Fifth Decade

Microsoft is working to adapt a basic version of XP so that it is compatible with the nonprofit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Foundation’s small green-and-white XO laptop.

The OLPC machine uses low-powered technology with limited processing power, no Hard Drive, and little memory but has a target price of $100 per laptop to enable users in the third world to partake in the digital age. Currently the price is $188 as further savings have been difficult to make without larger volumes of sales to drive component prices down.

How replacing the free, lean Linux based Operating System with a Microsoft controlled stodgy and resource hungry OS that has to be paid for can be seen as a boon for anyone other than Microsoft is beyond the ken of anyone who understands the principles of charitable giving.

Microsoft’s knee jerk reaction as a “Johnny come lately” to every market they didn’t think of first is probably what they imagine to be “innovation”. This lack of strategic vision is why their share price has underperformed the market for years.

If I was a shareholder I’d vote to hand the reins over to someone who knows there is more to business and technology than playing “follow my leader” and leveraging a monopoly position to try to force out competition from every niche, niches created by people with more imagination and often better business ethics to boot.

MS have admitted they have spent a “non-trivial amount” of cash on this project already, and it is unlikely to be profitable for them, but just like in other markets the wealth they have amassed through their monopoly behaviour is used to prevent these markets developing freely.

The still unprofitable XBox was launched to limit the PlayStation/Nintendo machines’ ultimate market size, the Zune to compete with the iPod, Internet Explorer was launched to kill off Netscape, Office Online was launched to damage Google’s online aspirations, MS Office was given exclusive links into MS Exchange Server to kill off Apache and Linux, need I go on? There are examples upon examples.

Undermining opportunities for advancement for the poor and underprivileged though is a new low for Microsoft in my book. It’s tantamount to competing with your local church’s weekly collection by saying “pay into our bowl, not the charitable one!” in order to further corporate objectives.

There was an interesting debate in Parliament about computing last week. Does the UK Government favour Microsoft?

Fanboys come in two flavours: the committed and devoted user with no financial stake to protect, just the defence of their decision to use one solution or another as an expression of their ego or intellectual snobbery; and the hard-working industry professional whose very financial success and future rests on the adoption of the platform he not only supports wherever he can, but also actively peddles to the less technically able industry and government purchasers he is paid well to advise just because that system will over the long term guarantee him the most work.

When it comes to awarding government contracts in IT, one of the perversities is that because of the size of the projects, the government favours IT consultancies that are large in terms of money earned, and employees available. They ask the consultancies to identify the solutions, when the consultancies have a vested interest in presenting a case that favours the solution that benefits them most. To stay big, and therefore remain on the gravy train, they need lots of man hours to be billed out.

The government say they are of course looking for a cost effective solution, but pre-select the most expensive ones by filtering out those consultancies who did not grow big or become rich because the solutions they provided were cheaper, lasted longer without needing attention, and were more reliable over the long term so needed fewer man hours to be invested.

How can firms that get to be big enough to qualify to tender because they tend to bill lots of man hours be asked to identify the most cost-effective solutions? That’s an organisational oxymoron.

The raison d’etre of both firm and technicians within it is to generate man hours. They should never be asked to identify the solution, because they will always favour the expensive one and find a way to make a convincing presentation that supports their choice. A mechanic who only knows how to repair a Morris Marina will not tell his boss to buy a VW: after all, just because you can find lots of garages with lots of mechanics with experience mending Morris Marinas does not mean the Morris Marinas were trouble free. How would the mechanics get so much hands-on experience if Morris Marina’s were totally reliable cars?

What we need here is separation. Separation between solution selector, and solution provider. At the moment, critics are fighting the symptoms, not the causes. Asking for the solutions to be “more cost-effective” just means the reports the big consultancies produce address this issue as part of the many other issues they know the government consider to be important. Only by having the solution identified by someone or somebody with no possible future advantage from favouring one solution over another will this perversity be addressed.

