Users complain new Gmail version slow, crashes browsers

A major upgrade to Gmail is getting the thumbs down from users who complain that the new version is extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers.
People have flooded discussion forums with complaints since Google began "upgrading" users about two weeks ago to the new version, popularly referred to in the blogosphere as Gmail 2.0.

Ironically, Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager, is designed to be faster and more stable. Gmail 2.0 is based on what a Google spokesman calls "a major structural code change" upon which new features will be launched in coming months.

"Most users should see a marked improvement in performance. We recommend using IE7 and Firefox 2 to take full advantage of Gmail's speedier interface," said spokesman Jason Freidenfelds via e-mail.

Asked about the problems users are reporting, Freidenfelds didn't address the complaints specifically but said that Google appreciates the feedback it's getting. "The new code underlying Gmail should allow us to roll out performance improvements more frequently," he said.

Users interviewed via e-mail for this article report a variety of performance problems with Gmail 2.0.

The most common complaint is that it is generally very slow, with delays of a minute or more when attempting to display the inbox upon logging on, to record keystrokes when typing text and to respond to mouse clicks. Often the tasks time out. Others report that Gmail 2.0 repeatedly crashes or freezes their browsers, in particular Firefox.

If these users switch to the "old" Gmail version, the problems go away. However, these users say they have to switch manually every time they log on, because Gmail 2.0 automatically became their default version once they got upgraded to it.

When Google upgraded his account last week, Jim Sellers, a software programmer based in Ottawa, Canada, was eager to try Gmail 2.0's improved contacts manager, but his Firefox 2.0 browser kept crashing both on Windows 2000 and Mac OS X 10.4.

"These problems were very disruptive. I spend at least 25 percent of my day using my browser as one of my main working tools. To have it crash like that made the new version of Gmail a non-option," said Sellers, an otherwise satisfied Gmail user since June 2004.

As a workaround, Sellers has bookmarked the URL for the "old" Gmail version. However, others expressed worry that Google at some point will phase out access to the "old" Gmail without having fully resolved problems.

Some users interviewed also complained that Google didn't notify them that they would be moved to Gmail 2.0, or give them an option to decline the upgrade.

Others, on the other hand, trust Google will soon solve the issues. That's the case of Jack Freeman, a retiree in Oklahoma who, for lack of broadband options in his area, has learned to live with, and make the best of, his relatively slow dial-up connection.

For example, he enjoys posting answers in Google discussion forums, and in recent days has been addressing a lot of questions about the slowness of Gmail 2.0. Freeman's solution to the delays has been to toggle between the two versions of the service. "It is still my favorite e-mail program," Freeman said.

Google is moving people progressively to Gmail 2.0, so some users have it and others don't.

Google didn't immediately reply to a series of follow-up questions, so it's not clear what percentage of people have access to the new version and how many are experiencing problems with it. It's also unclear when Google expects to have everyone on the new version and when the performance problems will be solved.

What's clear is that the problems have unleashed a storm of complaints. A search, sorted by date, for "Gmail slow" in the Gmail Help Discussion forum returns about 35 pages of results related to problems with Gmail 2.0.

Windows Live For Your Domain

Microsoft has quietly launched a competitor to Google Apps for your domain, Windows Live Community Builder.

The service offers customized versions of the Windows Live suite, including email, photo service, messenger, writer, livedrive and more for businesses or non for profit organizations ” looking to achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community.”

The service includes company specific domain support with the ability to register a domain name via supported partners included in registration.

The service was first written about by one of Microsoft Australia’s evangelist team Harvey Sanchez here and does not seem to have been announced elsewhere. Sanchez does note that this is a soft launch so perhaps we’ll see more on the service shortly.

With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organisations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customised, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft.

No details as to whether the service is paid or free, but given I couldn’t find any payment details I’m presuming free, at least for the base service.

Microsoft's Bill Hilf Reveals Its Open Source Strategy

The man in charge of Microsoft's strategy for living in harmony with Linux lays out the company's opportunities with open source and the open source business model.

InformationWeek recently interviewed Bill Hilf, Microsoft's leading light on open source issues. Since coming to Microsoft from IBM in 2003, Hilf has been inextricably involved with Microsoft's strategy for dealing with Linux. He's recently been appointed general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy, which means he's taking on an expanded role, but open source is still one of his core issues.

Bill Hilf

InformationWeek: How is Microsoft's strategy toward open source and viewpoint about open source shifting?

