Jerry Fishenden's Weblog Archives

I see the World Association of Newspapers - the biggest annual print media event - is upbeat, reporting that newspaper circulation rose slightly in 2004 (up just over 2%) and with the audience for newspaper Websites growing some 32% last year alone. However, there are notes of caution: and a recognition that the traditional print media needs to find news ways of delivering content, including for example to mobile devices.

One or two news Websites (such as the BBC) do provide news updates in a form specifically designed for mobile devices (I often find time spent on the Tube useful for catching up with the news on my Smartphone: although obviously at present only those sites that download and cache their content work well on the deep tunnels of the Underground). As with many new technological advances, new approaches only seem to complement old ones. In the same way TV did not kill radio or the cinema, each new technological development seems to give us more choice rather than to supersede and kill-off previous models.

Quite where newspapers go next is an interesting question: print on demand technologies almost make possible the production of individually tailored newspapers. Instead of the free newspapers read by commuters on the Tube at present, perhaps in the future we will be able to pick up a personalised version of a paper, printed as we arrive at the station. There are some dangers here of course: such as self-selection of news leading to us being less well informed, since we may well miss out on other stories from around the world and become increasingly insular. Personally, I'd also rather see the paper element taken out: it seems extravagant and wasteful to generate so much paper for distributing such ephemeral information. This will of course rely upon a future generation of form factors that have all the desirable characteristics of paper newspapers and none of the drawbacks of current technologies. SmartPhones and PDAs are a useful step on this journey, but they're clearly not the "killer" form factor that will see the end of traditional print-based newspapers for the majority of consumers. News organisations understand the need to see print as merely one form of distribution: and as new channels and form factors come along, they will need to embrace them.

In a world of blogs and other online news sources, that can come from anyone and anywhere in the world, whether the model of organised news provision will survive is an interesting question. Personally, I believe it will: not only because people want their news from authoritative and responsible providers, but also because they appreciate the additional analysis that the best news outlets provide.

I think the Forbes article on Open Source is a useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the economics of proprietary versus Open Source software development models. Larry McVoy, well known for his support of the Linux community and the contribution that his company's BitKeeper software development tool has made, has reached the point where he now has serious doubts about the economic viability of the open source model for pure software development.

“We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six months. The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you?"

“One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service? The other problem is that the services model doesn't generate enough revenue to support the creation of the next generation of innovative products. Red Hat has been around for a long time--for a decade now. Yet try to name one significant thing--one innovative product--that has come out of Red Hat."

"Nobody wants to admit that most of the money funding open source development, maybe 80% to 90%, is coming from companies that are not open source companies themselves. What happens when these sponsors go away and there is not enough money floating around? Where is innovation going to come from? Is the government going to fund it? This stuff is expensive. … If hardware companies stopped funding development, I think it would dramatically damage the pace at which Linux is being developed. It would be pretty darn close to a nuclear bomb going off.”

McVoy had previously asked the Linux community to pay for their use of his company's tools (the $500,000 or so a year it was costing them to provide the software and associated support) - but this was declined. Rather than pay, Linus Torvalds and others are now busy abandoning BitKeeper and beginning the development of their own tool instead. This seems to me a significant event, given how closely associated with the Open Source movement McVoy has been in the past.

There is an interesting issue here about software costs versus services costs. Typical IT projects only spend around 5% on software licences: the big savings are to be made in reductions of costs associated with integration and customisation, and the expensive, human resource intensive work that involves. Yet the Open Source model seems to be built not on the economics of better, more integrated and innovative software helping reduce overall IT costs and improve project efficiency and delivery - but with complex integration and customisation that drives an even bigger services element and overall higher project costs. I find it hard to see how this will improve the perception of the value of IT: one of the reasons I began to adopt Microsoft products in my former life as a head of IT and to move away from complex hybrid environments that spanned Netware, Solaris, Windows and other OSs and application environments was my analysis of my cost base. My IT budgets were not being used productively on returning value to the business, but on complex integration and engineering work merely to get the different platforms and applications communicating properly with each other. Well designed, integrated software suites and applications drive out nugatory costs and help deliver quicker value to the business. That is where IT needs to be focused: and where business owners should ensure it is delivering true value.

One of the problems IT should be helping us solve is silo, or stovepipe, thinking. But we seem to remain highly function-oriented in the way we design and operate, both as organisations (from small businesses through to government departments) and as individuals. At a personal level, this can be typified in that inevitable question asked on first meeting someone: "What do you do?". By which we mean of course "What are you employed as?". I've never quite understood the desire to characterise both ourselves and others we meet by job function: but this does suggest that function-orientated thinking runs deep in our psyches.

On a larger scale, the Department for Transport appears focused on physical transport infrastructure. It has defined a narrow problem domain - transport - and then identifies problems and potential solutions within that domain. So its focus is on new roads, or road improvements, or signage, or airports, or rail, or freight. And so on. But if we take a step back, transportation problems might be addressed through other approaches such as incentives to enable employees to work more flexibly and from other locations (including home). The Civil Service itself has recognised that it is prime territory for the smarter ways of working already embedded in private sector companies. Working from home when preparing or reviewing papers; telephone conference calls; Live Meeting and other modern forms of communication, collaboration and interaction all mean physical transportation should be becoming less prevalent than it has been.

