Should I upgrade to Windows 10?

Recent contribution to IT Pro's missive -  http://bit.ly/1IX4v7E

FAST enterprise search is back - and doing it in Norway

Further to the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference held in Vegas in mid November, Norwegian search solutions company Comperio has been running a series of events around Europe. In London Bjorn Olstad, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and a key acquisition when Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, confirmed that Microsoft is lifting search out of SharePoint and that enterprise search development will be headquartered in Norway, where the company is intending to recruit 50 people.
This is highly strategic good news, and for me confirms the line that Bjorn (and I from an independent perspective) have been saying for at least the last six years, "search is the new portal".

Storage de ja vu

Back in 2003, a number of us in the analyst community viewed the acquisition of the 800 lb gorilla in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace, aka Documentum, to be an exercise based upon the premise of EMC having so much in the way of storage products available, it needed to offer enterprises something to put on those products.  Roll on nearly a decade and we have the offer of  Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier to replace tape archives. Ignoring the current (but relevant) debates on pricing, response times, and issues of bandwidth to the Glacier offering, I personally like the idea. It is a modus operandi that is already prevalent in the consumer community. We upload our pictures to the likes of Flikr, Facebook etc not just because we want to show off, but because we believe our valuable memories will be safe there. Many use the likes of BOX.COM and Dropbox as personal archives, and many put their online passwords into emails on universally accessible webmail sites. AWS could be on to a winner.with Glacier, expect Microsoft et al to follow.

Outlook.Com does the job - including security

So it's been two weeks since I 'converted' from Microsoft's Hotmail to the new format Outlook.Com. And my verdict? I like it. The user interface is intuitive and migration was simple. The organisation features work well. What's not to like?
Microsoft desperately needed to improve on the tired and 'clunky' 1990's Hotmail interface (sic), where the likes of Google's Gmail and even Yahoo! have recently shown a much tidier set of functions.
And Microsoft has done what it always does best. Identify the features that users seem to work with most in rival products, and put those into its respective offering. This has meant that Microsoft software can never be seen as 'leading edge', and it may never be rated as the 'best' in a particular area, but it will be good enough for the vast majority of users/businesses and offer a reliable product. A while back I visited Microsoft Labs in Cambridge, UK, and was told that all the products developed in the labs are rewritten by a 'production team' to an engineering standard if they go mainstream, to ensure the reliability.
What has disappointed me about the launch of Outlook.Com is not the product, but the reaction of commentators that the 16 character password limit is not enough, and that Yahoo!'s 32 limit and the reportedly 200 for Google (and its ability to also use two-factor) are better for the job.
I know as well as anyone that the strength of a password is linked to its length. But so is the difficulty in remembering it! A lot of awareness raising has been done to push users to create complex passwords with a combination of upper and lowercase letters, characters and numbers. But the reality is that most home users, given the chance, will use the same, even complex, password on all their electronic accounts.
A much better way of getting users to make stronger passwords is to encourage the use of a standard pattern (algorithm). For example using a set string of characters and appending the characters from specific positions in the site's URL. Even at 8 characters that will be stronger than a 32 character password that is used on everything from Twitter to eBay.
Whist one of the arguments to moving to Outlook.Com was that it would look more 'business like', (just like the move of Googlemail to Gmail.com) the reality again is that the majority of Outlook.Com accounts will be home users, and the password will be protecting emails that mostly contain invitations to stag nites (sic) and the pictures of the dog/baby/etc. They may be protecting online banking, (which I would always recommend has a unique password), they will not be protecting accounts of large enterprises and 'national security' et. al. Those latter organisations use Exchange/Active Directory/Outlook client, etc. and are subject to polices that enforce 'secure' passwords, (although I would guess that many users utilise their 'work' password on 'home' accounts).
Outlook.Com is a 'good enough' product for the majority of the millions of users that it is aimed to support.
So which of Gmail, Yahoo! and Outlook.Com will I continue to use as my primary email address?

Internet search engines biased? Duh?

The news that Google is in discussion with European Commission (EC) to settle the alleged antitrust case around the biasing of search results to promote its own products, was inevitable, given that a similar allegations are being investigated by the FTC in the US.
What is surprising however, is that users of the dominant internet search engine in Europe apparently cannot recognise the bias.
Google is a business, it is not a charitable endeavor like Wikipedia. As a company it would be niaeve, in fact iresponsible to to its sharehol;ders not to promote its own, and other sponsored products.
When I go to my local Tesco supermarket, at the end of the isle will be the branded goods being promoted (and which Tesco is paid to place there). Then down the isles there will be a mix of branded and Tesco own label goods, with the own label goods often having a promotional price on the shelf edge.
Despite the ideal of a totally free internet, it has to be paid for somehow. Even Jimmy Wales has to post a donation request message once a year.
In due course Google will stump up lumps of cash for both the EU and US treasury coffers, and will make some changes to the algorithms. Let's just hope that the organisation currently funding the lobbying of the EC, Microsoft has the algorithms in Bing ready for inspection.