Zentelligence

It's Trust that Makes the World Go Round

Bill Gates says it's time to learn to trust your computer.

Well, I love my computer, if you can call it love, but I don't trust it and I don't think I ever will.

This is because however advanced and impressive the technology, computers, in my experience, remain as fallible as ever. Like people, they have a habit of letting you down when you need them most.

If I appear mildly cynical, it's because all the technology in the world has rather let me down today and I've just missed my flight home from Dubai.

And if anyone happens to know where my e-mails are going, let me know, because I certainly don't.

Reliability and trust are, however, two very different ideals for those of us sitting with PCs in front of us. But most systems are reliable most of the time and life is no longer the unhappy lottery it once was with Windows 3.1 and its frequent "Unexpected Applications Errors".

Granted, then, that PCs work most of the time. Trust is, however, a different matter. Trusted computing does, of course, imply security or, at least, something resembling environmental integrity. It's something Microsoft has never been particularly good at in the past but plans to excel at in the future.

Sitting out here in the Middle East, trusted computing needs to be at the top of everyone's agenda, a message I've been giving governments and business in the region.

If you're going to have e-commerce and e-government, then these have to be built upon an infrastructure of trust, rather than simply the promise of better-than-average connectivity, "security first" being the operative sentiment.

The elusive problem lies in achieving end-to-end trust within an IT infrastructure, regardless of whether your business happens to sit in Riyadh or Reading.

So Microsoft can discover "trusted computing" in much the same way as it discovered networking and then, a little later, the Internet, but it's debatable whether such an overdue sense of evangelism will really do much more than encourage people to think more clearly about the risks associated with using Windows.

Over time, Microsoft products will present a much harder nut to crack, but it's going to take another three to five years before what's already out in the market and, in particular, the less developed world, is going to be replaced by more secure iterations of Windows XP and beyond.

So while the message from Mr Gates appears sensible, we all need to see evidence that skyrocketing cybercrime is on the decline and that business is putting a security policy first, rather than last, on its list of priorities.

Many of us are still far from feeling trust in Microsoft, but let's give the company 12 months to start proving that it can make a difference, or whether this is simply another marketing daydream.

It’s All About ‘E’

“Internet threat to 800,000 in public jobs”, screams the editorial in the Sunday Times. “e-Envoy says that a fifth of public servants could lose their jobs over the next ten years because the Internet will make them redundant”.

After a long sleep, it seems that the Sunday Times and indeed, the Public Sector unions, may have just woken-up to the arrival of ‘Disintermediation’ and The Information Society? Take the banking sector as an example. First there was the arrival of ATM machines in the eighties and with them, came the opportunity to dramatically downsize the workforce. Then came the arrival of on-line banking and banking became leaner still, with some, like Egg, disappearing into cyber-space completely.

Eventually, most of the high-street banks will disappear, mine already has, and only those customers with acceptable credit ratings and Internet access, will have access to ‘The Bank that likes to say yes’.

What happens, I wonder, when the promise of Broadband Britain becomes a distinct reality and the greater part of the population starts ordering their supermarket shopping direct from Tesco.Com? Where will the tens of thousands of people now working on the checkout counters find work? Perhaps one day, there will only be two kinds of job available, either you’re a knowledge worker or a parking warden.

The world has changed around us in the space of less than twenty years and while technology may make our lives a little smoother, it also threatens to make the contribution of millions of relatively unskilled people irrelevant.

Twenty years ago, 43% of employment was in businesses with more than five hundred people. By the beginning of the last decade it was 34% and at the turn of the millennium, it was approximately 27%.

The question of ‘streamlining’ the public sector is an uncomfortable question for many governments now pursuing their different ‘e’ agendas. Most if not all governments, those like Brazil, Greece and Kuwait, have a vision of what technology can achieve in replacing tedious, inefficient and costly public services, replacing them with a citizens Web page and a transaction engine, linked across multiple government departments. The ideal state is of course close to invisible government, friendly, sterile, efficient and fully automated at the same time and when it works, much like Internet banking, the people wonder how they ever managed without it.

But in many countries across the world, the public sector represents a home for the over-qualified and the long-term unemployable. In others, mostly English-speaking countries, a process of streamlining, has been producing an increasingly thinner and frequently overworked and technology-dependent public-sector for the last two decades.

