Bird’s-eye view

Walking past the Natural History Museum yesterday on a glorious, sunny, brisk day, I dropped in on French aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s amazing Earth from the Air exhibition. As usual, I wound up watching the humans.

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Forgetting your own (domain) name

There but for the grace of God Department… “The Washington Post said yesterday that it had inadvertently allowed the registration for one of its Internet domain names – washpost.com – to expire. That lapse had the immediate effect of shutting down the e-mail system that reporters and other Post employees use to exchange messages with the world, something they were unable to do for much of the day.

In a message sent to newsroom employees over another computer server yesterday morning, Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Post, wrote that ‘Network Solutions, which manages Internet addresses, apparently notified The Post of the pending expiration via a drop-box that was not being monitored.’ Mr. Coll wrote that ‘all external e-mail has been disrupted and external senders are receiving delivery failure notices.’ In general, the cost of renewing an Internet domain name is under $100.

The Post said that it had been able to renew its registration for washpost.com by midmorning, before any outsider had a chance to lay claim to it. But the disruption to the newspaper’s newsgathering efforts was significant enough that Post editors were advising reporters to set up temporary e-mail accounts using Yahoo and Hotmail….” [New York Times story]

Apple’s chutzpah

Chutzpah was once defined as the state of mind that enables a person, after murdering both his parents, to appeal for sympathy as an orphan. So how about the Apple Superbowl ad? The sheer, unadulterated sassiness of it is, well, wonderful.

Interesting insight into Hutton’s past

From Paul Foot, writing in today’s Guardian:

“In August 1973, the Derry coroner, retired Major Hubert O’Neill, completed the inquest into the 13 unarmed people killed by the British army on Bloody Sunday. The jury returned an open verdict. Off the cuff, Major O’Neill described the killings as “sheer unadulterated murder”.

That was too much for the young barrister representing the Ministry of Defence. He lectured the coroner as follows: “It is not for you or the jury to express such wide-ranging views, particularly when a most eminent judge (Lord Chief Justice Widgery) has spent 20 days hearing evidence and come to a different conclusion.” The barrister’s name was Brian Hutton.

Whatever the outcome of the Saville inquiry, set up in 1998 to investigate the Bloody Sunday killings, everyone now accepts that the one-man Widgery tribunal was seriously flawed. So it follows that Brian Hutton quite early in his career was sticking up for one judicial whitewash and that, 30 years on, was playing the lead role in another one…”

The next whitewash

Is it any wonder people have lost trust in their politicians? Over in Washington, Dubya is suddenly demanding “to know the facts” about Iraq’s WMD for all the world (as Jonathan Freedland points out) as if he were “an aggrieved American voter, somehow hoodwinked into the war with Iraq”. In London, as late as last week, Tony Blair was denouncing the idea of an inquiry as ludicrous, unnecessary, etc. But now, suddenly (and immediately after Washington decides it has to have an inquiry), there is to a British inquiry too.

It will be a typical British affair too — held in secret and run by a panel consisting of two trusty political has-beens, a retired soldier and a former diplomat who has spent most of his professional life in the company of spooks. And it is to be chaired by Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary who defended the Tory government’s supply of arms to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war and was hoodwinked by Tory liars Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton. This forensic genius is to preside over an inquiry with sclerotic terms of reference, designed to make sure that the Blair government’s decision to go to war on false premises will not be questioned. Ye Gods! Who do these people think we are? The Liberal Democrats were right to boycott this secretive farce.

Microsoft eyes Google — the John Markoff version

This lovely illustration…

Image (c) the New York Times

… caught my eye. Here’s an extract from John Markoff’s article:

Later this year, Microsoft is expected to unveil its own search technology, which Mr. Gates says will help Microsoft catch up with Google. Last week, Microsoft released a test version of a special set of software buttons for its browser designed to direct users to its MSN search and related services. For Google, though, the greater threat is that Microsoft will decide that Internet search, like the Web browser before it, should be an integral part of future versions of the Windows operating system.

For the moment, though, Google’s lead seems formidable. Last year, Rick Rashid, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the company’s research division, came to its outpost in Silicon Valley to give a demonstration of an experimental Microsoft Research search engine. Shortly afterward, however, Mike Burrows, one of the original pioneers of Internet search at Digital Equipment who later helped design Microsoft’s experimental search engine, quietly defected. He joined Google.