This could also play strongly to other agenda, such as regionalisation and local economic regeneration across urban and rural communities. And so do more effectively than the current approach of function-oriented expatriation of public sector workers from London and the South East. Long term this transition to new ways of working and living will also give rise to more complex issues - since where we work and who we work for will become truly independent of physical location. We already see this with our most creative knowledge workers, such as authors, composers and actors. I am still far from convinced we have yet fully comprehended the scale of change we need to be contemplating and how technology is re-writing the rules we have long taken for granted in both the workplace and our personal lives.

"Telecommuting" and other technologically-derived ways of improving the way we work and live don't seem to have a very high prioritisation in terms of our UK transport strategy. We have seen elsewhere how outmoded methods of middle-management are often the largest inhibitors to productive innovation and reform. The out-dated management school that measures by inputs ("I need to see you at your desk to know you're working") has long been irrelevant. But equally it is highly persistent. Until we move to a model that measures by outcomes (and no - I don't mean outputs: that can merely encourage a litany of valueless papers and communications), we will lack the ability as a country to organise ourselves more efficiently and take true personal, societical and competitive advantage of the benefits technology can provide.

I’ve been in Sheffield for a few days at the Skills for Business event, delivering a Keynote on Service Oriented Architecture and the opportunities it presents for SMEs. This whole area of the north is undergoing substantial investment, regeneration and renewal. What strikes me most is the enthusiasm, commitment and talent here that could really help ensure sustainable economic regeneration. Some interesting underlying themes emerge during the main sessions and breaks:

Reflecting on the aspirations set out in the Government’s Connecting the UK: the Digital Strategy, it’s clear that some of the changes we aspire to see in the UK will only come about if we update prevailing models. We’ve already seen the Public Accounts Committee for example criticise large government projects (such as the former HMCE portal). Thinking about the problems experienced with large projects such as this, the points that emerged during the conference are worthy of more consideration: how can we break projects into smaller component pieces that deliver the required functionality on time and to budget? And which also let SMEs stand a better chance of bidding and becoming involved with key public sector developments alongside the larger IT organisations? Smaller projects - or big projects broken into smaller functional components - are also likely to encourage greater innovation and reduce risk.

I enjoyed the variety of contributions by my colleagues: the organisers orchestrated a great line-up, with HP, Atos Origin, Capex Health, Fujistu, EDS and Microsoft all represented in the main sessions and some equally impressive representation in the break-out seminars. Two contributions that particularly struck home to me were Methods in Madness, where Martyn Ould spoke in clear and memorable images about whether we had become so fashion driven in IT that that we were forgetting core good engineering principles and processes in ensuring high quality, reliable, robust, simple-to-use software. And the other was Charles Lilley, Chief Executive of Capex Health, who spoke with genuine passion and enthusiasm in his talk Walking with Giants about their programme to skill people in health informatics and hence help contribute both to the local community and to the demanding needs of the ambitious NHS modernisation programme. Charles' speech and description of what his company is achieving is one of the best articulations I've heard of how IT can really help re-skill and develop a community. There is a great deal spoken of IT being a catalyst for economic regeneration and the beneficial development of local communities, but here was evidence that the talk has at least in some places been turned into the walk.

The energy, commitment, enthusiasm and sheer talent that SMEs can bring to helping the public sector achieve its objectives is something we need to help foster and develop. It would be good not only for public services, but also help to encourage economic regeneration in areas such as Sheffield which on the evidence I witnessed firsthand are certainly not short of the necessary talent and entrepreneurship.

Coverage is beginning to emerge about the formal announcement Microsoft has made at DigitalID World of a proposed new identity metasystem, based on the Laws Kim Cameron has been developing (see www.identityblog.com). A great piece by John Fontana from Network World talks about both the 7 Laws and the identity metasystem. Likewise, Dan Farber’s ZDNet blog (Microsoft’s enlightened identity metasystem) is a good discussion, talking about the ideas put forward by Kim and John Shewchuk.

I’m delivering a paper at the Fifth European e-Government Conference at the University of Antwerp in June on the topic of eID: digital identity in an online world. It looks at the 7 Laws and discusses how proposed national eID card systems (such as the Belgian eID card and proposed UK National Identity Card) match up to the Laws. I have strong belief – based on many years of tackling identity management issues inside and outside of public sector organisations – that unless several key steps are included, such systems will fail. The Laws and associated identity metasystem are to me the best effort to date to address identity management’s “missing link”. We now have:

With these two building blocks, we have a much better prospect of delivering interoperable identity systems that both work and achieve the much-needed balance between privacy and security. Now we need to ensure that those tasked with delivering eID systems are armed with the right understanding of identity and the technical means of delivering it during their policy deliberations. With that in place, we can also then discuss the required overrides that can ensure appropriate interventions for purposes of criminal investigations and child protection.

