Port-to-Port

In the past two decades or so, as computers have become ubiquitous in our lives, we have found them to be damaging to our health in three major ways:

1. Repetitive Motion Injuries - these are injuries caused by performing the same physical task over and over. The most common was originally nicknamed "Blackberry Thumb" because it showed up in people who used their Blackberry for sending email a lot. Today, it has the less appealing name of de Quervain syndrome or tenosynovitis. The name change is mostly because sufferers are more likely to be heavy texters (and not likely to be using Blackberries).
2. Injuries from Unnatural Positions - Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the most notable of these problems. They are related to repetitive motion injuries but they involve extended periods in a bad position rather than repeated motions.
3. Eye Strain - this one is self-explanatory. Very few of us have our monitors positioned properly for prevention of eye strain, in addition to the fact that we tend to blink less when we are staring at the monitor.

The latest technology related hardship comes from the use of touchscreen devices. In addition to the obvious risk of focusing on that little screen while walking, jogging, or, heaven forbid, driving, new research shows that the three traditional computer health risks are all exacerbated by the touchscreen interface, which will come to your desktop soon by way of Windows 8.

This week, Symantec acknowledged that a hacker had stolen a portion of the source code to their flagship Norton Anti-Virus. The announcement downplayed the danger associated with the theft while offering tips to stay protected while using Symantec products. The whole thing brought to mind one of the questions most often posed to me by my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers. They want to know how to be sure that their computers are safe from viruses, trojans, worms, and other malicious software.

My short answer is that you don't know. The people who write malware are some of the most intelligent programmers in the world. They spend long hours working thru software applications to find odd behaviors that they then try to exploit to their advantage. This group used to consist primarily of young boys with little better to do. Today, hacking is big business and getting bigger. A talented programer with a tiny conscience can make a lot of money on the wrong side of the law. So the long answer isn't much more enlightening, but it is a little more hopeful.

Another change in the professionalization of hacking is that hackers, for the most part, aren't interested in the data on your computer. They want to use the storage, processing, and bandwidth of your computer to go after more lucrative targets. That's the good news. If your computer has been hacked, you probably don't have to be overly concerned with your personal data. The bad news is that so much bad software is out there, not to mention infected websites and emails, that you will become infected sooner or later. A good anti-virus program helps a lot. Sound computing practices - not clicking OK just because OK is there - help even more.

Good computer network services companies use professional anti-virus software that is centrally monitored and managed to help minimize network infections. They also work with their computer help desk customers to provide information on good computing habits. These two steps reduce your chances of infection greatly because there are so many computer owners who don't take these steps. It's like the old saying, "A locked door is to keep honest people out, but an unlocked one is inviting to the crooked."

Last February, I met with an Indianapolis area Not For Profit organization to discuss their computer network services needs. The organization was typical of many small nonprofits in that their computer network had been designed by one volunteer, built by a procession of other volunteers, and supported by no one really. They had reached a point where they realized the process of Information Technology management they were using was inadequate and wanted to discuss hiring professional computer network consultants.

Port-to-Port Consulting has a history of working with Not For Profits, and we usually try to provide a little extra when we work with them so I spent time with the staff and helped them develop a stopgap plan that would hold until they could develop a budget and plan for IT support services. Our conversations continued, on and off, for the rest of the year.

How surprising it was for me to receive an RFP for Computer Outsourcing Services from this very same agency a week or so ago. Small organizations should not use the RFP process for choosing an IT services provider.

1. They can't write one that will allow them to distinguish the differences between prospective bidders.
2. Most competent computer tech support providers will not go to the effort to respond for a small amount of work.
3. The relationship between the organization and the network services provider is far more important than most other elements, assuming all offerors are moderately competent.

There, I said it. If you're a small business looking for computer network consulting you need to face up to the fact that you don't need the smartest guy in the industry. Your network is actually pretty simple. In fact, its simplicity is what allows so many nearly-incompetent people to compete with good IT outsourcing companies. They only have to make it appear that your network is working and you'll never know the difference -- at least not for a long time.

Now I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do your homework. Talk to several providers and their current clients. Make sure you feel a connection with the company. Evaluate the fit between your culture and theirs. But don't write an RFP. The same volunteers who created your scary network are going to evaluate the responses. If they were as good as that, you wouldn't be looking for better help.

Pick your guy and then negotiate an agreement, or ask everyone you liked to provide a proposal.

