Oliver Bell’s weblog

Ages ago I talked about the regional fascination with text messaging and how it reaches into every corner of life in countries like Singapore, changing communication in ways that were almost unimaginable when I lived in the USA. (maybe not quite so much for my European friends and relatives)

One of the SMS based services that I have been using for the last couple of months is offered by a local taxi company here and allows you to call a taxi with a one line piece of text to any building in the city state.

Lee Lup Yuen mentions it in a blog posting on ZDNet this morning;

In Singapore, you can now book a cab by simply sending an SMS message. I have used the ComfortDelGro SMS Taxi Booking Service for over a month and it has become my favorite mobile service.  To book a taxi, just send an SMS like: “Book 098585 taxi stand outside giant to 71222.”

Kudos to ComfortDelGro for a great service!

My colleague Gray Knowlton has a post up on his blog this morning talking about our unwavering commitment to OpenXML as an essential component  of the Microsoft Office System.

Many have asked or speculated that the recent announcement of ODF in Service Pack 2 is an indication that Microsoft is quietly stepping away from Open XML. Some ask… “Is Microsoft abandoning Open XML?”

In a word, no.

That should be pretty clear.

He goes on to say;

We will continue to drive adoption of the compatibility pack for Open XML, which has now surpassed 40 Million individual downloads and gaining significant uptake in large-scale deployments. We will continue to develop and ship developer tools, translators, code samples, documentation, MSDN content and other material intended to educate people on how Open XML can help them solve specific business problems. Open XML is prominently featured in many Office Business Applications.

As to why we’re waiting for Office 14 to fully support IS29500, I think Gray did an excellent job of answering this in an earlier post of his;

Office 14 will update our support for IS29500. The timing for this might seem strange, but I do hope the rationale is clear. ODF 1.1 is a completed specification. The final version of IS29500 is not published today. While we do support a significant portion of IS29500 already, the BRM changes and other issues raised in public forums will inform us on how to best move forward with IS29500… and it gives me a little time to address the compatibility considerations that will be an important part of any file format related changes in Office. ODF has a potential upside in expanding interoperability, but as always, business continuity requirements will have a significant effect on our approach to these file format changes. Our customers will accept nothing less…

On a related note, a number of blogs are talking about the release of the 11.5.0 update for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac this morning, which adds additional support for folks wanting to use OpenXML in that version of office.

Here are some of the changes;

Adds read/write compatibility for Open XML Format (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) files if installed with the Open XML Format Converter, Better stability and printing/page setup fixes for Word, Better paste compatibility with Office 2008 for all apps, Powerpoint fixes for stability with large documents

You’ll find the Microsoft KB article that talks about the release of the update here.

Sometimes you hear a comment that just make you sit up, listen more intently and think.

One such comment was made in passing during the final ministerial panel session of the OECD meeting in Seoul this week, and it was;

“The policy response to complexity is often non-determination.”, Hon. David Cunliffe, New Zealand’s Minister for Health, Telecommunications and Information Technology.

I think there is a really important lesson in there for the information technology industry. Behaviors that we take for granted, and even enjoy on occasions, are tough for many of our political leaders and decision makers to reconcile.

Many (not all) technologists and software developers are a strange hybrid of engineer and artist, using their talents to design and build solutions and often defending their work and beliefs in the way that any passionate artist would.

As a result we tend to categorize each other into groups who believe one thing, or believe the opposite… if you’re for OpenXML then you must by extrapolation be against ODF, if you’re a supporter of free software then you much be against the traditional commercial software industry.

There are plenty of individuals who don’t fit this stereotype, but if you search the web today they’re hard to find. While for many people this is a highly unfair categorization it is one that plays out in the blogosphere and very often in the professional press. We saw a lot of it during the process to standardize OpenXML where the press worked hard to represent the process as an entertaining war between OpenXML and ODF.

During the process to standardize OpenXML within ISO anybody coming out with a middle ground view was immediately categorized and dismissed as having an interest in one side of the argument or the other. Patrick Durusau is probably a good example that will be understood by those who saw the way he was treated in the blogosphere during the later stages of the process. I sincerely believe that Partick carried a helpful and neutral view of the overall landscape of document format standards, but for some that just was not good enough.

The average politician lives in a world of negotiation, give and take and mediation. I’m sure that many of the arguments put forwards by the software communities are nothing short of confusing and mostly useless in their world. When one side declares that their argument is absolutely correct while the other side of the argument declares that they’re the ones who are absolutely correct it is impossible to make a determination - with no middle ground and no room for discussion or negotiation.