Hilf: Years ago, Microsoft had a very specific interpretation of what open source is. Open source and Linux were sort of synonymous and it was sort of a specter-like ghost. A lot of what I've done over the past four years is help to parse out two issues: Where do we cooperate and where's the value for our company in participating, and where specifically do we compete head-to-head and make sure there's no grayness around that?

We compete specifically with things like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The software that goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we may or may not compete with at a feature level, but the real value of open source from Microsoft is understanding how community developed software can happen on our platform and help grow our business as well as the open source community, which is how we started off on this whole path of launching things like Port25 and CodePlex, and which is why I submitted the licenses to the OSI.

InformationWeek: Are there any specific areas where you would see Microsoft placing things in an open source development environment as a way to further its own products or to better interoperate with things?

Hilf: When people buy commercial software, really what they're buying is a guarantee. You're buying a guarantee that what you have will perform, and has been tested and there's someone you can call up, and if things go really bad someone's liable if something doesn't work. You're buying this ecosystem of accountability. One of the challenges of open source and really the challenge with the open source business model is: it's hard to replicate that ecosystem of accountability and that guarantee.

The first question that I ask, because I'm deeply involved with that decision chain is, what does this do to help or hinder that ecosystem of accountability, the testing model, the support model, the backstop? That has to be a counterbalance to any value that we might get out of a community software development model, and those are decisions that we kind of walk through.

Red Hat's been really the only proof that somebody can provide an overlay support service, and even then, I don't know that it's even that significant of a proof. The community itself is the value of open source, not any one vendor who's participating in it. I think a lot of people get lost in the software, the source code part of it. What we've been doing strategically is try to figure out how do we participate in that community as a good citizen so that we're in that sort of same value chain. We did the same thing at IBM. There's lots of participation of IBM in open source, but there's very little shared source code between IBM's shipping products and open source software.

InformationWeek: In order to participate in communities like that, how do you cut through the muddle of the Richard Stallmans of the world and overcome the popular resistance, and also cut through the resistance that you've gotten from people like Red Hat who you might want to partner with?

Hilf: We just had a bunch of our global account managers in with us, people who handle our super big customers, and they said, these customers don't even know who Richard Stallman is, they don't even care. They've chosen Linux or Apache or open source in general because of a few simple reasons: either price, or functionality, they want a more modular system or they want something that has a smaller footprint, there are certain needs that they have that are satisfied by that type of software. Turning to the product that we're releasing, we said what do people really like about Linux servers, what do they really like about Unix servers? They like having a modular system that has a small footprint. They like having a great command line environment that allows a power user to do a lot of scripting and command line things that are not UI-based. That's what we built [Windows Server 2008] with Server Core and PowerShell and new technologies that support PHP better in IIS 7 [Internet Information Services]. For us, it's not a religion, there's literally feature requests from customers showing up in some of our competitive products, we said great, people want this stuff.

InformationWeek: Why not, say, broadly, well, let's do an interoperability agreement with the Linux community in general rather than saying, here's a deal with Xandros, here's a deal with Novell, etcetera?

Hilf: Customers are using distributions of Linux, because Linux the kernel is literally just a kernel and no one runs just a kernel, so they buy or are using distributions. That's why when we do these partnerships we want to use, we want to partner with the people who are distributing the product that customers use, the closest point of attachment to what the customer's using.

InformationWeek: Do you guys talk to the guys who are working on Samba at all?

Hilf: Yeah, I mean, I've known [Samba creator] Tridge [Andrew Tridgell] and [top Samba contributor] Jeremy Allison for many years and we have been and continue to be in active conversations with them on lots of things.

InformationWeek: But you haven't done anything deeply, you're not going to announce anything, partnerships, etcetera, at least publicly, right now?

Hilf: Not publicly right now. We're certainly, from all the activities in the EU, we've been -- they're obviously a principle project in open source related to interoperability, if not the premier open source interoperability project. So we've been talking very, very actively with them about what to do and how to do it, and things to improve things, and we're not announcing things, but I'll just say there's very, very positive conversations going on right now from both sides, and I think Jeremy would attest to that. We're still working through some issues, but it's in a very positive light.

InformationWeek: Anything closer, have you been talking to Red Hat any further?

Hilf: I'm not aware of anything that we're -- I mean, we still touch base with them every now and then, but I don't think there's anything specific that we've done. InformationWeek: I'm curious as to where do these patent claims come from? Microsoft has said there's X numbers of patents that Linux may infringe. Where does that intellectual property come from? Is it based on ownership of Xenix back in the day, is it based on things that are currently in Windows?

