Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Titus, looking for a home in Singapore…

Originally uploaded by Osrin

This is a little off topic from my usual government, technology and policy discussions.

Please meet Titus, we think he is about twelve weeks old and we’re trying to find him a home in Singapore. He is a little shy and not all that impressed with people, so any potential home provider will need to be ready to be patient with him.

My wife and I walk on a loop with the dog late each night, we had been seeing Titus pretty regularly for a few nights, feeding him when he would take food from us, and we decided it was time to find him a real home!

Shout if you can help.

There is a timely article in New Zealand’s ComputerWorld this morning entitled “There’s growing cynicism about going green“, I ended up in exactly this discussion over the weekend with a friend who is visiting from the UK.

From the NZ ComputerWorld article;

Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit saturation point and is beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about datacentre power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.

… and that is exactly where our conversation ended up, companies and government will focus on green initiatives when it brings real business value and benefit.

“Green” is certainly vogue at the moment, as much technology circles as anywhere else. There has been plenty of discussion and announcements of late from companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft around what the companies are doing in their data centers to reduce the carbon footprint of high uptime service delivery.

Almost all of those stories are centered on how companies are cutting back or becoming more efficient as organizations to meet the demands of today’s society.

What does not seem to be emerging in these discussions is the great opportunity that this brings for technology as we know it today in the consumer and desktop space, and I really think there is a need for more public thought in this area.

The green initiatives that companies are driving today also have the obvious potential to impact technology that we use on a day to day basis in very positive ways.

As an example, I carry a Windows Mobile smart phone, it is a great multipurpose device with a host operating system that serves my personal productivity needs along with having the ability to run a range of entertainment, personal management and other communication tools from a wide array of vendors. Each of the applications I have installed draw on common operating system capability, power management capability and processor cycles.

The high speed multi-purpose processor that sits in the device is a single core that is ideal for most of these functions especially when an application draws on UI functionality, in some cases though it is huge overkill.

Think for a moment about what is needed to play music files on the device, currently drawing on all of the available facilities to do this is much more of a power drain than is needed and probably results in my only being able to listen to music for a short number of hours. Chip and device companies that are looking at how we might deliver a “music only core” into the central processor of my smart phone, drawing significantly less power off a single circuit and providing me with music for hundreds of hours between charges. The future may hold a different sort of multi-core technology than we know today, with a single generic core accompanied by specific cores for sound, communication and other discrete use cases.

That is a pretty lightweight example, but you can see where I’m heading. Today we’re designing very powerful multipurpose devices for every area of computing, tomorrow for some users that requirement will still be there, for others we will be able to look at the use cases that really matter to them and provide a very power efficient way of meeting all of those cases through a very disparate set of well integrated, purpose designed circuits.

The end result will not be reduced functionality, as some seem to assume green brings, but a much richer environment for the user and a huge new set of opportunities for both hardware and software.

Hopefully you will agree that now is the time for the industry to start to look at the opportunities that the “green” moniker brings to computing as we will know it in the future, as well as how we retrospectively address the power consumption requirements of today’s devices.

As we look at driving a reduction in the global carbon footprint of IT success will only come through focusing on the benefit that these scenarios bring to end users, developers and data center environments.

For the end user green is really about cost, speed, focused use of resources and as always more efficient delivery of services.

The first of a series of Microsoft related ads aired earlier this week, and it appears to be the talk of the town.

With over 600,000 views… YouTube have it posted here;

Mary Jo Foley had the following to say;

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not yearning for the “Wow Starts Now.” But I’m not wowed by the first in what is expected to be a series of star-studded ads designed to reshape Microsoft’s consumer image.

And in New Zealand’s Computerword our Corporate Vice President for Windows Consumer Marketing, Brad Brooks, responded with;

The ad was a “teaser” to a much longer campaign, said Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing at Microsoft, in a video interview posted at Microsoft’s site.

Microsoft wants to “engage customers in a conversation and dialogue in a humorous and intriguing way,” said Brooks, who took over marketing for Windows and Vista in February after a major reorganisation.

You have to imagine that there is a lot more to come…

It is always amazing how quickly time passes. I started blogging just a touch over a year ago, at the time I wasn’t totally sure at the time how long I was going to keep it up for or what role blogging would take in my work and play.