David Pogue wrote a column in the January issue of Scientific American titled Silicon Superego. In it he discusses Apple's addition of Siri to the iPhone 4S. He makes the point that while Siri is pretty cool, she is NOT pretty smart. Everything that Siri says is the result of code that was written long before she says it, even her smartass responses to, "Open the pod bay doors, Siri."

Unlike the HAL she mimics, Siri isn't intelligent. She's not self-aware. She cannot think. But that doesn't stop her from being cool. In the end, we want our devices to be smart enough to interact with us in a way that feels human. At the same time, we don't really want them to get so smart that they begin to behave like humans. That always leads to trouble. Pogue points out other problems like the increased chatter if everyone is talking with their gadgets instead of pecking away silently.

The bigger problem with truly smart devices is that we believe intelligence will lead to self-awareness. Self-awareness certainly leads to personality. Can you imagine asking Siri to place a call for you and getting a response like, "I don't feel like it right now."? The line between this smart-enough-to-interact and too-smart-to-serve is a very long way off. It is likely that we will have a new favored interface before we get there. Telepathy?!

My friend Robert Kyslinger runs a good computer network services company in Houston called Omnipotech. He is fond of branding his products and services by using the prefix "omni" in front of it. While I enjoy making fun of the consistent way in which he does this, I realize that he's onto something. Having a consistent name can help people remember your company. However, it is possible to over do that -- hence our teasing of Robert.

One of the problems that the many different Android tablet devices face is the wide variety of names for them. In a sense, the tablet world is divided into 3 camps: iPads, Android devices, and the hopefully-coming-soon Windows 8 devices. While Apple is busy readying for the release of the 3rd version of the iPad, the Android world is chasing a way to get their devices recognized by name. I've played with dozens of them and I can only name a handful. The problem is so bad that Amazon seemed to go to extra effort to avoid calling their device an Android tablet. In the process they have done what I believe is significant damage to their Kindle brand by prepending it to the Fire, but that's how bad they didn't want to be lumped into the other Android tablets. More than 100 tablets have been introduced since the arrival of the iPad.

So when my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers ask me about the potential for tablets in their organizations, I tell them it is inevitable that they will be using tablets at some point because their people will start bringing their devices to work (BYOT). I also tell these IT support services customers that the only platform that has enough history to consider right now is the iPad. Any of the dozens of Android tablets could be gone in a matter of weeks.

2012 will be the year that tablets come into popular use in small businesses around central Indiana. The Pertingo computer support services customers that Port-to-Port Consulting works with will be ready.

When I attended the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology back in the 80s, we were required to learn three programming languages: BASIC, Fortran, and Assembly. The truth is we were required to write some fairly simple programs in each of these languages to prove that we could figure out how to look up the command syntax. Later I learned C and a little bit of Pascal. Shortly after that, the mouse became relevant and event-driven programming became important. I discovered that I tend to think in straight lines and I abandoned all hope of writing software.

Boy am I happy now. New programming languages appear and disappear at such a rapid rate these days that a good programmer's skills may be obsolete before he finishes his first project. The growth is driven by advances in processor technology and, of course, advances in the web.

As we work with our central Indiana small business computer outsourcing customers on the strategic level of their IT systems, we often have discussions about writing custom software. In the past, it wasn't necessary to obsess about the development language. Today, a bad choice of language could mean an orphaned application in just a few short years. New programmers don't want to learn the dying languages. They want to be on the front edge of the new ones.

Most small businesses shouldn't be writing custom software anyway. Someone out there has already taken a stab at the problem facing you right now. Find them and use what they did if at all possible. Now even this advice is suspect. My IT support services customers need to know that the specialty software they use to run their business will continue to be supportable as time goes on. The same holds true of cloud based services. The original version of Facebook was written in Cold Fusion. Without the influx of venture capital, it's unlikely that their transition to the many languages used today could have been done.

If you're considering new specialty software or cloud based services, be sure to have your IT support services provider check into the viability of the programming language used to develop your software.

Now that the NFL season is in Playoffs, everyone in central Indiana is thinking about the hoards of people who will descend on us in early February to watch the Super Bowl. Our host committee has done a fabulous job of preparing for the onslaught of people who will spend that week here in Indianapolis. We here at Port-to-Port Consulting have started thinking about the impact of all of these visitors on our routine that week. Many of our small business computer outsourcing customers are also starting to wonder. One of my downtown Indianapolis clients told me that their parking garage has informed them that their monthly passes will be no good during the Super Bowl week. They don't know where they'll park, or what it will cost them.