For Information and Communication Technology to reach the potential that we all know it carries we need to see some large scale policy commitments from governments covering issues such as technology availability, privacy protection, security education and strong cyber security policy and legislation.

Those big decisions will be tough for political leaders to make while conflicting arguments continue to be put forwards in the way they are today.

Non determination on these issues is probably our worst nightmare.

One of the more enlightening panel discussions in Seoul earlier this week was a discussion between a couple of well known telcos on the issue of Net Neutrality.

The arguments against Net Neutrality have never really been clear to me. Microsoft’s position is to support the drive for continued neutrality of services provided on the Internet, which makes sense to me personally as we deal with issues of connecting diverse communities to the network and see the delivery of services here in Asia that may not be quite so relevant in Western Europe or the United States.

I’ll give you examples of two sets of arguments put forwards by different providers which really brought clarity to the issue for me. For the sake of simplicity (or cowardice on my part!) I’ll just call them “TelCo A” and “TelCo B”, you can easily research (or work out) who holds which position on the issue.

TelCo A was against Net Neutrality, instead putting forwards an argument for what they called intelligent networks capable of doing more caching of data and selectively managing services based upon consumer demand and requirements. The rational behind this argument was based upon a rapidly growing amount of data passing through their backbone services, projected to be around 50,000 terabytes a day by 2010, making it essential to manage data flows to ensure that service would be consistent well into the future.

TelCo B was in support of Net Neutrality, their argument was that innovation on the Internet today is very often consumer and user driven, the role of the TelCo was to provide connectivity not to decide what would run across those connections. TelCo B made a strong case for an open and neutral Internet providing a platform for innovation, increased societal connections and economic growth.

The difference between TelCo A and TelCo B? Simple really.

TelCo A has a substantial investment in copper cable to millions of doorsteps delivering limited bandwidth to broadband users. TelCo B has made huge investments in recent years in delivering fibre to those same doorsteps offering comparably infinite bandwidth to the same households.

A notably simplistic view of the issue, but all the same a clarifying one.

Quite a few sites are carrying details of the Omnia SGH-i900 phone that Samsung have announced at CommunicAsia this week. A sleek looking full featured Windows Mobile 6.1 SmartPhone.

I’ve pulled a few links from different stories on cNet Asia’s site.

They are carrying details of the handset here, they have a first take review here, and Jason S has blogged about it here.

Jason talks a little about the features of the phone in his blog entry;

Omnia is simply stunning as it comes feature-packed with a 5-megapixel camera that has image stabilizer and face-smile detection inbuilt (hope Sony and Nokia are tuned in, too). The party doesn’t stop here. The phone will also support DivX, XviD, WMV and MP4 videos.

It will also have an integrated GPS unit to help you find your way if you are lost–or if you want to explore your neighborhood more. Omnia also has the now industry standard of Bluetooth, USB mass storage and also the more important Wi-Fi.

From cNet’s story;

Notable features:
• Quadband GSM with EGDE and HSDPA
• Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• 3.2-inch WQVGA display with TouchWiz UI
• 8GB/16GB onboard memory with microSD expansion card slot
• 5-megapixel camera with autofocus
• Wi-Fi; GPS (with A-GPS); USB 2.0; Bluetooth 2.0
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Automatic screen orientation
• Multimedia player and FM radio
• 112 x 56.9 x 12.5mm

Availability: Mid-June in Southeast Asia; July in Europe; August for rest of the world.

It has been a while since I upgraded my handset, I think it is time for a new phone!

Has anybody seen them in stock in Singapore anywhere yet?

Yesterday I shared the outline of a presentation that I made at the OECD Ministerial stakeholder side meeting that is being held in Seoul this week. I thought that it would be worthwhile sharing with you some of the higher level goals of the BIAC day that I participated in.

The goal of the session was for business leaders from around the world to express their views on the topic being discussed, and reach conclusions that will be expressed in a final report to be delivered to the Ministerial Meeting later in the week.

With the permission of the authors of the final report I thought I would share some of these outcomes with you, they make interesting and thought provoking reading;

We, the business community, envisage an Internet that is global in scope, interconnected in fact, inclusive by design, secure, reliable and available, and serving users who are increasingly mobile.

