I want to break the rules. Why don’t you join me?
Specifically, I intend to break my own rules. In fact, I broke my first rule with the first word of this column. In my nine years as a Computing journalist I was always taught, and in turn taught others, never to use the word “I”. Readers don’t want to know about the writer they want to know what the writer knows.
These days, with the rise of the self-obsessed blogger, use of “I” is endemic. But for the purpose of this article, let’s ignore that for now.
You see, for once this column is about me, so it’s difficult to avoid the personal pronoun. The reason it’s about me is because this is my final, valedictory scribbling before I leave Computing for pastures new. And if the departing editor can’t break his own rules, what has the world come to?
What a nine years it has been. In my first month, I wrote about the collapse of dot com darling Boo.com, and gurus everywhere said: “The internet? Pah! It’s just another fad.” I guess you would agree that things have moved on a lot since then.
Let me tell you what has changed most for me. Before I became a journalist, I worked in the IT industry. In those days, whenever I met someone new in a social situation, the inevitable moment would arise in conversation when they would ask me what I did for a living. I would say: “I work in IT.” They would say: “Oh,” and spot someone else to speak to.
As a journalist, things got better. “I’m a journalist,” I would answer. “Really? How interesting,” they would reply. “What do you write about?”
“Technology.”
“Oh…”
But recently, things have changed. “Technology? That must be interesting,” they say, before telling me how cool their iPhone is, at which point I say: “Oh…”
I once wrote a column in defence of geeks. The world needs geeks, I said. Geeks nodded appreciatively. Everyone else said: “Oh…”
But now, everyone is a geek. Even my mum enjoys texting away. Everyone loves technology OK, we’re not quite at the stage where they all love technologists too, but hey, it’s a start.
However, those in IT need to consider why everyone is a geek. To me it’s clear: non-geeks are developing new technology. They have made it easy to use, fun, fashionable sexy, even. The most talked-about IT is the simplest a junior programmer could write an application that publishes 140-character messages onto a web site. Apple managed to become an iconic brand by making products for people who didn’t like technology. It’s about technology without all that complex geekery that IT used to imply.
And yet, I bet if I walked into most IT departments, I would be confronted with complexity. Much of that is the legacy of historic IT purchasing, but it’s also a legacy of historic IT thinking. Complexity is good, it keeps techies in a job. But it doesn’t make users like you much.
We are near a time when IT-savvy users can create their own applications or access someone else’s in the cloud, bypassing the IT team altogether. And what a waste of the skills and ideas in the IT department that would be.
Technology is changing the world. But are those in IT still stuck in their old ways? It is time for IT to come out of the datacentre. It is time to break the rules.
"Lots of people are sending me birthday e-cards today because 40 years ago some government-types in the US sent the first piece of data from one computer to another across a network called Arpanet. I’m a little confused, because a whole bunch of other people sent me e-cards on 2nd September when the first connection between two computers was made on the same network. Am having a bit of an age-related crisis as a result.
Turning 40 is a bit of a milestone for anyone, but unlike all you actual people, nobody has yet created an Olay Fight The Seven Signs of Ageing cream for networks. Even if I am worth it.
(You’ll have to excuse me if I get my advertising slogans mixed up. There’s so many of them on Google these days and I try so hard not to switch the packets wrong along the way).
Unlike real 40-year olds, at least I don’t have to worry about grey hairs, or plucking unwanted hairs from places they never used to grow. But sometimes a few of my arteries do get a little blocked, although I’m glad to say that people soon sort out my little health problems quite quickly.
Also unlike real 40-year olds, I’m still growing. Apparently you people have stuck more than a trillion web pages onto the ends of my extremities now, and you have plans to connect me to all sorts of new things like sensors and fridge freezers. It sounds like my next decade will be pretty exciting – and considering how fast I grew during my thirties, that’s saying something.
I do sometimes stop and take a quick look at some of the information flowing through me these days – not that you’d notice, I’m a fast parser.
It seems lots of governments and rich business people are getting rather worried about me.
