I have written before about the problems of why ecommerce fails and the undeniable truth of the matter is that it usually comes down to treating customers like crap.

So here is a cautionary tale of how to spend

When Cuil launched just a couple of months back on the 28th July, it jumped right in there with the ridiculous claim that it was already the biggest search engine on the planet right from the get go. This was, apparently, based upon some clever math which ended up with Cuil indexing some 120 billion web pages, or more than three times as many as anyone else. Even Google, which at around the same time stuck a tentative claim in for a trillion unique web pages identified during the automatic index creation process had to admit it only actually indexed a percentage of those in order to weed out the duplicates and dynamically generated content.

What Cuil did was mix claims of the biggest web index with claims of unique content-based relevance methods for the engine, and promised to go beyond link analysis and traffic ranking in order to provide quite simply ‘the ideal search engine.’

Sounds impressive, huh? And the fact that Cuil was the brainchild of former Google search index architect Anna Patterson and Stanford University search research pioneer Tom Costello could not hurt either. “By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did too” Patterson exclaimed at the time.

Certainly that seemed to be the case at first, the publicity worked and the promise of a better-than-Google-search added up to a very quick carving out of a 0.26 percent share of the global search market. OK, so not something that would have Google executives quaking in their boots, nor shake the foundations of SEO the world over, but nonetheless impressive enough for a first 48 hours figure.

Yet Net Applications, the monitoring and measuring company which came up with those numbers has been keeping an eye on Cuil and now reports that things are not so hot, in fact they are positively icy cold. According to the latest figures for the end of August the Cuil market share has dropped to, well, just about nothing at all. Net Applications has the market share being a very meagre 0.01 percent. At least it is a very steady 0.01 percent though.

Why is this? Well I think I might know the answer: when compared to Google, Cuil search results are crap. A big steaming pile of crap in fact. I put it to a real world test after launch, going head to head against Google across a number of really very simple and very real world searches. The results were not just disappointing, they were devastating as far as Cuil was concerned. Other reviewers, bloggers, analysts and reporters were busy doing much the same and reaching much the same conclusions. That the technology behind Cuil might be impressive, the search index might be massive, the pedigree of the developers faultless, but the results were just not good enough. Certainly not good enough to switch from Google, not good enough to tarnish the Google brand one little bit in fact.

And those Net Applications market share numbers would seem to suggest that end users agree.

Not that everything is rosy for Google, because Net Applications has also announced a rather dramatic slide in popularity of the open source Google Chrome web browser. Chrome enjoyed a respectable one percent global market share within the first 48 hours, an unprecedented statistic. Now, though, it has slid down first to 0.85 percent last week and just 0.77 percent this. It seems like Chrome has been tarnished by one too many incidents involving security and stupid copyright grabs but above all else just does not deliver on the smaller, faster, safer promise. End users are, it seems, reverting back to Firefox and Internet Explorer, although Safari would appear to be doing best of all out of the Chrome migration.

Microsoft probably doesn’t like it very much. Actually scrap that, Microsoft definitely doesn’t like it at all. However, there seems little it can do about the fact that screen shots of Windows 7, specifically the M3 Build 6780, have been popping up online this week. The Internet will do what it does best, and ensure that those images live on no matter what steps are taken to have them removed. Web content: once up, never down. I want that on a T-Shirt.

Microsoft only started the release of ‘Milestone 3′ Windows 7 builds on or around the 12th September, and I am surprised that it took the best part of a week for the screen shots to start permeating across the Web. That said, and fair play to Microsoft, it had managed pretty well in preventing leakage up until this point (if you discount the early Milestone 1 leaks a year ago that is) and Milestone 2 never really saw the light of day online.

The UX Evangelist blog promises truly unique Microsoft content, and seems to be delivering. While a screen shot of WordPad might not ordinarily be the most exciting thing you have ever seen, when it is the WordPad UI from Windows 7 M3 Build 6780 it starts to take on a whole new dimension.

