Gosuto Consulting

Well, I’ve been extremely negligent in maintaining this blog.  Shortly after my last post things got very busy for me, both with my consulting business and because I’ve been working on development projects (primarily Apps).  I know the 5 people who read this blog are devastated.

Just some updates:

1) I was obviously wrong about how well the iPad would sell.  Foot.  In.  Mouth.  Honestly I’m shocked at how well it has done and how much small business users have lovingly adopted it.  It has turned out to be great for web Apps and the “cloud” (SaaS) – ultimately the iPad is the best portable web browser out there (except for the lack of flash of course).  One thing they nailed is making that small screen seem huge by careful selection of the appropriate ppi.  Imagine a netbook screen that size – everything would look tiny.  Apple did a great job overcoming that.  Still, mine primarily collects dust except when we are using it for App testing and on road trips (when my daughter loves it for games and drawing).  At the end of the day it doesn’t do much more than an iPhone or iPod touch, and it is ridiculously overpriced, so it is only a matter of time before someone else makes a better mousetrap.  Kudos for Apple for re-kindling the tablet form-factor though.

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I had put together a full iPad review, but I decided to hold off until I got the Apple case for it.  There are various form factor issues with the iPad (my biggest complaint, aside from the price), and I’m interested to see if the case helps.

Anyway, the Apple cases are back-ordered, but as soon as I get a hold of one I’ll finalize my review and post it here.

As an aside, I think it is ridiculous that a device that starts at $499 doesn’t include the Apple case (especially when it is becoming readily apparent that a case is mandatory – and considering that most $279 netbooks at least include a sleeve).

Some industry “analysts” have egg on their face today.  They bought into the hype – after coming out with conservative projections early on, they all doubled their sales estimates late Saturday, reporting “longer than expected lines” as part of their data (wow, real scientific).  Analyst Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray raised his first day sales expectations to 600,000 to 700,000 units.   Ooops.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/04/05ipad.html

“Apple Sells Over 300,000 iPads First Day”

Now, you may say, “hey, 300k units, that is still pretty amazing” – is it?  The devil is in the details.

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We’ve all been there – your computer won’t boot, or you can’t access those important files you had stored on an external hard-drive for safe keeping.  It always happens at the most inopportune times.

Many times it is a software issue, but every so often you run into a truly dead hard-drive with either severe file system corruption or worse mechanical issues.  In those cases, you have to outsource the repair to a data recovery service.

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I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Google’s project to build its own fiber-optic network to provide Gigabit Internet speeds to select communities (serving 50,000 to 500,000 customers).

At roughly 100x the speed of even the fastest residential broadband available today, 1Gbps (1000Mbps) is obviously overkill for current Internet applications which are optimized for lower bandwidth.  As such, Google is saying the purpose of this project is to “experiment and learn” – but I can’t help but think they have a more specific goal in mind.

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I don’t like to judge things before I’ve used them.  I also realize that a commentary on the iPad two weeks after the announcement is a bit late – but I’ve been busy, so sue me.  One more caveat – I’m not an Apple hater.  I started out on an Apple II and Macs after that, and appreciate the contributions Apple has made to computing.

Anyway, Steve Jobs is the master of the product announcement – but this was one just felt disingenuous.

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I’m not a fan of Active Directory for small businesses.  It’s feature set is overkill for most companies, it requires a windows server for each office (technically you can use a VPN to overcome that, but VPN’s have their own set of problems), and it can get expensive to maintain quickly.

Also, as someone who firmly believes in SaaS and cloud computing, it just makes logical sense that we push authentication to the cloud as well.

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Recently I was getting ready to migrate one of my clients over to Google Apps Premier – they are a small office that uses Outlook without an Exchange server, so it seemed like a no brainer.

Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, Google Apps Premier has a pretty major Achilles’ heel – NO SUPPORT FOR TASKS!

Now, this probably doesn’t come as news to some, but I guess it is just one of those features I never noticed was missing until now.  I mean, I don’t use Outlook at all, and even when I was I never used Outlook tasks, but apparently a lot of people do.

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Now, I’m far from the first person to use Twitter for business.  On the contrary, there are actually a lot of companies out there using Twitter for more than just news and product promotion.

However, sometimes the uses of Twitter aren’t inherently obvious.  The system is just so darn simple that it takes a while for people to “get” it (I’m the first person to admit I laughed at twitter and only started using it about  a month ago – 177 tweets later I’m hooked).  That’s just it though – the simplicity is why it works.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, Blackberry email integration with Google Apps could be better.  Specifically:

• sync’ing of read-status and deleted items only happens in one direction
• you can’t access your other gmail labels (folders), most importantly Sent Items
• you have no access to the company directory (aka “GAL”)

Calendar and contacts sync worked just fine with Google Sync for Blackberry (which basically just uses the ActiveSync protocol), but gmail sync is not included, apparently due to some limitation with the built-in Blackberry messaging app (I only assume this because Google Sync syncs gmail just fine on the iPhone and Windows Mobile).

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I stand corrected – there is already a shared contact service for Google Apps Premier, for a price ($349 one-time).  Check it out: http://www.setupmadeeasy.com/shared-contacts.php

The other day I spent a lot of time tinkering with my Google Apps Premier account, kicking the tires on all of its new features.  Most of the companies I come in contact with either a) are looking for Exchange functionality, or b) are looking to migrate away from Exchange.  In both cases they all love their blackberries (and if they have Exchange, they have a BES server too).  Thus, I wanted to see how Google Apps Premier would really do as an Exchange alternative.

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I thought it would be interesting to let everyone know what tools I use on a daily basis.

Google Apps Premier – I use Google Apps for email and to collaborate with my colleagues.  For $50/year you get all the benefits of an Exchange server and honestly a lot more.  I use the Premier version primarily so I can help clients migrate from Exchange to Google Apps Premier (I like to use the services I recommend).

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