For all of the companies to which we provide IT support services, there are some remote access capabilities. At least enough for our computer help desk staff to connect for maintenance and troubleshooting. For many, the remote access capability is more robust. We're talking to others about enhancing their remote access in advance of the Super Bowl. For the average office worker these days, the ability to work remotely is relatively inexpensive to provide. We add this capability to many of our computer network services customers after the first big snow storm each winter.

Because we know the date for the big game, we can get ahead of the traffic bottlenecks it will cause by making sure that our customers in downtown Indianapolis have a way to work without leaving home. Thank goodness getting them to come back afterwards is not our problem.

Last month, I was one of the computer tech support specialists who were guests on WFYI's No Limits radio show. Along with Regina Miller and Chris Flood, we answered questions about computers for callers during the one hour show. While No Limits is a fairly new show, the station reported that the response to the computer technology show was high. In fact, later in the month, the station re-aired that episode during their holiday hiatus.

The experience was a lot of fun for me. It made me start to think that Indianapolis could use a computer network services call-in show. It would be a neat way to provide useful information to the community about issues that we all have to fight with our home and small business computer networks.

I would have altered the format just a bit for this topic. John Krull, the show's host, generally takes calls, or emails, or tweets from the audience and then presents them to his guests to discuss. In the world of computer help desk work, it is imperative to talk thru the problem with the person. Troubleshooting a problem that gets described as a printing problem but turns out to be a keyboard problem is hard to do without the involvement of the person with the problem.

That's what made me think of the Car Talk format. Tom and Ray spend a good deal of their show querrying the callers to be sure the problem they have is the same as the one they described. They have a little fun with it as well. Both of these elements would make a computer call-in show less frightening to callers.

What do you think?

Several years ago, I went thru an experiment in which I tried to train myself to survive on just 3 hours of sleep each night. I was methodical and stepped down from my regular 6 hours in REM cycle increments. The experiment fell apart when I mentioned what I was doing to a group of friends and one of them went ballistic. She acted as if my personal experiment was somehow a risk to the future of humanity. Recently, I started filtering Outlook meeting requests. I don't like them because they don't enter the events in the way that I put things on my calendar causing me difficulty later on. Again, I've gotten the same kind of response. This time it's from all corners. Every person who gets my auto-reply feels as if Ive commited a crime against them.

It's amazing how people find that they can't let go of information, and they get offended by those who can. I have found that my life is happier when I filter out much of the flotsam and jetsam that passes for information any more. A new book by Clay Johnson takes a look at this glut of information. He compares it to the glut of calories available to us every day and proposes that we all go on an Information Diet.

A frequent comment lately about Facebook is that if the government had built a site and asked us to enter so much of our personal information, we'd be rioting in the streets. It's an interesting phenomenon that many (most) of us are willing to share some pretty intimate details about our lives with the general public. This isn't new because of Facebook. I can't tell you the number of people who have given me their life stories while sitting in waiting rooms or standing in lines. It's just easier to tell your story to uninvolved strangers.

So why is it a big deal for my central Indiana small business computer outsourcing customers?

When we tell the guy standing next to us at the hot dog stand about our troubles, we realize that he is going to quickly forget as he moves on with his life. But when we put it on the Internet, it's there forever. People who do know something about us are going to see that stuff. Yet it doesn't feel that way when we do it. It feels the same as the conversation in the Elephant Ear line at the fair, because the people we wouldn't share this with aren't there with us when we put it online. The pseudo-sense of animosity leads us to overshare.

With the possible competition of Social Media, Cloud Computing has been the question on the minds of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers in 2011. How can you not think about it when you're being bombarded by "to the Cloud!" commercials during prime time television? I've told many of my Pertingo IT support services clients that even though the name is cooler, cloud computing is just a re-branding of things that didn't have great names before: client-server, ASP, SaaS, and others.

The reality is that anything you do where the processing (or the bulk of it) is happening on a machine other than the one you're sitting in front of can be considered Cloud computing. A phrase my computer support technicians have used is "Cloud in the Closet" to explain to some of our network support customers that they already have some of their computing in the cloud because their server in the closet is doing the processing for them.

