Small Business Server

So, you own a small business with between 5 and 15 employees and need to buy a server. Which one should you get – Windows based or Mac OS X based? Let’s look at the costs involved, because lets face it, businesses need to make money, right?

Microsoft elbowing themselves onto the One Laptop Per Child project

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.

Which Mac should you get? An old switcher’s guide for new switchers

I first tried a Mac in, oh, about 1986. I hated it. Tiny little box with a screen in it, and the salesman sat me in front of it and tried to persuade me of its (expensive) merits by opening practically the only software they had for it – a Paint program. I wasn’t impressed. I wanted something to run a spreadsheet, not draw dumb pictures. From that moment on I thought all Macs were pretentious pieces of garbage for rich idiots who wanted to draw pictures all day long. How times change.

Almost two decades later, and I hadn’t looked at a Mac but I had slagged them off a few times on computer forums and so on. That was when my PC worked of course, didn’t have the anti-virus scanner working, wasn’t updating its virus definition files, or showing me the Blue Screen Of Death.

Now, one of the guys I hung out with worked for IBM. We used to go for a beer a couple of Fridays a month with some other computer guys to chew the fat. My friend’s girlfriend was very much into Macs, but she was studying a graphics course so I just thought, “Of course she’s got a Mac. She wants to make pretty pictures!”

But it wasn’t quite like that – her course was half graphics, half accounting. Huh? Accounting? On a Mac? That was a new idea I couldn’t get my head around to begin with.

After a while, my friend admitted he played around on his girlfriend’s Mac – because he could just get on and do his home stuff without worrying about things not working or needing new drivers or having conflicts or crashing. He said that both he and his girlfriend had completely different user accounts, with everything completely separate. He had his files and programs, she had hers. He ran Unix applications in the Terminal, she ran graphics files on the old Mac OS, called OS9.

Now remember, this guy worked on PCs all day long to keep them in working order. And yet he kept on going on about how reliable and user friendly the Mac was. Sure, he had a PC too, it was provided for him by his work. But when he went out and ordered a Mac mini – with his own money – I started to rethink things very carefully.

If everything was like he said, maybe I should buy one of these little wonders too. He assured me they were completely different now, and even Microsoft Office worked on it. They even had IBM chips inside, and connected to all the same things PCs could.

So I bought a Mac mini. It was the best decision I ever made buying a computer. Since then I’ve gone on to buy nine Macs in total for myself, my family, and my office. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve got a lot of experience from a PC user’s point of view about choosing a Mac – but I’m not you, so this is a guide, not a recommendation.

Mac mini
The first Mac for many people, and certainly the one with the lowest ticket price, is the Mac mini. Like all Macs, they look great but in addition it’s just so small. It fits anywhere, and runs very quietly. Compared to my previous PC, it’s silent. Perfect for the lounge. And it has been trouble free.

Mac minis do not come with a separate graphics card so share some of the standard system RAM. This means the largest screen they can power would be a 23″ Apple Display, although I have heard they could power a Dell or other model 24″ screen. The latest Mac minis are pretty nice right now, particularly the Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz model.

iMac
The new aluminium iMacs have a glossy screen which many people cannot bear, others seem not to worry about it. Personally I hate reflections on the screen and had a look at the new iMac in a variety of lighting situations at a number of locations (three Apple resellers and the Bluewater Apple Retail store) before excluding it for being too glossy. Not for nothing do the TV ads show the new glossy screened iMac from side on only! Any other view would put many people right off.

Talking of TV though, getting rid of screen reflections has been like hunting for the Holy Grail for most manufacturers for decades – there have even been products developed to counteract the reflections, so why the fashion has returned as an “advantage” is quite beyond me.

If you find the shiny screen doesn’t irritate the hell out of you, which iMac should you get? I bought a Refurbished 24″ white iMac (last model) from the Apple Online store and got a sizable discount, but these seem to be in short supply right now. It does have a large screen, but the size is very useful and not too big for a normal desk, especially since the computer is in the screen and there’s no beige box to have to work out how to hide.

The screen on the older iMac is non-reflective, and the size allows me to work on a full page on one side of the screen, and have my reference pages open on the right and just drag and drop pictures, charts, and even lumps of text straight from one to the other, not even needing to use cut and paste. Just seeing the two pages next to each other is a huge advantage.

