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FQ1: In one word, describe a luxury item you would want if stranded on a desert island for a year. Why?

The internet. Because then it wouldn’t matter that I was stranded – at least I’d be able to contact the outside world…

FQ2: In one word, describe a food you wouldn’t mind eating every day for a month. Why?

Bananas. Maybe then I’d actually convince myself that they were good for me, and I did like them…

FQ3: In one word, describe an occupation that you wouldn’t necessarily want as a career, but wouldn’t mind trying out for a week. Why?

Plumber. Then I’d be able to find out just why it’s so damn difficult to find one when you need one, and whether it’s as lucrative a trade as the urban myth would have us believe…

FQ Search: Enter your first name PLUS the above three words into a Google search and see if anything interesting comes up!

Erm – a runner-up World Conker champion and star of “Rabbit Fever”?

A bit of a confession here – I’m not sure I get the excitement over gmail.

It seems to be a perfectly well-designed online mail system, and the search facilities are neat – but why does this make it so different and wonderful? I use an IMAP-based service – Fastmail – and it gives me the best of both worlds, online access and offline replication. There just doesn’t seem to be a killer advantage to gmail in comparison – so am I missing something??

Oh, boy – talk about opening the floodgates. Robert Scoble asks why Microsoft products suck.

This has provoked any number of responses far more eloquent than I can make them – they crash (but so does lots of software); they’ve got clunky interfaces (but the worst interface of all time came courtesy of Lotus); they’re not open source (but neither is Apple software). So no point in rehashing those arguments: here’s mine:

They’re bloated: technology is moving towards small pieces, loosely-joined – but M$ products are bloated behemoths of marginally-useful functionality of which < 10% ever gets used. And it’s all a compromise – I go pale at the very thought of an IIS server because it’s been nailed on top of file and print functionality with the end result that neither works particularly well.

Microsoft can’t respond fast enough: Without exception, every interesting, exciting, must-have new development I’ve seen in the past three years or so has originated from somewhere other than Redmond. Firefox, PHP, NewsGator, iTunes, the iPod, RSS, SubEthaEdit – the list just goes on and on. I’m sure that deep in the bowels of the organisation there are any number of people who are having as good, if not better, ideas – it’s just that they can’t get them through the layers fast enough.

They’re evil: Microsoft could be an incredible force for good if they wanted to be – they’re bigger than any government can control. But instead, they’re a convicted predatory monopoly who (we have to assume, because their past behaviour suggests it) would boil down their own grandmothers for glue if they thought there was any commercial advantage for it. They’ve squandered any brand equity they once had. I’m sure that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Robert Scoble are kind-hearted, considerate and personally-principled individuals, but once they’ve taken the Microsoft shilling I want to count my fingers after metaphorically shaking their hands, because the organisation is so flawed and corrupt. They’re the Enron and the News International and the Wal-Mart and the Nike of the software world – sometimes it’s impossible to avoid dealing with them, but afterwards I always feel just that little bit unclean. Instead of embracing the incredible possibilities that digital media could bring, they’re cosying up to the media oligopoly and helping to prop up an ever-more redundant business model. Rather than positioning their products on the basis of them being the best tools for the job, they seek to lock me in with proprietary and ever-changing file formats. I’m not a customer, I’m owned – it’s not “embrace and extend”, it’s about “embrace, extend, lock-in, control, squeeze, and control some more”.

Every organisation eventually fails – the classic illustration of this is comparing the FTSE-100 or Dow indices in, say, 1904 and 2004. Most of the names are gone, because industries rise and fall. But when other industries died they didn’t do too much damage (aside from the individuals whose livelihoods disappeared) in the long-term. But Microsoft is in such a unique and overly-powerful position that when it fails – and history suggests it will, eventually – the damage it could inflict as it thrashes around in its death-throes is so much more widespread and pervasive, because by this time much of life as we know it will have gone digital.

What I think I’m trying to say is that it’s not really about the products sucking – it’s the organisation. And great products aren’t going to solve that problem.

OK, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my retirement years are going to be spent huddled over a single lump of coal eating leftover catfood – I might as well have buried my pension contributions in a hole in the garden. But when are we as a society going to wake up to the fact that if we want a Scandanavian-style crade-to-grave social system where pensioners don’t freeze to death in winter, the trains run on time and there’s a decent chance of getting treatment before whatever you’ve got kills you, we’re going to have to pay for it?!?

I mean, would you really notice an extra 1p or 2p on the basic rate of income tax – and if you’re earning over £100,000, is it going to be such a problem if there’s a 50% marginal rate? So why do we seem to have boxed ourselves into a situation where we’re stuck with the idea that Taxes Are Bad, but still expect to get the services without paying for them??

(Rant inspired by the latest waffling from Margaret Thatcher Tony Blair – apparently the only way to plug the pensions shortfall is for anyone on incapacity benefits to be boiled down for glue…)