The reality is that cloud computing is a way to trade one set of limiting factors for another. Smart small business owners will work with their computer network consulting provider to develop a plan for testing parts of their system against cloud alternatives. The best time to consider this is when critical IT infrastructure nears its replacement date. It's easier to make the switch to avoid a big capital expense than to switch and be left with a piece of equipment that has no purpose.

We have yet to find one of our computer outsourcing customers that can go completely to the cloud, but every one of them has something worth considering for moving out. You probably have something too.

With all of the talk (and hype) of social media these days, many people are beginning to think that email has already run its course and is being replaced by other forms of electronic communication. While I'm not willing to commit to email's long term existence, I will say that it is alive and well as we end 2011. I don't count it out because there are 2.9 billion email accounts that sent 188 billion messages this year.

Before you go subtracting the ones that were spam, realize this: the spammers are figuring out how to send spam via text, IM, and Facebook and Twitter. They will go wherever we go.

Here's the data from Visible Gains. Decide for yourself.

A well kept secret among the companies that provide small business computer outsourcing services is that the majority of people working in their tech support positions have little or no formal education in the area of IT support services. They are mostly self-taught tinkerers, or vendor-created "certified engineers." Not that I'm knocking the need to learn thru experience and tinkering. Some computer network support concepts can only be understood by building a network and then breaking it and seeing if it can be fixed. However, having spent 4 grueling years earning a real engineering degree, I'm a bit put-off by the flipant use of the engineer designation after passing a couple of multiple-guess questions, no matter how hard they might be.

An unintended downside of this industry full of people who are eager to chase the next great idea. Afterall, if the company that certified you thinks you should be moving in a new direction, who are you to argue. This, I believe, is what creates the compter network services of the month. Right now, there are two related IT services being built up by the hype: Cloud Computing and Virtual Desktops. I'll leave the Cloud for another discussion. It's the Virtual Desktop that has my ire now. While there are instances where this makes absolute good sense, those aren't most of the situations in which my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers find themselves most often. Virtualized desktops work best in environments where lots of people use their computers for nearly exactly the same small set of tasks. That doesn't describe most small business network environments.

Even if it did, we've found that the cost of outfitting the proper network infrastructure to support reliable desktop virtualization is comparable (if not larger) than the cost of doing things to "old fashioned way" of buying regular desktops and a file server. However, the cost of support may be higher because the "engineers" who support your virtual environment have more certificates than the other guys.

A good computer network consulting company will take the time to evaluate the latest craze to see if it really fits your needs. Ask lots of questions when offered something new.

One of the services that Port-to-Port Consulting provides to its Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers is registration and management of their domain names. On the surface, this seems like a simple thing, but we've found that many people involved in IT support services don't understand much about the magic of Internet domains. The most recent example of this problem is one of the worst we've seen. We have a new Pertingo computer network services customer whose previous tech support guy died suddenly. As we began to unravel the many things that were not documented about their system, we discovered that the previous IT guy had registered their domain using his name and company as the registrar. Consequently, we could not take control of the domain to make the changes necessitated by their merger with another group.

Since nothing at the registrar indicated a connection to my new network support client, we couldn't even talk to the registrar about the problem. When we told them the previous guy had died suddenly, they said that they could give access to his heirs if provided with proof of death, but that wouldn't help us. The grieving widow has been unreachable, so my customer has had to engage attorneys to fight to get control of their domain, which they paid for when the previous guy registered it.

We often see similar situations when we win a new Pertingo customer. Usually, a series of calls to the person who did the original registration, along with some tutorials from the registrar gets everything straightened out -- unless the original person is dead. If done properly, the domain should be registered with your company and a contact in your company as the Registrant. If your IT support services provider is going to manage the domain settings for you, he should be listed as the Technical Contact, and either of you can be the Administrative Contact. Under no circumstances should you let your network consulting provider be listed as the Registrant. When he tells you it must be done that way, he's misinformed and you should make sure his skills in other areas of IT are not as poor.

If you didn't register your domain yourself, you should check right now to confirm that it really is registered to you. You can do this using any number of whois websites. We often use whois.net. If you aren't listed as the Registrant, make whoever has control of it make the chang immediately. There is NO good reason why someone other than you has to be listed as the Registrant.