This is what they did not so long ago with the big accountancy firms. Their auditing and consulting arms were joined at the hip, and this gave each an unfair advantage to the detriment of investors. So the firms were told to separate their two halves, which they did. Now we need the big IT consultancies to do the same: they are too much in bed with Microsoft, and so it is no surprise that their solutions suffer from code bloat, setback, cost-overrun and lack of reliability. They do, however, produce lots of man hours.

Surprise, surprise. Who’d have thought that would happen?

But why do the critics suggest the UK government is a Microsoft fanboy? Dr Pugh MP (LibDem) said “The alternative (to Open Source and small company solutions), which applies across many Departments, is the tendency to have memorandums of understanding with big companies, often foreign and usually American. There is a close association between that side of the industry and the Government—an association that is personal, consultative and advisory. The House will be aware that the former Prime Minister launched the Labour business manifesto at Microsoft. Hon. Members will also be aware that, on the International Business Advisory Council formed by the current Prime Minister, there sits the owner and founder of Microsoft.”

You can certainly hear Microsoft’s own sales training manual coming out of the mouths of babes over and over again, such as in this defence of their position by Treasury Minister, Angela Eagle MP: “It is often suggested that open source solutions offer better value because they are cheaper to buy. In fact, the total cost of ownership is considered in procurement, and it is not always the case that the open source solutions are the cheapest.”

Well, it does depend a lot on who does the study. And if they consider hardware and software together or separately. Let’s face it, Windows programs and applications are not exactly intuitive, are they? There are considerable training costs associated with these too, although admittedly a lot of this familiarisation goes on at school. Yes, the good old Education budget subsidises the training cost of future Microsoft related solutions. I bet they don’t add in this cost to the analysis of doing business with Microsoft products, services, or applications - although they do seem to unfairly add in such costs as extras in the TCO calculations for training on the alternative Open Source or Mac solutions.

Angela Eagle goes on “Although they are free of licence charges, because they can involve high levels of support and training costs, they sometimes do not provide the best value for money. External studies have not shown a consistent cost advantage to open source solutions over proprietary solutions. It is often bandied about when such issues are debated that proprietary solutions are necessarily more expensive than open source solutions, but we have yet to prove that. Some of the figures of potential Government savings from the wholesale adoption of open source that are being bandied about are not taking into account the extra support costs over the lifetime of the project.”

Now, where have I heard that line before? In reality, Total Cost of Ownership studies have clearly shown that buying computers that use the Windows platform is the most expensive long-term option, especially when compared to the purchase of Apple Mac computers. Linux based solutions in some situations can be even better, although for commercial use the lack of a single responsible party to talk to does undermine the uptake of the various distributions somewhat.

But then, another perversity pops up. Dr Pugh again: “inside the Palace of Westminster I can no longer use an Apple Mac computer to surf the internet, which the Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology department has said is because of security, although it has never actually explained how.”

Perhaps they really mean that Apple Macs are so secure that the security services cannot snoop on them as easily as they can on the Windows computers that now have to be used. That wasn’t the decision of the government though, nor of Parliament itself, but a small committee called the “Information” Committee. They never did provide the information, just the secret lockout.

Were they nobbled? It wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft have successfully altered the composition of a body judging them - they even got the Judge changed to one more to their liking in their monopoly trial in the US when it was rumoured the Judge who found them guilty of abusing their monopoly favoured splitting Microsoft up into separate Operating System and Applications entities. The new Judge was more lenient. Quelle surprise.

Where the Government and Microsoft are concerned, there are lots of secrets - and lots for the rest of us to be worried about. For instance, the seemingly preferential treatment Microsoft are getting over IT in the NHS. Dr Pugh again: “I would like to believe the Government when they tell me that they have an efficient deal with Microsoft in relation to Connecting to Health, but I am less than happy that the details of the deal are subject to a confidentiality clause.”