Hilf: We published a patent map, which shows, literally, we listed out every number and we listed out every category it fits in and we published that so everyone can see it, because everybody kept asking us, well, what are the patents? (Note: a Microsoft spokesman later clarified Hilf was referring to a categorized tally of possibly infringed patents published earlier this year in a Fortune article, not a detailed list of every specific patent, which Microsoft declined to provide to InformationWeek.)

Classically, our preferred plan is to license our technology in a very proactive and productive way versus litigate. So what we try to do is say in a very, very nice way, there's a model here that allows us to be essentially paid some degree for our inventions in a way that says at least for all the money we invest, the $7 billion every year in research, there's a way to see some return on that if someone's using our technology.

Right now what we've been trying to establish with one to another from Novell to Linspire to Xandros, Turbolinux, a way to license technology so that's both cost effective and makes sense for us so we're protecting inventions that we have and move forward. It allows us to move forward and take that issue off the plate, versus have a rat hole of litigation nightmares and lawsuits.

InformationWeek: There are companies or organizations you've reached out to and they say no, we wouldn't like to do anything. If you talk about infringement there, but if you don't do anything, isn't that weakening your claim to hold valid patents?

Hilf: Would or could we ever litigate, yeah, sure, it's always an option. But it's the last option in the decision tree for us. Would we have to enforce it? Possibly yes.

The key to that is to separate, people's, individuals' and groups' belief about software patents as an issue and then what is the current way that we do patent law in at least the United States. You may disagree with it, but there's a law for how we deal with patents. They often get wrapped up together as the same issue, but they're not the same.

As a company, we're hyperactively involved with patent reform and trying to find models that work best for the industry. But it is key, as you have these conversations, particularly with the open source community, keep in the back of your mind, what is the current model for doing business, right, wrong or indifferent, and then what is the opinion about software patents as an issue.

courtesy @informationweek.com

Is the U.S. losing its role as the world leader in information technology?

Issue: U.S. as IT leader

The United States is the birthplace of both the personal computer and the Internet. It has written the rules for using business technology to deliver staggering increases in worker productivity. It has given the world major innovations in the microprocessors that power computing and electronics devices of all sizes and functions.

The U.S. has quite simply served as the undisputed leader and catalyst of the global IT industry for the past 40 years. Yet the landscape has changed rapidly over the past decade, and especially in the past five years, as the U.S. is now facing challenges across the board from nimble innovators in Europe and Asia.

In the past several months, many journalists and commentators in the U.S. have made bold assertions and dire predictions about America’s decline as a force in technology. Below is a list of some of the more prominent (and most dire) reports, including links and some quotes that provide a brief synopsis of each one.

US Losing Its IT Chops (TechNewsWorld)

“The United States has fallen to seventh place among 122 economies in its network readiness, or ability to leverage the opportunities of IT, according to a report … by the World Economic Forum [sponsored by Cisco]. Denmark supplanted the U.S. at the top of the list thanks in part to its regulatory environment, government leadership and vision in leveraging IT for growth.”

“I’m surprised we were in the No. 1 spot in 2006,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray. “The fact is, as much as we don’t like to admit it, we are not the leading edge of Internet and wireless technologies. Part of the reason has to do with our economy and lack of government support; it’s also a byproduct of the extremely competitive market.”

U.S. Technology Deployment Leadership Threatened by Emerging Economies (Info-Tech)

“The world’s emerging economies are narrowing the technology deployment gap with the U.S. and other developed countries, says a new global study conducted by Info-Tech Research Group and KnowledgeStorm. While the U.S. is still the global leader in the implementation of technology-enabled business solutions, adoption of these systems by enterprises within regions such as India, Africa, Asia and Latin America is growing due to confidence in the ability of technology to transform business…

“Emerging economies can play catch-up quickly because of the ability of these countries to adopt the latest versions of technology that’s already been tried, tested and improved in established economies. From an Information Technology (IT) solutions perspective, India has already joined the ranks of established economies because of the willingness of its IT managers to embrace sophisticated solutions.”

Study: US Lags Behind in Broadband Speeds (PC World)

“The U.S. is lagging behind other industrialized nations in the availability and use of high-speed broadband connections, according to a report [by] Washington-based Communications Workers of America… According to the report, the U.S. is 16th in the world in deployment and availability of high-speed networks…

“The U.S. [also] lags behind other nations when it comes to cost of broadband access… Speeds of 50Mbit/sec., which is not available to residential consumers in [the U.S.], is available to Japanese consumers for roughly US$30 per month. U.S. consumers typically pay $20 for about 1Mbit/sec. service and $30 to $40 for about 4Mbit/sec. service.”