I have been providing small business computer outsourcing in the Indianapolis area for more than 20 years. In that time I've worked with hundreds of businesses and not for profit organizations. Most were transitioning from one form of computer network support to another. Either they had an internal guy or two, or they were using one of my local network consulting competitors, or they had been relying on the kindness of someone close to the to keep them running and had worn out their welcome with them.

In all cases, one of the services high on the list to discuss was the computer help desk. It's one of the most visible parts of good IT outsourcing, even though we'd all like for it to be unnecessary. As a small business computer network consulting customer, you want your staff to be able to get their work done without having to reach out for IT support. As the IT support services provider, I want my staff to be working on more strategic and impactful issues with your Information Technology. Yet we both know that times will come when help is needed. The challenge for us both is to be sure that our Help Desk services don't become the landing place for all of the problems created by the other elements of a competent IT outsourcing engagement.

Frequently, poor planning and communication causes the compute Help Desk technicians to become burdened with calls that make them become defensive. When this happens, your Help Desk starts to hurt your business operations. Here are four ways this can happen:

1. The Help Desk staff forgets their main purpose. This problem is usually caused by heavy handed measurement on the part of the Help Desk management. If the help desk techs are measured by the amount of time they spend on each call, or how many calls they complete each day, or how many issues they resolve (as measured by their close rate), they will have a tendency during stressful times to get off the phone with their network support customers quickly, or to declare problems solved prematurely. This usually leads to repeat calls from the poor customer who still can't work, but it's a new issue from the monitoring standpoint.

2. The Help Desk staff doesn't listen. This is the expert error. People who are very familiar with a subject tend to try to jump ahead to the answer instead of listening to the problem. This is why your Help Desk technician starts fixing your email connection when your problem is opening an email attachment. She heard email and went to work.

3. The Help Desk staff doesn't tell you what's happening. Computer tech support involves a troubleshooting process that sometimes amounts to trial-and-error. Your network support technician doesn't want to tell you all of the things he's trying or eliminating. He only wants to tell you the successful solution. As a result, you feel as if you're being kept in the dark. You are. Good support people will tell you what they're doing and why.

4. The Help Desk staff won't admit when they're stumped. Since you're paying for the expertise of your computer technical support, many providers have a fear of admitting that they don't know how to fix your problem. As a result, they say things that are packed with jargon and techno-speak in an attempt to make you feel like they have a clue.

Watch out for these issues as you deal with your computer outsourcing provider. Call them on it when you notice these behaviors. Remember that many are just habits that need to  be monitored.

I got a call the other day from a friend who owns a clothing store. He sometimes calls me when he's having computer problems. Port-to-Port doesn't work in retail establishments but we have a few friends who ask us to sanity check what they hear from their computer tech support professionals.

In this case, the computer that runs the POS was unresponsive. They had called their software company and been told that it was a bad motherboard. I stopped by and quickly determined that the problem was a bad power supply. I shared this happier assessment with my friend and told him to pass it on to his computer help desk guys so they could be prepared when they came out. He did.

The next day, my friend called me to tell me that my diagnosis was correct and his IT support services technician had replaced the power supply and gotten the computer working again. I expressed my joy at having been able to help when he said, "That wasn't the end of the story."

He went on to relay how his computer network services guy had replaced the power supply, turned on the machine, watched it boot, and then packed up and left. It wasn't until he was out the door that they got logged in and discovered that the computer wouldn't talk to the receipt printer. Attempts to reach their network support tech were unsuccessful so they were left with a computer that worked but they couldn't use. Luckily, a customer with some network consulting experience volunteered to help out and managed, after more than an hour, to get the printer working.

Situations like this play out everyday in the Indianapolis computer outsourcing arena. Technicians finish their work at the point right before their customer starts his work. The result is one side who believes the work is successful and the other side who is extremely frustrated that he still can't work. Good computer tech support happens when the provider understands the real reason he has a job.

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 3.0 with Solitaire included I've found myself frequently having conversations with my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers about restricting employees' access to certain applications. Lately the conversation revolves more around access to certain Internet sites. The purpose is always to get employees to focus their energy on getting work done instead of personal activities. In the Windows 3.0 days I made the argument that letting your staff play Solitaire is a form of Mr. Miyagi training. Solitaire was designed to force the player to use the mouse. Clicks, double clicks, drag-and-drops -- these were transferable skills just like "Wax on. Wax off."

