Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

Are IT workers the new loom weavers?
“There are IT workers who can’t put food on their table,” complained an industry representative at an outsourcing conference.

It’s true – there are hundreds of once well paid project managers, technicians and support staff staff who can’t get work in their industry as some tasks go offshore and others are supplanted by new technologies.

None of this is new, we only have to think back to the heady days of the Dot Com boom when any punk with a basic knowledge of HTML could pull down six figures a year.

Just like the loom weavers of the 17th Century who became the Luddites, the HTML coders of 1998 and the project managers of 2008 have had a short period of affluence before been overtaken by change.

It’s something that today’s hot shot coders should keep in mind, bubbles burst and technology changes.

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August 2, 2012
Verified Jerks
When you work in customer service you quickly learn that some people are just rude jerks. Depending on how bad a day you have it could be 2, 5 or 10% of the population.

For these people the Internet has been a paradise with almost anonymous forums and newsgroups allowing them to be rude and obnoxious with little risk of being held accountable for their spiteful behaviour.

One of the hopes of social media services was that forcing people into using accounts tied to their real identities would impose some self discipline among these trolls and haters,

Sadly The argument that verified identities would stop people being irresponsible is wrong.

The sad story of seemingly mature people insulting and wanting to beat up a five year old participant on a reality TV show illustrates how manners, good taste and style are beyond some people.

It’s depressing, but unsurprising that this demographic can’t figure out that ‘reality’ TV shows are anything but real. The programs are carefully edited to suit the dramatic narrative of the producers with some of the participants being portrayed as villains and others as heroes.

The little girl in question could be in a spoilt little brat, but you’d want to be careful making that judgement from what you see on TV.

Many would put the spiteful behaviour of the Facebook commentors down to being another example of social media destroying our society, but this behaviour pre-dates the web.

In the 1990s we saw a similar wave of insults aimed at President Clinton’s then teenage daughter Chelsea. In many ways it was far worse in what we are seeing today in that those encouraging that behavior were the leaders of political parties and their ideological fellow travellers in the media.

The abuse of Chelsea Clinton marked the rapid decline of standards in politics that leaves many of us now sickened by the behaviour of all parties – and that of the media that treats their shenanigans seriously.

Notable about the raucous political partisanship is that most participant are happy, even proud, to be named as they debase the institutions they’ve been elected to represent.

The reason is they aren’t accountable, they know most of us are rusted on voters and the few that aren’t can be conned long enough by expensive advertising campaigns to get them elected.

Should they not get elected, they’ll be welcomed into the arms of their corporatist friends who will find them a nice sinecure on a board, committee or think tank.

The real reason people act like jerks is because they think they aren’t accountable – the politicians know they aren’t and most Facebook users figure the odds are in their favour that they’ll never be held to account for their boorish behaviour.

Anonymity is the reason for bad manners on the net, accountability is. While our society doesn’t make people accountable for cruel, rude or corrupt behaviour then these people will thrive. With or without the internet.

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August 1, 2012
Hacking the hacks
Hacks and Hackers is an informal global network of meetings discussing the intersection of technology and journalism. The inaugural Sydney Hacks and Hackers meetup recently looked at how journalists use data and showed the challenges the news media face in an age where information isn’t scarce.

The panel in Sydney were Sharona Coutts, Investigative Reporter at Global Mail; Edmund Tadros, Data Journalist at Australian Financial Review; and Courtney Hohne, Director of Communications Google Australia.

Courtney looked at some of the big data opportunities for journalists, a topic covered in the Closed Data Doors post. One of the areas she highlighted was emergency services sending out PDFs of updates during crises like bushfires and floods.

Listening to Sharona and Edmund, it was clear they were two overworked but keen young journalists who had neither the resources or the training to deal with the data flowing into their organisations.

Because journalists in modern media organisations don’t have the skills or the resources to properly understand and use raw data the public ends up with relatively trivial stories like league tables of school exam results or council building approvals – both of which are important, but are misread and used to confect outrage against incompetent public servants and duplicitous politicians.

For the public servant, school teacher or even bus driver it’s understandable they don’t want their performance measured if the measure is going to be misused and possibly jeopardize their jobs.

A deeper problem for journalism is the skills of the trade. Both Edmund and Sharona are smart young journos who will go far; but both admitted they had no training in statistic and mathematics.

Even more worrying are the older journalists, when I mentioned the lack of older and more experienced journalists to the organiser she said none would agree to come on the panel. One suspects this is because forty and fifty year old journalists have even fewer data skills than their young colleagues.

This lack of skills or understanding of data is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the media. In a world awash with data, the role of journalists is to filter the feed, interpret and explain it.

Pure reportage is being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of news and information available; the 1980s model of opinion based journalism is also failing as the audience now realise they have a voice, and better informed opinions, than the experts and columnists.

One of the notable themes that seemed to jump out of the evening was the divide between journalists and the wider community that always seems to appear when the future of journalism is discussed.

