Personal Productivity Archives - Page 7 of 27

Gmail Faster? Are You Sure?

Posted on May 18, 2008 ·

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it’s something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster

– says the Official Gmail Blog. They go on:

One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the “Sign in” button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won’t resolve every “This is taking longer than usual…” message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we’ve seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.

Hm…so the initial loading sequence got faster. Great news – I have only one question: Why do I now always see this previously unknown progress bar every time I sign in to Gmail?

Btw, I created the account specifically for this test, so it has absolutely no email to be pre-processed. Truth be told the progress bar flashes up and disappears quite fast in the empty account, but it stays there long enough in my real accounts with a lot of data. Not exactly a sign of progress, if you ask me (pun intended).

Update: A sure sign that Gmail must have gone through some changes is that the very popular Gmail Manager Firefox add-on is now knocked out: it is unable to login to any Google Apps email accounts. Regular Gmail accounts appear to be unaffected.

Update#2: I guess I should point out the positive side of the story: this approach is a lot better (transparent) then the Microsoft approach to their slow copy problem, where Vista SP1 improved (perceived) performance partly by rethinking the progress-bar.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: firefox, gmail, gmail manager, gmail slow, gmail speed, Google, microsoft, performance, SaaS, vista, vista sp1, windows vista

Document Collaboration Just Got Easier

Posted on May 14, 2008 ·

I often need to share a document with a few reviewers / contributors, and I hate sending attachments. Attachments are redundant, wasteful, and if you start marking up different copies of the same document, then emailing them around, you’re in for a major version-control nightmare.

The clean solution: share an online document. But which platform to use? I use Zoho applications, widely recognized to be the best. But until today, there’s been one obstacle to unlimited, open collaboration: users had to create a Zoho account first. Not that it was complicated (30 seconds?), but some people will stay away from apps requiring account registration as a principle.

The solution? Well, if you have any sort of online presence, chances are you already have an account either with Yahoo or Google. From now on you can use these credentials – yes, your Google / Yahoo account – to log in to Zoho applications. No more worrying whether the other party can access your shared documents.

The Zoho team points to a poll ran by Lifehacker last year. Obviously there are more Google than Zoho users. But look at the reason: most already have a Google account, and refuse to create another one for Zoho. Those who actually tried both system prefer Zoho by a 3:1 margin. So it clearly made sense for Zoho to remove the bottleneck and open up to their systems.

But I suspect this is just the beginning. TechCrunch France Editor Ouriel Ohayon and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett raised the issue of mass importing one’s Google documents to Zoho. I think it would make sense, although I don’t necessarily like importing – it’s a one-time shot.

Why not just make all documents available to online users, no matter where they were created? You should be able to list your Google and Zoho documents, open them, edit them, and save to whichever format (and storage) you want to.

Either way I’m sure we’ll see more open access and collaboration coming soon.

(Disclosure: I’m an Advisor to Zoho)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: Collaboration, Google, SaaS, web office, yahoo, zoho

Spreadsheet Macros and Pivot Tables: Google Says No. EditGrid Says No. Zoho Just Does It.

Posted on April 28, 2008 ·

OK, OK, I admit, the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek… but real. Sophisticated Excel users have long complained that none of the online spreadsheets support Macros or Pivot Tables. The answer has so far been sorry, no can do…

Google hinted they would likely not do it, as reported by TechCrunch:

Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

EditGrid’s David Lee also suggested Pivot Table are too difficult to do online. Well, maybe, but here they are both, in Zoho Sheet. Not that it comes a real surprise, in fact ever since the launch of Zoho DB pivot tables were just a matter of time, and Zoho has promised macros for some time, too.

I admit I probably don’t appreciate the importance of these two features, as I’ve said before, the level of my spreadsheet competency is probably stuck somewhere at Lotus 1-2-3. . But even I used very limited Excel macros in the past, although typically be recording and editing afterward, rather than writing them in Visual Basic. Now Zoho Sheet can interpret VB directly, without using Microsoft’s back-end, and that means you can import your Excel spreadsheet, the macros no longer die. No other spreadsheet (other than Excel itself) supports VB macros.