Some of them want to carve me up into different bits so they can charge you more money for accessing the things you most like to use me for. I don’t like the sound of that. How would they feel if I chopped off their legs because their lungs were being overworked?
(You’ll have to excuse me if my little jokes don’t work, I’ve tried to understand humour and cynicism, but without more metadata I just don’t get the contexts right. Come on all you linked data people, help me out here…).
I read some packets once about a thing called the Caxton printing press and how that upset lots of governments and rich religious people long before I was first connected. Apparently they were worried it might allow people to access too much information, and to buy things more cheaply that the rich people made money from. Ha! That Caxton bloke won. I think I might too.
What’s most exciting for me is that, even at 40, there’s lots of countries I haven’t visited yet. And even in those that I have, there’s lots of places still to go. I love my transport layer. Anything I can do to meet you all, help all you real people get to know each other, understand each other better, and find out what Stephen Fry is doing, well, that’s what I’m here for.
I’d invite you to my 40th birthday party, but I think you’re all too busy surfing across me (which is a weird sensation, let me tell you). Instead, put my 50th in your diary. By then, I expect you will all be carrying a little bit of me around in your pocket – some of you might even be wearing me. Some really foolhardy people among you might even have stuck part of me into your body somewhere.
But if I achieve everything I would like to achieve from my fifth decade, I know I will be an even more intimate part of your everyday life, keeping you in touch with all the people and information and even physical things that matter to you.
It’s just as well I’m on the side of the good guys and girls. At least, I think I am…
See you at my 50th birthday party! "
As told to Computing editor Bryan Glick, who shares a birthday with the internet (if it’s 2nd September, that is) even if he is, sadly, slightly older and less well connected, and understands first hand the line about hairs in unwanted places.
I was out of the country during the Labour Party conference, so it wasn’t until this week I found out about the funniest and certainly most ironic part of the event.
Put aside for now the fact that home secretary Alan Johnson already said the same thing a few months ago, and that the government has always been at pains to stress that compulsion was only a long-term option if take-up proved sufficient.
The greatest irony was that it comes to something when the party that dreamt up the idea of identity cards cheers its leader for saying that it won’t make its own policy compulsory.
There can be only one conclusion: please, someone, just put the ID cards scheme out of its misery while you can.
That’s not meant as a political statement – I’ve never had a problem in principle with ID cards; most European countries have them, after all. But the whole programme has been such a botched job from start to finish that it’s better to scrap the whole thing and start again. For once, this wouldn’t waste taxpayers' money, since much of the work that has already taken place is to support biometric passports, a project which is going to continue and does have some purpose.
We already know that a future Tory government would scrap ID cards forthwith, and if even Labour members cheer the fact they won’t be made to have one, then you have to wonder what is the point.
Labour have mucked this one up from the start. The cards were always going to be controversial, but the initial justification that they would help prevent terrorism was literally blown apart by the 7/7 Tube bombings in London, carried out by men that would have been perfectly eligible to hold a UK ID card.
Since then, the government has changed its rationale for the cards time and again, most recently coming to the conclusion that people will simply want to have one so they can prove their identities, even though they will not be a mandatory proof of identity for receiving public services.
There’s bound to a be an enthusiastic minority who go out and buy one, but what purpose will that serve?
The disappointment is that the concept could have been so much better, and actually serve a valuable purpose. At some point, it will become increasingly important to have a gold standard for authentication of our electronic identity, as more and more commercial and public service transactions take place online. Just this week, new figures show that banking fraud rose 55 per cent in the first six months of this year, stressing the importance of tackling identity theft.
An internet-enabled society will need a proper means of identity management, one that benefits citizens not monitors them. But the current half-baked scheme is not that means, and the sooner it is scrapped or radically re-thought, the better,
IBM must be going through an extreme state of déjà vu today.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is investigating allegations that the IT giant abused its dominance of the mainframe business to squeeze rivals out of the market.
