Windows was the Ford to the Apple Mac’s Mercedes.

SQL Server was the Chrysler to Oracle’s Jaguar.

With Surface though, we seem have a change of strategy from Microsoft. For the first time that I can see, they are chasing the premium business model of Apple, and seemingly leaving the middle ground for others to fight over.

Perhaps they think their hardware partners can do a good enough job of delivering mid-market Windows tablets.

I doubt it.

What I see is Android devices cleaning up in the low to mid-market (you can get 7” Android tablets for about £80 now) and Apple retaining and growing its premium position… Leaving Microsoft the crumbs of a declining middle-market.

Just like GM and Ford when Nissan and Toyota arrived on the scene.

As an ex-softie I have a lot of warm feelings towards Microsoft, but I think the next 10 years could be the hardest 10 years in their history.

With all the other launch activities last week – I didn’t get round to making the announcement here – so let’s put that right…

As a small business providing services to clients, you’ll no doubt have found people contacting you asking for ten or fifteen minutes of your time to give them your expert advice… for free.

At the same time there are a whole host of other people who are put off seeking the advice of professionals by the expectation of high fees and long contracts, often turning to internet forums for guidance instead.

What’s missing is a simple way for people to get expert advice from trusted professionals at a fair price.

Meet HonestyBoxx

HonestyBoxx helps start-ups, small businesses and individuals access affordable expertise from lawyers, accountants, consultants and other services professionals, and helps professionals from across the globe find new clients.

When a small business adds HonestyBoxx to their blog or website they’re telling visitors that they are happy to answer their questions in exchange for a fair fee. By providing an easy way to collect questions and payment from website visitors, HonestyBoxx instantly provides a new source of revenue and a stream of warm leads for larger pieces of work.

With HonestyBoxx the buyer asks their question and says how much they’d be happy to pay – just like the honesty box payment system you sometimes see at small stores. In exchange, professionals get to demonstrate their expertise and build trust so that when the buyer needs a larger piece of work, they’ll be the first people they think of.

HonestyBoxx CEO Linda Cheung said: “By helping buyers connect with professionals around the globe we’re changing the game for the little guy. Now small businesses, start-ups and individuals anywhere can get the expert advice they need to solve their problems and make informed decisions.

“And, by helping small businesses reach a new market for their expertise we’re providing them with a stream of warm leads and clients at a time when new business is at a premium.”

Duncan Johnson runs digital agency Yodelay. “I think the HonestyBoxx concept is pure genius.

“Small businesses can get instant access to expertise at a price they can afford and the experts are able to make their downtime profitable.

“The simple process of paying for quality information also helps small businesses to value the time of a consultant whilst not breaking their bank account.”

Linda added “The services sector has remained largely unchanged by ecommerce and the internet, but with the current economic climate we believe the time is right for change.

“Services firms have always won new business by demonstrating their expertise. These days the initial hook is provided by websites and blog posts. HonestyBoxx provides the next step so that experts can earn directly from their websites.”

More Information

Who is HonestyBoxx for?

HonestyBoxx is for anyone who provides expert advice or services to others. People like:

Lawyers Accountants Financial Advisors Marketing Agencies SEO Experts Social Media Consultants

Professional Coaches Advertising Experts Architects Business Consultants Interior Designers Doctors Dentists

Pharmacists IT Consultants Vets Photographers Wedding Planners Beauticians Careers Advisors

And many, many more.

How does HonestyBoxx Work?

We give you a small snippet of code that you can paste into your blog or website. If your website runs on WordPress we have a WordPress plugin too. The HonestyBoxx widget then appears on your website allowing visitors to ask questions and make payments.

More info: http://honestyboxx.com/how-honestyboxx-works/

What does HonestyBoxx Look Like?

We provide two different styles of widget: inline and fly-out. View a live demo of either of the two available widget styles: http://honestyboxx.com/widget/

How much does HonestyBoxx cost?

HonestyBoxx is free to join and set-up. For each answer accepted, we take a small fee of between 12% and 30% of the question value.

Who’s Behind HonestyBoxx?

HonestyBoxx was developed by the team behind the award-winning social CRM, CubeSocial.

Still Got Questions?

Try the FAQ.