When it comes to the new aluminium iMacs, there is a significant difference in quality between the 20″ and the 24″ models. Mainly, the 24″ model uses better components than the 20″ model, whose screen is actually of lower spec than its white plastic predecessor! Of course, with the glossy screen the reflections are larger the bigger the area they can reflect from…

Power Mac / Mac Pro
Unfortunately there isn’t a mid range Mac without an in-built screen, so if you don’t like the new iMac and can’t get an old iMac you have to go for either the Mac mini or a Mac Pro which is, err, B I G !!!

We use the current Mac Pro’s almost identical predecessor, a G5 PPC 2.0 GHz double processor powered Power Mac, in the office as a file and database server and it is very under-utilised, seldom using more than 30% of processor capacity.

It’s massive though. Not for on top of a desk. Solid sculpture, beautiful design. The metal case is thick, solid, sculpted anodised metal that weighs a ton. From an engineering point of view, it’s art. It feels nice to touch. Inside it’s as beautiful as outside, and very well designed and put together. Putting in new RAM is dead easy. In the new ones, even changing a Hard Disk drive is easy. We have two Hard Disks in ours, set up in a RAID configuration so that if one disk fails, the other is a mirror image with no data is lost.

When the new Mac Operating System, OS X 10.5 Leopard has had all the bugs ironed out, we’ll probably use its new Time Machine backup system for data security and change the RAID configuration to allow for faster read/write speeds to boost performance even more.

Laptops
Not everyone wants a desktop Mac though, and Mac laptops have become more and more popular this year, taking 17% of the laptop market and making Apple into the third biggest computer manufacturer after Dell and HP.

Power Book/MacBook Pro
Before Macs went from PPC chips to Intel, I bought a Power Book as I needed some portability for international travel. It is another piece of scuplted Aluminium beauty that is wonderfully rewarding in so many ways, not least of which being the tactile satisfaction of just using it. When light levels fall, the screen dims and the aluminium keys automatically light up so you can still see which keys to press, a big help for my aging eyes.

Closing the lid automatically sleeps the computer, opening it gives you an almost instant restart. Amazing. My girlfriend’s HP notebook would crash if you did this. To be fair, it was running Windows 98 though.

My old model Power Book is completely at home doing everything I have asked of it though – basically it is a portable version of a G4 iMac with equivalent specification. I run mine with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, plus a 19″ standalone monitor, so have a portable desktop. The two fingered scroll pad is fantastic. So intuitive. So unlike a PC. And the new MacBook Pro is much, much better.

MacBook
When the HP finally gave up the ghost (not only had all the key labels vanished from the keyboard so hitting the correct letter was often guesswork, eventually the keys stopped working too, it would never run without crashing and a host of other minor irritants) I got my girlfriend a MacBook. Bad mistake. Not because of the computer – but because I didn’t consult with her, I deprived her of the fun of choosing.

But the MacBook itself is pretty fast, it’s the Black 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo version with the 13.3 inch screen. This is a bit small for most eyes, but unfortunately the MacBook is not available with a larger screen. You have to go up to the MacBook Pro for that which has either a 15″ or a 17″ display.

For most purposes, the MacBook is fantastic and fun, but it doesn’t have a separate graphics card, so for big movie making work it probably struggles a bit. For general office work though, it is fine and connecting to an external monitor is definitely a good idea.

Making your Mac faster.
In all cases, max out your RAM wherever you can – but don’t buy it from Apple unless you are getting a Mac mini which is remarkably compact and difficult to access. One supplier that has a great website for helping you identify which RAM you need and its cost is Crucial. 2 Gb will have your Mac flying, although 1 Gb is really sufficient if you aren’t running Windows and OS X simultaneously on the same computer. Yes, both Parallels and VMWare alow this, not to mention Apple’s own Boot Camp – now replaced as part of the Leopard OS.

Whichever Mac you get, you won’t be disappointed. Do make sure the one you get is sufficient for your needs though, just like choosing any computer.

Have fun! But remember all those folks still on PC who have to fight their PC constantly, rather than have it work with them to get things out rather than just put effort in.

On a Mac, things just work.

When the Government becomes a Fanboy (but says they’re not)

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.”

The little bit of Microsoft that I like

I’ll be honest, most of what Microsoft does I don’t like. But somewhere deep in the bowels of the giant monopoly abuser are some good people doing some good coding and producing some interesting and profitable programs despite the efforts of the upper echelons to cripple good ideas.

