Fifth Decade

I was just reading an interesting story in MacFormat magazine about the NHS. They’ve spent a load of dosh (they can’t do anything without spending a load of dosh, apparently) on bringing themselves into the online age with a couple of applications - Choose and Book, and the even more expensive Electronic Patient Record system.

Anyway, they’ve spent £5,600,000,000 to be exact. That’s £5.6 billion. Plus £64.5 million on top. Like a kind of tip…

The story unfolds on Page 8 of the April issue of the mag “Safari users failed by NHS” and describes how NHS online schemes are unavailable to thousands of Mac users because the NHS systems only support Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw was queried in the House of Commons by the Conservative’s Stephen O’Brien about the £64.5 million Choose and Book appointments system and replied in a written answer using what can only be called Microsoft-speak:

Because of the number of browser versions available to internet users, priority has been given to certification of the application against the most popular browsers in the first instance.

Well, that is strange. I thought there was such a thing as Internet Standards? You know, rules like we have for driving - drive on the left, steering wheel on the right, accelerator on the right, clutch on the left and brake in the middle. Standards that when used mean that any manufacturer can build a car that works on the road, and that any driver can use without having to learn a new system.

On the internet there is a set standard, even a set of standards, and the best websites use what is known as “Standards compliant coding” which basically means they only have to design and code for one International Standard. It is then up to the browser writers to comply with those agreed standards. This saves a lot of money for developers.

I mean, why develop for many different systems when you could develop for just one global standard?

Ah, but that doesn’t help Microsoft sell their software does it, because when there are standards that anyone can use, there is no way to lock them in to having to buy Microsoft. Microsoft have a long history of sabotaging international standards, as we have just seen with the ISO voting process for Microsoft’s OOXML file format when there was already a perfectly adequate ISO standard with far wider acceptance in the Open Document Format (ODF).

That’s exactly what they have done with the internet. In order to force users to buy their Operating Systems they incorporated features into their browser that were sufficiently different to the agreed standards to make life difficult for those with different browsers. In fact, in many ways Internet Explorer does not read standards compliant websites awfully well at all - it’s a flawed browser on many levels, not least of which being security, something of a concern where our health records are concerned.

It’s the waste that gets me though. How on earth could the government spend £5.6 billion on any computer system at all? And then not have it fully working? That’s a lot of tax money. It’s a lot of free prescriptions. It’s a lot of patient beds, a lot of life-saving equipment. Oh, I forgot, it’s also a lot of profit for Microsoft and its supporters.

Well, at least we know what the NHS considers most important then.

US Elections

Senator Barack Obama: Aimed as much at Hillary Clinton as it is against George W Bush, Obama keeps on calling for a change in Washington. He wants to get rid of the people who are already there and bring in new blood to replace them. Err, Senator Obama, that big round Senatey thing you go to work in every day, isn’t that in Washington? So doesn’t that mean you? And by the way, how about a different speech now and then - I keep on hearing you say the same things over and over again…

Senator Hillary Clinton: All the world knows you stuck by your husband Hillary, and that’s laudable, but did you have to cold shoulder him quite so publicly when he was trying to congratulate you after your speech on Super Tuesday? He tried so very hard too… Go on, give him a hug!

IT

Bill Gates: Speaking as the owner of a company that dominates the world in many areas, not least of which being the 90% of office productivity software, 85% of Operating Systems, “The world needs an alternative to Google.” Google’s corporate motto is “Do no evil”. What does that say about Microsoft?

Tom Robertson (Microsoft’s general manager for corporate standards) talking about supporters of the Open Source ISO standard ODF file format: “Frankly some of the opposition is very commercially based”. Really? And Microsoft’s pushing of its own, non Open Source, proprietary OOXML format owned by a single monopolistic corporation isn’t commercial, then? Ahhh, Diddums…. is da likkle baby crying den?

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.

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.

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.”

Currency exchange is a complex subject with lots of interlaced layers. You can go deeper and deeper and still not explore ever nuance.

In general terms though, weakening your currency imports inflation. This then causes interest rates to rise, and this can hit the economy by hurting businesses as well as consumers, especially if the savings rate (basically the difference between a country’s savings and debts) is low - ie where mortgage lending is high, and people have high debts, increasing interest rates hurt. If they aren’t raised, the currency sinks lower, import costs increase, pushing up inflation until you end up with the Zimbabwean situation of hyper-inflation of 22,000% per year.