Zoho launched a “marketplace” -sort of, being free – of VB macros at http://vbmacros.wiki.zoho.com/

As for pivot tables, they are an important analytical tool, but instead of reading me, why don’t you look at this demo video:

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: editgrid, Google, Microsoft Excel, Visual Basic, zoho, zoho db, zoho sheet

Windows Barely Live Mesh and Why TechCrunch Needs a New Tab

Posted on April 28, 2008 ·

Steve Gillmor redefined TechCrunch today with a thoughtful but loooong (1709 words!) post on Windows Live Mesh. Others come to rescue translating him:

Robert Scoble: But, let’s translate Gillmor: Microsoft Mesh is fascinating. Agreed.

Phil Wainewright: Steve turns that around and points out that what Mesh is really about is connecting the desktop into the cloud

Mike Arrington: I’m pretty sure he’s saying Mesh = good.

Even Microsoft’s Steve Clayton is lost:

I got lost about two thirds of the way in to this post from Steve Gillmor but the first third was a great read. Actually the whole thing was but I just got a bit lost as I think some of the things going on in Steve’s fast thinking brain didn’t quite make it through to the keyboard so you’re left having to assume some things. I’m assuming he likes Mesh though. I think he does.

Commenters on TechCrunch were ruthless, I won’t even begin quoting them. But don’t get me wrong: this is a good article, which would have been a great fit for ReadWriteWeb, but the TC crowd expects short, to-the-point, fairly descriptive posts. In the words of TC owner Mike Arrington:

Steve is an acquired taste. his writing isn’t efficiently packaged into bite sized chunks like a lot of people have come to expect. but if you decide to give it the attention it needs, you may find that you come away a little bit smarter after you’re finished.

Yes. And perhaps Mike is trying to redefine TC’s style himself. But you have to know your readers, Mike – perhaps a a new tab for Essays would be appropriate – or if you want Gillmor’s writing part of the main flow, a graphical “grab a coffee this is a long one” icon would help.

Now, on to the bigger question, why Live Mesh is just Barely Live. (And yes, this will be a long post, too, but due to the screenprints.)

The first leaked news declared this a solution to “sync everything with everything”. Then came Amit Mital, Live Mesh General Manager with a visionary video and announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, adding towards the end: initially it will sync only Windows PC’s, adding more platforms and devices over time. Ahh! So it’s a … Foldershare for now.

Minutes after the presentation I was chatting with a startup CEO who reminded me he had seen a similar video from Microsoft years ago: kid playing, Mom capturing video on cell-phone, family watching it almost real-time on various devices, executive-type Dad watching video on his laptop at an airport feeling “almost at home”. Great video, and yes, it was conceptually familiar, but what has materialized of it?

Live Mesh will be great when it really happens, but for now it’s largely waporware: pre-announcement, typical Microsoft-style. And now, if you’re still here, why don’t you follow me through the hoops of trying to sign up for (Barely) Live Mesh.

Google Search and several Microsoft blogs point to http://mesh.com so that’s where we start:

Hm… I could never figure out why I so often get signed out of Live Network (good old passport style), and if that’s the case why can I not sign back here. But that’s OK, we just take a detour to live.com, sign in and come back to mesh.com:

I though I had just signed in, but fine, let’s do it again. Oops:

The sign-in button changes to sign up – as in sign up for a waiting list. Not fun.. but let’s do it anyway. Btw, before the wait-list screen there was another screen where I had to agree to some terms – sort of usual for actually using a service, but for getting on a waiting list?

Now we’re in something called Microsoft Connect. Is this the same thing? Who knows…let’s click Register (but why, after sign-up, sign-in, agree, now register? WTF?)