A year on, and almost 170 posts later, around 10,000 to 15,000 individuals a month visit this site, each making an average of three visits a month. The role that offline readers play in the traffic is surprisingly significant, with the majority of traffic being through RSS, RSS 2.0 and ATOM.

In the grand scheme of things the traffic is less significant than some of the other roles the blog has ended up playing.

First and foremost it has been a really useful way of keeping notes on issues, announcements and other references that I find interesting. Having built up a body of content I find myself searching my own site on a regular basis.

Secondly it has been a really useful way of crystallizing my own thoughts on a whole range of issues. When you work for any large corporation clarity of communication is important, thinking through complex issues is something that can frequently take rooms full of people debating it in one way or another. The blog forces me to think through issues as I write them into a post, and on that front it has been really useful.

I’ve also found myself involved in conversations with other bloggers in the region, and in some cases elsewhere in the world. In this decade the blogosphere and the conversations taking place here are probably as important as the mainstream press in many cases. When I look back to couple of years ago I was definitely missing many of those conversations, and I certainly wasn’t in any position to participate in them.

Finally, on a similar note, the blog has been a right to reply. Hopefully when I’ve exercised that right it has been constructive and helpful. I know that a slice of my readership don’t agree with my views or ideas, but it has been enlightening to engage in conversations around some of the more vigorously debated issues.

I don’t get enough time to write some of the posts that I’d like to write, but I will try to get to them over the coming months. I want to understand issues like the regions migration to IPv6, know more about what it will take to archive the growing body of digital assets that every country in the region is collecting, and get involved with some of the debates around electronic identity management that are taking place on shores local to here.

All those topics take research, and again that research will be driven by the need to write about the issues involved.

Let’s see what the next year holds…

I’ll place a bet that it isn’t quite as much as the taxi driver who brought me to the airport this morning does.

Recycling in the west is often a matter of environmental conscience, we do it because we feel better about ourselves (or we feel like we’re doing our bit) when we put that aluminum can in the right trash container or drop a stack of old newspapers off at a location that specializes in  such things.

The cultures in the countries around Asia seem to care a little more. Every day you see examples of reuse in ways that we just don’t tend to see in the west, and it isn’t just a case of sending trash in the right direction, it has more to do with recognizing and respecting every resource around you.

The janitor at our apartment block is a great example.

When you see him sweeping the corridors he isn’t carrying a plastic broom, sweeping the dust and grime into a specially designed device that carries it from the floor to the trash can. Instead you’ll see him sweeping with a broom that he made himself from debris fallen from local trees, he sweeps into an old oil can that he has cut at forty five degrees then attached a previously broken broom handle to. Nothing goes to waste.

Around here you see examples like this every day, people really appear to care about getting the most of the resources that they have. It isn’t an environmental drive designed to clear an aching conscience, it is a real will to get the most out of every resource available.

As we joined the Pan Island Expressway (PIE to the locals) at about 7:30am this morning my taxi driver did two things in pretty much the same motion. In response to the rising sun he flicked off his headlights, they were clearly no longer needed, but he also reached above his head and moved the switch on the interior light from auto to off.

I asked him if he did that every day, and he replied, “of course, it saves the bulb”.

I should have expected nothing else. Sometimes I think we have a lot to learn.

Patrick Durusau has posted a couple of his now characteristic PDFs since the end of the IS29500 appeals process.

It is worth taking a moment to read both of them;

http://www.durusau.net/publications/listening.pdf

OOXML has been approved by a super-majority of those eligible to vote, appeals have been denied and yet the cry: “You’re Not LISTENING TO ME!” goes on. I don’t normally restrict my posts to one type reader but if you have never raised teenagers, please stop reading here.

The second talks to an issue that was articulated well during the process to standardize IS29500, but seems to have lost some momentum in the blogosphere during recent weeks.

http://www.durusau.net/publications/reform.pdf

Rob Weir (IBM) gets it right when he notes that the JTC 1 Directives are in serious need of repair. Those rules are the results of twenty plus years of effort by IBM and others. Whatever brought about the sudden realization at IBM that the JTC 1 Directives are deeply defective (post ODF approval apparently) isn’t as important as the shape of the needed reform.

They key to the second one will be keeping broad representation from the ICT industry involved in the standards process, something I know we’re all keen to do.