How many of us would wish to turn back the clock and return to a time of queuing at the local branch of a bank to withdraw money or pay a telephone bill? How many of us would breathe a sigh of relief if we never had to visit another Post Office again to queue interminably to pay our road tax?

Institutions matter but not in any nostalgic sense. As a society we need to better understand where “joined-up” government is leading, rather than agonise too much over what it might be replacing.

What We Do in Life..... Echoes...!

Well, the marriage finally happened, Hewlett Packard and Compaq that is, all $87 billion of a partnership, which, among other ambitions aims to kick poor Dell where it hurts.

Confirmed optimist that I am, I think it will probably be a near term and very expensive disaster at a delicate time in the industry’s history, but let’s all hope that the first year’s trading results prove me wrong.

The new Hewlett Packard, HPQ, will of course keep the Compaq brand visible on some products going forward. After all, $19 Billion bought the company some pretty sizeable brand awareness and thousands of big corporations still feel comfortable with the Compaq brand

What will go is my relatively new HP Ominibook laptop. It appears that HP has conceded that Compaq makes better portables unless this part of some hidden compromise. Compaq’s workstation business will disappear and in the Pocket PC space, you can wave goodbye to the Jornada in favour of the Ipaq.

In order to out-compete Dell, the new HP has a new website, the HP Online Store, working. This now offers access to some 10,000 products and configurations. The objective is to move HP swiftly into second place as the largest web marketer with faster growth than archrival Dell Computer faster than Dell Apparently the new site has attracted $5 billion worth of new business in the last three months.

The HP/Compaq connection continues to raise some interesting ideas around the Microsoft relation. In particular, the constant effort to push Windows 2000 Datacenter into the Enterprise. Not so long ago, I wrote that Microsoft was starting to worry over the emphasis that IBM is placing behind AIX and Linux and of course, now we see Hewlett Packard swallowing Compaq, traditionally Microsoft’s favourite friend and now the property of a company, which has its own multi-platform agenda for the enterprise. Not a happy prospect for Redmond.

Enter of course Unisys, the product of an earlier mega-merger (Sperry & Burroughs) which didn’t quite go according to plan. I keep wondering about the company and where it sits, now squeezed between some very large playmates.

According to a story in Client Server News, research consultancy Illuminata has reported that the Unisys share of the joint ES7000-Windows 2000 Datacenter promotion, represents 10% of the total annual revenues that Unisys realises from the ES7000 platform, “A huge expenditure relative to revenue."

While Unisys is steadily moving more of its business focus towards the provision of services, 74% of 2001 company revenues, it’s debatable whether this kind of marketing spend in support of its hardware business is sound. Illuminata, speculates, as I have done in several previous columns, whether Unisys can continue in the market as a systems vendor selling Windows mainframes and if the new campaign doesn’t succeed, then Unisys may find itself forced into the services sector for good.

On reflection then, the Unisys/Microsoft “Big Iron” Datacenter campaign could well prove pivotal for both companies. Unisys MD Brian Hadfield once told me that the company had “Bet the Farm on Windows”. Ironically, Microsoft might have done the same with Unisys.

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls

The stock market needed a boost and this week, a universal sigh of relief accompanied Cisco’s “better than expected results”, it’s first year-on-year quarterly revenue rise for over twelvemonths and since it announced massive workforce cuts and rationalised it’s free soft drinks policy in a bid to cut costs.

Cisco is, of course a ‘Bellwether’ stock and I comment on it quite frequently on CNBC. However, before we start getting really excited and talk prematurely about ‘recovery’ in the tech-sector, I’ll grab my little green notebook and flick back through the pages to a few weeks ago to the programme that followed Microsoft’s earnings results. Then, I said that:

“Sun is flat, Microsoft is disappointing, IBM is wobbling and Compaq barely made it”.

On top of this, SAP had a 40% drop in income for the quarter and we won’t even talk about the telecoms stocks. It wouldn’t be kind.

Cisco could afford to be a little buoyant at its performance. It had, after all, avoided crucifixion and single-handedly took the Wall Street back over the Dow Jones 10,000 mark. In the words of Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, “: "Last year was a classic downturn. We took the critical steps to position ourselves for the upturn, and we are beginning to see the very positive results."