From this single definitely we can see, for example, that it has a definite Office 2007 feel about it. In fact, it looks very similar, stinkingly so, to Word 2007 in many ways. Not least thanks to the inclusion of the ‘Ribbon UI’ which I understand will be a prominent feature of Windows 7. Mind you, I am also led to believe that while WordPad gets the Ribbon, NotePad thankfully does not. There is a limit, I would suggest, as to how far the line in terms of basic applications such a UI change is needed.

The ThinkNext Blue blog, at least I think that is what it is called (it is a bit hard to tell, to be honest) has even more detailed screen shots. In fact, it goes way beyond just exposing the WordPad UI, with images of everything from the new Start Menu (with a change in look to the search box and shutdown buttons, plus a simplified right panel) through to detail of the new User Account Control which the blogger says only appeared once during and form this concludes that Microsoft is reigning in its use in Windows 7 when compared with Vista.

Other little points revealed from the screen shots here include the changing of My Documents to Libraries in the Windows 7 My Computer screen, and some new Control Panel items and system icons.

Microsoft has only itself to blame about the prominence these leaked screens will take, after all it has decided to pretty much clamp tight shut with regard to talking about Windows 7 to the media this time around. So what does it expect, that we will all just sit around and twiddle our thumbs until it wants us to get hyped up over the Beta release in December? Sorry Mr Ballmer, that just ain’t gonna happen. We all know you are bonkers, but I didn’t think you were that daft.

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear microchip
Happy Birthday to you

There, that’s better. Yes, the microchip is celebrating half a century since it was born. Or at least since it was first demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments on the 12th of September 1958.

Who would have thought that the strip of germanium with a single transistor, along with the other components, glued to a glass slide and measuring a whopping great 7/16ths of an inch by a 16th of an inch, would go on to be used in, well, just about everything?

Probably not Jack Kilby, after all he invented it because had was a newbie with time on his hands. Having not long joined Texas Instruments Kilby was not allowed to go on holiday like everyone else, so he spent his time attempting to solve a problem that had been bugging him. That problem was how to efficiently, in terms of both application and cost, connect a large number of components in elaborate circuits.

Of course, Kilby was not only the inventor of the microchip, he also invented the first hand-held calculator. I guess it should also be mentioned that he won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in the year 2000.

The humble, if that is the right word considering the statistics, microchip has gone of to truly great things. The semiconductor industry looks like producing in excess of 267 billion integrated circuits this year alone, rising to more than 330 billion within 3 years.

Not bad going for a fifty year old…

Has Patch Tuesday really been and gone again already? Oh lawdy yes, it has. Which means that you need to know the impact that those updates are going to have on your business. Indeed, I know of some folk who take a twisted ‘if it ain’t too broken don’t let a Microsoft fix break something else’ approach to patch management. Sorry, but that really is Ostrich Security in action if you ask me.

So, assuming your head is not buried in the sand, or firmly stuck somewhere else that I cannot mention in mixed company, what do you do about it? The answer is, of course, let someone else determine the risk and reward process of updating. Which is where those lovely chaps over at ChangeBASE enter the patch management equation. This ain’t no advert, so if you want to find out more about the application come patch management stuff it provides, go Google or visit the website.

Why I mention ChangeBASE at all is because they also issue Patch Tuesday application compatibility labs testing results which can help determine just what the impact on your business of quickly updating will be. This month, so I am informed, the patches and updates fall into the ‘relatively light’ band.

“The updates MS08-055 and MS08-053 relate to Windows Media player which has a minimal impact on the Operating system and few applications have a direct dependency on Windows Media player” ChangeBASE told me, adding “More importantly, MS08-052 includes an update to a core element of the operating system (GDIPLUS.DLL). This file is part of the graphics library for Window XP. Several applications run through AOK can load a version of this file from their source media/download process when they are installed and there is a danger that if this happens the installation will result in an out of date version of this file being loaded and overwriting the version in the patch update this month.”