For the past decade or so, it’s been Microsoft facing the wrath of the competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, but for IBM it was a fact of life for 13 years until President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the early 1980s called off US government attempts to tackle Big Blue’s dominance.
The need to maintain competition in IT is of course paramount, but the after effects of these huge actions can be profound, and not always for the best.
In many ways, IBM still suffers from the cultural impact of the anti-trust case against it more than 20 years later.
Anyone dealing with the supplier still finds it a maze of Chinese walls and organisational siloes that often make it difficult to get a view of what IBM the company can do for you, as opposed to what a particular IBM product range can do.
Even IBM staff complain there is too little interaction between products groups, a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
This is a legacy of the days when IBM was utterly paranoid about being perceived as anti-competitive. The gist of the anti-trust lobby was that the company’s size and dominant influence in so many sectors of the industry in its late 1970s peak gave it undue advantage. So, for example, it was perceived that if you bought a mainframe from IBM, you were more likely to buy a mid-range server, or a software application, because IBM would wrap it all up into a deal that rivals could simply not match.
So IBM consciously created an organisational culture whereby each product group competed only against competitors in that same sector, to the extent that buying a whole new IT infrastructure (as IT departments would still do in those days) meant dealing with several different IBM salespeople, none of whom could act as if they all worked for the same company.
Even after the huge changes IBM has been through since the dark days of the early 1990s, when it made what was at the time the largest corporate loss in history, the influence of those anti-trust-induced days are still evident.
Microsoft, however, has made significant cultural changes after the mauling it has received from EU and US competition authorities.
The software giant has always been an aggressive sales and marketing organisation. It still is. But during the investigation into Microsoft’s tactics in bullying Netscape into submission in the browser market in the 1990s, there was plenty of evidence of this aggressiveness. Executives were found to have talked about crushing Netscape, and similarly bombastic talk. For a company with 95 per cent share of the PC operating system market, that was deemed anti-competitive.
In many ways, Microsoft was simply continuing the tactics it had employed when it was a young upstart. Go into an executive sales meeting at any successful IT supplier and you will hear similar language used – “Let’s crush the competition”; “Let’s blow them away”; “We’ll grind them into the dust”. That’s how aggressive salespeople talk.
Microsoft’s failure was to not realise that behaviour was no longer publicly acceptable when you become a dominant, industry-leading influence and not the agent of disruption changing the market.
Redmond is by no means a perfect organisation today, but it is certainly more aware of its responsibilities and has gone out of its way to appease the authorities and end its disputes with rivals, even if at heart it would rather not have had to.
The EU has forced Microsoft to agree it will ensure interoperability between Windows operating systems and rival applications – effectively giving Windows the legal status of a market in itself. This is a good and inevitable move.
But I still struggle to see the benefit of the endless dispute that has now been settled over the bundling of Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows.
When the case started – it seems like half a lifetime ago – it was clearly an attempt by the EU to set a precedent for the development of Windows-based applications. The EU view was that Windows is a market in itself – now acknowledged – and even Microsoft must compete on a level playing field in that market against other firms writing software to run on Windows. IE was meant to be the Trojan horse for the EU to force that through, and I have often wondered to what extent it was chosen because of the sensitivity over the browser market created after the Netscape case.
Now the IE situation has been resolved, if that was the EU’s objective it has singularly failed. All we have now is a botched solution whereby PC users – who simply want to switch their computer on first time and see it work (in much the way that Apple Macs with their bundled Safari browser do), will be forced to go through a stage of choosing which browser they want to use.
They don’t have to do this for security software – bundled in with Windows but also available from Symantec, Sophos, F-Secure and so on. They don’t have to do it for media players – also available from Apple, Real Player and so on – this in itself being the subject of another daft ruling that Microsoft had to sell a Windows Media Player-free version of Windows in Europe, which of course nobody bought.
And besides, Firefox has been doing very nicely anyway, building up a 24 per cent market share without any help from the authorities.
Then of course there was telecoms giant AT&T in the US – the only technology company forcibly split into its components parts, creating the “Baby Bells” of regional communications companies in 1982. What happened? Within about 25 years, most of those smaller companies had merged together and all became AT&T again.