The market is however looking for hope, any hope and now it will be looking for evidence that Cisco’s recovery is rather more than a blip of optimism in a rather desolate landscape. Cisco and others like it, such as Foundry Networks represent the foundation of the DotCom effect and the vision of a broadband-driven universe, which has yet to arrive. Unfortunately though, my innate cynicism and the only too visible tech-stock bloodbath that I see around me, leads me to think that it’s far too early for people to talk of any real recovery. We need to see at least three companies come out with strong results before we start breaking out the champagne. Dell is one, Cisco of course is another and a third might be Microsoft or IBM. Judging this highly volatile market on a single encouraging performance is far too risky and most certainly premature, in my mind.

I can’t see a single company that I know of in this industry, which isn’t suffering. There is business to be had, particularly in the public sector but much of the time, IT companies’ largest customers are other IT companies and so the recession we are trapped in goes around in an unhappy circle, one which has created a condition where we can’t find two or three IT companies able to offer the market enough good news simultaneously, to jumpstart confidence and revive the march of progress.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel somewhere for the IT business but for many IT companies, it’s just as likely to be a train coming from the other direction.

New Technology but Old Methods

eBusiness is THE game blares the latest IBM advertisement on the television in front of me. My wife wonders why I laugh.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We all know about it and many companies spend a fortune on the software that goes with it but why, I ask, do those who need it most, never seem to use it?

Let’s take Parcel Force or should I call it ‘Parcel Farce’. We all suspect, I’m sure, that a First Class letter is only marginally quicker than a message in a bottle and that second class mail is sorted in Kabul before being lost in Reading but you would at least expect the Post Office or Consignia, as it’s now called, to recognise a valid London postcode.

There must be a deep personal experience at the heart of this column you might be thinking and you’d be right.

Somewhere between California and Mitcham there is a £1000 package on its way to me. I know it’s on its way, because the American supplier “Cutting Edge Technology”, has told me, because it’s their second attempt to send it to me. First time around, two weeks ago, the package reached Mitcham and although it had my name, address, postcode and telephone number on the package in large letters, it was returned to California, much the worse for wear as an unknown London address.

Now my address is the only street of its name in London, which is quite remarkable. In fact, if you type in my full SW19 postcode into Streetmap.co.uk, you can even see an aerial picture of my patio roof and whether my car is in its drive.

Parcel Force has a 0800 service number with a recorded message that insists its agents are looking after other customers and that you should please use the Web site or call later. It then disconnects the call to reinforce the point.

The www.parcelforce.co.uk website offers a rudimentary tracking agent, which yes, tells you that the package - if you happen to have the consignment reference from the obligingly friendly American side of the exercise – is on the UK system and en route. But you knew that already and it’s hardly up to Fedex global positioning standards.

To be really awkward, what you might want to know as a customer is whether it’s en route to you or en route back to the States for a second time because our sad excuse for a postal system is unable to put in place anything that even remotely resembles an efficient business process or useful CRM system.

I did manage to find out a week ago, that the package was on a guaranteed four day delivery, so my best guess for its whereabouts remains the black hole of Mitcham but how, I wonder, do I actually find out where it is and even why they chose to turn it right around to California on the first attempt?

Oh, and by the way, when I do receive a letter telling me that they have the package, it's cash only for the duty, so I have to drive across Mitcham to London to retrieve it, during working hours of course.

Isn’t this what .Net and the Internet revolution is all about? Are so many of our older and larger companies and institutions, like the Post Office, the railways and the Inland Revenue so bogged down by bureaucracy and mediocrity that they are unable to build useful customer interfaces and services from the vast sums they spend on new technology?

We have this collective vision of a ‘Wired Society’. Joined-up government, UK-Online, e-this and e-that. The problem is that the bad old ways of doing business are still alive and well and all the money in the world spent on customer relationship training and software makes very little difference to our lives when we have to deal with the everyday companies like BT and Consignia. it strikes me, that companies of this size and reputations are likely to take Microsoft’s ‘One Degree of Separation’ slogan literally where their customers are concerned. Perhaps it should be “One More Excuse for Separation” instead.

The end of history or the end of trust?

When Francis Fukuyama wrote ‘The End of History’, he was thinking of a new world order that followed the end of the cold war. One where unrestrained capitalism had prevailed over what we understand as democracy. However, mix capitalism and technology, I commented on a programme earlier this week; at the start of the Andersen trial and you also stimulate the expansion of two separate but connected forces: Globalisation and virtualisation.

