Today I’m a judge for the MITX Technology Awards, held at Microsoft’s palatial new office in Kendall Square, Cambridge. Microsoft will be spending $100 million in remodeling and rent on this facility over the years, but apparently couldn’t find enough cash for a few $200 desktop machines to park in each conference room.
Each conference room does have a video projector and the building is covered by various 802.11 wireless networks. Anyone who wants to use the Web in a meeting is supposed to bring his or her own laptop and hook it up to the network and the projector. For our meeting, the ensuing harlequinade occupied two Microsoft employees and one guest for a full 15 minutes. When they were done we could see Web pages, but the entire screen would go blank every 30 seconds and stay dark for several seconds.
What will it take for corporate America to decide that a meeting room should have a hardwired Web browser, with some sort of screen viewable by all in the room?
When the 5 Cambridge Center building was under construction in 1981, Index Systems (a 1969 Sloan PhD thesis) was to occupy the top three floors.
I remember there was executive level grousing about how difficult it was to get extra “wiring” into the offices. Seems the building trades simply couldn’t understand/do all the extra wiring.
Former Wal Mart CEO David Glass said once that companies (in retail) are either focused on systems or merchandise, and that if you’re focused on systems you inevitably layer on more and more bureaucracy. If you’re focused on merchandise you can always work on the systems part of it but it’s hard to do it the other way.
After working at Wal Mart for ten years, most of it as a manager, I know all of the reasons why big companies don’t function. Lots of times it’s tunnel vision, or the total inability of the manager making the decision to understand all the ramifications of the decision.
I mean, it sounds like you had a worse experience than your average guy at an internet cafe pretty much anywhere. It seems unbelievable, but it just seems that way. It’s totally believable. New nations win wars….until they come old. New companies succeed, for a time. Until when? Until they become big enough that one person doesnt know where all the money went. Then they hire a guy to track the money. Soon that guy needs an assistant, then it’s anarchy all the way. thanks
Hahaha, that’s laughable. I suspect Microsoft’s past savable at this point; I just saw online that they’ve installed a microsoft-only shopping mall on their campus in Redmond. I know nerds like to be pampered, but it’s not like you need to do a lot to retain top engineering talent these days, and isn’t it really supposed to be all about the software?
I’m not sure that hardwired (windows) pcs work much better.
I gave a presentation at an unnamed, but, very tech rich company. It took 10 mins to go through the login process because the contact at the company had never logged into this particular pc, and, a load of files, it seems, must be copied to the pc the first time you log in.
Plus it went through about 20 installs as it installed Word, Excel, and SAP.
Of course, the second time this should be faster.
When my former employer built out a new space, they put a TV and hardwired PC in every conference room. It was awesome! Finally you could be assured that you could walk into a room, access the internal network or remote desktop to a computer. It is the way to go, as far as I can tell. No more fumbling with network settings and/or the projector.
LOL! We deal with this every day at Microsoft as employees. Every meeting starts 5-10 minutes late because someone is having problems with network, projectors, Live Meeting, or whatever else. We did have some conference rooms with hard wired PC’s and they didn’t work as the load time for new users was abismal and they seemed to always have problems with them, and that always made it harder to use ones own laptop. We’ve gotten our standard meetings pretty nailed down now, but whenever someone new comes in and wants to run the meetings it takes the extra time to setup.
Things are a lot better here than when I worked at Sun Microsystems and most of the projectors we had in conference rooms didn’t support Solaris or Linux which we were all required to use and the hardwired network computers in the rooms were not able to connect to the projectors at all, they were just good for surfing the web during meetings or getting people to huddle around a monitor in the corner.
The problem is that unattended conference room PCs suffer from a tragedy of the commons and tend to devolve into a morass of viruses and spyware (well, more so than even the standard Windows PC).
Some LCD projectors now have the ability to project slideshows made from JPEG images on a USB thumb drive. You just export your presentation to JPEG and plug it in.
I’m an 802.11 engineer, and if this problem was due to the wireless network, then somebody in the IT department should get fired. In this day and age, there is no excuse for going to the considerably added expense of putting extensive ethernet wiring throughout every room of a large building or campus environment.
Even if you have a permanent PC, and can get past login issues, it’s humorous to see multiple presenters fumbling for several minutes with USB sticks and powerpoint files. It’s 2009, and still hardly anyone puts their slides on a web page. Creating a simple page with a permanent URL is as difficult for many people as it was in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee hoped that all html browsers would also be editors.
Fazal: I think that there are standard mechanisms for periodically restoring a Windows machine to a standardized state, e.g., Web browser, Flash, and Acrobat Reader. I’ve seen this in hotel business centers (every time a new person logs on; takes just a minute or so). I suspect that the large-scale Internet cafes do something like this, perhaps on a nightly basis.
Ben: Our meeting was a group of people trying to look at various company Web sites and services. Nobody wanted to show prepared slides. Nobody would have had to bring a USB stick. We did not need PowerPoint. We just needed what we would have gotten at any Internet cafe: a Web browser, a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen that everyone could see.
This combines several pet peeves of mine:
1. Projectors should work flawlessly with any laptop. Every laptop/graphics card/”whoever is responsible” manufacturer should have an (updated!) single A4 sheet explaining how to get from standard display to “projector mode.” Your laptop should come shipped with these instructions laminated. No hunting around for “well, I’m using the integrated Intel graphics chip, so that means you need to go search your start menu for Intel, then hunt through their badly-written C++ application for the magic property box containing laptop mode. Oh wait, you have an HP, that’s completely different.” Ridiculous! Aside: Windows 7 finally fixed this problem with a “Windows-key P” shortcut, but 2009 is a little late.
2. As someone who is not a network engineer of any kind, it’s super annoying to endure the hassles of byzantine corporate wireless setups. Again, one laminated page, give it to me when I request access to your network. Vista makes the crazier TKIP/PEAP/LEAP setups easier to manage than XP, but, we still need a laminated page explaining what to select. Also how much would it cost to throw a completely unsecured, completely isolated guest wireless system out there? Did I hear “pretty much nothing?” I think I did hear “almost no cost” mumbled from somewhere in the back of the room.
3. How hard is it to have corporations set up kiosk-style computers as Philip mentions above? Once somebody in the world has done it, once, it shouldn’t take great feats of Active Directory group policy engineering to make it happen everywhere…right? This is one of those things where I wish everyone had to open source all their work. Ridiculous how much people reinvent the wheel.
And if you’re saying “but all these laminated pages…isn’t that impractical? Isn’t there a better solution?” Yes there is, and that is of course, software. A little script to set up your corporate wireless settings; the Win-P fix but for Vista/XP; scripts to set up a kiosk in Active Directory.
Joe: How does the bandwidth of modern 802.11 compare to the bandwidth of gigabit ethernet?