The joint Steve Ballmer/Scott McNeally press conference contains some major announcements that many of us have been hoping for. Most notable is the work to ensure that the Liberty Alliance and WS-Federation identity architectures will interoperate. This has been a major request from organisations across the world. This gives us the catalyst to make practical progress in tackling the real issues of single sign-on so that urgently required changes on the backs of the likes of Bichard can now be made reality. On top of WS-Federation and Liberty Alliance interop, it will also be useful to consider how other authentication architectures – such as Shibboleth – can be brought into play.

The preview of Xbox 360 on MTV highlights the increasing range of categories of non-PC based computing. Smart phones, PDAs, and TV, especially IP-based televisions, are all examples of strategic non-PC categories. In the UK, other companies, such as Amstrad, have also been experimenting with different form factors, such as the emailer. As broadband increasingly displaces the traditional PSTN and telecoms industry, there's a host of new opportunities opening up. Obvious ones include VOIP (voice over IP - voice over the Internet) which offers 'free' communication (ignoring the cost of broadband itself). New generation products and form factors are going to make this as easy to use as previous generation cordless phones made traditional telephone lines. Not only are there enormous implications for the telecoms and IT industries in this transition, but also for local initiatives such as digital community projects who can share a single broadband connection amongst a community (including wirelessly) and offer access and services at notional rates.

A new Microsoft-backed laboratory in Hong Kong is aiming to open up the internet (and other information technology) to the disabled through researching ways to improve human interaction with computers. The primary focus is going to be on enabling computers to listen, see and learn. These are quite clearly non-trivial problems. I recall the somewhat rogue behaviour of neural networks and other so-called artificial intelligence (AI) techniques when I was conducting my research into the applications of AI to music composition. Some of the more simple aspects of improved human interfacing with computers are already in use - text-to-speech perhaps being one of the most obvious examples.

Forrester Research is reported to have forecast steady growth in accessibility technologies in the next few years - and that 70 million people in the US alone would be using some type of accessibility technology by 2010.

News is appearing that Project Harmony aims to write from scratch the Java software, called Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), that is needed to run Java programs on desktop PCs. This seems to be the natural progression of the debate within the Open Source community about Sun’s Java language and when/if Sun will ever make it Open Source. Sun has in the past been pretty clear about this – worrying that making it Open Source will cause Java to fork and hence lead to incompatibilities, undermining the whole value of the language. Equally, there is a view that no project or software can be regarded as Open Source if it includes Java (since that still remains the intellectual property of Sun). This is causing some debate around projects such as OpenOffice which seems to be relying more and more on Java.

There is a point of view – that I witnessed in South Africa, where they have applications running and mirroring between Windows and Linux servers – that the only true Open Source projects are those written in entirely IP-free and OS-independent languages such as C and C++. The debate is of course further muddled (or muddied) by initiatives such as project Mono which now has .NET applications running on Linux – in fact SuSE 9.3 includes several .NET developed projects, including search and digital photo library software. But writing the whole Java language in an Open Source version seems to me a major undertaking (something of an understatement I suspect). And also one that is at least in part questionable: one of the main complaints of many developers is that since Java predates developments such as XML, working with it now has become too complex. I’d have thought if someone was going to go to all the time and energy of re-writing Java from scratch, it would also be a good opportunity to roll in many of the technical developments that have become ubiquitous (and core to the likes of .NET – XML, Web services etc) since its original launch. On the other hand you could say that's already happened: it's called, er, .NET.

There are reports on the wire that Microsoft has moved some social-computing experts from Microsoft Research onto the Windows user interface team. Given the variety of peer-to-peer models we've seen and the likes of blogs, wikis, RSS, and social networking software generally, this could produce some interesting developments. There have already been brief insights into Wallop (and a wider range of social computing initiatives). Wallop is a great new way of visualising our various relationships and interactions across communities on the Web. If these ideas continue to develop, I'll be looking to get them included in a conceptual 'digital community toolkit'; something that brings together all the right components, architectures and links to make it as simple and cost-effective as possible for local community projects to set-up and launch their networks. If we could add into this some smart interlinks with local businesses and entrepreneurs, I think we'll finally be at the point of realising the true potential of IT to help with economic regeneration and development - as well as strengthening communities who already have a more vibrant ecosystem.

Microsoft IP Ventures is a positive new development, enabling ideas from Microsoft Research and the Microsoft product groups to be made available to third parties. There’s some very thought-provoking IP contained in their portfolio. For example, ideas such as Biocert provide interesting technical inputs to debates such as the UK National ID Card: since Biocert enables authentication without any data stored in a central database. I think it’s important that policy-makers are provided with high quality briefings by the technology industry to help inform them about the whole range of options available so that they in turn can take a fully-informed decision about policies that stand the best chance of success. To date I’ve been disappointed at the poor quality of the debate and inputs from the IT industry in the UK to the National ID Card debate. Concepts such as Biocert are great examples of alternative technical options.

National Technology Officer - UK Web Site

Jerry Fishenden's Weblog Archives - May 2005