Month: April 2007

Static on the radio

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about how human behaviour divides neatly into good and bad, positive and negative, constructive and destructive, helpful and unhelpful, kind or evil, and so on. But however you describe it, for every positive there is a negative. For every person fighting for something, there are people fighting against it. These struggles have existed since the dawn of human-kind, and are still very much alive today.

The problem is that things are rarely black and white. What is good for one person can turn out bad for another, so it all depends on your perspective – which side of the fence you’re on, in other words. If you’re in the ‘fine by me’ camp it’s easy to forget people in the other ‘not so good for me’ camp. When people voluntarily reach across this ‘void’ we call this charity, and the reaching hand usually does so with a fistful of hard-earned dollar bills. This might solve the problem, but then again it might not.

When people give to good causes they assume their money will be used wisely and that it will tackle the problem in the best possible, most efficient way. But for every few dollars given to solve the problem, infinitely more goes towards keeping things as they are. Maintaining the status quo is big business. Indeed, big business, governments and lobby groups are all guilty to some degree. Their job is to keep things good for their ‘fine by me’ constituents, and what happens on the other side of the fence doesn’t concern them. With this going on, are people effectively pouring their money down the drain?

Take international trade as an example. The global system is heavily weighted against the smallest, poorest and most disadvantaged nations. At World Trade Organisation (WTO) gatherings, developing nations with their four or five delegates are regularly overwhelmed by the several hundreds sent by the European Union and United States. It’s not surprising they find it hard to get their voices heard.

Meanwhile, the man and woman on the street are giving their few dollars to ‘help’ tackle world poverty, wearing their white wristbands or whatever. This might be the easiest and most convenient thing to do, but is it the most effective? Is it really doing any good? The real problem might not be poverty, but the world trade system which perpetuates it.

Fact: A one percent increase in world trade would generate an extra $70 billion in Africa, five times more than it currently receives in aid

Isn’t it time we re-thought the problem?

Who’s afraid of Google?

I was passing through WHSmith at Heathrow airport yesterday on my way back to San Francisco when the latest BusinessWeek magazine caught my eye. The cover story addresses fears that Google may be getting a little too big for its boots.

The timing was quite neat. Only a couple of days ago I blogged about a possible IT future dominated by Google’s technology (see below), and drew comparisons with IBM. The BusinessWeek article does the same. However, it talks of Google “building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data”, which goes slightly over my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that everything could be done with five (although, to be fair, I didn’t say how big they had to be!)

Thomas J. Watson, Sr. – Right after all?

Thomas John Watson, Sr. was the President of International Business Machines (IBM) during its years of spectacular growth in the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. It was during this time that he nurtured IBM’s innovative management style which, until recently, kept Big Blue at the top of the global IT league (although, with over 350,000 employees worldwide, IBM is still the world’s largest information technology employer. It was finally knocked off top spot by Hewlett Packard, based on total revenue, not profits).

It was Thomas Watson’s son, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., who finally took IBM into the “modern-day” computer business after taking over the reins in 1956, one month before the death of his father. Previously the company concentrated on the building of tabulating machines and cash registers – products which were to later be replaced by mainframes and personal computers. Thomas Watson Sr. was sceptical of the role of these ‘new’ machines – still very much in their infancy in his time – and was reported to have famously said that “there is a world market for maybe five computers”. There is considerable debate as to whether he did or did not actually say this, but looking at the landscape 64 years on, maybe he had a point.

It goes without saying that there was a much larger market for mainframe and personal computers, but had Mr. Watson said that the world could perhaps be run on five computers, then he might not have looked so out-of-touch. I’m thinking Google here, with it’s plans for on-line domination. First search, and more recently on-line tools and applications which many believe will rival and eventually replace Microsoft Office as our main productivity tool. Google has had such an astronomical impact since floating only three years ago, and, as with IBM in its day, it is blazing a trail with its innovative work and management practices.

Imagine the on-line landscape by the end of the decade. Is it really so unbelievable to think that everything we do could be run from five solar powered servers in Mountain View, home of Google? Thomas Watson, Sr. could have been a lot closer to the truth than he ever imagined.

If, of course, he ever said it in the first place…