11-23-97 what's new

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The LangaLetter

A free email newsletter from Fred Langa

Week of 11/23/97

This issue is a bit unusual. With the Thanksgiving Holiday this week (a US tradition, to all our overseas readers) this will be a short workweek. And last week had basically one giant focus---Comdex. So let me jump right in:

Microsoft Responds!
Last week’s LangaLetter talked about the 30+ known bugs in IE4 and invited you to share your opinions---good, bad, or otherwise---on Microsoft's latest browser/desktop.

And what a response! The discussion thread over on the WinMag site got more active postings than any column we've run to date. And although it'll be a while before we get the server logs processed, I'll bet the total number of people viewing the thread (there are always more lurkers than active posters) will also be a record.

Most of the comments were not complimentary to IE4 or to Microsoft. Here's one that captures the tenor of the majority of messages posted:

"With all the added functionality that IE4 offers, it would seem to be a dream come true. However, once within its environment the dream quickly fades. Kernel32.DLL crashes and internal errors due to active desktop conflicts makes using IE4 a bittersweet experience. If only IE4 was stable...is Microsoft listening?"

The answer to at least the last part of that post is "yes." Late in the week, I got a call from Microsoft's Bob Visse, the IE Product Manager. I don’t envy Bob his job. Usually, the #2 player in a market gets cut some slack because it’s the underdog. But because this is Microsoft, IE4 (and Bob) gets no slack at all. That’s a tough spot to be in.

But for all the flaming arrows shot his way, Bob is cordial, upbeat, and articulate. He admits there are some issues that clearly should have been caught before IE4 shipped. "We definitely realize there are some problems," Bob told me. "All we can do is apologize and make it right."

Bob simultaneously sent me a letter and lengthy attachment; the former explains his position pretty clearly and the latter contains a ton of useful troubleshooting information: Bob’s team went through last week’s column, identified a number of common complaints, and assembled some advice on several patches, fixes, and workarounds. Most of the information is available elsewhere, but you'd have to dig through various portion of the MS site to find them all. So Bob and his team did us all a time-saving favor by assembling this information into one convenient document. Thanks, Bob!

Bob and I also discussed a wide range of related issues---far too much to include in a single letter (I'd have to rename this "The LangaBook..."). I'll include the less time-critical information in future issues.

But some of it is time-critical: On Monday the 24th I'll post Bob's letter (verbatim), my reactions, and the IE4 troubleshooting attachment in my weekly online column at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//bbs/columns/. (The column goes up on Monday and stays up all week).

I invite you to check out Bob's response, and to let me know if you think MS is on top of the situation. Does his reply satisfy you? If you've sworn off IE4, does any of this make you want to give it another try? If not, what would it take for Microsoft to win you back?

As usual, previous weekly discussions can still be accessed at http://content.techweb.com/winmag//bbs/columns/. Note that there are some great user-to-user tips in last week's discussion: For example: If you have an ATI card that's giving you IE4 trouble, run SysEdit, and in the [Display] section of System.Ini, add this line: DevBmp=0

That setting tells Windows to handle device bitmaps on its own instead of going through the hardware and apparently solves many of the lockups users have reported with IE4. Supposedly, the performance hit is insignificant---and in any case, running is always faster than crashing. 8-) You can check out the rest of the thread for other tidbits like that via the above link.

Comdex, Part Deux
OK, I underestimated. There were not 150,000 but 250,000 geeks (and I was one of 'em) crowding the streets of Las Vegas last week. It was pocket-protector heaven.

On average, during peak times, it took five tries to get either a cell phone dialtone or three tries to get an outside line on a hotel-room phone. Lines were long, and the food was... like eating in an airplane all week. Prices were jacked impossibly high. (Don't even ask about the $17 bowl of raisin bran I had for breakfast one morning.)

But there was some good stuff. I'm wading through my show notes and contact cards, and I've asked for eval units of the more interesting hardware and software I saw so I can try it first hand. I'll tell you all the good stuff I saw, right here.