First of all, forget the top two. They’re both there because Bill G’s mother sat on the board of IBM at the time IBM chose Microsoft to supply the Operating System for the new IBM PC. And don’t forget – they didn’t write that themselves, they hacked someone else’s code paying the inventor of CP/M $50,000 in the process. Since then they have hardly shown themselves to be especially talented, unlike many of the people who work for them.

Forget too the business ethics department at MS, because they palpably don’t have one. If they do, it doesn’t work the way you and I understand ethics. For one, they really seem to believe they are above the law. Even where they have been found guilty of abusing their monopoly – in the US and in Europe – they have tried wriggling out of things, or dragging legal cases on so long they evaporate competition while the courts deliberate. After being found guilty of monopoly abuse in the US they applied political and financial pressure to have the judge who found them guilty removed from the case that would identify the appropriate punishment in the US; the replacement left the company intact, a big mistake in my opinion for both the coders at Microsoft and their customers. In Europe they applied similar political pressure to politicians in an attempt to wriggle out of paying that fine – which they still haven’t paid 5 years after they lost the case.

Forget how they treat competitors. The Microsoft way to dominance is to bully the opposition either by forced or coerced buyout, by sabotaging other competitors’ markets by undercutting them with loss making cheaper or even free products (eg the neutering of Netscape), or by writing the code of Windows so that it favours their own Office product (eg the removal of Word Perfect from the No 1 Word Processor slot). I’m sure you can think of other occasions.

Forget anything to do with making customers want to do business with them, the Microsoft way is to force customers to do business with them. This is in sharp contrast to companies like Apple whose customers are wooed by the company with great systems, amazing designs, and an “I want one!” culture so powerful that the shares of other companies can plummet just on the rumour that Apple the innovator might enter their market (eg mobile phone maker shares on the announcement of the soon to be here Apple iPhone).

Forget innovation too. Microsoft haven’t made anything truly innovative since the, err, erm…. actually, what innovation have they brought to the table? Ah yes, the legal argument that if the company was split up it wouldn’t be able to innovate. Er, hello? Innovation is something other companies do Microsoft. You just copy and that isn’t the same. MS is a bit like Bizarro from the DC comics Superman stories, if you remember that far back.

But Microsoft really does have a diamond in its cupboard, and that diamond is Microsoft Office. OK, it has a load of crap stuck in there too, and some of it (such as Access) has been artificially restricted to force users (there they go again, forcing) to buy the more expensive SQL server.

Perhaps Word is rather too difficult to navigate, and sometimes you need to alter three seperate settings held on lower sub-levels of more than one menu selection just to change what something looks like on a page. Word also makes you change each formatting setting one at a time, whereas programs such as IBM’’s Lotus Smartsuite have a pop up menu with all the options available in one place with one click alterations possible. Word files (.doc) take up a lot more space for storage than the equivalent from OpenOffice (.odt files) too.

PowerPoint and Publisher are pretty awful really when you look at other alternatives out there. FrontPage is tragic – have you ever seen the amount of sewage-code this generates for a simple text only web-page? It’s mind-boggling. As for Outlook, it’s really not very powerful and has loads of holes.

The brightest bit of the diamond is though, without a doubt, Microsoft Excel – particularly it’s graphing capabilities. This program is amazing, and when compared to the main opposition at the moment, OpenOffice, it’s like comparing a seedling with a California Redwood. Except that Apple comes from California of course, not Microsoft.

OK, the standard colours of the charts Excel produces are pretty uninspiring, but it’s amazing how few people change them. You can see them dotted around, here and there, in coprorate brochures, annual reports and other literature. But to give them their due, Excel I believe is a wholly grown internal project, not bought in, not pirated, not copied. When it was launched it really did mess up the sales of the then leader for spreadsheets, Lotus Corp’s Lotus 123.

If it wasn’t for Excel, I wouldn’t have bought Microsoft Office. I did buy it to run on a Mac though – I still don’t have MS Office on my PC. Actually, MS Excel appeared on Macs before it appeared on Windows, if you are to believe the stories. One other program Microsoft makes that is pretty good is Visio, but it doesn’t come with MS Office.