Enabling developers to target all mobile OSs with a single code base is great for developers but terrible for platform owners. First off you lose any competitive advantage from having the best apps, and even more importantly in the mobile world, Apple and Google forfeit the 30% tax they charge on App Store / Google Play sales.

Of course we have been here before. Back around 2002 Microsoft was using anti-competitive practices to kill off competing browsers with the aim of ensuring all the best apps remained only on the Windows platform. Ultimately that didn’t work of course. The regulators got involved and developers built for the browser and W3C standards anyway.

Ultimately the same will happen on the mobile platforms I’m sure. Interesting now though is that the tables have been turned. Microsoft is the minnow with lots to gain by disrupting the established players. It’ll be fun watching this one play out.

We’ve just heard… CubeSocial is one of 20 tech start-ups selected for Seedcamp London! The event takes place next Thursday 11 August.

During the event, we get five minutes to showcase our business to a range of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, accountants and other experts, followed by an afternoon of expert mentoring and coaching.

Becoming a Seedcamp London finalist is great recognition for everyone involved here at CubeSocial and follows on from last month’s listing as a Company to Watch in the Thames Valley 250. We hope the day itself brings us more good news.

Wish us luck!

Yesterday Linda and I were guests at an excellent Thames Valley Innovation and Growth (TVIG) event “Building for the Valley”.

The session was delivered by Nick Halstead, CEO and founder of TweetMeme.

As a TVIG-sponsored start-up ourselves, we were fascinated to hear the story of Tweetmeme’s growth from being one of the first TVIG start-ups “when it was just Nick and his heavily pregnant wife in a cupboard” (!!) to a globally known brand, with 15 staff, handling more web hits than the BBC.

It was a story of rapid growth on a bootstrapping budget, and an inspiration for all budding entrepreneurs. Here are some of the takeaways:

On Networking

Don’t go to a networking event unless you can get a list of attendees beforehand. When you get the list, run it through LinkedIn and choose your ‘targets’ deliberately. Time is too valuable. Don’t leave networking to chance meetings. Have a maximum of one beer all evening: this is about business not partying.

On Marketing and PR

Become a reference point for your industry. Bootstrap your PR.

When Nick started Tweetmeme he blogged every night, then nagged friends and other bloggers to read his posts: “we have never paid a PR agency”. Nick explained that it helps to have a consumer focussed element to your portfolio because these tend to get more press.

Blogging means that you get to lead the conversation; the traffic you get translates into customers; you become a reference for news stories; and you get asked to speak at events.

On Public Speaking

Public speaking = free PR, but don’t be tempted you use it to advertise your product. Instead give useful information. (Don’t sell, educate). Build your reputation and integrity, and the (interested) attendees will become customers over time. A side benefit of public speaking is that you are more prepared and confident when you have to pitch to investors.

On Recruitment

Avoid recruitment agencies. Hire straight from university; only “bedroom coders”; pay them in options – “they must believe in the dream”.

On Investment

Getting investment has the biggest learning curve. It takes up 90% of your time. Keep the deal simple – complex terms tend to drive the wrong behaviours in leadership team: “with hindsight we would have given more away for simpler terms”.

Not quite believing I went back to check pricing. And sure enough it’s true. In fact it is probably an even higher ratio as you have to buy SQL Azure in chunks of 1,5,10,20 GB etc.

If you have 15Gb of data in SQL Azure you need a 20Gb database @ ~$200/month.

15 Gb of data in Table Storage = 15 * $0.15 = $2.25 / month.

That would make SQL Azure around 89x as expensive as Table Storage.

Wow.

That’s not quite the full story though. In Table Storage the idea is that you would often not normalise your data. Data is likely to be stored multiple times in the store. And additionally there are transactional costs associated with Table Storage ($0.01 per 10,000) transactions.  These both make estimating cost more tricky.

As a guestimate starting point, let’s say I need to store each data item 3 times in Table Storage, meaning that 15Gb of normalised data gives me a requirement of 45Gb Table Storage. If my system has 1000 users each performing 10,000 transactions / month, then my total Table Storage costs would be:

(45 * $0.15) + (1000 * $0.01) = $16.75 / month

That’s about a 12x ratio (and is based on a lot of assumption too).