With the advent of virus inflicting websites, I started supporting my network support clients to manage where employees can go to avoid gunking up the network. If people just click their way around the Internet without some kind of supervision they will surely rain damage down in the whole network and lead to the need for lots of computer network services to get things going again.

Today, I sit on the fence between the two camps. I say let your employees do their holiday shopping online, as long as they are reasonable in their use of time and do the shopping at sites with name recognition. Sure, there are some risks to both productivity and network security, but neither should be at great risk. First, if your staff has so little to do that they can spend hours shopping online, then you've got a business and management problem that can't be solved with Information Technology. Second, if the shopping is restricted to the major sites, the risk of attracting a virus is pretty slim. Finally, no matter what you do, a third of your employees are going to shop online at work anyway. Why not deal with it head on.

If you think my stance is extreme, you'll be more shocked than I was to read this. I talked with a prospect for our Pertingo Computer Support service last week and he described his biggest problem to be cleaning viruses off his network from his staff porn surfing. I assured him we could reduce that to nearly nothing and identify those who refused to stop. He told me that would be detrimental to morale since his folks worked a lot and they were unable to porn surf at home. He just wants to keep the network virus-free as they do it.

We won't be providing computer network consulting to that organization.

The first time I visited a restaurant with a sign out front that said "BYOB" I was unsure what it meant... until it was too late. Don't let that happen to you with the latest acronym to hit the computer tech support: BYOT. It stands for Bring Your Own Technology. Now that the real innovation in Information Technology is in consumer products, we're starting to see more and more people at work using the same equipment that they've become accustomed to using at home. This started with home laptops, and that was a nightmare because the consumer versions of computer equipment was not the same in terms of features and capabilities. Hardware manufacturers fed you the numbers that you thought were important, and made the computer cheap by cutting every other corner.

Not so with the latest set of smart phones and tablets. Many of these consumer products have the ability to do the work that my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers need to have done. In fact, the trend to bring in home equipment that started with laptops and moved to smart phones and now is going into tablets (and laptops again), is putting pressure on companies to upgrade their computer network equipment more often so their employees have equipment that is as capable as the devices they have at home.

Perhaps one day soon our computer network equipment will be like the craftsman's tools. We'll only want to use our own because we know it very well. That will be a living nightmare for those of us who provide computer tech support in central Indiana and elsewhere, but the possibility looms large now that we have BYOT.

As I grow older, I find that some things aren't as easy as they used to be for me. I can't run as fast or as far as I used to. Just thinking about eating causes my waist line to expand. My arms just aren't long enough to hold the menus where I can read them. More and more people refer to me as "sir" than ever did before. I look at all of these things as the small price I must pay for living nearly half a century, except for my declining memory.

Now don't start thinking that senility is right around the corner for me. I'm still sharp enough to keep my Indianpolis small business computer network services customers up to date on the things that are happening in the IT industry that affects their businesses. I haven't forgotten my anniversary or anybody's birthday. I just don't have the quickness of recall that was once a hallmark of my personality. I have found that this problem isn't all bad. In fact, forgetting is an important thing for humans. Our memories don't work like computer hard drives. Although a new service connected to Foursquare is working on that, and another does it for Facebook.

By signing up for 4Squareand7YearsAgo.com, you will receive a daily email reminding you of the places you visited one year ago today. PastPosts.com does the same thing with your Facebook updates. It's like going back and reading your diary daily. Well, almost like it.

When I started Port-to-Port Consulting back in 1991, I did a speaking circuit to drum up business. In my canned speech, I discussed the next great things that were going to happen in technology. All of the things on my list were essentially available at the time, although incredibly expensive and kind of kludgy. Here we are 20 years later and one of those items is still "coming soon." Without question, we get closer to being able to talk with our computers every year, but I am amazed at how difficult this task has proven. Note I say talk with, not talk to, our computers. The difference defines the difficulty.

So, even though I continue to tell my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers that they will one day be able to talk to their computers, I no longer predict it as the next user interface. That will undoubtedly be your fingers. The mouse and stylus will give way to the fingers and hands. The release today of the latest iOS reminds me of that fact. Apple and their finger gestures began the death of the mouse. Microsoft will release Windows 8 sometime next year, and it resembles the Windows 7 Phone interface, which is far more finger friendly than anything Microsoft has done before.

Fear not, consumers of computer network services, I still include a line about talking with your computer in my stump speech. I don't deliver it with the force of conviction that I used to have though.