Yes, a weak currency does allow for cheaper export prices - or higher profits from exports where prices in export markets are maintained at high levels. This is happening now with Adobe (Europeans pay nearly double the US price), Microsoft (we pay about 50% more), and to a much smaller extent, Apple (about 15% higher over here). It does depend on the product you pick though.

When the pound weakened in the 1980s Jaguar took the decision to maintain Dollar prices and just make more money from sales in the US, although they could have made the price a lot cheaper because of the lower FX values. It’s also possible they didn’t have the money to invest in extra production (the Brown’s Lane, Coventry factory was renowned for being too small for existing production anyway, never mind increases).

I’m not sure that long term keeping profits high from exchange rate variations is a good policy; reducing prices and selling more volume should give you more customers for the future, many of whom will remain even after prices return to previous levels. Future upgrade costs from new customers can far outweigh short term profit benefits over the long term, but executive pay is geared to getting higher and higher short term profits without long term thinking being so important. It’s a delicate balancing act though.

The Chinese economy is benefiting from artificially low FX rates, but their currency doesn’t float and has a fixed peg to the dollar. That means their economic development can be paid for by the countries they export to. You can see their exchange rate is artificially low because they can even undercut products made in India, a similar country with similar levels of economic development.

It isn’t always a bed of roses though, often a weak currency smells more like the fertiliser roses need. You may remember (or have seen the clip again and again) Harold Wilson in the 1960s trying to explain that “The pound in your pocket is worth what it always was” just after Sterling hit a bad patch and was devalued overnight. Of course, he was totally wrong, it really was worth less because imports became more expensive. He was rightly lambasted in the press for that.

In the US, the Bush administration are wedded to income tax cuts, without reducing spending (look up “Pork Belly Politics”). This only really works if you can grow the economy sufficiently fast enough through exporting more than you import. But the US double deficit isn’t just about how much the government spends or receives in taxes. The second part is the Trade Balance: it’s at record highs because no matter what the state of the US economy American consumers are wedded to buying expensive imports on credit, and buy more from overseas than they export.

So, a low currency can appear nice, but while the total volume of exports may rise, the total value of these exports in monetary terms may not change that much. More volume for export also means factories at home working at higher capacity, and as output capacity gets tighter, wages and other costs rise. Meanwhile, the value of consumer-led imports does increase in cost. This all adds to more inflation.

Basically, both the US government and the US consumer are living beyond their means, funded by a pile of debt that ultimately is owned by the large exporting countries - mainly China and Japan. That’s why politically the US cannot threaten China much, because if they did the Chinese could dump dollars and cause a real crisis in the US as well as the world economy.

One of the many hidden reasons for going into Iraq was because of the threat by Saddam to price Iraqi oil in Euros, not USD, and other oil-leaders were thinking the same. That would have hit the Dollar’s reputation as the world’s reserve currency (it took over from Gold some years back).

So, unless the US consumer stops buying so much imported stuff - such as more attractive cars and luxury goods from Europe and Japan, cheaper electronic goods from China and the Far East and less oil from everywhere - then the Dollar will remain on a downward path. And ironically, giving disproportionate tax cuts to the rich and wealthy actually stimulates more imports of luxury goods, increasing the Trade Deficit rather than reducing it.

As I said, I’m only brushing the surface here. I’ll bet you didn’t really want to know that much about it…

The ink’s only just dry on the appointment of Nicholas Sarkozy as French Premier, but already he’s showing he isn’t as right wing as expected. Either that, or he’s in the pocket of Big Business. That wouldn’t be the first time for European right wing politicians.

You may have heard that the EU Treaty is being renegotiated this week. Instead of introducing a Constitution which was rejected by French and Dutch referenda when it was put to the people of those countries, it seems the powers that be have decided if they call it a treaty, and drop some name tags here and there they can still get all the changes they wanted without needing citizens to vote for it. Nice to see democracy is flourishing.