We see an Internet that is a key enabler of:

A virtuous circle of investment and innovation spurred by a growing ecosystem of services providers, application developers, device and hardware manufacturers

Innovation fueled by creativity, enabled by technology and empowering creators and users

Economic growth and social benefit in national and regional economies driven by new business models, technologies and services, as well as by greater efficiency and productivity of existing business models and services

Expanded access to and quality of education and skills development, including from ICTs,from early schooling through life-long learning, resulting in increased employment opportunities and social welfare, both within and across borders

Increased user choice of applications, products and services, provided through a wide variety of high capacity platforms, which are more available, affordable, and user-friendly

Better access to health care, particularly for those in remote areas or with fewer financial resources, through tele-medicine and related services, applications, and capabilities

Increased participation by individuals in the Internet economy not just as consumers but also as producers of information, content and services within the context of evolving uses of the Internet

Greater respect and empowerment for all stakeholders - building upon cultural, social and gender diversity and improved opportunities and mechanisms for greater collaboration and communication between across those stakeholder groups

Increased trust and confidence in the Internet, its infrastructure, and the applications and services that protect all users, especially children and the elderly

Sustainability and an eco-conscious society driven and supported by innovative ICT solutions

The report then goes on to articulate several areas where the business stakeholders felt that Government policy makers needed to act to carry these ideas forwards;

While business has the principal responsibility to bring expertise, investment and creativity to this process, the appropriate balance of government policies can continue to positively drive the future benefits of the Internet.

Therefore, for this vision to be realized, certain framework conditions must be put in place through multi-stakeholder cooperation to support the development of a broad range of sophisticated and increasingly “real-time” services transactions, communications, networks and interactions. Among these conditions are:

Support for innovation and investment

An environment characterized by appropriate incentives and legal protections, where innovation and creativity can flourish across communities, business models and disciplines

Open, fair and competitive marketplaces for new and existing market players

Incentives for investment in high speed communications infrastructure and next generation networks, as well as new media and information technologies, that will provide adequate capacity, security and capabilities for future Internet supported development and connectivity

Respect for Intellectual Property rights, and further development of systems to enforce those rights

Transparent legal and regulatory frameworks that are applied fairly with predictable outcomes

Focus on privacy and security

Continued and enhanced respect for both the privacy of personal information and the benefits of global information flows and practical solutions that might be applicable such as outreach, coordination and accountability across and for all stakeholders

A stable, reliable and trusted infrastructure capable of addressing and responding to emerging risks and threats

Better disaster preparedness in co-operation with the private sector

Market driven standards

Respect for recognized international standards that are established through market-driven, consensus-based mechanisms

As you read this text remember that it is being expressed in terms that are designed to be relevant at a ministerial or national policy level, not to directly address technical issues or debates - although of course the two are closely related. Many of these issues and statements are in the realm of the obvious for the technical community, but it will still take time before policy makers completely buy into the arguments that are being made in support of the Internet as a commerce and service delivery platform.

If you’re interested in reading more then the document can be downloaded from the BIAC site here.

As the week has progressed there have been a few debates that have been both fascinating and enlightening, I’ll try and find time later in the week to document a couple of them.

Earlier today I had the honor of participating in the Business Stakeholder meetings being held in Seoul preparing for the OECD Ministerial Meeting on “The Future of the Internet Economy” that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

My input to the meeting was pretty straight forwards, the goal was to demonstrate that the evolution of services offered by software has been on a steady trajectory for some years now, and at every stage has offered an increased level of opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of the services offered by the network - then to go on to talk a little about what the future might hold and how government could support that future.

The evolution of the network and the increased level of opportunity that can be witnessed at various points in time is obviously interesting to watch.

Twenty five years ago the PC was a stand alone device offering little or no options for connectivity for the average user or business, as a result data was also stand alone and the effectiveness of your device directly related to the amount of data that you had personally spent time inputting.

Some fifteen or so years ago we moved on a step, the world started to talk about client-server computing and the PC began to integrate with services that were offered by an organizations data center - the PC suddenly became a lot more useful, but in many if not most cases that usefulness still ended at the boundary of your own organization.

Ten years ago the Internet began to become mainstream, some had been using the services of the Internet for longer, many had not. It does not need to be said that this was a pretty revolutionary point in time. Suddenly individuals could search for and obtain information on just about any topic they could dream of. At the same time huge opportunity opened up for business, allowing companies new and old to open store fronts that reached many hundreds of millions of customers.

Then the final stage I talked about was the idea of seamless computing, again a concept that is familiar to many in the technical world, a concept that allows diverse organizations to share data and business processes to build new services that were previously just not possible. This era includes many of the ideas that are still evolving around cloud computing and hosted services.