Today, business is both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and concepts of corporate governance, have, in a number of prominent examples, been discarded as irrelevant luxury. Twenty years after the movie ‘Wall Street’, Greed it appears is still good and business degeneracy is on the rise.

If investor credulity and the Dot Com ‘bubble’ defined the end of the 20th century, trust is an early casualty of the 21st century. Trust in governments and trust in institutions, such as Andersen which were once recognised as pillars of professionalism and integrity and now appear to be riddled by conflicts of interest.

Ironically, at a time when technology offers instant accountability over any distance, large, multi-national companies seem less able to exercise authority from the centre. Individuals at distant locations are increasingly capable of ignoring corporate policy and thanks to communications technology, able rashly or intentionally of triggering an international business crisis for a company in a matter of minutes.

When I was in Saudi Arabia last month, the Arab News broke the story that in the heat of international concern over events taking place in West Bank of Israel, the country’s local office had, without any consultation with Redmond, sponsored an advertisement in support of the Israeli army. While the story may not have seen the light of day here, it was front page news in the Middle-east and an immediate public relations disaster for Microsoft in the region.

Theoretically, technology should offer a company tighter control of its decision-making and accountability functions than ever before in human history but quite demonstrably, I doesn’t. Why is this?

My own theory is that the management theories of the eighties and nineties, re-engineering, downsizing, up-shifting and many more, produced post-modern businesses with a single profit-driven purpose. Anything else was ‘streamlined’ and viewed as irrelevant. In simple terms, if like me you have been on the outside, looking in at many of the world’s largest and best-known corporations, then you’ll be aware in almost every case, business is so streamlined and downsized, that management spends much of its time reading e-mail and hoping that all the spinning plates don’t stop at once.

In a flat corporation, nobody really owns the responsibility until, like Barings before or Deloittes or Andersen and Enron today, it’s too late. The technology at our disposal should offer the means of facilitating a wider sense of corporate responsibility and of tightening the governance which is so obviously and frequently failing.
As a global business community, we need to start concentrating a little less frantically on creative management theories that drive profitability and rather more on measures and systems that encourage trust, responsibility and good management. Integrity for a business of any size is a currency that once lost can never be recovered.

Predictions - Who Can Say?

The wonderful thing about being in the predictions business is that one is rarely right in anticipating what one knows about most and uncannily accurate at guessing the future of things on the periphery of one's experience.

Of course, I have my own parallel universe theories, some tarot cards and a bag of rune stones that I use when I really want to surprise myself.

I should add, though, that flipping a coin is as good a way as any for predicting IBM's or Sun's results this year.

My bookcase has an interesting collection of "classics" going back to the earlier years of computing. There's Re-engineering the Corporation and Paradigm Shift, Release 3.0 and even an original Bill Gates' The Road Ahead, sitting next to Under the Radar, by Bob Young of Red Hat.

One of the more interesting books is Dvorak Predicts, by the US columnist, John Dvorak, whose big prediction is that "Microsoft's domination will come to an abrupt end".

"One bad quarter and the bloom is off Microsoft stock". "When the boom ends, Microsoft will be just another software company and Lotus will re-emerge as a leader in the spreadsheet and Groupware category".

Lets face it, he speculates, "DOS is dead and Windows NT won't really catch on and OS/2 will still give it a run for its money."

With almost 200 pages of nostalgia, it's really hard to pick the best predictions. There's:

Strong OS/2 usage will confuse the market

Unix will never become a mainstream operating system

Windows for Workgroups is Microsoft's long-term strategy

DEC will take Microsoft to the next level

NT is a smokescreen operating system

RISC will win

The Pentium will mark the end of the line for the 80x86 family

The TV and the computer won't merge

There'll be a backlash against personal devices

He does get close sometimes, identifying Unix as a target for Windows NT.

Unfortunately, Dvorak is more way out than way on, but big corporations will pay good money for this kind of crystal ball-gazing.
So am I going to predict the next ten years? Not on your life. I think Windows will be "big" and that IBM will still be around.

There'll be a few big hardware manufacturers and software will be something that exists in the device and several other places at the same time through Web services.

Technology will never be cheap and I will still have to ask my daughter to show me how to use the home entertainment "hub".
Winston Churchill once said: "I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place."

Perhaps we so-called IT experts should heed his advice.