Is it confidential because Microsoft do not want to be prosecuted for illegal restraint of Trade, for again abusing their monopoly power, because of pork belly politics, or because the contract was bought so cheaply the EU competition commission would see it as an abuse of monopoly, trade “dumping”, or illegal state subsidy?

We are right to be suspicious. Dr Pugh reminds us that “during the court case against Microsoft, Judge Jackson in the US Department of Justice said—I would not have put it in such a way, as he said things that are quite damning—that Microsoft’s executives had

“proved time and time again to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false…Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.” “

What chance has Open Source with the British government if they don’t even practice Open Government, particularly with such partners? And how will anyone be able to see if there is any skullduggery involved? The press make a big thing about contracts to Saudi Arabia over arms deals with hidden payoffs from private companies who just happen to be British, but nobody kicks up a stink when UK taxpayer’s money is spent by our own Government without us being able to see exactly how.

There should be no confidentiality clauses on large deals. The bigger the deal, the easier it is to “launder” some money for some pork belly scheme or another, and the more concerned we should be about where our money is going.

I am quite prepared to believe that many politicians really do want a level playing field, but what about the civil service? All those Sir Humphrey Applebys… they don’t like change, they do like monoliths. They tell the politicians what to say. And they like little advisory jobs after retirement.

I bet they love Microsoft. Maybe the fanboys are the real power behind the throne?

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

Why are British schools now pushing Mandarin Chinese as a subject? It’s not the language we need to be teaching our kids if you look at the trade and population movement statistics. It’s as if our schools have become conditioned to only be interested in the GCSE league tables, not the future of our children.

If we should be increasing langauge learning it should be on languages our children will be most likely to need to use during their lifetimes, the main languages of the European Union, German and French. Languages such as Polish and other Slavic languages will be more relevant to our children as the new Europeans take more of a place at the European table than far-away Asian languages such as Chinese.

Britain’s major trading partner is the EU with over half of both imports and exports. We import nearly twice as much from our largest partner, Germany, as we do from the second largest, the US or France with 8.8% and 8% respectively. Although the US is still our biggest export market on an individual country by country basis, Germany and then France run it close.

On those figures alone you’d think that German would be the main foreign language our kids learn, followed by French. But no, for reasons set more than fifty years ago, French is still our number one foreign language. For some reason, German is considered “unimportant” or “too difficult” or perhaps as the tabloids seem to think “unnecessary” - after all, who won the war, as they like to say? Strange attitude since almost 100 million people in Europe have it as their main language and our linguistic inadequacies prevent us from selling as much of our stuff to them as they sell of their stuff to us.

Even with our main foreign language, French, just 200,000 pupils took the subject at GCSE this summer: that’s no more candidates than took Religious Education! Even fewer sat German - just over 80,000 pupils sitting the GCSE in 2007. That’s just one in nine of the 732,000 who sat English which puts the numbers into perspective a little.

For a very short time, teaching foreign languages was compulsory at secondary level, but this is no longer the case. Pressured by the need for higher success rates in literacy and numeracy, languages seem to have been considered a “soft option” for the educators to get rid of. Sorry, wrong decision.

If they want our children to become more literate, then they need to stop giving them drawings to do for homework in History, Geography - and even in English! Practice makes perfect, and modern educators don’t give kids enough opportunity to practice writing, nor do they point out mistakes of spelling or punctuation. No employer wants someone who cannot be trusted to write a letter because they fill it with errors. And few employers are interested in the creative writing capabilities of their staff. That’s about as useful as trigonometry for most.

Even when languages are taught, do we give our children enough opportunity to reach their full linguistic potential? How many hours a week do they learn languages? Most of the time it’s less than 3 hours. In trilingual Switzerland they teach each language for between 3 and 6 hours per week depending on age. No wonder we’re falling behind international competitors: they take export markets seriously, we don’t. Never have.