There’s probably a need for a simple spreadsheet to help look at the trade-offs here, but as a rule of thumb the pricing model from Microsoft is giving us some strong guidance: Windows Azure architects should look to put data in Windows Azure Storage first and SQL Azure conservatively.

The two scenarios I see when I would prefer SQL Azure over Table Storage are:

• When I need SQL Transactions – ie. the ability to group together a bunch of database actions and commit them as a single atomic unit. There’s no concept of this type of transaction in Table Storage.
• When I need reporting – especially enabling end-users to design their own queries and reports. In this case I don’t know how the user will want to query the data at design time and will need to rely on SQL Servers ability to query across tables to enable this.

Lots has been written about the impact of PaaS and IaaS services like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure on software architecture.  I’ve seen plenty of commentary arguing that architects need to change the way they design systems to consider the platform billing model and on-going costs.

But is that really a change? In my opinion, it’s no different to what we architects have always done – only in the past the cost considerations were different. It was about numbers of servers, software licences, software versions etc.

I believe the cloud computing model changes our approach in a much more fundamental way.

I see the shift that is happening right now as the modern equivalent of what happened when Windows went from 16-bit to 32-bit.

Freed from the memory limitations of 16-bit computing we all stopped optimizing our Windows code, as there were simply so many system resources available to play with… it was effectively limitless.

Cloud computing platforms bring the same philosophical shift to web applications.

Yes, I could spend time architecting for the billing model. I could spend money getting programmers to performance tune their code to reduce billing charges. But that doesn’t mean I should.

Let me ask you this: Why spend 50$ an hour on getting a programmer to tune their code, when instead I can pay Microsoft or Amazon another $50 a month and throw another web front end at the problem. Then, instead I can have my developers doing something much more useful to the business: adding new product features more quickly than the competition so that I can sell more and make more revenue.

And that is the true economics of cloud computing.

First off, I wanted to make my life as simple as possible and start with a base Windows 2008 build, rather than create my own from scratch.  Here’s how to speed along that process.

First, download the Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Trial VHD from the Microsoft Download site

Expand the downloaded files, then open the Command Prompt. Be sure to Run as Administrator though!

Now execute these commands:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Boot_From_VHD”

Copy the CSLID that is displayed, and then use that CLSID as you run each of the following commands:

bcdedit /set {CLSID} device vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} osdevice vhd=[C:]\vhdname.vhd

bcdedit /set {CLSID} detecthal on

You should replace [C:]\vhdname.vhd with the path and name of your extracted VHD.

Once that is complete reboot and you will have the option to “Boot_From_VHD”!  You can verify the bootloader is configured correctly with the bcdedit command which will list all the boot options.  If you want to delete the entry make note of the GUID listed in bcdedit and use the following command…

bcdedit /delete {GUID} /cleanup

At this point you may find (as I did) that when you boot your VHD it bluescreens. This can often be because the maximum size of the VHD was configured to be larger than the free space available on the physical hard drive.

In Windows 7 you can mount the VHD as a volume in Computer Management, and shrink the volume (thanks http://radicaldevelopment.net/index.php/2009/11/20/create-virtual-hard-disk-vhd-windows-7/)

To do this, open Computer Management from Administrative Tools. Click Disk Management in the nav pane. Then, on the Action menu click Attach VHD. Right-click the volume you want to shrink and click Shrink Volume.

But that just decreases the size of the volume as seen by the guest OS. It doesn’t decrease the amount of physical disk space the VHD attempts to reserve when you boot it.  That’s the next step…

Download and install VHD Resizer from vmtoolkit.com and shrink the VHD to a suitable maximum size for your physical disk. I chose 25Gb.

Now reboot your PC into your Windows 2008 virtual machine and simply install SharePoint 2010.  I recommend using Joe Li’s SharePoint 2010 installation FAQ as a guide.

Happy SharePointing!

If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, you should install 64-bit Office, right?

WRONG!

Official advice from Microsoft is to use the 32-bit version unless you specifically need to make use of some of the capabilities only available in the x64 version such as Excel 2010’s support for larger data sets.

The problem is that Office 2010 x64 introduces breaking changes that mean 32-bit add-ins may not work in 64-bit Office. For a complete discussion see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691831(office.14).aspx