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.

Whoever broke this story certainly threw a real problem at Senator John McCain.

For Republicans, close association with lobbyists is normal business. In fact, that’s how Republicans do business. Just so long as the relationship isn’t too close with an individual (close association with a specific lobbying company is OK), isn’t too often, or too personal. In this case, the relationship (platonic or not) has been with a particular lobbyist, and even worse than that, with a pretty blonde lobbyist he seems to have spent rather a lot of time with.

I’m sure a lot of GOP members are relieved that at least it’s a change from the many homosexual scandals various Republicans have been involved with in the recent past. At least, they may be saying, if there is anything going on here, it isn’t what they charmingly refer to as “deviancy”.

The crux of this problem is it’s double edged nature. It’s negative for McCain if anyone thinks there was some funny business with this lady, and it’s negative because it brings into perspective just how much time politicians and lobbyists spend together. It’s even negative for people who believe it’s OK for politicians to be wined and dined, and to go on flights and trips with lobbyists - because they normally disguise such behaviour by not spending so much time with any one individual lobbyist, and this smacks of favouritism. Personally I think McCain is too honourable, but what influence do I have?

So, which camp is most likely to have got this story going? That’s the sixty four thousand dollar question. Obama is most against the close ties Washington politicians have with lobbyists - or so he says. Huckabee probably thinks some hanky panky went on and wants to air such rumours before McCain reaches an unassailable lead, which he shortly will. Clinton probably wouldn’t mind McCain attacking Obama, but is unlikely to want to draw attention to relationships with lobbyists or bring back memories of how her husband ended his Presidency.

So, my money’s on this story originating in the Obama camp. It hits all of his opponents at once, gets in the first shot against his probable main opponent, and does him no harm at all. In fact, it even releases, by transferring attention, some of the pressure on him for his wife’s gaffe when she said she was proud of her country “for the first time” just recently - something Americans seem to take rather badly.

If I were McCain, I’d be counter-punching Obama, but he’d better do it quick or the mud will stick. He’s spent so much time lately trying to prove how much of a conservative he really is, he seems to have taken his eye off the ball.

As for Hillary, she’d better get her website reorganised, the two main words that crop up on the first two pages are “Submit” followed by “Contribute” whereas Obama’s site cries out “Change,” “Believe” and “One Million People” which makes it a lot more powerful. McCain’s is more like Hillary’s, proclaiming “Ready to Lead” which is perhaps too subtle for most folks, sounds like he wants to be given something, rather than to give something.

No wonder Obama is hoovering up the youth vote. And by that, I mean all those under 50… the internet generation. His opponents are both looking rather out of touch, if you ask me. I still don’t think he will make the best President, but I do believe he is running the best campaign right now.

Only time will tell what happens next.

Why? Because people agreed with it? Or because they didn’t attack it?

You can see here the post no longer exists. It was just quoting a Democratic candidate saying how America’s obesity figures had risen, and literacy figures had dropped, but some of the comments were interesting. Mostly cleverly written, but one or two misled or misleading - eg the one claiming the post was just calling Republicans “fatter and thinner” clearly missing the point but confusing the dumb. Another referred to a report which referred to Gen Petraeus as General Betray Us which I thought was a little unfair, just because he was a politically appointed General assigned to support the Bush/Republican position in Iraq doesn’t mean he can’t see the facts: he just reports those that are convenient is all. He’s just another “fatter, dumber American” who wants to do what he has worked out is best for his country - sorry, what he has been told is best. And he would never willingly betray his country.

Most of the comments I read - until the page disappeared from in front of my eyes, half way through a sentence - were supportive or Mr Gravel and his truthfulness. Some got a bit carried away saying it was all a Republican plan to keep more Americans dumber so they wouldn’t ask too many difficult questions, and fatter so they didn’t care they didn’t know, but none of the ones I read justified pulling the post.

But then, aren’t CNN one of the big supporters of the Republican party? To hell with free speech, they don’t really have it in Russia or China, so why in Corporate US?

Mr Gravel said (quoting someone famous) “We Americans get the Government we deserve”. Well, you also seem to get the media you deserve too. Free speech? That’s only for the Constitution! Get real - this is life we’re talking about - it’s different!

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.

Wrong! It isn’t “I could  care less” - it’s “I couldn’t care less!” If you miss out the “couldn’t, it actually means you really care a lot… and mostly it isn’t used in this context.

This phrase really annoys me, it is abused so often. It’s a joke. And yet people - mainly Americans right now but I am sure it will spread - people keep on getting it wrong, time after time, in comments, on fora, mostly on the internet.

I could care less… but then I wouldn’t be so passionate about it!

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?