Perspective: America’s tech moment of truth (CNET)

“In the past few years, other nations have caught up with, and in many ways surpassed, the United States in reaching important milestones, and the future is probably going to get worse… A decade or so ago, roughly 35 percent of the investments in leading-edge chip technologies were made in the United States. In the last five years, only about 10 percent to 12 percent of those investments landed stateside… Many of these overseas investments are made by U.S. corporations.”

Turning Our Backs on Tech: Corporate America has to make IT jobs sexy again (Fortune)

“In the global battle for infotech supremacy, is America surrendering? Recent evidence suggests that the U.S. is at least thinking about giving up. I’m talking not just about America’s ability to produce the fastest chip or most popular software but also about something potentially even more serious: the ability of all businesses to be world-class users of information technology…

“The more worrisome problem is what’s happening with the kids. Moving herdlike, as usual, they’ve decided that IT is excruciatingly uncool. Of course it was the coolest thing on the planet just seven years ago, when interest in computer science as an undergraduate major hit a 20-year high. But then a lot of things happened. The dot-com boom went bust at just the time companies stopped hiring staff to fix Y2K problems. More important, the pop culture image of infotech workers flipped from dot-com billionaires in Gulfstreams to Dilbertesque drones writing code in cubicles and Third World masses working for pennies an hour.”

Sanity check

After reading those articles, it’s easy to get pessimistic about the current state of IT in the U.S., but I would caution against concluding that the U.S. is doomed to tech mediocrity for the following four reasons:

1.) The U.S. is at a tactical disadvantage at the moment — Since many of today’s latest technologies (in virtually every field) are simpler to use and implement, have more features, and are much cheaper than their predecessors, international upstarts have a big advantage right out of the gates when they establish their internal IT infrastructure. These upstarts get to build their infrastructure from scratch, unlike many of their U.S. rivals, which don’t have the luxury of a clean slate but have to face the difficulties of data migration and staff retraining when upgrading or migrating to the latest technologies. That means new rivals have the advantages of new technologies. However, this advantage will even out and disappear over time as the upstarts become entrenched in their current systems. The irony is that the technology itself — much of it created by U.S. companies and often including major innovations in recent years — can be one of the major factors that allows startups to quickly make up ground on incumbents.

2.) This was bound to happen as IT helped accelerate globalization — One of the most significant changes that has come with the rapid advancement of computers and networks has been the world-changing developments in communications technology. Just think of it … you can now make a good-quality Skype video call from the U.S. to China and be connected for over an hour, and it’s free! These changes have connected people more quickly and cohesively than ever before, have spread new ideas and developments across the planet, and have driven the powerful forces of economic globalization. With all of these forces at work, it was only a matter of time before more people from new parts of the globe got involved in the technology sector and helped drive it forward in new directions.

3.) Silicon Valley is still the epicenter of the technology world — Clearly, not all of the best ideas in technology are hatched from that overpriced stretch of real estate from San Jose to San Francisco, California. Companies such as Vidoop (in Tulsa, Oklahoma) and Zoho (with its product teams in India) have proven that. Nevertheless, there are still more new and innovative tech ideas concentrated in Silicon Valley than anywhere else on earth. And with Google, Intel, Yahoo, Apple, and so many other tech giants anchored in Silicon Valley, nothing is going to change that fact anytime soon. More of the greatest innovations in technology are coming out of the U.S. than anywhere else.

4.) The sleeping giant hasn’t woken up yet — The U.S. can never go back to having the kind of unparalleled tech leadership position that it enjoyed a decade ago. That genie will never go back in the bottle. There are simply too many players involved now and too much competition. However, the sleeping giant does need to wake up and acknowledge that it is under attack from various competitors. Many of the problems that the IT industry faces in the U.S are due to complacency, and that’s fixable. The U.S. tech industry must shake off that complacency and work toward creating a better regulatory atmosphere for tech companies to flourish here (with help from the U.S. government, of course), a better approach to reigniting interest in tech education, and a better sense of the areas where the competition is winning and where there are still opportunities for U.S. companies and workers to take the lead in today’s multinational IT industry.

