What’s IT all about?

Most people nowadays have a mobile phone (cellular if you’re the wrong side of the pond), and whilst many stump up the full whack for their handset and then stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in, a sizeable percentage (in the UK at least) have the cost of their handset heavily subsidised by opting for a 12 or 18 month contract. If you’re a reasonably heavy user, then contracts make sense, particularly since they give you the option to upgrade to another handset at the end of the contract.

Zonbu have borrowed from this business model to sell their Linux-based PC’s and Laptops. You can purchase their products as you can from any other PC manufacturer. However, they also give you the option of entering into what is, in effect, a hire-purchase agreement. Pay your money up front (for their laptop, $279), pay a monthly fee for a couple of years ($14.95) and you get an entry-level laptop with unlimited maintenance and support, online backup and a free replacement should anything untoward happen.

Will it work ? I can see it being attractive in the home or small business where IT knowledge is limited. Would I buy one? Nope, not when I can carry out my own support and maintenance, and organise online backup if I so desire (in fact I have an old PC running Bacula to protect my data). Most importantly, though, when I buy a PC or laptop I want to be able to control the spec.

Still, it’s something relatively new in the marketplace, and I applaud them for giving it a good shot and wish it every success.

There are a few optiones if you wish to use a free database in your business. Nowadays many are aware of the open-source options such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, but may not be aware of some of the free options from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. In this article, Leon Katsnelson of IBM evaluates his company’s offering - DB2 Express-C, in a prelude to looking at Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 and Oracle Express Edition (XE). It’s an interesting read, with the obvious proviso that this is an IBM guy talking about an IBM product.

I read an article by Davey Winder on the ITPro website today about the recent announcement by IBM that it’s Sametime server will support both the XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE instant messaging protocols, out of the box, allowing free access to interoperability with Yahoo, AIM and GoogleTalk users. This is, apparently, set to create the world’s largest business IM community.

However, the article bemoans the absence of Microsoft-based IM users

Not so great if you happen to be a user of MSN Messenger or Live Communication Server though, as IBM has not included Microsoft in its chat strategy.

Now anyone who has read this blog will know that I have a background in Lotus Domino consulting and have voiced criticism of Microsoft’s marketing strategies. That may be construed as bias, but I prefer to consider myself selective.

Anyway, I would like to point out one fact that seems to have been overlooked by Mr Winder. Microsoft are carrying out their usual strategy with open standards, in this case the SIP/SIMPLE standard adhered to by the other IM players mentioned above. That strategy can be summarised as embrace, extend and extinguish. There is an initial show of welcoming the standard with open arms, followed quickly by MS-specific extensions that are most definitely non-standard resulting in the creation of a closed and proprietary ’standard’ where Microsoft dictates what goes, and always to it’s own benefit.

Bearing that in mind, I believe IBM are perfectly right to open up Sametime to standards-compliant IM systems. If Microsoft wants to join in, then let it do exactly the same, and without charging it’s users as it does now. After all, why should IBM have to open it’s product up to a non-standard competitor ? In the short term it may be beneficial, but in the long term it most certainly isn’t.

The Ferris Research blog carries a story about a woman in Denver (Colorado) who had a visit from the local Sheriff’s office to forcibly remove her PC. Why? Because Ms Winkler’s PC had been infected and been used to make fradulent purchases online.

This got me thinking. Should we require people to have a licence to own a PC? After all, in the wrong hands it can be used to cause a lot of damage to businesses and reputations, and inflict a lot of inconvenience on the general public if used to distribute spam. Licencing puts PC’s in the same category as cars and guns (in those countries where you can still buy one) which may be overstating it’s capacity to cause actual physical harm, although I’m sure it would hurt a bit if dropped on your head! But requiring a licence may cause people to think twice about leaving it wide open for use as a spam relay or bot.

In reality it isn’t going to happen. For a start it would need to happen world-wide to be effective. But it was an interesting thought

In the past, you may have used your spare CPU cycles (as I have) to benefit the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, or to research a cure for cancer. Both are worthy uses, although one more than the other, depending on your point of view. More recently I have not been utilising my computer in this way, mainly because it costs to keep computers running 24×7 if you were not planning to do that beforehand (and before anyone comments, I know you don’t have to keep your computer going all the time to contribute, but if you’re going to offer it as a resource, it seems churlish not to keep it running). When I say cost, it’s not the pounds and pence coming from my pocket I’m worried about, it’s the cost to the planet of the power needed to keep the PC active.