But even if it can protect its technological lead, will Google still succumb to Microsoft’s marketing muscle?

Google shares the intense Silicon Valley work ethic that characterized companies like Netscape. Its new headquarters, on a spacious campus once occupied by SGI, a computer maker, are just across the freeway from Netscape’s original base.

But many veteran Silicon Valley executives are skeptical about Google’s ability to hold its corporate culture together once it goes public later this year. The initial public offering, much anticipated, is expected to create hundreds of instant multimillionaires among its regular employees, but will leave many others hired as contractors without significant gains. As a result, some people fret that Google is fostering a class society in its ranks.

So far, though, the disaffection is limited largely to the company’s Adwords business, which is aimed at creating and placing its focused search advertising. That operation has grown rapidly with temporary workers. “The Adwords environment is brutal,” one Google executive said.

Clearly, though, keeping its ebullient esprit de corps so robust after the I.P.O. will be difficult, say those who have gone through similar roller-coaster rides in Silicon Valley.

“The challenge Google faces is figuring out how to retain a high rate of innovation” in the face of a disruptive event like the I.P.O., said a former Netscape executive, who also worries that the two young founders, for all their brilliance, may not fit well into the kind of management team needed to run Google as a fast-growing public company.

Although Google has clear vulnerabilities, Microsoft is seen in Silicon Valley as a powerful but not particularly creative competitor. Beyond its core business in Office and Windows, Microsoft has no major recent successes to point to – but it has a growing list of disappointments. These include its Xbox video game player and Ultimate TV set-top box.

In other words, rivals have fought Microsoft and lived to tell about it. “At TiVo, we managed to stare down that $40 billion barrel,” said Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist who helped finance the creation of TiVo’s digital video recorder, which allows TV viewers to easily record hours of video programming for viewing at other times. “We dodged that particular bullet,” Mr. Alsop said, when Microsoft “shut down Ultimate TV and got out of the business.”

Other executives who compete with Microsoft said Google’s position might be more defensible than Microsoft executives believe.

“The good news for Google is that what they do has many branches,” said Rob Glaser, the chief executive of RealNetworks, which competes with Microsoft in the software for playing video and digital audio on personal computers. “It’s not easily replicable in one step.”

The two big questions, it seems to me, are: (1) Will Google lose its innovative ethos after its IPO? and (2) will it become the next Netscape (and would legislators allow that to happen)?

The ‘offshoring’ debate…

… is really hotting up in the US, as skilled workers (e.g. programmers) who once thought themselves indispensable are now discovering that that their employers have discovered real (and cheaper) alternatives overseas. I’ve come across an interesting post from John Robb’s weblog on the scope of the problem:

“Here isan article in the McKinsey Quarterly (via Forbes):  By McKinsey estimates, in 2002 it was worth $32 billion to $35 billion–just 1% of the $3 trillion worth of business functions that could be performed remotely. Because of the significant benefits already being realized through offshoring, the market is projected to grow by 30% to 40% percent annually over the next five years. This prospect may cause consternation over job losses in the United States but it will make offshoring an industry with well over $100 billion in annual revenue by 2008. 

What is $100 b of offshored services worth in terms of jobs?  First, an offshored service costs ~50% of the service produced in the US (on average).  Since this is basically a pure salary play (infrastructure is minimal), these estimates mean that 2 m ($100k) information workers will be offshored by 2008.  Also, given these jobs usually produce upwards of ~4 additional jobs per position (community impact), this is a net loss of 10 m jobs by 2008.”

More Hutton fallout

Two interesting articles today. A terrific polemic by Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, and not one of nature’s left-wingers. Here’s part of what he has to say:

The longer I think about Hutton, the angrier I get. It is hard to dissent from his conclusions about the BBC’s failures. Yet the damage done by his grotesquely lopsided report vastly outweighs the gravity of the offence. The corporation, guilty of lapses of journalistic judgment, has been treated as if its reporter had committed perjury in a court of law. Lord Hutton seems to expect from working journalists the standards of proof he would demand from witnesses on oath.

Lord Hutton seems unable to grasp a simple truth: all journalism is conducted against a background of official obfuscation and deceit, which does much to explain our blunders and omissions. It seems remarkable not how much journalists get wrong – a great deal – but that we are able to retrieve from the Whitehall swamp fragments of truth, and to present the waterlogged and bedraggled exhibits to readers and listeners.