The very fact that we don’t match language learning with the ages Child Development Psychologists say the human brain finds them easiest to learn - which is up to the age of 9/10 - shows UK education thinking urgently needs an overhaul.

Let’s look at Switzerland again where one in five of the population is non-Swiss. As an advisor to expats, I do know how many kids with English speaking parents go to Swiss primary schools and within a year or two speak German or French as well as the locals. They do put the hours in though, something British educators seem often reluctant or unable to empower their charges to do.The kids have the energy, but are there enough teachers?

Some UK primary schools are far thinking enough to teach French for instance from the age of 7, but even then it is voluntary and not part of the curriculum. There is evidence that children who have been exposed to French from an early age such as 7 learn the language far better at secondary school, and pick up other languages more easily too.

But why Mandarin Chinese? I know about the predictions about China becoming the worlds biggest economy in 2040. But let’s examine that more closely. If China’s economy right now was the same size as that of the US, its GDP per head would still only just meet the world average of about $8,900 per person; in the US it is currently $39,680.

With current population sizes, China’s economy will have to grow and grow until it is nearly five times as large as the US economy per head of population to equal the US economy on a GDP per head basis. I don’t see that happening this century, never mind in my lifetime. It’s clear that China’s population is so large that it skews statistics and makes us think it is more important than it is. But it is disingenous to claim that “because 20% of the world’s population speaks Chinese our children must learn it too”. That’s a bit like saying we should teach Gujerati or Urdu because another 20% of the world’s population lives in India.

But let’s ignore trade for now. What about where we choose to live and work? Do Brits retire en masse to China? No, to France and Spain. Do Brits go to work en masse in China? No, to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and France.

Whichever way you look at it, our children have need of more and better language skills. In a European future the best jobs will go to those who can do their specialisations and speak more than one language. Our European neighbours are aware of this, even if we are not.

It really is time we woke up: reliance on English in future just won’t be enough.

The only rich country that treats its children worse than the USA is Britain, according to a recent Unicef report [1.5Mb pdf]. OECD and WHO studies contributed to the results which show the direction to go in is clearly the European one as the Netherlands came first, and Denmark and other Scandinavian countries were in the Top 5. A summary can be found on the BBC’s Newsnight webpages.

I’ve had a read through the report, and while there are clearly areas which may have been misinterpreted, there seems no doubt that in broad terms the report’s findings should be listened to. It is clear the Anglo-American model of life is not as helpful to our children, and ultimately to our adult societies, as we would like to think.

OK, we score higher for affluence, but is money happiness? Or are there other factors that affect wellbeing? What areas did the study cover? I’d like to comment on a few striking points.

Continue reading ‘Britain and America worst environments for children of any of the Top 20 rich countries’

Most obvious of course is that it still exists almost 200 years after it was introduced to fund the Napoleonic Wars - which we won ages ago anyway.

One big problem with Income Tax is that it is normally collected by people who live a long way away from where we do. What’s worse is that they have totally different ideas of how they should spend our money.

So - make it local!

How would this work? Well, at the moment Income Tax is collected centrally, and Council Tax is collected locally. Problem is, the Council Tax is topped up with money that comes from rebates from the centrally collected Income Taxes.

Inefficient? Of course it is. Why not just let each local community collect the taxes they need to pay for the services they provide by collecting the income tax themselves?

So, every County/Unitary authority would set it’s own income tax rates payable by all residents of their area. At election times the politicians would be judged on how well they managed our money, and whether the services they provided were too expensive, or not. If the population believed what they got for the money they were charged the politicians would be reelected, if not, they wouldn’t.

If you thought you lived somewhere that charged too high a rate of income tax, you could move to somewhere cheaper. Of course, house prices would also be affected, as who would want to live in a particularly highly taxed area?

Local taxes would be spent on everything except for National Security and International Affairs. Oh, and maybe on National infrastructure like motorways, railways and airports.

