Philip Richardson

Last night I upgraded my Lenovo T60p from Vista to Windows 7. So far it’s been smooth sailing with all my apps and drivers working perfectly. I’m running Build 6801 (which I believe is the M3 build we gave out at the PDC). If you have the opportunity to try out Windows 7: I thoroughly recommend it.

The ever observant Simon Hutson has been scouring public sources for CRM5 features. He has compiled a great list on his UK CRM Blog. Naturally this isn’t a complete list – but it does give a good idea of some of the themes in CRM5 (the code name for release currently under development). Given that most of these features were spotted in the wild at the PDC you can expect that they are platform/developer focused. Expect some more business user focused features to be previewed at Convergence North America next year.

It's so much nicer when Gartner says it for you….

"Gartner believes that the technologies underlying Dynamics CRM (code named Titan) represent a significant opportunity for Microsoft. Thus far, little emphasis has been placed on this technology, which has potential to be a mainstream offering that will compete with SFDC’s force.com platform at what Gartner calls aPaas, a type of cloud/web platform application infrastructure service. In fact, Titan represents the only tool/off the shelf technology as part of Windows Azure that actually helps facilitate the building of multitenant apps. Larger questions remain about the specific applicability of multitenant app servers and Microsoft apparently has not made final decisions as of yet. However, “Titan” does represent a potential under invested, under marketed alternative to more complications, comprehensive approaches."

A few days ago I switched my Zune 30 (aka Zune Classic) over to a 8 gig iPod Touch. It’s awesome. Enough said.

Now… while we are on the subject of disapproval. We packed our little tribe off to Stumptown on 12th/Madison yesterday for a decent coffee and to restock our beans. The beans: awesome. The coffee: rat-shit. I don’t know who is doing training and/or quality control for Stumptown – but please do something about the baristas you had on duty yesterday. The espresso in my cappuccino was badly burned and my foam was sub-par for a Starbucks. That kind of crap would never pass muster at Vivace. I was tempted to take it back – but it was so bad I didn’t know where to begin: eg. “there isn’t any thing good about this coffee”.