Then I came across Local Cooling. Similar concept in the way it’s offered to the public (sign up and then share your stats with the world), but this time it’s reducing power consumption and not increasing it. So I have signed up (hence the nice little banner on the right) and I encourage you to do so. Go on, you know it makes sense.

My recent post on the Effects of Open Source, which I reproduced on the Ecademy networking site (link) has evolved into an interesting discussion of the long-term viability of the OS model. It has been pointed out, quite rightly, that a significant amount of OS development is either carried out by developers in their spare time, or by teams that receive funding from universities, or philantropists. So, should the use of OSS continue to rise, will we reach a point where future development within the OS/GPL model will not be possible because the companies employing or funding the developers have gone out of business ?

To answer this, I think we need to look at the real reason why people are happy to spend money to purchase software. In my opinion, the reason is because people (not companies, because ultimately this decision boils down to individuals making decisions) believe that paying a company some money for their software obliges the supplier to deal with any issues that occur. You could argue that the customer is paying for development, but only indirectly. The customer couldn’t give two hoots as to home much time and effort went into getting the software where it is, their considerations are - will it do what I need it to do now; and will it carry on working for the foreseeable future (or for a specific time period if it has a pre-defined life-span).

The first of those considerations applies regardless of the licence that the software is distributed under. If it’s not fit for purpose then it won’t be used, free or not. If it is used, then the customer’s a fool who shouldn’t be let out in charge of a budget. So it’s the obligation to provide support that’s a key difference between the two licence models. And some OSS providers, particularly those of the more popular and business-oriented Linux distros,  are quite happy to charge you for that support, in terms of documentation, training, and an obligation to actively investigate and resolve any bugs that you identify, as long as those updates are fed back into the OS community (whilst they don’t have to be fed back as part of the GPL, it is common practice).

Ultimately, there are opportunities for the creators of OSS to make money without charging for licences. Currently, many of the commercial organisations in this space act in a way similar to charities, asking for donations and for public bodies (universities, etc.) to fund their work. I don’t believe this is sustainable should the OSS market grow significantly, and there does seem to be growing public acceptance of the quality and applicability of OSS applications. So the challenge will be to make money in other ways.

An interesting model right now is the OSDL, the current employer of Linus Torvalds and the overseer of ongoing Linux kernel development, who are funded by a consortium of large commercial organisations who already have a commitment to using Linux and see the benefit of having a say in the development of a constantly-improving, freely available operating system.

However, my suspicion is that, while OSS usage will continue to grow, there will always be room for commercially licenced software in the marketplace. OSS has a history of re-engineering software that already exists rather than being truly innovative, and I think this will continue. Commercial software developers may well find that their product lifespan comes down to 2 or 3 years because of OSS imitators, but this is no bad thing for the customer. Bloated organisations, mentioning no-one in particluar , tend to become lazy and concentrate on where the next dollar is coming from rather than looking 5 or 10 years down the road at where the market is heading.

Of course, there is another way to make money, and that is by hosting your application centrally and charging for continued use. There is currently a lot of innovation in the Web 2.0 sphere, and I can see this growing. The ironic thing, though, is that much of the underlying technology is OSS So will the software companies developing the Web 2.0 (or Web 3.0) applications use commercial or open source software ? I know where my money would be long term.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Open Source Software (OSS), i.e. software that is freely distributable without licence fee, has been around for a long time. The best known and most widespread child of that concept, Linux, is in use across the world, running mission-critical services in environments ranging from large data centres to one-man bands. OSS has given a genuine alternative to the Microsoft stronghold for small businesses (see my Life without Microsoft article), as well as continuing to underpin the majority or websites across the world in the guise of the Apache webserver.

I read, with interest, a recent email from VMWare that illustrated just how the very concept of Open Source software is starting to impact directly on licenced software products. The email was announcing the new VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace, an area where self-contained virtual machines with a specific purpose can be showcased and made available for others to try out. Some of the appliances utilise licenced software and are not free, but many merely pull together OSS products and add some configuration. The end result is a free virtual machine that you can download and run within the free VMWare Player to add a particular function to your network. For example, you might want to add a web proxy server with content filtering without having to download Squid and Dansguardian and configuring them from scratch. So instead, you can go to the Virtual Appliance Marketplace and download one of many submitted there, such as this one.