But local spending would go on local roads, education, local health services (which would not get any money from large and inefficient centralised centres in London); police and emergency services would be managed from the localities as they are now, but without the need to go to London with a begging bowl for top up funds; it would be much easier to raise funds for local issues that were unique to your areas.

If you live outside of London, how do you know how much of your tax bill goes to subsidising things such as the Covent Garden Opera House for the benefit of people who live hundreds of miles away? Maybe your own local theatres and arts providers could do with the money instead?

If you live in London, are you happy for your tax money to be spent on large regional aid projects “oop North” in places you wouldn’t even want to drive through in an APC?

If you live in an unemployment black spot, wouldn’t you like your local authority to be able to charge lower taxes to encourage companies that brought employment to the area?

Would you be more interested in local politics if it affected your income tax bill?

If schools in your area are failing, wouldn’t you like to be able to increase their budgets and provide an education system more tailored to local needs - eg increase the amount of computing and/or maths and/or commerce and/or vocational skills - and wouldn’t you like to be able to increase the budgets to the schools in your area without needing to have to beg? Imagine, each pupil with their own school provided laptop…

If the health service in your area didn’t have enough scanners, you could allocate funds to make sure they were provided. You wouldn’t have to close hospitals or their wards if you didn’t want to.

Your MP (who you probably never hear of right now, except at election time) would become less important than your local councillor who you would see a lot more of as he wouldn’t be so close to Covent Garden any more.

So, you may ask, how is this all financed? First of all, there’d be the same amount of money coming in in total as there is today; it just wouldn’t have to go via London. Cutting out the trip to London and back would eliminate one layer of cost from the equation, and London costs - as we all know - are higher than anywhere else in the country, so the savings would be big.

Let’s face it, the rest of the country currently pays for the London weighting on civil service salaries; move these jobs to local councils and you’d have cheaper administration costs immediately.

Democracy would also be improved because the control of money would no longer be in the hands of people who had very little connection with your area, but in the hands of people who lived, worked, and travelled in the area every day.

People would have a sense of ownership.

There are working examples of this kind of set up - in Switzerland. It works very well, it keeps taxes low, services high, and competition between areas maintainis high levels of employment too. In fact it works so well the EU is actually complaining about the Swiss tax system, saying it is “unfair”! Just because the French and Germans are too monolithic and in need of restructuring to efficiently manage their own economies.

If you dislike the EU because it is too big, too bureaucratic, then why is the UK system that is centralised on London any different?

Local spending should be controlled by locals. It’s your money, so why give it away to strangers?

I recently found out that they don’t teach Geography in schools in Boston, Mass. in the USA. Can this be true?

Last September a group of kids went to Boston, Mass. in the US for a two week exchange visit. They came from Switzerland. You may not know this, but the Swiss admire America the concept so much their constitution is based on the American one. Many Swiss visit the US every year and love the experience.

So it came as some surprise to this group of kids when they arrived to discover that America the reality was not what they expected.

First of all, they were asked “Do you have trees in Switzerland?” Wow. Now that’s a hard one. Trees. Never heard of those in Europe, have we?

Another question they were asked was “Is Switzerland in the Arctic?” Err, no, that’s Sweden. Switzerland is about 3 hours drive from the Mediterranean, if you drive through its neighbour Italy.

But most amazing of all was finding out that none of the kids they met had any Geography lessons in school. Because Boston schools don’t think it’s important enough. Which of course explained a lot. The question is - why? Why do schools in Boston not teach Geography?

Being charitable you could say that the lack of a good understanding of the rest of the world is less than constructive for drafting foreign policy. Alternatively you could say the lack of geographical knowledge impoverishes Americans, weakens their foreign policy, and puts their security at risk. Conspiracy theorists would say it is so that the masses can be more easily controlled: if they don’t know what works better overseas, they will be less likely to question what happens at home.

If you are American and are reading this, I hope you will check up on why Boston (and maybe your education district too) does not teach Geography, and post back here with some ideas. It just doesn’t seem logical to me.