Computer Interface
Computer Interface
Samir Kapadia
Chartered Accountant
Tech
update
While change is inevitable, keeping up with change is also a
challenge. This month I have chosen three hot topics (while there were many more
to choose from) I thought would interest you more than the others. The topics
are :
(1) Social networking
(2) 3G auction and rollout
(3) Microsoft launches Office 2010
Social media and networking — To be or not to be :
“To be or not to be — that is the question”. While many would
immediately recall these words quoted straight out of Shakespeare, some (movie
buffs like me) would think about Mel Brookes performing on the stage and
delivering his version of Shakespeare in the movie “To be or not to be”. The
scene where he repeats these words (over and over again) is one of my all-time-favourites.
No matter how many times I watch the movie, I keep coming back for more. But for
many netizens, this is a very peculiar question to ask when one is discussing
the merits and demerits of social media and networking tools.
While there is no doubt that social media and networking have
changed the very face of marketing, recently (particularly last month) social
media and networking have been at the receiving end. Popular sites like Facebook
and You tube faced a lot of flak, in some cases faced bans.
Facebook was in the media for all the wrong reasons last
month. Here are a few instances
-
Facebook faced public
lash-back and was banned in Pakistan and in Bangladesh over a controversy
related to a certain drawing. The fallout began in Karachi (Pakistan) where
people took to the streets protesting against the social networking site.
These protests culminated to a ban being imposed on the site. Bangladesh was
quick to follow suit. Needless to say that emotions ran high that week. In
fact six tech-savy Pakistanis following the furore launched a halal version of
the Facebook by the name Millatfacebook.com. The question that many are now
asking is — do we really need another Facebook and what’s next gender
seggregation ?
-
Facebook was also under
the spotlight on account of privacy concerns. Facebook’s growth as an Internet
social networking site has met criticism on a range of issues, especially the
privacy of their users, child safety, the use of advertising scripts, data
mining, and the inability to terminate accounts without first manually
deleting all the content. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had to
respond by saying that the Internet social network would roll out new privacy
settings for its more than 400 million users, amid growing concerns that the
company is pushing users to make more of their personal data public. A google
search on this issue gave some very interesting insights related to this
controversy.
-
May 30-31 went down in
history as the “quit Facebook day”. There has been a lot of angst amongst
users on account of the privacy issues, frequent changes in personal settings,
etc. While the response was hardly noteworthy (some 27000 people quit facebook),
it appears in India it passed almost unnoticed.
-
Limit on number of
friends. For many the lucky number is 7, for others the lucky number is 5000
(Yes, it is Facebook). In case you didn’t know, you cannot have more than 5000
Facebook friends. While there has been some amount of outcry against this
‘arbitrary’ limit, recent news reports suggest that the popular site is likely
to enforce the limit, much to the disappointment of its loyal followers.
To summarise, while social media continues to grow as a
popular medium, there are questions being raised regarding its unintended
consequences. Hence the question that begs to be answered — “To be or not to be
?”
3G auction and rollout plans :
The recently concluded auction for 3G spectrum has brought in
a lot of cheer for many parties —the winners of the auction, the Government (the
budget deficit may be more manageable) and the subscribers. There is a lot of
excitement about the rollout plans. Equipment manufacturers have already started
dolling out 3G-ready phones and the consumers are lapping the new models. The
noteworthy issues which need to be considered are :
-
In spite of the amounts
being so large, the entire licence fee was paid by the winners, in one
instalment. In fact none of the winners asked for an extension (that includes
MTNL and BSNL — however there are reports of BSNL asking for a refund). A lot
is at stake. One could say that it is a make-or-break scenario, especially for
the telcom service providers.
-
When one pays such high
licence fee, it is natural that the cost of the service is likely to be
impacted. There are concerns regarding the pricing strategy and how the
winners would recover these amounts. The pricing strategy is being watched
very closely. Unfortunately for the subscribers, it is likely to take at least
6-9 months before any of the winners launch the 3G service.