Here's one that can't wait: HotOffice Technologies has a product in late public beta, and is about to go commercial with a web-based "virtual intranet." You've read about web hosting services--- well this is an intranet service provider. You're basically renting space and access to a full virtual intranet (email, document sharing, conferencing, Internet phone, travel planning, business-oriented database searching, phone messaging, scheduling, BBS/threaded chat, etc., etc.).

Functionally, it's a complete, ready-to use intranet you and your office cohorts can access via a dial-up connection. You and your coworkers see only your own intranet; it's exactly as if the intranet were locally hosted in your own office---but without the expense and headaches. HotOffice provides all the hardware and back-end software: secure, mirrored, backed-up servers, fat pipes (accessible via any dial-up connection); all the back-end apps, 24/7 support; full disaster-recovery planning to protect your data, etc. You access it all via a name/password protected web page that gives you access to all the key intranet features.

Your designated office manager (by default, you or whoever is your account's first logon) assigns user names and permissions via simple check-box web pages---no network management knowledge is required. Once signed in, each user can do whatever their permissions allow. It works exactly like any full-featured intranet does.

Almost everything is accessible through your browser, except document-sharing. That's handled through a separate custom Java applet that works like a "wizard." You can drag and drop a document you want to share to the wizard, or invoke the wizard from the toolbar of an Office app; the wizard asks a few questions (what people or group do you want to share with? etc.); and then posts the document and notifies the appropriate people in your "office" that the document is available.

Your virtual office email address is "yourname.yourcompany@hotoffice.com" but if you want to keep your current email address, you can use a full-featured mail app like Eudora, or your ISP's own features, to redirect or auto-forward your existing email into or out of the HotOffice account, for convenience.

Each intranet's first logon account costs $19.95/mo, and the prices go down from there---the more users you sign on for your intranet, the less each costs. Your intranet is allocated 10Mb of data storage per user (there's no charge for the intranet apps storage). The storage is jointly held and can be divvied up among your intranet users however you need it. You can buy more storage if you need it at $1/Mb/mo.

The HotOffice folks see their market as people who don't want to carry a laptop (you can login to your secure data from any PC or terminal with web access); geographically dispersed staffs (so no one has to keep a server on premises); and general small-office/home-office use.

The whole thing is slick. It sports a very well-polished UI (actually, well-done web pages), and a highly-thought-out suite of included intranet apps. You can sign up for a 30 day free trial at www.hotoffice.com. Very cool.

I'll cover more from Comdex in the future, but if you want immediate Comdex gratification (without the sore feet and the $17 raisin bran) check the WinMag news pages off the main page at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/ for the show reports published by the WinMag team.

LangaLetter:
Almost 2000 new subscribers last week. Another record week!

Please help me spread the word---if you think a friend or coworker might be interested in the newsletter, why not forward this copy to them? They can sign up for free too!

BrowserTune:
I'll be running a major proof-of-concept test this week for the next version of BrowserTune. If all goes well, I'll be able to start posting public test pages very soon. Stay tuned!

HotSpots:
It's driving me nuts to have a Java applet I know is IE4 incompatible, so tops on my list this week is a new logo that won't cause any trouble. Watch for it by midweek!

Design issues aside, here's this week's HotSpots lineup:

Sunday: Yum.

Monday: Very cool design, and a major update to a previous HotSpots winner.

Tuesday: Intel hates it, but it's definitely worth a bookmark.

Wednesday: The "DataDiva's" site---an awesomely-designed personal web.

Thursday: Talk about overspecialization...

Friday: Interesting---and just imagine the labor that went into this!

Saturday: Rich resource on a too-little-known North American culture.

Last week's rich lineup of HotSpots is available at: http://content.techweb.com/winmag//flanga/phs.htm .

More HotSpots Needed!
The web has gotten so big, the signal/noise ratio is awful. It's hard to find great pages. But everyone has several pages they visit all the time. Could you take a second and tell me your favorite site(s)? I'd like to possibly include them as future HotSpots. It'd just take a sec--- email your favorite URLs to hotspots@langa.com No explanation is needed---just paste the raw URLs into the body of the mail message, ideally, 1 URL per line. I'll sift through them and queue 'em up for possible inclusion as future HotSpot. Thanks!

See you next week!

Fred
(fred@langa.com)

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