FryPhone 2.0

The Greatest Living Englishman on the iPhone, with a quote about enterprise IT that should be tattooed onto the retinas of CIOs as they assume their position:

the iPhone is now a serious corporate contender: employee pester-power will see to it that it becomes the tool of choice for medium to large businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.

OMFG we’re all going to die

Latest “news” from the sloppy-unquestioning-journalism-from-recycled-press-releases department:

Police disrupt 13 terror networks

Scotland Yard has disrupted 13 terrorist networks in London in the last financial year.

During the 12 month period, there was an average of a suspected terrorist incident in London every other day.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Collateral damage

According to Jonathan Zittrain, we’re all going to go to hell in a handbasket because devices are increasingly closed.

According to Adam Thierer, it doesn’t matter because they’ll get cracked open anyway:

So, Jonathan, I hate to pick on you again buddy, but what exactly is the problem? Apple has put another great device on the market and people immediately took steps to open it up and see if they can make it even better. Sounds like progress to me.

The Zittrain thesis is just getting harder and harder for me to take seriously.

Well, yes, up to a point. The issue isn’t that it’s possible to crack open devices like the iPhone. The issue is the collateral damage that gets caused when heavy-handed legislation is used to try to prevent what’s going to happen anyway:

Germany has just passed a new law that adds more “anti-hacker” provisions to the German criminal code. Although the new rules are meant to apply narrowly to hacking, critics are already complaining that they may prevent necessary security and network research.

The Future Of The Web, and the Past Of Panel Events

It’s said that you should never meet your heroes in case they turn out to be a disappointment. That’s not something that’s ever really bothered me before - the chances of bumping into Asterix and Biggles is fairly low - but I was a bit apprehensive about seeing Tim Berners-Lee speak at NESTA’s The Future Of The Web event last night. In the event it was a bit of a disappointment, although nothing to do with the man himself.

Mr Modesty

The Great Man himself probably doesn’t like being billed as that - refreshingly, he comes across as being totally free of ego. Ten minutes prior to the presentation, he was on his hands and knees plugging in his Mac, which is the antithesis of the superstar CEO keynote speaker.

Hearing the story of the genesis of the web from the man who invented it made it worth the trip, although he was at pains to point out that he wasn’t the web’s creator - just the inventor of a small part of it. And just as fascinating was hearing that in the early days, he had difficulty in explaining to people what it was.

Berners-Lee also has passionately held opinions about net neutrality and privacy. One of the later questions referred to ISPs as the “villain of the piece”, which prompted the nearest thing to an outburst that I think you’re likely to hear from him - he wants just three things from an internet service: “give me plenty of bandwidth, don’t sell my clickstream and let me connect to anybody”.

And the others

And that’s about as much as it’s possible to say about Tim Berners Lee, because that’s about all we got to hear from him. He was bookended by Charles Leadbetter, author of “We Think“, and Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4. Whether that was because the organisers thought the audience might get bored of just one speaker I’m not sure, but the end result was frustrating in the extreme - Leadbetter is such a talking head it’s possible to hear him any night of the week, whereas Berners Lee speaks much less frequently.

And Andy Duncan was something of a bizarre choice given the main speaker. I really wasn’t sure about his description of Channel 4 as “open source television” - I suspect he might have different ideas if I was to take a creative commons approach to his content and start remixing it? His other main point seemed to be a plea to Google to “put more back” - presumably the cry of a man watching his traditional advertising revenues disappearing online.

The evening itself was the usual tired NESTA format - three suits on a stage, compered by a simpering Chief Executive. There was no attempt to control either of the two subsidiary speakers, who rambled on at length, and that was aggravated by the frankly bizarre practice of taking questions in threes. All that happens is that the first two get lost, particularly if the chair doesn’t prevent the habit of the usual suspects forgetting that questions have a question mark at the end.

Fortunately for my blood pressure, there was an active backchannel on Twitter, which was being “monitored” during the event itself. I know there are conflicting opinions about the benefits or otherwise of a backchannel, but if it rises above the bitching it can become a great aggregation tool for catching points and opinions that you might otherwise have missed.

See you there again?

Despite the problems with the format, it was an excellent evening - it’s not often you get to meet the person who started this all. And despite the inevitability of the format being repeated, I’ll likely go along to the next one, if only because they tend to attract interesting people to talk to - and moan about the format with - over the canapes afterwards.

Everything that is wrong and broken with corporate IT, summed up in a single, sad sentence:

Everything that is wrong and broken with corporate IT, summed up in a single, sad sentence:

“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise

Social contracts

Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog - “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” - an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:

It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.

Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support - and most organisations below a certain size don’t - then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.

They’ll be prising his gun from his cold, dead fingers, then…

New York Times: Charlton Heston, Legendary Actor, Is Dead

Downing Street Twitters

I’m fairly late to the party on this one, but Downing Street is Twittering. As is HMGov, which came first - both being official UK Government presences in the Twittersphere.

My initial reaction was “meh” - about the very last thing anyone on the planet needs is yet another conduit for the tedious, unadventurous, corporate and just plain bland waffle that characterises the spoutings of central Government PR. After 11 years of New Labour media management, my default setting when hearing anything emanating from government is - to misquote Jeremy Paxman - “why are the lying bastards lying to me?”

And that pretty much sums up HMGov - it’s regurgitated press releases that noone read previously, shovel-wared via RSS into Twitter so noone will read them now that they’re only 140 characters long. Nice example of how to do it technically, but a waste of time from a “contributing to the good of humanity” point of view.

Downing Street started in much the same way - “PM marks 90 years of the RAF and 100 years of the Territorial Army in Downing Street statements”, “PM outlines measures to protect the UK from turbulence in the global economy at his press conference”, that sort of thing. But then as other Twitter users started to prod it to see if there was actually anyone behind the front door, Downing Street actually started to respond. Which is pretty much unique, as far as I can see.

Of course, the responding is being done by Downing Street staffers - I would guess they’d have to be civil servants, given the rules about how official Government channels can be used - and not the actual political inhabitants. Which is a shame, because it’s the politicians who need to be plugged into this - about the only people left in the country who think 42-day-detention is a good idea are Gordon Brown and Jacquie Smith, and *still* she spent Sunday morning lecturing Andrew Marr about how “the Government are listening”. Exposing them to something as immediate and conversational as Twitter could only be a positive thing.

I expect that this initial burst of conversational engagement will be fairly short-lived, as the more risk-averse holders of the levers of power hear about this - presumably by email - and clamp down. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before our Prime Minister Twitters personally. Trying as hard as I can to *not* be cynical about our government - and god knows how *hard* that is - it’s nice to think that this might be the *start* of something. And I’m impressed that I got followed back within 10 minutes of following Downing Street - so either there’s someone monitoring it, even at this late hour, or someone’s written an auto-follow bot. Both impressive in their own ways.

On Microsoft + Yahoo:

Microsoft’s web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!’s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you’ve already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There’s no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.

Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone. Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is “kinda cool” but like a quiet working environment.

The Fundamentalist Agenda

The Fundamentalist Agenda as defined by a theologist, which pretty much nails the intellectual laziness of the “my god’s bigger than your god” approach to life.

The most famous definition of fundamentalism is H. L. Mencken’s: a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun

Having seen him on Newsnight this evening, I got the depressing feeling that Ian Paisley hasn’t read this article…