Microsoft’s Plan to Be King of All Media

J Allard: Microsoft’s Plan to Be King of All Media

J Allard of Microsoft. Photo: John Froschauer/Associated Press

In November 1994, I had breakfast with Nathan Myhrvold, then the chief technology officer of Microsoft. He talked about how the soon-to-be-introduced MSN online service would best America Online. Central to his thinking was that MSN would give publishers a higher percentage of the per-minute fee for using the service. This would draw more content and thus more users to Microsoft and allow it to earn a smaller fee on a larger block of minutes.

This strategy was misguided for so many reasons. Most notably, the open standard of the Internet allowed publishers to reach out directly to users, without MSN or AOL as the tollbooth.

That conversation jumped into my head as I talked earlier this week with J Allard, a key force behind the Xbox who is now driving the Zune music player business (and, he said several times, a few other secret product efforts).

We talked about the Zune and Microsoft’s approach to cellphones, about which I’ll post shortly. The most significant thing he talked about was the way the company is building an online service that will be the back end for all sorts of communication and entertainment. Xbox Live, the rather successful online aspect of Microsoft’s video game franchise, uses the same back end as the far less successful online service for Zune. Indeed, users get one account for both.

This service will at some point add more options for video and mobile phones, Mr. Allard said, without offering details. Actually, Microsoft has been quite successful selling video downloads and online movie rentals through the Xbox Live service already.

This seems a bit too much like the initial plan for MSN. This new network would be the switchboard through which all entertainment content and communication flows.

Pretty much everything else in the technology world now is revolving around open systems where the Internet, and some simple standards, are in the middle. The biggest and most interesting exception is Apple’s iTunes, which has a shot at extending its central role in music to video and mobile applications. (I think the odds are against it, but I’m not sure.) But how does it make sense to compete with a market-leading closed system, and the enormous momentum of open systems, with a proposal for a monumental everything-is-better-if-it-goes-through-Microsoft megaservice?

Here is what Mr. Allard said about these plans.

Even though the Zune and Xbox product brands are separate, they are ultimately meant to connect to the same central network.

The Zune guys have to run really fast. The Windows Mobile guys are on a two-year release cycle. The Xbox team now needs to focus on cost reduction, distribution and quality process. Everyone is on their own cadence. The one thing that transcends all this is the network as the nexus.

If you are in an MP3 aisle, we want to be the connected MP3 player. That’s mainly connecting artist and audience together, mostly around the culture of music. Yes, we’ll do video. Yes, we’ll do games. But the heart and soul of that brand is music.

Xbox is the most connected game experience. When you go down the gaming aisle, you’ll see we can do things others can’t do. We keep hitting on the idea of connections.

The online services for Xbox, Zune and future products will merge.

Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.

Video will be a key part of this service.

What I want to do at E&D [the entertainment and devices division] is build an entertainment service that can connect, that has a screen and buttons and a speaker, so you can watch what you want, where you want, how you want.

Maybe the business model for you is rental. God bless you. Maybe you want to download and own it. Maybe you are a physical goods guy. You want to prove you have physical goods, and watch on the seatback while you fly to New York. Say you like the phone. Maybe you are a commuter, and what you are all about is ESPN. I’ll give you ESPN your way. You like Formula One, downhill mountain biking and ice hockey, I will show you a SportsCenter designed for you.

Content providers like ESPN, in this vision, will need Microsoft to handle the technical details and marketing of selling their products.

We go in as a platform company and say to ESPN that we can offer preference information so you can curate programs in a way that has never been done before. And you don’t have to worry about multiple formats; we do it all for you on the back end. And you can reach all these eyeballs without lifting a finger.

courtesy @blogs.nytimes.com

Symantec's Top 10 Internet Security Trends

With the end of 2007 approaching, security companies are looking ahead to 2008. McAfee planned to release its predictions about upcoming risk trends on Friday and Symantec has sent members of the media its assessment of the year to date and of the computer security perils people will be dealing with next year.

Topping Symantec's list of 2007 security trends is data breaches. Given that Symantec said earlier this month that it has agreed to purchase data-leak prevention company Vontu for $350 million, this isn't entirely surprising. Symantec is making a significant bet that there's money to be made plugging holes in corporate firewalls, as are competitors like Cisco, Trend Micro, and Websense, all of which have made similar acquisitions.

It's not hard to understand why: According to a 2006 study by the Ponemon Institute, data breaches cost an average of $4.7 million per incident and are predicted to cost even more in the future. That's not the sort of outlay any IT pro wants to own.