Well, Mr Sarkozy has insisted the 50 year old committment to “free and undistorted competition” should be replaced by a “social market economy aiming at full employment“. Mr Sarkozy is only thinking of France here of course, and the habit French governments can’t get out of of subsidising uncompetitive French industries with taxpayers money. But the effects will be far deeper and far wider than Mr Sarkozy’s lack of vision can encompass.

If adopted this will, in one fell swoop, move all of Europe from a Capitalist based system to a Socialist based system. Where private companies exist, they will gravitate towards monopoly status and behaviour. This will favour large American corporations such as Microsoft, whom only the EU courts have really brought to task for running as uncontrolled monopolies.

Meanwhile, the UK Independence Party and the UK Conservative Party continue blathering on about “we must keep UK Sovereignty sacred” when it was given away to the US half a century ago in the Bretton-Woods agreement. If the UK did leave Europe, and Europe adopted more of this ridiculous socialist dogma, Britain plc would have huge problems competing with massive, subsidised European businesses on the one hand, and massive protected American Corporations on the other.

All most of the Tories can say, in their best public school accents, is “I say! We must keep the Qweens Head on our cuwwency!” All our enfeebled and divisive gutter press can say is “Remember the War!” - they’re talking about the 1415 Battle of Agincourt here, of course, they’re so stuck in the past.

Wake up, people! The only way to protect British interests and values is as a part of Europe, and by rejecting the imposition of backdoor socialism by French protectionists.

Update:
The French did an about-turn (as usual) and have withdrawn the changes. It seems the Poles have also given in and done a deal at the last minute. As I write, no details have emerged other than an agreement has been reached. We’ll just have to wait to see what that is, and how it affects us all.

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.

A lot has been written about Microsoft and it’s stranglehold over desktop and office systems, and rightly so as that company has shown they do not use their monopoly power ethically. They claim to be innovators, but their latest Operating System, Microsoft Vista, is no more than a copy of Apple’s OS X - it even looks the same. But enough of that. We all know about that monopoly. But are there any others?

Many people complain about the growing prevalence of the iPod/iTunes mix, but that is far less pervasive IMO with far more media providers, and no hardware or software lockins. When someone brings out a competing product that is more stylish and easier to use, Apple will not be able to force consumers not to buy it as Microsoft can with Windows and Office.

The other monopoly in computing though is one not often written about, but one that is nonetheless becoming problematic for consumers, particularly European ones.

I am talking here about Adobe/Macromedia.

Their stranglehold over the graphics market (particularly web design) is awesome. When the two companies merged recently I was amazed the US competition authorities didn’t complain about the reduction in competition this would cause. The result has predictably been to create a monster that is abusing its monopoly power with hugely exorbitant prices for its software.

One good example of this is their newly launched CS3 product. The price in Europe is nearly twice that of the identical US product when measured in USD terms. It’s also about twice the price of the Macromedia Dreamweaver/Fireworks bundle I bought a few years ago.

In former times, pre-merger, the top applications for web design were Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe’s GoLive! which wasn’t quite as good, but at least the competition between them kept prices down.

Since the merger in Dec 2005, Adobe has had a free rein to raise prices because there is nobody to undercut them anymore. There may be other editors out there, but none with the market penetration of Adobe’s package. It is widely expected that eventually Dreamweaver will have totally replaced GoLive! to the detriment of consumer choice as well. And that means prices will go up. Again.

One sure sign of being a near-monopoly is when you try to hide the fact by deflecting attention from your own business to that of others - hopefully onto others who are monopolists. Adobe’s boss, Bruce Chizen: “Microsoft is a $50 billion monopolist who’s in the software business. I take them very seriously.” Maybe he’s trying to emulate them?

Rumours are going around that with the recent USD 6 billion purchase by Microsoft of digital marketing firm Aquantive the software giant is planning to incorporate advertising into its Windows OS.

The BSOD could be sponsored by an insurance or car breakdown company - or even a car manufacturer with the line “Aren’t you glad our cars don’t break down as often as your computer?”

Windows Explorer could advertise the cult TV show Lost, McDonalds could advertise on the Start menu since their food always has loads of extras you don’t really need to start the day, while lastminute.com could sponsor the MS Office menu bar with the message “The total time you’ve wasted so far this year looking for the correct control in this program is enough to have spent two weeks in the Caribbean at this hotel. Book now!”