No Smoking Camel

Sitting in my hotel room in sunny Riyadh, channel hopping between Arab language stations, I’m startled to see our very own town of Blackpool offering itself to the desert as the “Pearl of the English Seaside”, during the commercial break, on what looks like the Al Jazirah news channel.

Somehow footage of the English seaside appears a little incongruous when it’s squeezed in between vivid close-up film of the human carnage left behind in the ruins of Jenin. However, advertising of this kind, illustrates how the numbers game of cheap, mass communications technology of the satellite and the Internet, is increasingly unselective and frequently intrusive. After all, enough wealthy Arabs might even reject the charms of the Cote D’Azur in favour of Blackpool this summer, making the exercise worthwhile, as in much the same way, tens of thousands of gullible people fall prey to Internet advertising scams through junk e-mail each year.

Sifting through the usual unwelcome pile of pornography, loan offers and other garbage in my overloaded Hotmail inbox, I’m beginning to wonder how much further America’s constitutional right to advertise can go before people everywhere else decide they have had enough of being abused. And even if we did protest, it’s unlikely that they would take any notice.

Stuck with a cripplingly slow connection to the outside world, I’m guessing that if I divided my hotel phone bill in half, assuming 50/50 split between trash and legitimate mail, the privilege of being spammed is costing me at least £10 a day in wasted connection charges to both my hotmail account and my company email.

Of course, with Hotmail, you get Instant Messenger, which is a handy invention. Three hours ahead of the UK and I can spot my colleagues logging on to their PCs and pass notes to them as if they were on the other side of my room, so technology has some benefits, although invariably it involves an uncomfortable compromise between what you might want from the service and what you are obliged to put up with.

Even if we leave aside the distasteful side of unsolicited email, there’s very little doubt that the problem is becoming worse as the delivery mechanisms become cheaper and more sophisticated. After all, you can sell what you like, you can make any claim, any promise and as long as you’re clever there’s very little chance that you’ll be called to account by any law enforcement agency anywhere.

There’s a side to the Internet that’s starting to worry me. Any serious practical and moral debate over its future and its security is almost exclusively American and driven by that country’s laws and commercial interests. Whether you happen to be watching its progress as a European or an Arab, I don’t believe this is healthy way to manage the development of the world’s information super-highway because the very freedom that the neutrality of the Internet represents is also the weakness that threatens most to compromise our faith in its future as a global communications medium.

Go Stand in Front of a Train

Sage may claim they aren’t worried by Microsoft’s expanding interest in financial software but if I remember correctly, neither was Novel over NT or Intuit, over Quicken and Lotus Development over Excel. Of course there’s a list of equally unworried other companies going back in history, which might make a pretty war memorial to look back on one day, when I tell my grandchildren that Microsoft and software don’t mean the same thing.

It must be ten years since I predicted that Microsoft would start squeezing vertical markets, one by one, starting funnily enough with Flight Simulator, as it would be a relatively simple task to crush the relatively unsophisticated and expensive competition without anyone screaming “monopoly” to the nearest judge.

Of course, every company has the right to compete but very few companies are big enough and bad enough to have any chance of competing head-on with Microsoft and winning. However big Sage thinks it may be, if Microsoft wants a market and the customers that go with it, then it, it will, over time, out manoeuvre, out-compete and outspend its victim. It’s the industry equivalent of stepping in front of an express train, wearing clean underwear and hoping it won’t run you over.

When CDs first appeared, I predicted that one day, all the software you might need would be available on a single disk and ten years on, here’s another, pretty safe, prediction. Regardless of talk about open standards XML and .Net, within three to five years, there will be very few line of business and entertainment applications that will not be Microsoft badged, either directly or indirectly through partnership and investment. There will be choice still among financial products in an industry where loyalty is particularly strong but as the world moves towards a more on-line, Web-services style of delivery model, integration and cost will be valued over brand.

Some areas will of course be harder for Microsoft to crack than others. The X-Box needs to make an impact on the Japanese market if it is to squeeze-out Sony and businesses, like my own, aren’t going to throw out Sage or MYOB overnight, But ultimately, Microsoft will compete on price and features and customers will start to drift, as they did with so many other different software applications in the past.

Last week, when I was in the Middle east and while I was shopping for a USB pen drive, men kept leaping out of doorways and alleys offering me software. Other than the piracy issue, what was remarkable was that in almost every case, the CD on offer was Office and the same salesmen only had a single word of English to describe their wares,” Microsoft”.

– Make you think doesn’t it?