"Data breaches are indicative of an underlying trend: a movement away from hobbyist attacks... to targeted financially motivated attacks," said Amrit Williams, CTO of enterprise security company BigFix and a former IT security analyst for Gartner. "When you have a motivation that's driven by financial gain, the goal is to be quiet. You don't want to be seen. What the attackers are after is not to bring systems down. They're after the information itself."

Symantec's number two security trend for 2007 is Windows Vista, which has seen 16 security patches since its introduction. Both Symantec and McAfee foresee more attention being paid to Vista by malware writers as Vista adoption continues.

Third on Symantec's list is spam, which reached record levels in 2007, according to the company. That may seem improbable given the vast sea of spam in which we've been swimming for the past few years, but spammers' fortunes are buoyed by their ever-rising tide of unwanted messages. Thus, we now have to contend with spam in new bulky flavors -- image spam, PDF spam, MP3 spam, and greeting card spam -- that strains server resources even further.

A tasty irony: Offline, the mafia has long been involved with garbage collection; online, the cyber mafia is in the business of garbage generation and it's the security industry that makes a killing cleaning up.

And, as Williams and others have said, it is a business. Symantec claims that a member of the Fujacks cybercrime gang once boasted, "This is a better money-making industry than real estate."

To sustain that business and improve margins, cybercriminals are creating professional attack kits. That's the fourth-ranked trend on Symantec's list. "Forty-two percent of phishing Web sites observed in the first half of the year were associated with three phishing toolkits," according to Symantec. Kits like WebAttacker and MPack make malicious expertise available globally in an instant, with the only requirements being a download, some IT savvy, and contempt for the law. Keeping with the professionalization of cybercrime are the fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-ranked security trends of 2007: phishing, exploitation of trusted brands, and bots, respectively. Phishing sites rose 18% in the first half of the year, according to Symantec, and the bots conquered Estonia in May, albeit briefly.

The eighth-ranked trend of 2007, as Symantec sees it, is Web plug-in vulnerabilities.

Number nine gets back to the professionalization of cybercrime: The creation of a market for security vulnerabilities. WabiSabiLabi aspires to be an informational eBay for legitimate buyers to obtain information about security flaws that isn't yet public knowledge. If the market works, and it appears to be doing so, companies may discover that the cost of security is more than they expected.

Finally, the last item on Symantec's list is virtual machine security. Virtualization is all the rage, because of perceived benefits in terms of cost and flexibility of management. Security is in there too, but there's some debate about whether virtualization creates security problems, too. Symantec expects malware writers will give the skeptics some ammunition as they find ways into virtualized systems.

Looking ahead, Symantec sees storm clouds, which proves convenient for a company that sells umbrellas, so to speak. It expects election season social engineering to victimize computer users in 2008. It foresees increasingly sophisticated bots that can host phishing sites on the compromised computers of unwitting consumers -- have fun explaining that to the FBI when they seize your PC.

Web-based threats will continue, Symantec expects, particularly as browsers become more uniform in the way they respond to scripting languages like JavaScript. And cross-site scripting exploits work, so malware writers can be counted on to continue making use of them.

As mobile phones, particularly smartphones with complex operating systems, continue to become more popular, Symantec sees hacker interest following. What luck that security companies are already offering mobile security software.

And like McAfee, Symantec expects attacks on virtual worlds to rise. There's already a thriving market for virtual goods and it's probably a safe bet that the FBI won't send agents to recover your stolen gold or Axe of the Gronn Lords.

Such threats won't be fixed by products, Williams insisted. He expects that the IT security story of 2008 will be the convergence of security and systems management. "It's too costly, difficult, and challenging to maintain separate infrastructures," he said.

Happy New Year! Better make that Busy New Year.

Forget What You Learned in Grade School: Five Teamwork Myths

Since we were all knee-high to a whiteboard, we’ve been told that we need to work well as part of a team, that the team trumps the individual, that every leader is only as good as his team. Team team team team team. Who didn’t ride the pine in Little League so everyone could get a few minutes of playing time?

But now that we’re adults, cynics — many of us full-blown skeptics — can we really believe that this idea of team is the holy grail of productivity and success? Anyone whose days are spent trying to squeeze in work between all of their meetings can tell you that team unity can sometimes be counterproductive. And it seems that the only people who get anything out of you and your officemates catching a backward-falling coworker is the consulting company that charged $5,000 to show you how to do it.

So just as we adults have learned that you can, in fact, drink too much milk or water, we also must question the grade-school wisdom we’ve always assumed to be true about teamwork.