I’m starting to really not like this. So far I’ve been presented with a maze of registration, confirmation, you-name-it screens, and I don’t know where the hell I am. Let’s backtrack a bit.

Oh, several screens above, at the waiting list signup, it stated on the next screen I should click Connection Directory, a small option on the top, not the main Register for Connect link… but who reads small prints, all screens should offer enough navigational clues to not get me lost. OK, redoing, now…

This jungle is the Connection Directory. No sign of Live Mesh, at least not on the first page. Text search to the rescue: there we are… somewhere towards the bottom (scroll way down) there is Live Mesh Tech Preview! Voila! (or not). The button to click is Apply Now! As if I hadn’t done it a zillion times already…

Hm.. I can do this now with my eyes closed… click.. click..click.

Geez, this looks like a plain old BS signup form again. I’ve had it. Done. I let others experiment with Microsoft’s Windows Dead Mesh. Let me know when it’s Live. For real.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: cloud computing, foldershare, live mesh, microsoft, synchronization, web apps, windosw live mesh, windows live

Zoho Launches in China @ Baihui.com

Posted on April 24, 2008 ·

Just days ago we read that China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users., so of course it’s a huge market that SaaS providers would love to enter. What better way than have the market come to you?

That’s what happened to Zoho when their Beijing Office was contacted by PC Stars, the largest online distributor in China with more than 2400 resellers and over 1000 system integrators. The are assembling a portal at Baihui, currently offering specific search and productivity tools. Their search products appear to be geared to product groups like software, hardware, games and automotive.

For the productivity apps they teamed up with Zoho, who would provide white-label versions of their products. After a few months of private beta testing, Baihui built a new data center (*), and today they are launching the Zoho Suite under their own brand:

Zoho Writer – Baihui Xiexie
Zoho Sheet – Baihui Gege
Zoho Show – Baihui Xiuxiu
Zoho CRM – Baihui CRM

These apps will be offered free to individual users, just like they are in the US, and CRM will have a similar pricing, too: free for the first 3 users, then 99RMB /user/months, which is about $14, close to the US pricing. (I would have thought Chinese prices to be less, but they know what they’re doing…) Baihui will later add other Zoho (Business) products.

Zoho’s current user base is 800,000 adding 100k about every 5-6 weeks, and they certainly expect that number to jump with the China deal.

OEM-ing their product is not unusual for Zoho, and especially for the parent company: there are other deals under consideration, and if you own a D-Link access point, chances are the wifi-manager software you have is from Adventnet. I plan to write a backgrounder on Adventnet, their approach to business and their international presence in the near future.

(* Please note, Baihui’s investment is into their own data center, running the Zoho Apps, not Zoho’s parent company, Adventnet, as (first) incorrectly reported on TechCrunch.) Update: it’s now fixed on TC.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: baihau, china, office 2.0, SaaS, web office, zoho

Free Mini-Office from Microsoft?

Posted on April 22, 2008 ·

There’s some renewed chatter about Microsoft’s plans for a subscription-based Office and even a free, ad-based alternative. Some rumors put the subscription price in the $12/ month range, which I believe is way too expensive for basic productivity tools, hence the need for another business model: offering MS Works for free, supported by advertising.

MS Works is nowadays widely considered a “dumbed down” version of its big brother, the real MS Office suite, but I beg to disagree.

Two decades ago MS Works was my main productivity suite: I was happily crunching numbers, generating charts, including them as well as data from my database in word-processing documents. In other words, I had a perfectly working and lightweight integrated office suite at the time when Word, Excel and Powerpoint were fragmented individual applications not talking to each other. For all its capabilities Works was very lightweight, I could use it on a laptop with 640K memory (that’s K, not MB!) and two 720k floppy drives – no hard-disk at all.

I can’t say this enough, Microsoft had a perfectly working integrated suite 20 years ago, which should have become what Office is today. But I guess you need bloatware to charge bloated prices, so Microsoft shoved Works aside, favoring the higher margin, high-end but fragmented products, which took years to become a true Office Suite.