I chose to talk about the future in the form of three scenarios, looking at the future for the highly connected individual, the highly connected business and the highly connected society. In all three cases we can already see trends and expectations starting to emerge. Much of my presentation focused on extrapolating these trends, predicting the future is a dangerous game, who am I to say what will or won’t become components of how we live our lives in the future.

If you’re interested you can see the details of the presentation here, but at a high level the idea was to provide more empowerment for connected individuals, more opportunity for the connected business and to focus on an increased level of individual participation in the connected society.

The presentation closed with some suggestions for government policy makers around areas that need focus and attention as we create a secure and inclusive internet for the coming years,I outlined the following;

• Provide a framework and foundation for innovation and sustainable growth through the promotion of intellectual property rights, choice and interoperability and a competitive environment for software innovation;
• Promote the open and free flow of people, products, services, and ideas through free and fair trade, preserving freedom of expression online and supporting immigration policies that foster cross-border educational and professional opportunities;
• Create a more trustworthy computing environment by strengthening laws around cybercrime, online safety and privacy in accordance with global and regional norms including the Council of Europe’s Convention on cybercrime and the OECD and APEC Privacy principles;
• Transform education, learning and access to technology and promote innovative IT solutions for healthcare.
• Most important of all… move beyond “The Internet Economy” and return to “The Economy”

The final point is very important here in the Asia Pacific region, and probably other areas of the world as well. I still see many governments in the region segmenting their digital strategy and leaving it to be dealt with by an IT agency or individual technocrats.

The idea of the internet, and the benefits that it brings to individuals, businesses and society as a whole is no longer a new one.

Eventually I would like to think that we will stop thinking about “The Internet Economy” or “eGovernment”, and start thinking about “The Economy” and just “Government” - where technology plays a pivotal but tightly integrated role in the way that services and government business process are delivered.

I meant to talk a little about this last week, but got wrapped up in a customer event in Korea for a few days.

Two weeks ago the World Congress on Information Technology was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  It was a huge event bringing together technology and policy folks from all around the world to discuss the future of the industry that we work in and share good practices from around the world, I’m told that around 20,000 people turned up in total.

Two interesting stories that I enjoyed from the WCIT event.

The first was an appearance by Bill Gates, not in person but as a hologram. This is the first time Bill has appeared this way at any event, and it was fun to do it here in the region. Rendering work for the hologram was done by a Malaysian company called Fat Boy Records, and it came out really well.

My colleague Stephannie Chin has a video of it over on her blog, the hologram itself was near life size but looks a little smaller in the video!

For PR reasons we were not supposed to speak for the company but now that it’s almost a month over, I can now tell you that Bill did make his appearance in WCIT but only virtually.

Maybe in this increasingly green world this is a far better way for executives to present at events rather than burning jet fuel.  Hop on over and have a look for yourself.

The second story to share was an MoU signing with another Malaysian company called QubeConnect, they provide an open source based IP telephony platform that is garnering more and more attention here in the region.

The MoU provides for an agreement between Microsoft and QubeConnect to work together and share protocol information that will allow integration of their telephony platform with Microsoft OCS.

Edwin Yapp at ZDNet Asia carried the story;

Dinesh Nair, co-founder and CTO of QubeConnect, said Wednesday Microsoft OCS runs on the Windows platform and as such, its reach is limited to users and organizations on the same platform.

“Using our solution, users on either open source or other proprietary communications platforms will be able to communicate with Microsoft’s OCS seamlessly,” Nair said, during the deal-signing on the sidelines of the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) held in Malaysia this week.

Interoperability comes in many ways, while the world is very focused on the big announcements that come from Microsoft (for example, ODF support in Office), personally I find the smaller relationships like the one with QubeConnect a lot more exciting, there are an increasing number of those underway - especially here in Asia.

There are no shortage of press and blog stories this morning sharing the news that Microsoft has committed to supporting version 1.1 of the Open Document Format in SP2 of Office 2007.

As the announcement happened while those of us here in Asia were sleeping peacefully pretty much everything that could have been said on the topic has already been said, so I thought it might be more useful to present more of a round up of what I’ve been reading this morning.

First of all a little about the announcement itself.

There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.

The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats - including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.  

In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.

Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.

The Microsoft blogs that first carried the announcement were the usual folks.

Jason Matusow looks at this announcement in the context of the companies continuing commitment to interoperability as a tenant of the way we design products and collaborate with the rest of the industry. Jason and I share views on the issue of so called “single standards” and he eloquently explains that further in his post.

This is not about any one document format “winning” – it is about enabling customers to evaluate and use document formats that make the most sense for them. Just as the MS deal with JBOSS didn’t mean we were saying that J2 was better than .NET – it is that we want our customers to have the most positive experience possible when using our product.

