed them through the Channel9 GmailRequestList Wiki. It’s a great place to give/get gmail accounts!

I _think_ the invites are rolling in (I’ve gotten 18 so far) because I’m _actively providing feedback_ to the gmail team. If you want invites, make good suggestions, or report a bug! I can’t guarantee it’ll work for you, but it seems to be working for me! I also had 6 waiting when I first signed up. Not sure how the system works, but it’s still fun to spread the joy.

I received a heartfelt thanks from David Ochoa, and a link to his game development site (http://doc.dbspot.com). It’s always fun to connect to random people on the net! Good luck with the game David!

Update: Ok, it’s getting a little ridiculous, I just finished sending out 6 invites, and I’ve got another 6 available now. If you want an account feel free to email me directly or add your name to the Channel9 GmailRequestList Wiki.

Free invites to the first 6 people to send requests to rick.hallihan@gmail.com…

1:21 PM EST, 5 left….

Credit goes to Karim on Channel9 for pointing this out…

It looks like the target market is the “non-adopters”, or the folks who wouldn’t be on the internet otherwise, similar to WebTV. This is a small market, but I’m thinking the low price will make it fairly hot in the gift arena.

If this is too successful, Microsoft might even run into a situation where it cannibalizes other product lines. For those of us who provide “free tech support” to family & friends, this might be a lot more attractive of an option than repeatedly cleaning spyware of the old PC that we cobbled together from old parts, just so that someone can browse the web & write email. Granted, Micrsoft would probably love to see someone signed up for a subscription based service rather than have them using old licenses of Windows98 and Office97…

So here’s what it comes down to…. Longhorn is going to ship without WinFS and Avalon is getting scaled back (I think I remember reading that they’ve chopped vector-based graphics, but I can’t find a reference), and the remainder of WinFX will be back-ported to Windows XP and Server 2003. There’s a bunch of other changes in all of the pillars, but these seem to be the ones that everyone is talking about.

I think this is a good strategic move for Microsoft.

The shareholders should be happy, because this decision makes good business sense. The original roadmap made all of us geeks happy. Things like database file systems and scalable 3-d screen elements make us giddy. While we are the early adopters and we generally drive the platform forward, we don’t make-up the majority of the user base. The new roadmap should be more in-line with the needs and wants of the majority of customers.

As an example, try to imagine how you would explain to your parents or grandparents, or to a non-geek business manager why they need WinFS… Yes WinFS is a good idea, and Microsoft needs to keep working on it, but implementing it within 2 years not only would be technically challenging, but the user-base isn’t ready for it, and they won’t be ready for it until it is seamless, easy-to-use, and easy-to-understand. To those of us that utilize databases every day, WinFS just makes sense, but getting everyday users on-board is going to be tough since we’ve spent the last couple decades teaching them to use files. And files were somewhat easy because we related them to documents & file-folders. How are we going to explain WinFS?

Me: “Well grandma, it’s like this… when you save this picture, you’re actually going to be putting in 4 different file cabinets… in this one the tabs are labeled by date, in this one, the tabs are the name of the person who took the picture, in this one they’re organized by size, and in this one the tabs are the names of the people and objects in the picture, and you might put it in a bunch of different folders in that last cabinet…”

Grandma: “That sounds like a lot of work… I’ll just stick to my 35mm..”

Many home-users and businesses are already lagging behind on the upgrade path. There is a combined problem of a lack of upgrade dollars, and a “what I have is good-enough” mentality. With that said, Microsoft needs to focus on making the Longhorn platform(s) a complelling and worthwhile upgrade for business and home users. For home users it’s about “What features will make my life easier and more fun?”, and for business users it’s “What features will make my business more efficient and more profitable?”

Robert Scoble has some good perspective here and links to lots of blog feedback here.

I’m psyched that we’ll see Longhorn in 2006. I’m disappointed that WinFS will lag behind. I’m hoping that Microsoft can keep this on-schedule.