The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
  - Ronald Reagan

President Reagan had many talents, one of which was the innate ability to take very complex issues and sum them up in very few words, the above quote is one such example.

Sometimes when we’re deep in discussions about government policy, structure or requirements we probably need to step back and examine exactly what we’re trying to achieve. On many occasions I suspect we’re just getting sucked up into the a vortex of the three dynamics described above.

The decision making process for policy related issues are rarely about technology as such, and often have more to do with running a country and keeping a complex economy moving.

Food for thought.

Last October I shared a few thoughts on a study that we conduct with IDC every year looking at the net impact of Microsoft’s business on the ecosystem of partners,developers and other service companies around us. The headline is that we measure part of our relevance in markets where we do business in terms of the number of dollars generated locally compared to every dollar of revenue that we generate directly as a company.

In Asia in general the local software and services economies generate around eleven dollars for every dollar of direct Microsoft revenue when working on Microsoft related projects. In some ways the figure is a health indicator, Microsoft has always been reliant on our partners using our platform to develop and deploy solutions of their own, the more these partners succeed the healthier our long term business is.

That said this is a study that we commission, and it is always helpful to hear this data being backed up by external voices.

We were fortunate enough to have Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali, the CEO of MSC Malaysia, talk at Teched’08 SEA earlier this week and he touched on the size and scale of the software economy in Malaysia. He talked about the role of the Microsoft related activity in the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative in the country.

The Star Online reports the following from Dato’ Ghazali’s keynote;

MSC Malaysia companies on the Microsoft platform generated close to RM3bil in revenue at the end of 2006, said the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), guardian of the MSC Malaysia initiative. This is an increase of 44% from the RM2.05bil made in 2005.

These companies were also responsible for 77% of the MSC Malaysia revenue in 2005. How much they account for MSC Malaysia’s 2006 revenues will only be available next month, said MDeC, which explained that the late numbers are because the figures need to be audited before being released.

…

The growth was generated by companies developing security, business intelligence, and customer relationship management solutions on the Microsoft platform, he added. There are about 319 active MSC Malaysia software companies that are running on that platform.

RM3bn is about US$1bn.

Of course these numbers are just a representative slice (the Microsoft related slice) of the success that the MSC initiative has been driving in Malaysia as a whole. It is useful to see the study that we do with IDC externally validated on some level, and very encouraging to see the amount of revenue generated by companies working with our platform in Malaysia continue to grow!

This story has appeared in several of my regular sets of reading materials this morning.

It seems that China will be breaking ground on a whole new city that will be built from the ground up with the environment in mind.

My move to Singapore almost two years ago gave me the opportunity to travel to China on a pretty regular basis, I stand in awe at the size and scale of some of the projects that are underway there.

At a time when most of the world seems to be pulling back on investments in general infrastructure we’re seeing China do the exact opposite.

The clean air through green roofs blog says;

Dongtan, which according to Business Week, “About the size of Manhattan, Dongtan aims to be energy self-sufficient using a combination of wind, solar power, and biofuels.” The design is being done by Arup Group, out of London, with Alejandro Gutierrez as the Project Designer. Peter Head is the Project Director, and Roger Wood is the Project Manager. The final customer is Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), and they will be making the final decisions.

Which in turn links to a story in Wired Magazine;

Dongtan breaks ground later this year on a plot about the size of Manhattan on Chongming Island. The first condos and commercial space will hit the market by 2010, around the time a 12-mile bridge and tunnel combo and subway extension will link the city to Shanghai’s new international airport (45 minutes away) and financial district (30 minutes). By 2050, Dongtan will have a half-million residents, more than Miami or Atlanta today.

Big problems are often solved through big bold initiatives and driven by equally bold goals. This is one to watch.

I hadn’t realized it had been two years already!

S.Somasegar has a celebratory post up this morning discussing two years of Codeplex.

Since launching, CodePlex has grown steadily, recently achieving two major milestones: 1,000,000 unique visitors/month and 5,000 total projects. CodePlex projects appeal to many audiences and include the AJAX Control Toolkit, Rawr (a .NET tool for World of Warcraft), and IronPython.

At OSCON Sam Ramji mentioned that of those 5000 projects over 400 are Microsoft led.

Having watched the team who originally posted WiX up on Sourceforge it amazes me that we have come so far so quietly.