Top Five Myths of Teamwork

1. Teams are always good. Managers confronted with a new task should always consider whether pulling together a team will be the most efficient way to complete the task. Sometimes it’s faster and less complicated to parcel it out or delegate it to one or two people, especially if the task is fairly routine.
2. Teams should come to a consensus. Time spent trying to reach consensus on decisions could be better spent acting on the decisions, as Jon Katzenbach discusses in his book “Teams at the Top.” More often than not, the team members who possess the knowledge to make an informed decision should do so individually.
3. There’s no “I” in team. This old chestnut gets trotted out anytime a manager doesn’t want to consider the needs of individuals within the team. But keeping the individual members of the team happy, invested in the task, and excited about their job is the only way a team can be effective. They need to know you have their long-term development in mind too, not just the goals of the team.
4. You must get along with your teammates. Rodney King’s famous rhetorical question (”Why can’t we all just get along?”) was just that. Sometimes your team members’ personalities just don’t mesh, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Conflict actually helps a team stay innovative. Your team members need to respect each other and their respective roles, and follow the team’s general code of behavior; they don’t have to go out for pints or stand as godparent for each other’s kids.
5. The more the merrier. Though it seems like adding another pair of eyes, ears, and typing hands to a project is always a positive, teams lose some of their effectiveness when they expand past 12 to 15 members. The larger a team gets, the harder it is to keep members invested, informed, on task, and on the same page.

Don't give up on team morale problems

Takeaway: Project managers should keep their eyes open for morale problems and look for ways to turn things around. Here are some suggestions.

Have you been the project manager for a team that had poor morale? I'm not referring to one malcontent. I'm talking about a team that has a pervasive morale problem. You may see symptoms of poor morale in the way team members respond to you, their lack of enthusiasm, or if they get angry at small matters, etc. The thing about poor morale is that people don't like to keep it to themselves. If one team member has poor morale, he wants to spread that fact so that others will come over to his side. As they say, "Misery loves company."

Morale problems don't happen overnight, and they can't be resolved overnight. Sometimes the morale problems are caused by the project itself. Other times the causes are out of your control. This could be the case when a company has lower revenue or staff cutbacks. However, even if the causes are not in your control (and remember many times they are) you have to take action. Here are some examples of how to address morale problems.

• Be a good listener. You'll find that the simple act of listening will help people's morale. It shows that you at least recognize the problems and are concerned.
• Say "thank you" for good contributions. If team members feel that the project manager recognizes their contributions, it will go a long way toward helping them feel better about their situation.
• Assign more challenging work. This is a tough one because, in most cases, the work is the work and you can't change the basic nature of that work. However, there are some things you can do to introduce new challenges. For instance, you can rotate people into new roles. If two people have done the same job for a long time, switch them. This gives each person an opportunity to learn new skills and new areas of expertise, while also giving you more backup coverage. You can also give people more responsibility. This might include letting new people manage the budget for the team, putting people in charge of subteams, and assigning new people to manage the work of contractors.
• Provide opportunities to learn new technologies. You can try to rotate people into new technologies, switch responsibilities to allow people to learn new skills, and increase the training opportunities.
• Make sure people know what's expected of them. You should make sure people are clear on what their job responsibilities are, what their current work activities are, and how their contributions help the entire project to be successful.
• Offer more flexibility. Allowing people more control over their jobs and lives can help morale. Offer flextime options or some form of telecommuting.
• Get the right equipment. Make sure people have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. It's especially frustrating for people to work on slow equipment, especially when hardware is so cheap.
• Look for opportunities to have fun. Let’s not forget this one. Look for an opportunity for a social events, pizza parties, birthday cakes, etc.
• Solicit opinions and ideas from employees. The project manager should encourage team members to become involved and offer their insights on assignments. If team members feel like their opinions and ideas are valuable, they will feel better about their situation.

Project managers should keep their eyes open for morale problems and look for ways to turn things around. Regardless of the limitations of your role, there are always some things that are within your control.

Is stress incurable for IT pros?

I found this in an article on the PubMed web site: "In a study of the bodily, mental, and psychophysiological reactions of employees involved in the design of advanced telecommunications systems and of office employees using regular video display technology, several stress-related psychosomatic disorders have been identified." Those disorders include:

• Sleep disturbances
• Psychophysiological stress (I looked this up and got this definition — the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. Now if I only knew what that means.)
• Somatic complaints (headaches, chest pains, nausea, lower back pain, etc.)