The 80/20 rule applies for the MS Office Suite, in fact I’d rather say 90/10: 90% of users only need 10% of the functionality. MS Works has that – but now that it’s making a comeback (?), an ironic situation develops: the new online challengers like Google Docs and the Zoho Suite were targeting the mainstream Office Suite, and while in terms on features (needed or not) they are still behind Word, Excel..etc, the comparison to Works would quite possibly have a different outcome. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show turned out to offer richer functionality than Works, and then we did not even look at the collaboration, mobility offered by the fact that they are Web-based.

Conclusion: MS Works should have been a winner 20 years ago, and ever since. Now it’s too little, too late.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: google docs, microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, MS Works, office suite, web office, zoho

How to Make Outlook Cool. Actually, Kool.

Posted on April 20, 2008 ·

Outlook read backwards is Kooltuo. Wow, it would make a good startup name. No, I did not go crazy, but TechCrunch reports that Microsoft just signed a letter of intent to acquire Xobni. And Xobni = Inbox, backwards.

Not that it’s a surprise: I wish I could predict everything with such certainty. This is what wrote in February, when Bill Gates presented Xobni for Outlook as “the next generation of social networking” at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference:

What does it mean when Bill Gates presents your product, a super-cool Outlook plugin to his crowd of developers?

Gates’s message: now go back and copy this fast. That would be the classic Microsoft style, as many software startups can attest to. It would also put the market introduction to somewhere … around 2015? Unlikely.

Microsoft will acquire Xobni in no time. Sweet and fast deal. Congratulations to the Xobni team and investors!

So, yes, congratulations to the Xobni team! On a personal note, I regret I can’t try Xobni, as I long ago ditched Outlook along with a lot of desktop bloatware, and am in happier land now, using Web-based applications. I’m perfectly happy ( and productive) with the combination of Gmail and the Zoho apps, and if I ever leave Gmail, it will be for another web-mail, not back to the desktop. The air is fresher in the Cloud.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: bill gates, cloud computing, email, gmail, Google, microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook, SaaS, xobni, zoho

Hate PowerPoint Because You Love Your Audience

Posted on April 9, 2008 ·

Ok, I admit: it’s a bombastic title. Even worse, it’s stolen. I stole it from Entrepreneur – Startup CEO – Investor – Blogger Dharmesh Shah, who just explained why he hates Powerpoint, and we should, too. He points to Jeff Nolan’s post titled PowerPoint And The Spoken Word, which in turn links to Presentation Diva Laura “Pistachio” Fitton’s humorous piece, I don’t want them to be bored.

Client: “Should I have a PowerPoint?”

Pistachio: “Why?”

Client: “I don’t want them to be bored.”

Pistachio: “Then don’t.”

Pistachio: “Is there anything you need to tell them that you cannot do with your body or your voice?”

Client: “No.”

Pistachio: “There you go.”

Pistachio: “Uh, do you mind if I write this down for a blog post?”

The only reason the Presentation meme is not featured on TechMeme yet is that a good part of it is behind firewall, born at the SAP Marketing Community Virtual Meeting. So now I’m playing manual TechMeme, aggregating the conversation together here.

It all started by Laura giving practical advice on 10 Minutes to a Presentation that Rocks MUCH More. My favorite of her tips:

Lightning Round
Race through your presentation using no more than one sentence to explain each slide. Take no more than five seconds per slide. State the point in just one short remark. If you can’t, kill the slide. If you
can’t kill it, “maim” it until it has a point.

Then in Your Role-O-Deck (hm, I think I’ve just discovered another of her tricks, i.e. use killer titles) she speaks out against using “the deck”, a thick set of slides that are not used as visual aids by a live speaker, but as bastardized and poor replacement for MS Word, to write actual reports in SAP – in fact any large corporation.

