About

About the name

The name of this blog is a two sided reference, to both a tendency of the manufacturer of the products I support and of my own behavior.

Long ago I noticed something about Microsoft products. Where they succeed is when they develop a generic solution to a complex problem that is simple and customizable. Where they fail is with providing easy or comprehensive use cases. This led me to start saying that “Microsoft is the king of minimum required effort”. Office is a perfect example; it is the bare minimum required solution for office work, slightly easier and for slightly less then alternatives. Hyper-V is another, Service manager is the third. Config manager still uses a lot of the same code from SMS 2.0; it’s not broken, so don’t fix it. it’s too much effort.

Now Microsoft products are GOOD solutions, every product I have referenced here does exactly what it’s intended, easily and mostly completely for the use cases that it covers. It’s only when you compare competitors, the Microsoft solution looks like a minimal solution; Hyper-V to VMWare for instance, using the preexisting MS Cluster server’s shared storage behavior as a redundancy mechanism in Hyper-V vs the vCenter managed worker shared nothing model that VMWare designed to meet the unique needs of virtual infrastructure. This DOES NOT mean that the Microsoft solution is a worse solution, just one that was produced with lower effort. Exchange is an incredible product, primarily because of this tendency to simplify and minimize. The separation of server roles in 2007, and their subsequent reduction in 2013 made everything easier exactly because there was less effort to design, support and configure.

The other side  of that is my own behavior. I am lazy to the point of a virtue. I have, on many occasions, spent days scripting automation so I don’t have to do a 10 minute process twice. I frequently get upset that I have to tie BOTH shoes, EVERY morning. Once a problem is solved, I HATE having to re-solve it. This has served me remarkably well in my career; my tendency to automate means that I can scale solutions easily, and my desire to understand everything about a problem so I never ever have to fix it again it means that once a solution is done, that problem tends to STAY solved.

So take the minimum required solution, put in the minimum required implementation, and solve the problem with the minimum work. do that enough, and all your problems just go away.

About the Blog

This blog is infrequently updated. As I run into interesting things as part of my daily job, i’ll throw up notes here for later consideration, and then when I have some downtime, I’ll edit and post those blogs. I don’t promise posts will be regular, reliable, or timely, but hopefully it’ll be interesting and useful.

About the author

Thomas Bianco is a full time IT Systems Engineer working in the Houston metro area. He has 17 years of experience in IT services and solutions supporting diverse industries including the military, manufacturing, software development, resource extraction, financial and professional services, as well as 9 years direct business consulting experience. He is also quite self conscious about writing in the third person, so chooses to end this paragraph here.