Desktop software is hard, eh Google?

I was excited to hear about Google Calendar Sync. I got a Blackberry Curve last week, and I've been playing around with the best way to get both my personal (Google) and business (Outlook) calendars sync'd with it.

We don't use Blackberry Enterprise Server, so the Outlook syncing seemed to be a bit spotty. It got some events over the air (maybe the ones for which I was e-mailed invitations), but didn't get all of them. If I plugged it in and used Blackberry Desktop Manager it worked fine -- but I didn't want to have to plug it in.

But with the Google Sync download for my phone, it started grabbing my Google Calendar items with no problem.

Google Calendar Sync seems like it's an ideal solution for me: it can keep my Outlook calendar in sync with a Google Calendar, and my phone can grab those events directly from Google over the internet. Fantastic!

So I headed over to Google, downloaded the software, and ran the install. And this is what I see: "Google Calendar Sync supports Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 only"

Now, this is a brand new laptop that has only ever had Outlook 2007 on it. It's never been uninstalled, reinstalled, or anything hinky. Should be pretty vanilla.

What's worse is that there's nothing I can do. No setup pages to look at, no documentation to read. I guess I'm just SOL.

Has anyone else seen this? And more importantly: has anyone else solved this?

Technorati tags: blackberry, googlesync

Where Was HPC?

Nathan Trueblood, John Powers, and I went to the Windows Server 2008 launch last week (of course, we had to show off our shiny new Certified for Server 2008 logo).

It was surprisingly well attended (and I wasn't the only one who was surprised; apparently the catering staff was as well. In the continuing battle of Microsoft vs. Ciruli on the lunch front, I lost -- no lunch for me. How hard is it to count attendees at an event that requires pre-registration??).

Anyway, there were thousands of people there. We had hundreds walking around with the cool-looking Digipede stickers, and one lucky sticker-wearer went home with an XBox.

With a triple-product launch, Microsoft had an enormous contingent there, both attending and demonstrating. In the Microsoft pavilion, they had 30 booths -- most of them centered around Server 2008. Many of those booths weren't for products that were launching: SharePoint Server was there, Microsoft Forefront, Exchange Server. Many of the booths were related to Server 2008: Hyper-V, File and Storage Solutions for Server 2008, Scalability with Server 2008.

But you know what had no mention at all? HPC Server 2008.

It was conspicuous in its absence.

Now, HPC Server 2008 won't be out for months...then again, neither will SQL Server 2008 and it was launched at this event.

So, what's the deal? While I think HPC Server 2008 will go far beyond what Windows Server 2003 CCE did (both in terms of capabilities and sales), missing an event like this shows that Microsoft still isn't thinking of the server market as a continuum. They're dividing server users into HPC (high performance computing) and what may as well be called LPC (low performance computing).

In reality, of course, there's no strict division. It's a continuum. And Microsoft should be doing everything it can to bridge the gap between HPC and "the rest of us." As Jim Gray used to refer to it: Indoor Computing. It runs the gamut.

I guess the HPC crew are huddled in Redmond, preparing for their release later this year...too bad they couldn't find the time to market to the thousands of Windows Server fans who gathered in LA last week.

Technorati tags: microsoft, server 2008, hpc server 2008