I’m sure that Microsoft has looked at the lessons of history and tried to avoid a situation like that facing IBM where the hangover lasts for decades. The IE resolution affects nothing but IE – and the poor confused PC users who now have to go through another stage in the installation process.
So who’s next? You have to wonder how long it will be before Google comes under the authorities’ microscope. It seems a little obtuse that Microsoft’s search marketing deal with Yahoo seems to be coming under scrutiny, when all it has done is create a bigger rival to Google’s dominance.
But the beady eyes of the competition watchdogs have helped shape the modern IT industry, and undoubtedly will do so again.
Today I presented to an audience of open source vendors at an event organised by technology trade association Intellect.
I had been asked to give a “media perspective” on open source – which I interpreted as giving a journalist's view of IT decision-makers’ perspective on the technology.
I suspect I might have been treading a bit of a fine line, since my presentation was not entirely positive about the state of open source use in enterprises.
I started off with a list of quotes taken from the reader comments section of an article about open source from The Register:
And I added a quote from a very respected source, Freeform Dynamics director Dale Vile: “The fanatics and evangelists that push Linux in your face as the answer to everything actually put normal IT professionals off considering it”.
(Read the full list of comments through the link to the Reg story above and you’ll see how badly the open source advocates in the discussion make their argument.)
At this point I could sense some awkward shuffling of bums on seast among the 40-strong audience.
I went on to quote a Forrester Research study that suggested that more than 50 per cent of software development decision-makers in North America and Europe say they intend to decrease or remove their use of open source in the next 12 months, or are simply not interested in using it in the first place.
Whoops.
The research also showed that total cost of ownership – the single biggest part of the sales pitch for open source – is among the lowest concerns among firms that have chosen not to use open source. Security, service and support, and technical complexity were the big three worries. Given that the other main sales pitches for open source have typically been: no viruses; easy to use and support; reliable and simple to implement – it somewhat suggests that the open source community has rather misjudged its potential customers.
I also wasn't aware that there was a representative of the Open Source Consortium trade body in the audience, and I think he particularly squirmed when one of my slides said: "Open source on the desktop? Forget it..."
And yet…
Despite such apparent negativity, there are many open source success stories, of which I quoted:
Firefox 24% browser market share;
Apache 47% web server market share;
Eclipse – the only open source product to genuinely change an entire market (sorry Borland);
Linux de facto standard in supercomputers;
Continuing Red Hat growth.
At this point some of the audience started to cheer up.
But the point I was trying to make is that the historical weakness of open source among IT decision-makers could be about to become its greatest opportunity.
It seems to me that much of the open source community has never quite grasped the fact that what IT managers actually buy is reduced risk. Cost and support and reliability are all important factors in that decision, of course, but ultimately IT buyers know that IT can be a risky thing, so they opt for the safer bet. Their two biggest daily priorities are to keep the lights on, and to not lose their job. Open source has never been able to convince them it is lower risk than proprietary alternatives. Hence it remains a niche technology among corporate IT departments.
But what has been open source’s most unique quality has been massively undersold, and is becoming especially relevant today.
The business world – and the public sector – are moving to a culture of openness and collaboration. The rise of social networking is a symptom of this trend. The open source community has been built around those two principles – and as such is in a great position to go to IT managers and say: “Hey, we understand what it means to build technology in an open and collaborative way – let us help you apply those concepts to your IT.” What could be lower risk than asking for help from a bunch of experts that has been doing this for years?
The barrier to greater corporate use of open source has always been that it is perceived as a technical solution for technical people – and the geeky, often defensive nature of many in the open source community has only reinforced that point, as Dale Vile pointed out.
IT managers care about what software goes into their desktops and datacentres. But as IT infrastructures move gradually into the cloud, the basis of decision is reversed – no IT manager will care at all about what software their cloud service provider uses behind the scenes, all that will matter is the service they receive.