So, okay, the fact that IT design people are more prone to stress is not such a big surprise. The depressing part is that the same group performed a controlled experiment with 116 advanced telecommunication systems design employees to see how well stress reduction techniques worked on them. Their conclusion?

"The type of stress-reduction programs chosen and intensity of participation did not significantly impact results."

Wow. That's certainly an uplifting bit of data. I wonder how closely that mirrors the IT society as a whole?

Is stress impacting your team?

It is generally understood that stress can be both good and bad. Positive or good stress can help make life interesting and helps us do a good job. Stress can be a source of positive motivation to succeed or it can be a dark cloud that hinders morale, relationships and performance. The latter is what I call bad stress. Bad stress can ultimately be destructive to a person’s body. This type of stress will impact the productivity-and in the end, the success-of your team. Here are some techniques that I have learned for identifying the stress signals and managing the impact to your team. First, let’s get a better understanding of stress.

What is Stress?

Stress is a natural response to the challenges, changes and pressures of life. Bad stress is the negative and unpleasant condition which may be experienced when a person perceives that they are unable to meet the demands and pressures placed upon them. This type of stress may be associated with a wide range of ill health effects, both psychological and physical. It can have a significant impact on your team’s ability to be successful if not managed properly. Its affect can seriously impact a person’s concentration, energy level, health, mood and productivity.

What are some of the causes of negative stress?

Virtually every company today is trying to do more with less. Unfortunately, the “less” usually means less people. In the past, work that was done by two or three people is performed by one today. This situation can be coupled with corporate downsizing; an increase in merger activity; increased business travel; negative impacts on company financials; a significant increase in regulatory requirements; in increase in company security requirements; and, of course, hundreds of emails a day. These are just some of the work stressors. This list does not take into account the stressors that individuals experience outside of the work environment.

How is stress impacting your ability to succeed?

The first thing to keep in mind is that stress is inevitable. Times are changing and the power of negative stress is not going away. The second thing to remember is that significant increases in stress will cost both you and your company. Finally, the impacts of negative stress are not restricted to a profession, type of company, industry or geographical location. There are studies that have indicated that approximately sixty percent of absenteeism is related to stress. Many of these absences progress into short and long term disability leaves. It is difficult to get things done when the people are not available to do the work. The opposite situation is what some health officials call presenteeism. These are the people who are experiencing increased stress levels yet come to work. These individuals will generally demonstrate reduced productivity and energy levels.

What are some of the common signs?

It is easy for a manager to overlook the signs of stress that can ultimately impact their ability to get the job done. There are a number of signs that can indicate that stress levels are going to impact your team. Some are physical, some are not. One sign that is generally easy to recognize is when people who are your top performers seem to produce less even though nothing in the environment appeared to have changed. A number of health organizations have outlined a few of the more common signs. They are frequent complaints of headaches (migraines), backaches, shoulder and neck aches; cracked voice and dry mouth; complaints of indigestion problems and excessive episodes of acid reflux; rapid or excessive weight loss (for no apparent reason); feeling helpless and depressed; and defensive. In addition, the person can easily get upset or angered; they will tend to withdraw from others; and they may experience frequent emotional outbursts. This is just a sample. Many health organizations indicate that these signs may appear where they were not demonstrated by these individuals in the past. You should contact a reputable health services organization and get a more exhaustive list of things to observe. For example, HELPGUIDE.org has a fairly complete list on their website.

What can you do?

First, you must recognize that some people thrive on stressful environments. These people operate at their peak performance when faced with a stressful situation. Therefore, you should be aware of the normal behavior patterns of your team members so that a change in that pattern is obvious. When you observe a change that could affect the health of your team member, you should consider transferring the employee to less stressful work assignment; give the individual assistance to do the work; or give the individual a ‘buddy’ to encourage confidence. In addition, consider the following:

• Ensure team members take time off to avoid too many long days on the job.
• Make certain individuals are aware of your company’s employee assistance program (EAP). This organization can work with them on stress-related or personal problems.
• Ensure opportunities for them to pursue skill-development and professional-development programs.
• Encourage them to participate in stress-reduction workshops that may be available.
• Work with team members on their workload management skills and assist them in assessing their priorities.

Most of all ensure that you provide leadership support to those individuals.

Stress does not have to impact your team’s ability to succeed. However, it is important to be aware of the signs and manage the stress levels that can hinder you and your team’s success.

May I Ask You one question :

Have the stress levels changed in your company?

1. Stress has increased
2. Stress has decreased
3. No, stress level remains the same

What is your answer let me know???