Tag Archive for MSFT

| March 11, 2017
Comments Off on Who Rules the Internet?

Who Rules the Internet?

Who Rules the Internet?

Singapore-based ISP Vodien published an infographic that lists the 100 highest-ranking websites in the U.S. by traffic, according to website analytics company Alexa. There are over 1.1 billion websites on the Internet, but the majority of all traffic actually goes to a very small number of firms. Seven companies control 30% of the top 100 websites and the related web traffic.

InternetNot surprisingly Alphabet controls the most popular sites on the web, Google and YouTube. Surprisingly, Microsoft controls the most sites in the top 100. Redmond controls seven of the top web properties including recently purchased LinkedIn, Bing, and Microsoft.com. For a long time, MSFT’s online efforts were a disaster. That seems to have changed with Azure, but I still hate Bing. According to the Vodien infographic Alphabet controls four of the most popular sites.

The Visual Capitalist points out that Google.com gets an astounding 28 billion visits per month. The next closest is also a Google-owned property, YouTube, which brings in 20.5 billion visits.

Facebook (FB) controls two of the most popular websites; Facebook (#3) and Instagram (#13).

Jeff Bezo’s firm Amazon (AMZN) directs four popular websites;

The infographic says Verizon (VZ) now controls the Huffington Post (#49) and AOL (#59) and will control Yahoo (#5) and Tumlr (#12) if the deal closes in 2017 Q2.

Reddit.com comes in at #7 and Reddituploads.com is #61.

Online retailer eBay comes in as the #8 website.

POTUS favorite Twitter (TWTR) is the 9th ranked website and t.co is #25.

Video streamer Netflix comes in ranked #10 by Vodien.

Microsoft (MSFT) controls 7 of the top 100 websites with recently purchased LinkedIn at #11, Live.com #14. so-so search engine Bing is #17, followed by Office.com (#23), Microsoft Online Services (#24), MSN (#37), and Microsoft.com (#41).


Vodien lists the 100 highest ranking websites

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The consolidation of all of this web traffic is troubling. The current administration is going to allow online firms to sell all the personal information they collect to the government, data aggregators or anybody else to make a buck.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 4, 2017
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How Much Code Does It Take?

How Much Code Does It Take?David McCandless from Information is Beautiful tries to answer the question of how many millions of lines of code does it take to? For reference, the Visual Capitalist calculates that a million lines of code (MLOC), if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. That’s 14x the length of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The total lines of code to run systems vary widely as Mr. McCandless shows in the infographic.

  • Stack of paperIt took less than a million lines of code to run the NASA Space Shuttle.
    • The Mars Rover Curiosity takes less than 5 million lines of code to run.
    • The latest version of the Firefox web browser includes just under 10 million lines of code.
    • General Motors’ (GM) Chevy Volt requires just over 10 million lines of code.
    • Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008 for the Apple (AAPL) Mac consists of over 35 million lines of code.
    • And it took 50 million lines of code to bring us Microsoft Vista.
    • Finally, all Google (GOOG) services combine for a whopping 2 billion lines – that means it would take 36 million pages to “print out” all of the code behind all Google services. That would be a stack of paper 2.2 miles high!

Information is Beautiful Infographic
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 26, 2017
Comments Off on Avaya Goes Chapter 11

Avaya Goes Chapter 11

-Updated- 03-07-17 As predicted Avaya spun off its networking business. The lucky winner is Extreme. The presser from Extreme is here.

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Avaya Goes Chapter 11In one of the worst-kept secrets in tech, Avaya has finally declared bankruptcy. The Santa Clara, CA-based communications company filed for chapter 11 protection on January 19th, 2017 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Reports are that Avaya faced an end of January deadline to reach agreements with creditors to address its $6.3 billion debt or potentially default.

Avaya logoThe company’s presser announcing the bankruptcy characterizes the decision to seek Chapter 11 as a necessary re-do on deals made a decade ago. The company was spun off from Lucent, a former AT&T unit, in 2000. Avaya went private in 2007 when private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group took over the firm for $8.2 billion. Avaya was set up as a leveraged buyout – loaded with debt. At the time the new owners said going private would help Avaya to accelerate product development. In 2009 Avaya scooped up the remnants of Nortel for $900m.