ChangeBASE tested the following updates this month:

MS08-052: updates key components of Microsoft Messenger and Digital Imager
Impact: MS08-052 updates a core OS level DLL that is responsible for Windows XP/2000 graphics interface. A number of applications contain this file in their application installation routine including; Reuters Messaging, Microsoft Messenger, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Digital Image which could cause application compatibility issues when these packages are deployed. In addition, a significant portion of our testing portfolio had a file level dependency on this updated DLL.

MS08-053: Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
Impact: This update had a marginal impact on the AOK Workbench application package portfolio through direct file and configuration overlaps with the update payload and the portfolio packages.

MS08-054: Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
Impact: This update had a marginal impact on the AOK Workbench application package portfolio through direct file and configuration overlaps with the update payload and the portfolio packages.

MS08-055: Updates key Microsoft Office components - full application test required
Impact: This Microsoft security update, while not affecting a large portion of the AOK application portfolio did directly affect a number of Microsoft application packages including Office 2003 (standard and professional), Microsoft Visual Basic, and Microsoft Project.

I’m a sucker for a ’stupid security’ story, and have to admit getting a certain amount of satisfaction from exposing those organisations which just do not get security best practise although I do not relish the consequences of the security stinkers which all too often impacts upon the data of innocent third parties.

However, every now and then I get caught in a happy mood and a good news story crosses my path which makes me smile. Such is the case of the Shropshire Fire and Rescue service which has just recently given fire crews better access to the emergency incident risk data they rely upon. The security angle being that it is all thanks to a new secure Virtual Private Network from CI-Net.

“The new network is designed to gives us a reliable, resilient infrastructure for the flow of information to the individual stations from our headquarters in Shrewsbury,” explained John Rix, network manager at Shropshire Fire and Rescue, which employs 318 fire fighters serving a population of approximately 448,900.

Risk data can be sent to fire stations around the county, across the secure VPN, and then downloaded to touch-screen computers actually on board the emergency vehicles, as well as onto appliances via wireless network connections within each station itself.

The kind of risk data concerned includes updates to mapping information, building layouts and incident specific data. All the kind of stuff that needs to be communicated to fire crews, and can now be sent more quickly to them even when they are on the way to a ’shout’ with much improved reliability.

CI-Net has designed a meshed VPN allowing the headquarters office to communicate effectively with the remote fire station sites. “Previously we had to have someone within the individual fire stations create a dial-up link to HQ,” said Rix. “This could be slow and unreliable and we often experienced technical problems. For the on-board computers within our fire vehicles or appliances, we’d written a specific software script to create an automatic VPN connection via wireless access points in the fire stations. But if the VPN didn’t work, we could lose connectivity, delaying the availability of risk data relating to emergency calls.”

Apparently, 62 percent of Brits want it. Unfortunately, 75 percent of us are not going to get it. Some 17 percent have said that they feel ill equipped to do it. Meanwhile, 46 percent are doing something else when they should be doing it. 10 percent of us even confess to watching the telly instead of doing it. An embarrassingly large 42 percent of women admit to doing the washing instead of doing it.

12 percent of Brits are doing it on a regular basis however.

Working from home, that is.

According to a Plantronics survey of office workers, working from home is something that a decent majority of us would love to do and firmly believe would lead to increased productivity and job satisfaction. The problem is that, even in this increasingly connected world, employers remain largely opposed to the idea it would seem.

I was surprised at how many thought that they did not have access to the right kit to enable home working though, unless that 17 percent who argued that they were ‘poorly equipped’ and their employers ‘reluctant’ to help are in some bizarre line of office work such as, err, actually I cannot think of any standard office work role that could not be done at home using a laptop and a bog-standard broadband connection to be honest.

Just for the record, I have been doing it for nearly 20 years now. For the past 14 years I have been doing it with my wife. I do it while browsing the web mainly, although I have been known to do it while watching the sheep grazing in the lower field, and hope to be able to continue doing it for many years to come…