But don’t you think it is ironic that MS, who regularly spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about other platforms such as Linux and Apple – and who try to put Apple off people’s shopping lists by dismissively saying “Macs are only good for graphics” actually have as their “best” products two, err, graphics related programs?

The best thing that could happen for Microsoft would be a breakup, as the one that broke up Standard Oil in the 1920s. When that oil monopoly was broken up into 34 daughter companies including Exxon, Amoco, Conoco etc the sum market capitalisation of all the post-breakup component companies almost doubled overnight – a capital movement the like of like which Microsoft hasn’t seen for many years, unlike the much smaller Apple Inc whose shares have more than doubled in the last year alone. But making more money probably isn’t important as keeping control of as much as possible when you reach top executive level at MS. If I were a shareholder in the company, that would worry me.

Only after a breakup will the bright young minds that are hidden away, deep inside Microsoft have the freedom and lack of top-down management to become truly innovative and bring the world ideas to stimulate our minds and make us finally want to buy MS stuff. Maybe the hard light of day shining into the recesses of the machine would purify and illuminate smaller, post-breakup companies. I fear it’ll be just more of the same though.

What a lost opportunity.

When it comes to Microsoft, is BBC news coverage biased?

First thing you have to understand is that most people believe the BBC to be the de rigeur news organisation in the world, compelled by its Charter to be unbiased politically, economically, and in fact in all areas.

But when it comes to Microsoft, the BBC does seem to have quite a few MS fanboys in its technical department. Not surprising when you read stuff like “Bumbling BBC gives away millions to Microsoft with exclusive 2 year viewer lock-in! ” which shows that someone in the BBC has crossed the line in being so wedded to their own idea of what is best they have now put themselves into the position of having to try and support their technical decision through manipulating the “bias balance” towards Microsoft. Go to any Mac forum with a UK flavour and you’ll soon see posts related to bias on behalf of the BBC in favour of Microsoft. Is it imaginary, or real?

For an example of the kind of thing I mean, look at these two reports of the recent San Diego court which has just fined Microsoft $1.5 Billion for infringing on patents for MP3 encoding and decoding technology.

The MacWorld website, not renowned for its music coverage, wrote the most informative piece, giving quite a lot of background detail and information on what happens next. The BBC website, however, really didn’t give much information out at all, with very little background and no mentions of what happens next, or why.

Considering how big an issue digital music is right now, any court case about the subject is surely a hot topic. You only have to look at the bloglists to see that it is indeed a Big Story right now – particularly the Digital Rights Management issues of restrictions against normal users.

One Blogger, Blue Magnolia, is so cross at the abuse of power the BBC is currently exhibiting they have set up an ePetition on the UK Government’s website asking for people to register their unhappiness with the way the BBC are doing things. You should drop by and sign it – it only takes a minute and will help rein in the mad Microsoft machine the BBC has become.

You should sign the petition even if you are not a Mac or Linux user, because it is the principle of BBC neutrality that is at stake here. Anyway, even Windows users are affected – if you are running Windows 95/98, Windows ME, or Windows 2000 on your computer your needs are being ignored too.

Now, maybe the BBC is being a good boy and following the government’s wishes – after all, Bill Gates did visit Tony Blair a few years ago just before a number of big decisions about which platform to use were up in the air, particularly the issue of whether Governments should use an Open Document Format or a proprietary one (it was around the time when the City of Munich announced it was moving away from Microsoft onto Linux to save money and prevent accusations of favouritism; they wanted a non-proprietary format for word processor files too).

Tony Blair is apparently a self-confessed non-expert when it comes to computers, so you can imagine him being easy to bamboozle in these matters, even if he did have some advisors around him. Since then, there have been many decisions in favour of Microsoft technologies when many of them are insecure, unreliable, or just so complex they are difficult to implement. (See Reforming the NHS and it’s National Insurance funding system for some associated information).

As usual, I’ve digressed slightly – but only because the spider’s web of intrigue crosses into many areas, background information comes from many places, and the motivation for some actions may at first appear unrelated, but are frequently causal.

I’m going to post more examples of BBC bias here, and please add any you find yourself in the comments below too. Together, we the people have a voice that cannot forever be ignored.

Isn’t blogging great?

Examples

1. One example is this story on the BBC website “News that Microsoft has been fined for violating MP3 patents belonging to Alcatel-Lucent could have widespread fallout for the industry.”