The Nortel acquisition added Ethernet switching and VoIP to Avaya’s portfolio. While the move added needed hardware to the Avaya portfolio the rest of the tech world started the shift towards software-as-a-service and the cloud. Avaya was not able to digest Nortel while taking on Cisco, Microsoft, and the cloud at the same time.

$6.3 billion debtAvaya was both late with VoIP and Unified Communications. Neither Microsoft nor Cisco were competitors in the TDM/PBX era. Cisco joined the race with VoIP and Microsoft then came along with Unified Communications. Both have tremendous enterprise penetration and brand recognition.

The pressure forced Avaya to consider selling its crown jewel, its contact center products to Genesys in 2016, in the hope it would raise some cash. When the deal with Genesys fell through, Avaya decided to file for bankruptcy. Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy said in a statement, “…chapter 11 is the best path forward at this time.”

In order to keep the lights on during the reorganization, the company has secured a $725 million loan underwritten by Citibank.

As part of its debt load, Avaya owes its pensioners $1.7 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. According to NoJitter Avaya will honor it obligations to maintain and continue the pension (as did GM in its reorganization).

Chapter 11 only impacts Avaya’s United States operations. In the rest of the world, the company is moving to assure customers and stakeholders that it’s business as usual.

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My experience is that the Avaya IP Office product is way over-priced, even in a bid environment. Why would anyone buy an Avaya Ethernet switch or access point when you can get a Cisco or an HP?

So what is to become of Avaya? One likely outcome is that all of the business units will be sold off to satisfy the creditors. The only thing left of Avaya will be a service organization to care for the huge installed base of orphaned Nortel and Avaya systems.

I know people are already getting calls from Cisco about replacing Avaya.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 26, 2016
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Reducing Your LinkedIn Risks

Reducing Your LinkedIn RisksMicrosoft’s recent purchase of LinkedIn has pushed the struggling ersatz professional networking site back into the limelight. There is plenty of speculation why Microsoft (MSFT) purchased the site for over $2.6 billion. Undoubtedly it has to do with LinkedIn’s (LNKD) cache of over 430 million online users. Whatever Redmond’s designs are, now is probably a good time to check LinkedIn security to reduce your LinkedIn risks.

LinkedIn logoAttackers have long used social networking as part of their reconnaissance activities. They cull personal information posted on the site to craft targeted attacks that have a higher chance of succeeding. The cyber-criminals rely on the fact that people tend to trust people within their personal network.Their targets are more likely to fall for a spear phishing email if it appeared to come from a fellow member. The victims would also be more likely to visit a website if a member of their network suggested it.

LinkedIn risks

The fake LinkedIn profiles “significantly increase” the likelihood that these social engineering attacks will work according to research by Dell SecureWorks. The SecureWorks article describes how attackers use fake LinkedIn profiles. Most of these fake accounts follow a specific pattern:

  1. LinkedIn RisksThey bill themselves as recruiters for fake firms or are supposedly self-employed. Under the guise of a recruiter, the attackers have an easy entry point into the networks of real business professionals. Real recruiters already use the service as a way to find potential candidates. LinkedIn users expect to be contacted by recruiters, so this ruse works out in the scammers’ favor.
  2. They primarily use photos of women pulled from stock image sites or of real professionals. Many of the fake LinkedIn accounts use unoriginal photographs. Their profile photos were found on stock image sites, other LinkedIn profiles, or other social networking sites.
  3. Attackers copy text from profiles of real professionals. They then paste it into their own. The text used in the Summary and Experience sections were usually lifted verbatim, from real professionals on LinkedIn.
  4. They keyword-stuff their profile for visibility in search results. Fake LinkedIn accounts stuff their profiles with keywords to gain visibility in to specific industries or firms.  Northrup Grumman and Airbus Group are popular.