Doug Mahugh talks about some of the more technical details of the announcement, as well as discussing what this means to existing initiatives. He talks about our continued commitment to the translator projects for ODF, DAISY, UOF etc. and links to the ODF Translator team blog where they have just kicked off version two of that project.

Finally Doug answers a question I was asked over dinner earlier this week… we’ll be adding APIs that allow third parties to intercept the ODF load and save paths so if anybody disagrees with our implementation then all the tools are available for them to write their own.

Gray Knowlton digs around the “Why?” question, again one that came up in my dinner conversation earler this week. Why now? Why when OpenXML just got approval? etc.

Success in our industry (like a lot of other industries) boils down to successfully addressing the needs of customers. By offering greater choice for file formats, our products address more scenarios and provide greater flexibility in enabling specific solutions. From a pragmatic standpoint, adding ODF to Office allows us to re-focus Office on product capabilities rather than a debate about file formats. We’re quite comfortable when we compete in the marketplace on these merits.

Looking around the blogosphere this morning the announcement appears to be very well received by just about everybody, as I said earlier in this post most people seem to be focused on the component of this announcement that talks about native ODF support in Microsoft Office, but it is important to recognize that this is bigger than just that one item.

The announcement, in my view, demonstrates a strong commitment to the Interoperability Principles that we shared earlier this year. As always there is still much work to be done, but this is a great step in the right direction.

If you want to read a little more then here are some links that you might find useful. There is a lot more out there, feel free to link anything addition that you find in the comments of this post.

Press: PC World NZ, Information Week, CNet News, SD Times, New York Times, itWire, Slashdot(!)

Blogs: Stephen McGibbon (MS), Jerry Fishenden (MS), Brian Jones (MS), Jesper Lund Stocholm, Richard Koman, Andy Updegrove, Bob Sutor, Ed Brill, GeekZone NZ, Joe Wilcox, Eric White (MS), Savio Rodrigues

On a final note, I feel compelled to pull one paragraph out of Bob Sutor’s (IBM) post;

There is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF. If you are not using ODF today, you should put adoption plans in place.

There is an area where Microsoft and IBM seem to disagree.

My own personal view on this, which appears to be shared by a majority of the customers I work with, is that mandating a single standard for anything IT related is generally not a great move for government.

IT standards, like any area of technology, move on.

Governments need to remain ready to move with the technology that is in use by their citizens and businesses, mandates for information technology standards often do little more than operate as a hurdle to doing this.

A couple of posts caught my eye this morning, representing very closely related discussions from opposite sides of the globe.

One from New Zealand, and a second from the United Kingdom.

Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, shares some insight into discussions taking place in New Zealand around how to encourage increased growth in the local IT industry by putting the right policy framework in place.

Some of the conclusions and ideas include;

Some of the general themes we’d like as an industry would be around

• Encouraging more people into the industry
• Certification programs
• Immigration
• Education

But what would be some specific and measurable things we could achieve if we worked together?

Here are some that I’ve been thinking of.

1. Establishment of an ICT procurement ombudsman, so that procurement issues can be raised without the vendor being penalized in the market.
2. A work visa program between New Zealand and Silicon Valley so that we can send our talented people up to work there for a few years and bring experts down here tightening the relationship between ourselves and the center of the tech universe.
3. R&D tax credits limits lifted if you are exporting products developed from that R&D.
4. The industry supporting Government initiatives on Online Identity Management for individuals and businesses facilitating electronic commerce. We could lead the world here.

Rod goes on to invite wider participation in this conversation, I suspect he is looking for strong voices from New Zealand, personally I think this is a good discussion to be having across the region.

There are some interesting ideas being raised in the comments.

At the same time my colleague Jerry Fishenden posted a list of sound bytes from NESTA’s Innovation Edge event that was held in the UK this week.

The final quote that Jerry picked up gives a lot of food for thought;

“In the 20 years to come there will be more innovation and disruption than in the last 100 years”

Every national government should probably be asking itself how it prepares for the significant change that will be driven by innovation in the IT industry, how it will position it’s local economy and how it will manage the social evolutions that these changes will bring.

The whole list is worth a read, and I think complements the conversation that Rod is having in New Zealand pretty well.

Much like the current dip in activity around eGovernment, discussions and policy that relate to how we create the right environment for a thriving IT industry in countries around the region seem to have slipped in priority over recent years.

It is encouraging to see these conversations appearing back on the agenda and bringing forth new thinking and ideas.