Usually this expressed in terms of those employed by major mastheads sneering at “citizen journalists” but at Hacks and Hackers it was about “geeks and journos coming together.”

In reality there is no divide – good analytic and technology skills should be as much a part of journalism as any other field in a modern economy.

The fear from the Sydney Hacks and Hackers night is that the media industry is one of the sectors that’s failing to deal with technological change.

It’s hard not to think that journalists wondering at the power of spreadsheets and pivot tables is like 18th Century blacksmiths trying to figure out how steam engines can make better horseshoes.

For an industry that is so deeply challenged by technological change, it seems the news media is still unprepared for the changes that hit nearly a decade ago.

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July 31, 2012
So you think services are easy?
ZDNet columnist Ed Bott is possibly one of Microsoft’s closest followers and among the few to defend Windows Vista, Ed though can’t be faulted for doing the hard yards including reading Microsoft’s stock market10-K filings.

In their most recent filing, Ed finds Microsoft has used the word “service” 73 times as opposed to 44 appearances last year.

A key phrase in the filing is “a growing part of our strategy involves cloud-based services used with smart client devices.”

This is consistent with the hands on previews of Windows 8 which Microsoft have been giving journalists over the last few months. Something that leaps out is the integration with online services; something that both Google and Apple have also been pushing.

What should worry investors is that moving into services isn’t easy. Service businesses are far more labour intensive and, as a consequence, far less profitable.

Despite having relatively low labour costs, cloud computing services are problematic as many sectors have been commoditised, which is the genius of Salesforce in establishing a profitable niche.

The fat margins Microsoft are used to in their core software business can’t be replicated in the cloud based markets, which is one of the reasons why customers are switching to the cloud.

Microsoft’s problem is shared by telecommunications companies who are finding their cloud offering don’t generate the same ARPUs — Annual Revenue Per User — that they’ve become accustomed to in the mobile phone market. Which means pain for executives whose KPIs are tied to historical performance.

For Microsoft, the problem is compounded by their simultaneous move into hardware with the Surface tablets. Meaning the company’s has to deal with two significantly different business models to the ones they are used to.

Again Microsoft aren’t alone in this, Google is having similar problems adjusting to the hardware market though its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Integrating hardware with services and manufacturing isn’t impossible, we only have to look at Apple for how a company can succeed in that space although most managements struggle with the very different demands of each sector.

During the 1980s we saw the rise of the “all business is soap” philosophy where MBAs and management consultants preached that the challenges of running a business were the same regardless of whether you sold cleaning products, soft drinks, computers or automobiles.

Those folk were wrong. Most famously the Australian media company Fairfax hired as CEO a business school professor who preached this philosophy and managed to ignore the rise of the Internet, the echoes of the failed McKinsey ideas haunt Fairfax over a decade later.

While its possible for a software company to succeed at services or hardware, the magnitude and complexity of the management challenge shouldn’t be understated. Both Google and Microsoft will be defined by how well their leaders succeed.

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July 31, 2012
The Olympian quest for control
“Blogs or tweets must be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist,” state the International Olympic Committee’s social media guidelines.

The London Olympics Committee betrays how their ignorance of how the Internet works with an unrealistic and unenforceable linking policy.

More worryingly, an army of ‘brand police’ are scouring Britain for renegade cake decorators or knitting clubs breaching Olympic copyrights. Council trading inspectors have been redeployed from their main role of protecting the community to guarding the sponsorship values of the IOC and the world’s biggest corporations.

All of this is about control – a country that bids to host the Olympics agrees to draconian rules and regulations on free speech and commerce. Athletes too find themselves subject to harsh, and sometimes arbitrary, controls.

The purpose of these controls is to enhance the commercial value of sponsorships – this is why only McDonalds can serve fries, except with fish, at Olympic venues and only Visa credit cards can be used to buy a souvenir t-shirt.

Like all major sporting organizations, the value of Olympic rights exploded with the growth of advertising and broadcasting rights from the 1960s onwards.

We’ve reached the logical end of that growth as broadcasters struggle under the load of funding massive rights payments and advertisers find campaigns based on what worked in the 1960s or 1980s have less resonance with the debt addled consumers of the 2010s.

None of this will stop the IOC and other sports administrators from enacting iron fisted controls on participants, sponsors, spectators and any one else they can bully, but their power is waning.

Just like the Soviet Union tried to control fax machines as their economy crumbled around them, the same thing is happening with the Olympics and other big ticket sports.

Top level sports administrators are very good at currying favours from the corporate Bourbons and political princelings who love to spend other people’s money to build their own egos which will allow the facade to continue for a few more years.

Eventually though the money will run out as shareholders question the value of billion dollar sponsorships coupled with executive gold passes to the VIP marquee and taxpayers will ask why governments have money to spend on stadiums or elite sports programs when their local school, hospital and police stations are being closed.

History shows that threatened leaders tighten controls when they are threatened. We can expect the next couple of Olympics to have even more draconian rules than London’s.

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July 30, 2012