-
In the meanwhile
subscribers are going about upgrading their phones. As mentioned, equipment
manufacturers have already started dolling out 3G-ready phones. The price of
the new instruments ranges from (as low as) Rs.3500 to (as high as) Rs.35000.
Naturally, one needs to be aware about what is being offered. While these
phones may be 3G-ready, performance i.e., download speed, quality of the
content (picture, sound), battery life, memory can vary significantly. Hence
be careful, all that glitters may not be gold.
-
As expected (read my
columns for January-March 2010), the investments and developments in mobile
technology ecosystem have started gaining momentum. There are a lot of media
reports about tie-ups for content, new investment in R&D, etc.
There is a lot more action waiting to happen, just wait and
watch.
Microsoft launches Office 2010 :
While I have not been able to check the new offering myself, I did some digging. News reports on this product say the following :
Microsoft Office 2010, brings a set of important incremental improvements to the office suite. Among them : making the Ribbon the default interface for all Office applications, adding a host of new features to individual applications i.e., video editing in PowerPoint, improved mail handling in Outlook, introducing a number of Office-wide productivity enhancers, photo editing tools and a much-improved paste operation.
What is being touted as the most important change to Office in years — a Web-based version for both enterprises and consumers and access to Office for mobile phones and other mobile clients. Reportedly, Microsoft has also strengthened the links between Office and various Microsoft communication server products. Apparently, if you use Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 with Office 2010, you’ll be able to see the availability status of other people with whom you work and ways to contact them, such as e-mail and instant messaging. SharePoint is even more intimately tied to Office, and lets people collaborate on Office documents.
The Ribbon feature was introduced in Office 2007, but in Office 2010 a major change has been made to Office’s interface — it has replaced the old menus and submenus with a graphical system that groups buttons for common tasks together in tabs. But apparently, Microsoft didn’t go whole hog with it back then; Outlook, among other applications, was not given the full Ribbon treatment. In this version of Office, all applications now share the common Ribbon interface, including Outlook, OneNote and all other Office applications, and SharePoint. Love it or hate it, the Ribbon is here to stay.
Email/Outlook users are most likely be pleased with the new version of Outlook, which adds a variety of features designed to help solve the most common productivity problem — e-mail overload. One of the most useful new features is called Quick Steps, which speeds up mail handling considerably. Right-click on a message, and you can choose from a variety of actions to take on it — moving the mes-sage to a specific folder, forwarding it to your manager, setting up a team meeting with its recipients, sending e-mail to an entire team and so on. This new version of Outlook also tackles one of Outlook’s perennial problems
— how poorly it follows threads of messages. There’s a related feature that helps cut down on e-mail clutter — the ability to ‘clean up’ a conversation. When you do this, you delete all of the unnecessary quoted and previous text in long e-mail threads; only unduplicated versions remain. However, once you do that, all of the quoted and previous text and e-mails are actually deleted, not just hidden, so use this feature carefully. It would be more useful if you were given the option of hiding the text, not completely deleting it.
Not much new in Excel though! Excel hasn’t been touched as much as the other major applications in Office 2010, but its not a total loss, there have been some useful additions. The most important is called ‘Sparklines’ — small cell-sized charts that you can embed in a worksheet next to data to get a quick visual representation of the data. For example, if you had a worksheet that tracked the performance of several dozen stocks, you could create a Sparkline for each stock that graphed its performance over time, in a very compact way. Conditional formatting — the ability to apply a format to a range of cells, and then have the formatting change according to the value of the cell or formula — has been improved as well, including the addition of more styles and icons.
PowerPoint apparently has entered the video age. 2010 introduces a slew of enhanced video features, although in the Technical Preview not all were working properly. Key among the new features is a set of basic video editing tools built directly into PowerPoint. They’re not as powerful as full-blown video editing software, but work well for common tasks such as trimming and compressing videos and adding fade-ins and fade-outs. Highlight a video you’ve embedded in a presentation, and the tools appear in the Ribbon. Also useful is a set of video controls you can use during the presentation to pause, rewind, fast-forward and so on — something that the previous version of PowerPoint did not have.
I am hoping that I get an opportunity to test this new product soon.