When I initially read the email, I was immediately struck by the similarity to another OSS marketplace I had come across in the Notes/Domino world, namely the OpenNTF site. This is a website whereby applications developed in the Notes/Domino environment can be made freely available to all (NTF is the file extension for Notes Template Files, application templates to you and me). And, like the VMWare marketplace, it contains some applications that one would normally expect to pay a large licence fee to use. Popular applications include a blogging tool (Blogsphere) and a Wiki application (DominoWiki), although there are many others.

You might wonder why Open Source is so popular, not just with consumers of the software but with developers too. Certainly, at first glance, it can be difficult to see why a developer would want to put so much blood, sweat and tears into an application without making any money out of it. But from the developers point of view it can have some very good benefits. Not only is it a way of honing your development skills, but it also raises your profile in a way that can be referred to in future job interviews (not dissimilar to a consultant giving presentations at seminars to demonstrate their expertise in a certain area). Finally, it removes the need to ’sell a product’, so the developer doesn’t have to worry about marketing and taking payments and providing support and so on. Although frequently the developer will find that happy customers are very willing to make a contribution towards their costs.

For consumers of OSS, there is the obvious benefit of not having to pay licence fees, and the opportunity afforded to properly evaluate a product without having to worry about artificial deadlines or crippled versions of software. However, it also removes one of the frustrations frequently experience by large organisations when they encounter a bug in some software. Instead of having to wait for the licence holder to replicate the bug, produce a fix, test the fix and release it to customers; they can just go ahead and fix the bug themselves. The only obligation is to release the fix back into the OSS community so that others may benefit from it.

What is the future of OSS ? Difficult to say. I think there will be a continued move away from licenced software and towards OSS until a balance is found. It is possible that licenced software will die away completely, but that may have serious implications on the development of new software as well as the provision of support to smaller organisations. I’m sure the pendulum will continue to sway back and forth for some time yet, but eventually a happy medium will be found.

Just come across an interesting article on the ITPro website which states:

A survey by AMR of 200 companies across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain found that technology-related spending on environmental initiatives will be more than 21 per cent in 2007.

And also:

Increasingly, however, businesses are setting out to improve their environmental performance as a result of customer pressure, not least the worry that they might loose sales to greener rivals.

Can you afford not to start thinking about how to make your business more environmentally friendly?

Click here for the full article.

This is a thought that has been bugging me on and off for some time now. Of course, the answer is ‘Yes’. Not only can IT, or to be more specific, individual IT companies, be ethical, but many of them already are. First things first, though….what do I mean by “Ethical”? For me, ethical equates to a mindset, an ethos for doing business. There is a full description on our website but essentially is covers:

• Fairness
• Honesty
• Openness
• Environmental awareness
• Charity

Don’t get me wrong, there are IT companies out there that already follow these principles, but for every ‘good’ company we have all come across many bad ones. You know the type I mean, usually there’s a slick salesman who promises the earth, then the company starts the work and it takes longer than first envisaged, and there are changes to the specification that increase the cost. Before you know it, the project is way over time and budget and you’re going to end up with something that bear’s only passing resemblance to what you asked for in the first place.

You could argue that it is the customer’s responsibility to keep the IT company ‘honest’. And there is some truth is that. Most IT companies employ people who get excited by technology, and it is in their nature to want to try out the latest and slickest widget, frequently with unintended consequences. But just take a step back a think for a second about how nice it would be if the IT company came in and delivered on time and to specification. Nirvana, eh ?

Except……..an IT company this honest will always struggle to get work in the first place. If you quote a realistic timescale and price for a project then someone else will always undercut you. No matter that they may end up taking twice as long and cost four times as much, by that time the customer is hooked in and very reluctant to change ships midstream (this is popularly know as throwing good money after bad).

Is there an answer ? I believe there is and I’m willing to bet my company on it It appears to me that the customer’s issue is in identifying an ethical company up front. There’s no point asking them, the answer will be ‘Yes’ regardless. And it’s relatively easy for a company to put together an Ethical Code of Practice that has no real teeth. No, the only true measure is money, so we are backing our Ethical charter by making the following promise:

“If you are not happy with any piece of work carried out by Four Lakes Consulting, then you will not be charged for it.“

It’s simple and straightforward, and it leaves the ultimate choice with the customer.

Would you trust a company that makes such a promise ?