The story is a follow-up about a subject that primarily affects Microsoft and its customers, Dell and Gateway Computer, due to the patent infringements inherent in the Windows Operating System. Yet the principal photograph used to illustrate the story shows only Apple equipment, none of which has been affected by the Court case yet.

The BBC story does say that others might be affected by the ruling, but surely other users of the Microsoft Windows OS and music players that primarily play MP3 tracks would be first in line? You can see a list of those companies licenced to do so – the list of MP3 licencees.

Lower down in the story, there is a photo of some Creative MP3 players, but it’s buried. Nowhere is there a photo showing the Microsoft logo, or that of any other manufacturer. Without a picture of a wide range of products from different manufacturers it is a clear bias against Apple.

Bumbling BBC gives away millions to Microsoft with exclusive 2 year viewer lock-in! (Updated)

Yes, it’s true, the Executive of the BBC is giving Microsoft the equivalent of millions in revenue. For free. On an exclusive basis. They don’t seem to have even realised the commercial implications of what they are doing. But this blogger does.

The BBC wants to begin offering a BBC on-demand TV over the internet service. It’s a very laudable aim – giving viewers 7 days to freely download a program they missed, and then a further 30 days to watch it before it disappears in a puff of smoke. OK, electrons, but let’s not get pedantic.

The problem is, they are planning to use a Microsoft-based DRM strategy. Not only will the strategy be based only on the Microsoft platform, but it will also need Windows XP or above and Media Player 10 to work. If you have a computer that uses Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, or any Linux or Apple Macintosh computer the BBC will thus exclude you – even if you have paid your licence fee.

Before everything is finalised though, it has to go through a Public Value Test or PVT, and the Conclusions of the BBCTrust [pdf download, 167 kb] which now sits above the governors and the Executive are now available for public scrutiny.

I’ll save you reading through the entire document (it’s pretty yawn inducing overall) but I recommend you read just two bits.

On Page 10, near the bottom it says:

The BBC Executive proposes a digital rights management solution which would require consumers to be using Windows XP (or above) and Windows Media Player 10 (or above) to be able to access seven-day TV catch-up over the internet.

You have to hand it to the Microsoft sales guys, don’t you? They really got into the BBC’s britches! No wonder the BBC is gently pushing Vista – it’s fundamental to their ideas for DRM, so of course they are looking favourably on any press release from Microsoft and even gave Bill Gates an easy time of it when Huw Edwards interviewed him this week.

Then, at the top of Page 11 they go on to say:

Our understanding is that the BBC Executive aspires to offer an alternative DRM framework, which would enable Apple and Linux users to access the service, but has yet to identify a satisfactory solution. In either case, we will expect this to have been addressed within 24 months.

This is the most dangerous point. It basically gives free rein to Microsoft to build a dominating presence in the nascent TV over internet market in the UK. Not only that, but it allows Microsoft free access to BBC television for at least 2 years, as the BBC Trust only require a proposed solution, not an implemented one, within 2 years!

By that time, Microsoft will have used the advantage thus gained to deal a mortal blow to Apple in the home environment for entertainment, or will at least have dramatically clipped Apple’s wings so expansion into that space will have been made only by Microsoft, and not by Apple. First mover advantage would then give yet another monopoly market share to Microsoft. In the UK, the BBC is clearly the dominant player.

The BBC may argue that they had to pick one technology, and don’t have the resources to develop solutions for two. Since their revenue comes mostly from the UK TV Licence Fee – which has just been increased – I can understand their resources are limited to their £4 billion per year income. Which is why it is all the stranger that they haven’t asked Microsoft to pay millions for this exclusive arrangement. Well, not to the BBC anyway. It’ll certainly be worth that and more to Microsoft who get to lock consumers out of Apple and Linux, just at a time when the pendulum is beginning to move in that direction and away from Microsoft.

It isn’t as if there are not already some well-tested alternative solutions in place. Apple has very successful Movies and TV Shows sections with DRM in it’s iTunes store which serves both Microsoft and Apple computers. Linux I know less about, but there must be some alternatives out there for Linux too.

The provisional conclusions are open to consultation for a period of eight weeks, following which a final decision whether or not to approve the proposals will be made by the Trust by 2 May 2007.