My comment to her post is that the “ppt deck” is not only a corporate disease:

I’m involved with the startup community here, where the mentality is fresh thinking, “challenge all”, yet VC’s repeatedly ask startup Founders to send their “deck”. Deck is a nasty word, but describes what these bastardized “presentations” have become: thick and heavy.
My simple rule: if your deck is good enough to send in advance, i.e. it has enough content to convey the message, than you don’t have a presentation. Send the document, but develop another one you can use as visual aid to an actual live presentation.

Faheem Ahmed, VP of Portfolio Positioning and Messaging at SAP agrees in The myth of the “standalone” presentation:

Not all slides are presented. And there’s nothing wrong with using PPT to create useful diagrams or reports … it’s a tool just like any other. But then we shouldn’t call this set of slides a “presentation” any more. It’s a document.

He also talks against recycling presentations again and again, instead advises to define the strategic intent and develop specific ones.

So coming back to Dharmesh, does he really hate Powerpoint? No he doesn’t – not as a tool. He just hates “the deck”, and presentations that take over from the person who should be what we focus on. To illustrate his point, he shows us two examples, Mac vs. PC style:

Steve Jobs apparently wants the audience to listen to him tell the story, rather than read the slides:

Next comes a slide from Michael Dell. These are meant to be sent to someone who needs to get the full story looking at them, but when they are use as illustration to a live story, they become a distraction:

Dharmesh concludes:

If I had the talent and resources of Steve Jobs, I’d be able to create slides just fine. But I don’t (have the talent) and don’t have the resources) so I don’t like to create slides.

Hate PowerPoint because you love your audience.

I’m going to finish this with a quote from Jeff Nolan (hey, kids are always winners):

Powerpoint is like my 4 year old’s blanket, he can’t have his apple juice or go to sleep without it. Executives are afraid to not have Powerpoint, the big difference is that my 4 year old will eventually give up his blanket.

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity · Tagged: powerpoint, ppt, ppt deck, presentations

Asus eee PC: Size Matters

Posted on April 2, 2008 ·

Size matters… a lot. I still haven’t decided if I’ll be able to work on this mini-PC (the Asus eee PC). The 7″ screen in itself would not be that bad, but the 800×600 resolution is far too restricting: most websites are designed for higher resolution, meaning one has to scroll horizontally to see all, or click action buttons. The other problem is the keyboard – I don’t think I have fat fingers, but am struggling with it.

On the other had, it’s the ideal travel / conference machine. I don’t even need it as a computer, just a web browsing / note-taking / blogging device. And of course the alternative is His Beautiness the MacBook Air, but boy, that price for a travel accessory! Decisions…decisions…

(My regular display vs. the eee)

Update (4/3): I’ve owned the eee PC for a day and am returning it tonight. I could get used to the screen size, my fingers would learn to deal with the keyboard, but it’s impossible to browse the Net with this thing. The problem is that most websites are designed for larger resolution, and the eee can only display part of a page. Vertical scrolling (a lot) is not the end of the world, but having to scroll horizontally, just to find disappearing action buttons is simply ridiculous.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity · Tagged: asus, eee pc, MacBook Air

My Very Short GTDInbox Experiment

Posted on March 26, 2008 ·

I wanted to get organized about my ever-growing inbox, so I thought I’d give GTDInbox a try, especially after reading the positive reviews on both WebWorkerDaily and ReadWriteWeb.

My experiment has lasted a grand total of two days. Firefox freezes every hour or so, I just can’t stand it anymore.

Of course it doesn’t necessarily prove GTDInbox is the offending party; for all I know it could be any other Firefox extension that was a sleeper until now, yet in combination with all the others it now misbehaves. But it’s beyond the point: I am a user, not a tester, so I took the easy path out of this nightmare: remove the most recent addition, and the freezes will stop.

I still like the concept, so will look at GTDInbox a few releases later.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: email, firefox, gdt, get things done, gmail, gtdinbox, gtdmail, inbox, productivity