And we are already seeing that trend in action – Linux plays a big part in the mega datacentres of Google and Amazon, on IBM mainframes, and no doubt increasingly will be used as new IT utility providers emerge offering cloud-based pay-as-you-go services to businesses.
In fact, what will reassure IT managers about a cloud provider will be the knowledge that it uses a technical solution approved by technical people.
Open source will, in my view, remain a niche product in the IT department. Its future lies in a re-think of its unique selling points and making the most of the emerging opportunity to become the technical backbone of a new generation of cloud services.
It has become impossible for any politician to mention the new “C” word – cuts – without also mentioning IT projects.
David Cameron, George Osborne, Vince Cable, and even the occasional Labour minister by subtle implication, have all highlighted the apparent potential for big savings in public sector spending by scrapping some of the major government IT projects currently underway. The most likely candidates that are often mentioned are ID cards and the NHS National Programme for IT.
Frankly, I’m a bit fed up with this knee-jerk posturing seemingly based on no other logic than “IT is expensive, therefore it must be cut”.
If these programmes are to be cut, do it because they are no longer politically viable, not because it’s a big IT project.
Politically, the easiest to go would be ID cards. There is enough bad feeling about the whole concept to see that one bite the dust without too much controversy. But much of the existing planned cost is already committed for biometric passports. And a future government – ideally the next one if the UK is to make a much-needed move to further online delivery of public services – will at some point have to face up to the thorny problem of securing our electronic identities.
The more we use e-government services, the greater the need for identity management and verification, something where ID cards could potentially offer a solution (although not necessarily the optimum solution). Nonetheless, money will still have to be spent on electronic ID management.
As for the NHS IT programme, put aside all the delays and technical difficulties for a moment, and it is blatantly obvious that the health service needs and must have the efficiencies that will come from greater computerisation and automation, and in particular from electronic medical records, in whatever form they may eventually be delivered.
Review the project by all means, but scrapping it merely puts off the inevitable. It is a critical programme and eventually that money will still have to be spent, even if the technical solution changes.
The problem is that as far as most politicians are concerned, IT is simply another item on a spreadsheet with a big number alongside it. It worries me greatly that any potential government can so glibly dismiss the potential repercussions of scrapping major IT projects that will ultimately deliver great benefit – and cost savings.
Technology is only going to be become more important to a future government having to deal with demands for greater openness and transparency, and for an internet generation used to making its own choices, not following central dictats.
Let’s have the debate about the best way to deliver that technology, of course. But let’s be worried about any party manifesto that simply wants to cut every big IT project without proper consideration of what that means.
Microsoft and Yahoo have finally reached the inevitability of a deal to work together.
As soon as the software giant tried to buy its internet rival something was always going to happen. There might be a few investors still shaking their heads at spurning a buyout at $33 per share last year with Yahoo stock currently below $16, but give credit to the new leadership at what used to be called “the search firm” for convincing shareholders of the long-term value – it makes a change not to be driven by short-term quick returns.
The deal confirmed today means that Yahoo is no longer a search firm – it is an internet firm that uses Microsoft’s Bing search technology. Equally, Microsoft is no longer a search advertising firm – it effectively hands its search properties to Yahoo to do the sales on its behalf.
So what’s it all about?
Putting aside the headline justification – that only a single, combined search engine can really compete with Google and attempt to claw back some of the billions of ad sales not going to Microsoft/Yahoo – perhaps Redmond still thinks it can apply some of what it has learned from the past into the future of the web.
This could be Microsoft’s attempt to commoditise search – in which case, we might start to see “powered by Bing” appearing more frequently around the internet.
Microsoft – despite its protestations to the contrary – has never really been an innovator. It is a close follower; it takes other people’s ideas and turns them into big-earning commercial products. The firm has commoditised operating systems, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, browsers and so on, and through Microsoft’s sheer scale has knocked out rivals that depended on a high ongoing licence stream.
Such a strategy is not unlike what Google wants to do to Microsoft, but by making many of those applications available for free on the web.