If you use an Apple Mac or a Linux box, you need to ask why as a licence payer you are being penalised for choosing a more secure computer; if you use Windows you should ask why Microsoft has not been asked to pay for this vastly commercially advantageous deal that will guarantee them a protected market share for at least two years.

You can send in your complaints to pvtconsultation.ondemand@bbc.co.uk or by snail mail (always gets the BBCs attention) to this address:

On-Demand Consultation
BBC Trust
35 Marylebone High Street
London W1U 4AA

The Minister with responsibility for TV in the UK is Tessa Jowell, who must be looking for a good platform on which to rebuild her reputation right now after the Mills-Berlusconi affair. You can e-mail Tessa Jowell at tessa.jowell@culture.gsi.gov.uk

Update
Ofcom first raised the issue of competition, so are also involved. You can reach them here:
Ofcom Board members and their email addresses

As the Ofcom website is very difficult to navigate to a point from which you can actually do something I’ve also copied the names and emails of their main movers for you:

Chief Executive Officer
Ed.Richards@ofcom.org.uk

Chief Technology Officer
peter.ingram@ofcom.org.uk

Partner, Competition
sean.williams@ofcom.org.uk

Peter Ingram you may remember was involved with the EU’s legal case regarding Microsoft’s alleged abuse of monopoly power which Microsoft have so far lost every round of, but have still to change their attitude regarding lockins of users and lock outs of competitors of their software.

I’ve had a look at the EU website too. The EU’s Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, is clearly going to need to look into this matter. Here’s a relevant excerpt from her website:

“As European Commissioner for Competition, my aim is to promote a fair and free environment for business in Europe.

The job involves both setting EU-wide rules to guarantee fair competition, and enforcing them fairly and with vigour, to prevent and punish any breaches. That means making sure that:

• companies do not carve up markets or fix prices amongst themselves;

• taxpayers money is used to pursue socially desirable objectives without disproportionately distorting competition or wasted when public authorities grant subsidies to business“.

(The italics are mine, just to highlight the areas which this BBC action is moving into.)

Clearly, the BBC-Microsoft deal will carve up markets; the two year timescale will significantly distort competition; and the lack of a fee being charged to Microsoft is in effect a subsidy. It’s a subsidy because a canny commercial broadcaster would have wrung a high price for giving such a hugely advantageous arrangement to a software company that is just beginning to lose market share in both the internet and desktop computer markets.

In effect, the BBC are giving Microsoft a two year season ticket for free.

To contact Neelie Kroes:

Neelie Kroes
European Commissioner for Competition
Neelie.Kroes@ec.europa.eu

Further info:
The Guardian on the BBC iPlayer

University of Auckland Computer Science Department Paper by Peter Gutmann
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Open Standards

There’s a lot of hoohaa around at the moment that’s revolving around the standards to be used for future documents. For years the .doc proprietary format for Word files has ruled the roost, courtesy of the Windows monopoly and the fact that MS Office is a pretty capable program that would probably be able to stand on its own two feet and compete in the marketplace even without the Windows crutch.

It got to a point though where governments around the world, from the US to Europe and many others too, realised just how much of a problem this was, so they demanded a new standard be set up, open for all to use, so as to give all application developers a fair crack of the whip.

The Open Source community created one Open Standard they hoped would be accepted, but Microsoft created a Proprietary Open Standard instead, and this is the one being rushed through the ISO standards setting institution at the moment, as a fait accompli. Acceptance of the Open Source community’s standard is out of sight.

I’m not technical enough to understand the differences between these two standards, but I do know that if a standard owned by a single company is made into a world standard, that is a “bad thing”. It gives Institutional support, and Government support by proxy, to a thus strengthened corporate monopoly. When that monopoly has the morals and track record of a Microsoft, that has to be worrying.

I’m not the only one worried though. The European Commission has funded a report investigating the economic impact of open source in the business community in Europe (pdf download). The report found that in “almost all” cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft.

No wonder Microsoft has been frog-marching the standards regulators into a quick decision – they want their solution in place before anyone can spot its implications. Oh, and they’ve helpfully included the specification of their “standard” too – all 6,000 pages of it! And that’s not counting the supporting material. It all has to be read and reported on by interested parties by 5th February if they want to make a complaint. Nice.

What’s that saying? Ah yes, act in haste, repent at leisure. There’s going to be a rush on worry beads soon…