The primary goal of these fake LinkedIn accounts is to map out the networks of business professionals. Using these fake LinkedIn accounts, scammers can establish a sense of credibility among professionals to start further connections. The fake network was created to help attackers target victims via social engineering.

disguise it as a résumé applicationIn addition to mapping connections, scammers can also scrape contact information from their connections. The attackers collect personal and professional email addresses as well as phone numbers. This information could be used to send spear-phishing emails.

LinkedIn cyber-thieves use TinyZbotmalware (a password stealer, keystroke logger, multifunctional Trojan) and disguise it as a résumé application. The Dell researchers advise organizations to educate their users of the specific and general LinkedIn risks in their report:

  • Avoid contact with known fake personas.
  • Only connect with people you know and trust.
  • Use caution when engaging with members of colleagues’ or friends’ networks that they have not verified outside of LinkedIn.
  • When evaluating employment offers, confirm the person is legitimate by directly contacting the purported employer.

Reduce your risks

There are a few ways users can identify fake LinkedIn accounts:

  • search engineDo a reverse-image search. Tineye.com offers a browser plugin or use Google’s Search by Image to confirm the in picture is legit.
  • Copy and paste profile information into a search engine to find real profiles.
  • If someone you know is already connected with one of these fake accounts, reach out to them and find out how they know them.
  • If you suspect that you’ve identified a fake LinkedIn account, you should report it.

LinkedIn told Panda Security:

We investigate suspected violations of our Terms of Service, including the creation of false profiles, and take immediate action when violations are uncovered. We have a number of measures in place to confirm authenticity of profiles and remove those that are fake. We urge members to use our Help Center to report inaccurate profiles and specific profile content to LinkedIn.

As always, it pays to be careful with information that you share online as it can save you many potential problems in the future.

Here are some tips to keep your LinkedIn experience as secure as possible. Update Privacy Settings to understand how you’re sharing information. Smart options include:

  • ApathyTurn your activity broadcasts on or off. If you don’t want your connections to see when you change your profile, follow companies or recommend connections, uncheck this option.
  • Select what others can see when you’ve viewed their profile. When you visit other profiles on LinkedIn, those people can then see your name, photo, and headline. If you want more privacy, display anonymous profile information or show up as an anonymous member.
  • Select who can see your connections. You can share your connections’ names with your other first-degree connections, or you can make your connections list visible only to you.
  • Change your profile photo and visibility. You can choose to have your photo displayed only to your first-degree connections, only to your network, or to everyone who views your profile.

Opt into Two-Step Verification to prevent other people from accessing your account. LinkedIn lets members turn on two-step verification for their accounts. This will require an account password and a numeric code sent to your phone when you attempt to sign in from a device your account doesn’t recognize.

Opt into Secure Browsing for extra protection against unauthorized access to your Internet activity and to make sure you’re connected to the real LinkedIn website. While LinkedIn automatically secures a connection when you’re on certain pages that require sensitive information, you also have the option to turn on this protected connection when viewing any page.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 18, 2016
Comments Off on Stop Having These Meetings

Stop Having These Meetings

Stop Having These MeetingsFollowers of the Bach Seat know that passwords suck. As a Project Manager, something that also sucks are bad meetings. Meetings that don’t have an agenda or a goal or a purpose will suck the motivation out of people coming to the meeting. In the interest of having fewer sucky meetings here are some meetings, your team will thank you for eliminating or fixing.

The Monday morning staff meeting

Monday Morning Staff MeetingsThe problem with this meeting is that no one is ever ready for it. After all, it’s 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Nothing has happened yet and whatever happened last week is mostly ancient history. A second problem with this meeting is that for anyone to be ready, they have to work Sunday night. That is fine on occasion but guaranteed to earn you some serious votes for “jerk of the year” from employees and the family members of employees. For a while, I worked for an insomniac boss who would fire off emails off at 2:00 AM on Sunday. She would expect answers at 8:00 AM meetings. It was a happy day when she moved on.

