Category Archives: Observer

XO+XP=POXX?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Much heat and little light were generated last week by the announcement, made jointly by Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that Windows XP is to be made available on the project’s ‘XO’ laptop, the little green machine aimed at the world’s poorest children. Next month, trials of Windows on the XO will begin in what Microsoft – in a telling phrase – describes as ‘key emerging markets’.

The news has been hailed as welcome pragmatism on the part of Nicholas Negroponte, the project’s director. But among some of his colleagues and in the wider Open Source community, it has also been excoriated as a betrayal. Which view is correct? Both…

Two machines are better than one

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This morning’s Observer column…

If you’ve signed up for a new web service recently, you may have noticed that a final stage of the enrolment process presents you with an indistinct image of a number of letters and numbers, often in a wavy line, and sometimes displayed against a confusing background. You are asked to identify the sequence and type it accurately into a text box. You have just encountered a Captcha…

Thirty years on…

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This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.

Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.

If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…

The iPod firm makes computers, too! You don’t say?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Wall street made an interesting discovery last week. Apple, the iPod and mobile phone company, also makes computers! Shock! Horror! This elementary fact had hitherto escaped the notice of investment analysts, hypnotised as they were by the glamour of the iPod, the implosion of the music industry and the belief – ably fostered by Dell & Co – that making computers was a low-end, commoditised business…

The Steve and Jerri show

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From this morning’s Observer column…

Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the US, Microsoft’s hilarious pursuit of Yahoo! has already yielded a dizzying sequence of counter-moves, feints, bluffs and evasions to the point where it’s looking like an episode of Friends. So why not cast it as a soap-opera, with some minor gender changes? The synopsis goes …

Steve (Ballmer, Microsoft CEO) is having a mid-life crisis. Once irresistible to women, he now finds he’s regarded as passé. Just down the road, Jerri (Yang, CEO of Yahoo!) has also been having a bad time. She once had star quality, but is looking a bit faded. And she’s running out of dough. Deep down, though, she’s still alluring….

Later: I’m a bit miffed about the way the column was sub-edited (‘subbed’ in newspaper lingo). The last para, as filed by me, read:

In the latest episode, as ‘Good Morning Silicon Valley’ imagines it, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”‘

But in the paper, this appeared as:

In the latest episode, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’

In other words, the attribution to Good Morning Silicon Valley (one of my favourite blogs) has been dropped, making it seem as though I was lifting their joke without attribution. Bah!

Child’s play?

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This morning’s Observer column…

For some months, strange goings-on have been reported in branches of Toys ‘R’ Us. Shifty-looking middle-aged men and younger males wearing ponytails and Grateful Dead T-shirts have been observed leaving the premises with small cardboard boxes which they then gleefully tear open upon reaching the safety of their cars. Exclamations of ‘Yes! And ‘Yeehaw!!!’ have been heard by security guards, who are as puzzled by all this as their checkout colleagues.

‘I can’t figure it out,’ said one store manager, when quizzed by this columnist a few months ago. ‘The things are just walking out of the store. They sell out the minute we get a delivery.’

Carphone Charlie gets his wires crossed

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This morning’s Observer column…

To date, three UK ISPs have signed up for the Phorm system: BT, Virgin Media – and TalkTalk. This suggests that Dunstone’s rage against the BPI may have impaired his capacity for joined-up thinking. On the one hand, he declines to monitor his customers’ behaviour at the behest of the music industry; on the other, he seems content to monitor their behaviour in order to take a cut from advertising whose targeting has been improved by such monitoring. It won’t wash, Charlie. Make a clean break and see how it improves your argument.

Update: Rory-Cellan Jones emails to say that Dunstone told him that Talk Talk will make the Phorm snooping something that users have to opt in to. If that’s true then it means the Phorm system is dead — it’s unlikely that BT and Virgin will not also make it opt-in for fear of losing customers to Talk Talk.

Bricks ‘n mortar retailing

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This morning’s Observer column…

From further along the arcade could be heard shouting, whistling and general sounds of excited hubbub. Further examination revealed a 100-yard queue of people. Every so often, a steward would motion the 10 people at the head of the queue to enter a store. As they did so, the staff applauded them. Many of the customers took photographs of themselves as they entered. Inside they were greeted by more applauding staff and given a white box containing a complimentary T-shirt, after which they proceeded into the seething centre of the emporium. As they left, a smiling staff member thanked them. And from the expressions on the departing faces, it was clear that they had had what in marketing cant is called ‘a great retail experience’. This was the only shop in the entire arcade that had generated any excitement…

E-vote early, e-vote often…

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This morning’s Observer column (about voting machines)…

It’s not just the accuracy of the machines that is questionable, it’s also their security. Several projects have demonstrated how voting machines from all the major makers can be hacked into with comparative ease. This is not an argument for not using machines: who would want to replicate the ‘hanging chads’ fiasco of the 2000 election? But before a society entrusts its central democratic process to machines, it ought to take reasonable steps to instil public confidence in the technology.

This requires only two very basic provisions…

Picture this

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This morning’s Observer column…

Flickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.

Flickr’s designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking – namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr’s databases. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr ‘photostreams’. The results are clear for all to see. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day…