Some experts say that Google is pursuing classic disruptive marketing techniques by building products that in future can obviate the need for Microsoft – for example, if the world moves to Android-based smartphones and Chrome OS-based netbooks instead of Windows-based PCs.
But Microsoft is the past master at market disruption.
Remember that Google is entirely dependent on online advertising – mainly search based – for its revenue. If a rival can commoditise search technology, make it so ubiquitous that it has no inherent value, and support it by driving down advertising rates as a result, then who takes the biggest hit? Google, that’s who.
I’m very hesitant of seemingly going overboard in making the future of IT appear to be about nothing more than a battle between Google and Microsoft. Clearly their rivalry is going to be a major issue for years to come, but there’s a lot more to the IT world than those two giants.
And as I have written before, it will take a lot more than the Yahoo tie-up to make people want to Bing rather than to Google.
Nonetheless, Microsoft is smart enough to realise how the world is changing, and to recognise that the company that has become most associated with that change is still dependent on one – albeit currently very healthy – income stream.
Disrupt that stream, and Google’s ability to disrupt takes a big blow.
The somewhat bizarre news emerged this week that Bill Gates owns about three per cent of sports retailer JJB Sports and five per cent of floorings specialist Carpetright.
Inevitably, this led me to wonder what unexpected UK high street investments might be appropriate for other top IT executives.
Here’s my unlikely top 10 – please add yours in a comment at the end, a prize of unlimited kudos to the best suggestion…
Steve Jobs – Burtons
The Apple chief executive must be in for a share of Burtons, the menswear chain – or at least, to own the black T-shirt section.
Larry Ellison – Millets
The yacht racing Oracle chief executive is bound to pop into Millets now and then for a new sou’wester and waterproof togs, so he’ll want enough shares to have his say at the AGM.
Jonathan Schwartz – Toni & Guy
With that ponytail, there’s only one place for the Sun Microsystems chief to make a beeline for.
Mark Hurd – Jobcentre Plus
Given the number of people the HP chief executive has put their way, he must be interested in part ownership.
Scott McNealy – Car Giant
What better than one of the UK’s biggest car showrooms for the Sun founder who named his sons Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout.
Sam Palmisano – Sunglass Hut
Is the IBM chief executive ever spotted in public? It’s the shades; lets him walk un-noticed through crowds.
Michael Dell – John Lewis
He has to love anyone who names their store after themselves. Eponymous shareholdings only for the PC maker’s founder.
Eric Schmidt – British Library
What do you need all those books for? Once the Google chief is a shareholder, it’s digitisation all the way.
Steve Ballmer – Apple Store
Because you know that secretly the Microsoft chief executive uses an iPod…
John Suffolk – HSS Hire
Just in case the farm-owning UK government CIO runs out of equipment at ploughing / milking / harvest time.
Over the course of 10 years in technology journalism and 10 years before that working in the IT industry, I have developed a knee-jerk anti-hype reaction.
When a new product or technology is announced and the world of IT experts cranks instantly into hyperbole, it equally instantly brings out in me a degree of cynicism.
Today’s “announcement” of Google’s plan to build a Chrome operating system (OS) is currently having just that affect.
For one thing it’s a blog post, rather than any formal product announcement, on which Google will not comment further – suggesting that at this stage there is not much else to say. The timing – as Microsoft gears up to launch Windows 7 later this year and is due to preview its Azure cloud development system this week – is pretty much indicative of good old-fashioned guerilla marketing.
Then there’s the over-the-top reaction to anything Google does.
Take this example – Rob Enderle, a reasonably well respected US analyst, told the BBC: "This announcement is huge. This is the first time we have had a truly competitive OS on the market in years. This is potentially disruptive and is the first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft.”
Can you count the ways this comment is just so wrong? Without wishing to criticise Rob himself – I’m attacking the hyperbole of which his statement is just one example - let me help.
“Huge”? Again, it’s a blog post, there is very little real detail, every gap is filled in by pure speculation.