The third problem with this meeting is that stuff happens on the weekends. And stuff needs to be addressed, especially in IT. Did you change your tapes? Check your logs? Walk your data center? Are there warning lights? How many tickets are there? Who has time for a meeting? The solution: if you must run a team meeting on Monday, push it to later in the morning or early in the afternoon. Better yet, push it to Tuesday morning.

The Round-the-Table status meeting

Round-the-Table Status MeetingWe have all been there. It’s the meeting where focus moves around the room and everybody shares their latest updates, sagas, fantasies, and dreams. Sit in the wrong place and you end up as the 19th person to offer an update. By that time nobody cares because their bladders are over-strained and brains numb from the politically oriented updates emanating from the mouths of colleagues in far-away functions.

The solution: meet if you must, but set some rules on the updates. Ask people to focus on important news that impacts everyone or on challenges that need help from across functions. Do anything to limit the painful march of gratuitous and self-serving status updates that undisciplined round-the-table meetings generate.

Recurring meetings with no purpose

Recurring Meetings that Have Lost Their PurposeAny recurring meeting where no one can remember why this meeting still takes place is a candidate for immediate elimination. The laws of physics transfer to meetings. A meeting on the schedule tends to stay on the schedule long after it has used up its usefulness in the workplace.

The solution: review all the recurring meetings that you subject your team to or that you are a participant in. Drop them from your life and the lives of your team members. If you are not the host of the meeting, tell the host of your intention and of your perspective on the utility of the meeting. If you are the host/sponsor, poll team members and give them a voice and a vote. A bit of draconian slicing of recurring meetings opens up valuable time for other more important activities.

Group wordsmithing

ThGroup Wordsmithing Meetingsis is any meeting where you pull together a group of people to work on the wording for something. Be it a vision, a mission, a strategy statement, a scope statement in project management. The output of these sessions is typically a series of awkwardly constructed sentences reflecting compromises on the part of the HPPiO. Everyone nods their heads, yes but no one agrees with the final product. The wording moves beyond ridiculous to just awful in trying to make the pain go away.

The solution: never relegate rough wording of anything to a committee. Take a stab at the item in question yourself. Then bounce it off a few colleagues. When you approach something that is beginning to work for you, very carefully ask for comments from a group. Ask clarifying questions, take great notes and then disappear and redraft the statement(s). Repeat the process as necessary.

Death by PowerPoint

Death by PowerPointDeath by PowerPoint is a phenomenon that can make any meeting suck. The poor use of presentation software causes Death by PowerPoint (DBPP) according to TargetTech. Key contributors to DBPP include confusing graphics, slides with too much text, and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud.

Audiences that are emotionally disconnected from the presentation are the fault of the presenter. There is a good chance that the speaker has not spent enough time and effort thinking about which key points he wants the audience to take away. Or she has spent entirely too much time and effort setting up the presentation in PowerPoint.

DBPP can be avoided if the speaker uses the technology as a visual aid to enhance what is being said. Do not rely on the technology to serve as the focus of the presentation. Don McMillan demonstrates what not to do with PowerPoint in his video “Life after Death by PowerPoint.”

How to be better at meetings

Meetings are opportunities ripe for overuse and even abuse. Strive to be the manager that respects the power and importance of meetings. Use these forums to focus on key issues and solicit ideas. To keep your meetings constructive you need to start with respect.

Respect the time that everyone puts into the sessions. Start your meetings on time. If your meeting starts on time there are fewer chances to derail others’ productivity throughout the day. Starting on time also helps you to end on time. This is crucial because once the time slot for the meeting is over, employees will start to mentally check out whether you’ve made it through the agenda.

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Bad meetings suck so much that the Project Management Institute (PMI) added a section to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) on meetings. that right – In version 5 of the PMBOK Integration Knowledge Area, there are four processes that have “Meetings” as a Tool & Techniques.

  • 4.3 Direct and Manage Project Work
  • 4.4 Monitor and Control Project Work
  • 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control
  • 4.6 Close Project or Phase
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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