I say this with regret. I am more instinctively supportive of institutions, less iconoclastic, than most of the people who write for the Guardian, never mind read it. I am a small “c” conservative, who started out as a newspaper editor 18 years ago much influenced by a remark Robin Day once made to me: “Even when I am giving politicians a hard time on camera,” he said, “I try to remember that they are trying to do something very difficult – govern the country.”

Yet over the years that followed, I came to believe that for working journalists the late Nicholas Tomalin’s words, offered before I took off for Vietnam for the first time back in 1970, are more relevant: “they lie”, he said. “Never forget that they lie, they lie, they lie.”

The strangest thing about Hutton’s mindset, as Max observes, is his quaint idea of how political journalism is conducted in the UK. His model seems to be this: the journalist asks the government spokesman a question; the spokesman answers; the journalist writes down the answer; and the newspaper prints it. The idea that an official source might not be truthful never crosses old Hutton’s mind. Hastings goes on to cite two cases where prominent (named) New Labour politicians told him outright lies. And, in another interesting article, lawyer Anthony Lester ponders the implications of Hutton’s proposed code of conduct for the media. Quote:

“The report found David Kelly guilty of acting in breach of the civil service code in talking to Gilligan without authority. It did not consider whether Kelly might have had a public interest Spycatcher defence as a whistleblower. Hutton stated, as a general principle, that ‘accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media’, without referring to the dangers inherent in self-censorship and prior restraint, or to the constitutional right to free speech now protected by the Human Rights Act against unnecessary interference or restriction – especially on matters of political expression. The report does not consider (as a libel jury would have done) whether, despite sloppy journalism, weak editorial supervision and poor management, it was still in the public interest for the BBC to broadcast the fact that a senior and well-informed public officer had made serious accusations about the way in which the dossier had been compiled.

Those newspapers that have gleefully attacked the BBC should consider the dangers to them and their readers of acquiescing in this approach. As for the BBC, we must hope that its new chairman and director general will be chosen without government influence, that the systemic failures will be corrected but not over-corrected, and that the public’s right to know will not be chilled by self-censorship or government interference as a result of the extraordinary and costly procedure that the government invented to vindicate its reputation.”

Ryanair loses it

It’s not often that one can spot the exact moment when a company blows it, but this week we saw it with Ryanair, the Irish budget airline that has hitherto been the apple of every traveller’s eye. It’s just lost a case brought against it by a disabled traveller who was charged an extortionate fee for the use of a wheelchair. According to the BBC report, “Bob Ross said it was discriminatory to be charged an £18 fee because he was unable to walk to the check-in desk. [Mr Ross has had cerebral palsy since birth and later developed arthritis, so walking is very painful.]

Judge Crawford Lindsay QC ruled Ryanair acted unlawfully by not ensuring a free wheelchair was provided.

The community worker was awarded £1,336 in compensation.”

And guess what Ryanair does next? Claps a 50p levy on every passenger from now on. This will yield about £12 million a year — enough to buy 24,000 wheelchairs by my calculations. It’s a spiteful, vindictive response which will damage the passenger-friendly image of the airline and cost far more in public relations terms than any money it will bring in. Ryanair’s bosses are clearly getting rattled — they had to issue their first profits warning this week after years of spectacular growth. And shares dropped 30% in a week.

A new kind of email server — the 50cc Honda motorcycle

Fascinating article in the NYT and IHT about an ingenious way of getting email to and from places with no internet connections. Extract:

“Without wires for electricity or telephones, O Siengle, a village of about 800 people, has nevertheless joined the online world, taking part in a development project set up by an American benefactor to connect 13 rural schools to the Internet.

Since the system went into place in September at the new elementary school here in Cambodia’s remote northeast corner, solar panels have been powering three computers.

Once a day, an Internet “Motoman” rides a red motorcycle slowly past the school. On the passenger seat is a gray metal box with a short fat antenna. The box holds a wireless Wi-Fi chip set that allows the exchange of e-mail between the box and computers. Briefly, this schoolyard of tree stumps and a hand-cranked water well becomes an Internet hot spot.

It is a digital pony express: Five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The system, developed by First Mile Solutions, based in Boston, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle’s battery. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village’s outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. Newly collected information is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world…”