“The first truly competitive OS market in years”? For one, Chrome OS doesn’t actually exist, it won’t be available for at least a year, so isn’t much of a competitor to anyone just yet. Plus I’m sure Linux advocates might have something to say too.
“The first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft”? I think even the European Union competition commission would admit that Microsoft does actually have a few competitors. And I’m sure Apple Mac users would be just as vociferous as Linux fans in extolling the competitive benefits of their products.
Without a doubt Chrome OS is an interesting development, one that has been on the cards for some time. It’s a natural evolution of what Google has been doing with tools such as Gears and the Chrome web browser (which, by the way, remains a distant fourth in the browser market with just two per cent share).
But I can’t honestly imagine any IT leader worth their salt will seriously spend the next 12 months waiting for Chrome OS to appear before evaluating whether or not to move to Windows 7. And besides, Microsoft's research teams are already working on a project called Gazelle that seems to be going down similar lines of a brower-oriented OS.
Your usual tech crowd of anti-Microsoft enthusiasts will lap up Chrome OS as soon as it appears of course. And equally, any IT leader worth their salt will take a look and test how well the system works with their business applications and see if there are some users for whom it might be appropriate as a low-cost (presumably – no pricing or licensing details yet) alternative for netbook users who just need basic web access.
The emerging competition in enterprise software between Google and Microsoft promises to be fascinating battle – one driven by ideology as much as technology. Google will be trying to convince people they do not need a big function-rich desktop operating system, while Microsoft wants to prove that Windows is the best way into the cloud.
But let’s at least wait until both companies have some actual products to evaluate, rather than exploding with excitement at the slightest hint of Googlejam tomorrow.
PS – One interesting aspect of the Chrome OS announcement was pointed out by RedMonk analyst James Governor on his Twitter feed today. If Chrome OS is a genuine competitor to Windows, will the EU now revisit its anti-trust case against Microsoft in the light of Google’s plans? Given that Microsoft has been forced to offer Windows 7 without a browser pre-installed, with Google be also told to sell Chrome OS without the Chrome browser? It won’t of course, but it does highlight some of the flaws in the EU case.
The Tories like technology. They increasingly seem to think IT is going to help them win the General Election due next year. And they might be right – in fact, getting behind the tech sector would not be a bad policy for anyone to pursue, as Labour has already realised with its Digital Britain plan.
But, as I have written before, the Conservatives seem to be bring with them the same optimistic naivety that has blighted the Labour government’s IT track record.
The Times today reports that the Tories could bring in a policy that would see NHS patients storing their electronic medical records on web-based private sector systems run by the likes of Microsoft and Google.
The Times claims this as an exclusive, despite the fact David Cameron announced the concept in April and Computing wrote about it at the time, but I digress.
The newspaper quotes a Tory source saying: “We’re thinking about how in government the architecture of technology needs to change, with people ‘owning’ their own data, including their health records.”
The idea of citizens owning their own data is welcomed, it’s a concept that could work, and was first suggested in a different context by former HBOS chief executive James Crosby in a report on ID cards he produced for the Treasury two years ago (which was pretty much ignored by the Home Office at the time, but I digress again).
But to think that simply letting people put their medical records online will be easier or cut costs is disturbingly naïve.
The questions that would need to be addressed pour out:
Will people have to pay?
I could go on.
Labour should have learned by now the downside of technology over-optimism. Tony Blair rightly saw that IT-enabled change was the key to transforming public services and his government set out down that road with enthusiasm. But they soon discovered that delivery was a rather more complex affair.
Politically-driven deadlines for IT projects have inevitably slipped. And where politics over-rode IT, such as the disastrously rushed tax credits system, everyone suffered as projects went live too soon.
I’m sure there are votes – and certainly attractive national newspaper headlines – to be gained by populist ideas such as giving electronic patient records to Google. Come to think about it, while you’re at it, why not make them available through Apple’s iPhone app store?
As the NHS is already finding out to its cost, introducing e-records is a massively complex task, and just by stamping the names Google or Microsoft all over them does not make them any cheaper, easier, or more likely to succeed.