Gavin Terrill's Blog

Magnanimous MS

MS announced they are "giving away" their new Office UI design. Wait, what are they giving away? Not a product, or toolkit, or samples. No, they are letting you use their User Interface concepts.

Seems to me that the Windows UI was originally built around WIMP principals, oh, 20 odd years ago. That's right, the UI invented by Xerox Parc. Come to think of it, wasn't there a whole bunch of noise around MS "borrowing" the Lotus 1-2-3 menu idea for Excel when it first came out? And what about Apple's woes trying to defend it's UI paradigm legally against, you guessed it, MS. And then there is the tabbed browsing idea that Mozilla introduced that now appears in IE 7.

It would see the worm has turned. If this is indeed enforceable, then it is setting a dangerous precedent for the industry.

Just the fax 'mam

In these security conscious days it is common to come under fairly intense scrutiny as a software vendor proposing a solution, but you would think large enterprises would have the 'nouse and wherewithall to look beyond the obvious. One of the largest banks in Canada has made an incredible blunder by faxing customer details, including social insurance and account numbers, to a scrap yard in West Virginia. WTF!? There is going to be some nasty fall out from this, starting with the rather belated memo that went out today - time to get a clue guys -  you need to examine your business processes outside of just the bits on the wire and software applications. Thank goodness I don't bank there.