Oooh… what a nice surprise. The wonderful Arts & Letters Daily picked up one of my columns in their weekend edition.
Daily Archives: June 29, 2008
At last — a useful role for bankers
According to Miriam Lord, Parliamentary sketch-writer for the Irish Times, the Irish Labour Party has a policy on big bankers. It is, she writes that “They should be recycled and made into pork pies for the working man”.
Now there’s an interesting idea. Personally I think that, if boiled with pepper, a few carrots and a clove or two of garlic, many of them would also make a nourishing soup.
Fact: I don’t much care for pork pies. But then I don’t care much for bankers either.
Microsoft’s other problem
Google is Problem #1, obviously. But the other one is the baroque — and unsustainable — architectural complexity of Windows 12 (which is what Vista really is). Randall Stross has an interesting piece about this in the NYT. The next version of Windows is — bizarrely — called Windows 7 by the Microsoft High Command.
Will it be a top-to-bottom rewrite? Last week, Bill Veghte, a Microsoft senior vice president, sent a letter to customers reassuring them there would be minimal changes to Windows’ essential code. “Our approach with Windows 7,” he wrote, “is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7.”
But sticking with that same core architecture is the problem, not the solution. In April, Michael A. Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at Gartner, the research firm, presented a talk titled “Windows Is Collapsing.” Their argument isn’t that Windows will cease to function but that the accumulated complexity, as Microsoft tries to support 20 years of legacies, prevents timely delivery of advances. “The situation is untenable,” their joint presentation says. “Windows must change radically.”
Randall points out that the problem facing Microsoft now is analogous to that which faced Apple with its ageing OS9 system in the late 1990s. The solution was a radical break and the adoption of a completely different OS architecture — OS X. This meant a lot of pain for some die-hard Apple users, though it was partially eased by providing an OS9 emulator.
The complexity of Vista is largely a consequence of having to ensure backwards compatibility with earlier versions — which is why Bill Veghte wrote as he did. But with the power of modern Intel processors, where’s absolutely nothing to prevent Microsoft harnessing virtualisation technology to enable users to run earlier versions of Windows in virtual machines, leaving Redmond’s software designers free to design a completely new OS.
Controlling the email monster
Intriguing account by Luis Suarez of IBM…
EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.
I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.
It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction…
This strikes a chord. I’ve found that the email system at my day job has become positively dysfunctional (I’m cc’d on everything, it seems), so I’ve had to resort to giving selected colleagues a different address, which ensures that anything from them comes straight through to my phone. But of course this has the disadvantage that I may miss ‘important’ messages from other people in the organisation — who then get shirty because I don’t appear to be paying due attention to them!
I’ve taken to using Skype a lot — mainly for IM and occasional phone conferencing. I’ve also found Twitter useful — and its unreliability correspondingly infuriating. So I often fall back on SMS. My experience with wikis has been mixed — most of my colleagues seem reluctant to use them.
The bottom line, though, is that organisational email has to be brought back under control. Someone once told me that one of the big supermarket chains — it may be ASDA — has a policy in its open-plan HQ that when anyone’s on email they have to wear a red baseball cap. It’s wacky, but might just work.
The mess that is organisational email is actually a symptom of the failure of ICT systems to provide software services that workers really need. Why, for example, do you find that office workers have email inboxes with thousands of messages in them? Answer: because it gives them an electronic filing system that they can use. So instead of being an indicator of how hopeless people are at managing ICT, overflowing inboxes are actually a measure of how ingenious humans are when faced with useless technology.
Measuring compassion
Simon Caulkin is the most perceptive writer on management in the UK. He’s also been a relentless critic of the Labour government’s obsession with ‘targets’ in the public services. This morning he excoriates the latest absurdity, namely
Alan Johnson’s inexpressibly depressing announcement the week before last of a ‘compassion index’, the results to be published on an official website, to show how kind hospitals are to their patients. This is so tragic that it’s hard to know where to begin (although I already have an idea of the ending). But let’s try.
The question is not whether compassion is desirable. It should go without saying that it is vital. For at least 50 years, it has been known that recovery from injury or illness is a delicate joint venture in which dedicated medical care and will and optimism on the part of the patient feed off and reinforce each other. A health service without compassion is therefore a contradiction in terms – compassion indeed figured among the important reasons the NHS was set up in the first place. In such a context, the question that needs answering is: how and why did compassion get lost that it now has to be inspected and audited in again?
The culprit is the dehumanising, Soviet-style regime of league tables, inspection and audit by which the UK public sector is now run…
The effect of targets is to create professions that are increasingly administrative rather than vocational.
First, simplistic targets (waiting times, exam results, detection rates) take away from professionals the duty to use independent judgment and make them accountable to inspectors, auditors and ministers rather than the citizens they are serving. Then, to deal with the mountainous bureaucracy that targets generate, the next step is to break the professions in two. As a Guardian blogger noted, over the last decade nursing has been turned into an academic and ‘managerial’ discipline, with wards turned over to managers and the basic caring component (bathing, feeding and comfort) hived off to less trained, lower-status heath care support workers. Exactly the same process of separating out the menial, ‘volume’ tasks from the rest can be seen at work in schools (classroom assistants) and the police (community police support officers), all in the vain quest for economies of scale.
Apré Billg
This morning’s Observer column…
There’s been a lot of ‘end-of-an-era’ talk about the departure of Gates from the company he founded with Paul Allen in 1975. There have also been acres of speculation about ‘whither Microsoft after Gates?’ Both topics are, well, a bit passé. The eclipse of the Gates ‘era’ began with the arrival of Google 10 years ago. And the succession plan that he and Ballmer engineered nearly two years ago effectively handed direction of Microsoft to a triumvirate of Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. So let us dispense with the Kleenex and take a detached view of Mr Gates’s contribution to civilisation.
The headline is that he is the John D Rockefeller de nos jours in the sense that he shaped an emerging industry and revolutionised philanthropy. The big difference is that, unlike Rockefeller, Gates did not wait until the closing years of his career to engage in good works, and the $100bn endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will ensure that his name lives on…
The point I was trying to make about Microsoft is also taken up by the Economist in its piece about the end of the Gates era. The article includes this chart:
