Peter Christy

Laptop Analytics

MS "Gemini:" I had heard about Gemini before. At the BI Conference Keynote last year Gemini was demoed — a user with a laptop running Excel with 100 million rows of data. My mistaken understanding at the time was that this clever parlor trick had a large, server-based in-memory database system network connected. Au contraire Mon Ami! This was a more or less standard 4GB laptop running Vista and Excel with an interesting Excel plug in ("Gemini")! The magic is columnar compression — the category of technology also used by the log file tool vendors use for fast log file analysis. When a data set is imported into Gemini this columnar compression occurs, but after that, all the processing is on the laptop (MS also demonstrated Gemini on a Netbook, admitting you probably couldn't get 100M rows on a 1GB machine, but you could get 20M!). Gemini also remembers where all the data came from with XML metadata, solving the traditional problem of ad hoc spreadsheets when the creator is no longer around ("where the hell did this data come from?!!"). The Gemini team is in the under-commit mode for now (smart) but I think this kind of tool could have a profound impact on business analytics over time.

Windows 7

 Steven Sinofsky gave a very upbeat introduction to Windows 7. Windows 7 of course is the version of Windows that comes after Vista, and Vista of course is one of Microsoft's biggest business embarrassments. Vista isn't at all a bad system today, what with the platform hardware catching up and with the SP1 fixes. In retrospect, Vista was just much too much stuff, all pulling in different directions. Remember that Vista was the version of Windows that (1) converged the client source tree with the Server and changed device models; (2) introduced a whole new application model (Dot Net); (3) introduced a new UI model that leveraged GPU hardware; (4) was reengineered to provide much better security; and so on. Possibly it was just too much, but certainly it was too much for Microsoft to wrangle successfully into something that was ready for the marketplace and that the marketplace was in turn ready for. When you talk to insiders, there was no shortage of contributing problems. But the causality of the Vista debacle isn't really the issue; the issue is the brand damage that occurred. Windows 7 is an entirely different beast. With the possible exception of multi-touch integration (which is very much optional), it isn't really a different or new operating system -- rather it's a much refined and better system in a lot of little ways. Julie Larson Green, who drove the UI improvements in Office 2007, has been hard at work with Windows 7 with similar results -- significantly better usability and a more pleasing user experience. And Windows 7 intends to be smaller and faster as well which will be welcome too. It took a lot of hard work by people like Sinofsky and and Jon DeVann (who we are told gets a lot of credits for herding the many engineering pieces back into a team). The product team seems to be doing a great job building on Vista and remedying the things that went wrong there. At some point soon the marketing team gets the more difficult challenge of reestablishing the brand.