you want to start something?

David on the

I think Microsoft would be wise to remember that trying to buy cool has a tendency of making you look even more like a dork. I guess they have to try something — anything — to improve their image to investors, entrepreneurs, future employees, and the media.

Ouch, this means it’s not just me that thinks Microsoft is making some major blunders.

But this is the problem when you’ve got higher-ups who just don’t understand cool. Microsoft never did. They were never hip and happening any further than the celebs they’d invite to their product launches, most of whom were very public Mac users. Further pinning their hopes for the future on Ray Ozzie (whose very name should inspire fear and doubt due to inflicting Lotus Notes on the world), Microsoft is definitely entering the Autumn of their time. Sure, they’re still pulling in billions in revenue, but for how long. It took them 30 years to get where they are now, it’ll probably take another 20 of them to fall.

Tags: Commentary, Cool, infurious by mj
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BBC News LinkMore than 900 workers losing their jobs at a County Londonderry computer company are to receive details of the redundancy terms being offered to them. Staff at Seagate in Limavady were told on Monday they were losing their jobs. Seagate, which has received £12m from Invest Northern Ireland and its predecessor IDB since 2001, will close in the second half of next year.

…

However, it has a plant in Malaysia which is due to start operations in the new year.
It will make the computer components currently being made in Limavady.

Ouch.

The hard drive manufacture market is going to take more of a beating in the future as more and more devices move to solid state memory. Seagate don’t really have a rep for reliability anyway but reduced margins and reduced costs are not going to improve that.

End of the day, that’s probably 900 Christmases ruined. I love it when companies wait til this time of the year to dump their staff. Scrooge ain’t in it. Nortel was an expert at it (note: it’s now 5 years since I left Nortel) with multiple years of “Christmas is coming, better go down the job market”. Bless them.

This, alongside the Nortel/Flextronics fallout, is going to flood the Northern Ireland marketplace with ex-technology workers. I think, however, the market will have to realise that these things come in cycles. Technology firms like Seagate will come in, stay for a decade and realise good savings from Northern Irelands low-cost economy (and a £12 000 000 sweetener ain’t bad) and then will move off again to a lower cost economy. This means, in the grand scheme of things, that Northern Ireland is just a middle man, a safe harbour for US companies to attempt their offshoring. Once they’re confident with it, they can go further afield.

Is Northern Ireland doomed to an ephemeral manufacturing economy? Yes, I think so.

Are there other areas where Northern Ireland could excel? Possibly.

We’ve already seen how popular Northern Ireland is as a call centre location: all of the call centres in the province are growing, especially as companies attempt to bring them back from their first rounds of offshoring. The Irish just seem to be cheap good at it.

InvestNI should be focussing on the Seagate fallout and acting as a dating service. There are going to be a lot of potential startup companies coming out of Limavady in the near future with specific (and potentially high margin) expertise in data storage and retention.

There’s a frighteningly large number of empty and derelict warehouse and manufacturing premises in Northern Ireland that could really do with being repurposed. All of them “InvestNI properties”. Empty they’re a drain, filled, even with only a small number of tenant companies, they’re a boon.

Tags: Commentary, Startup, infurious, politics by mj
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Yeah, there’s a certain “Duh!” about the headline…

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.

The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.

The article is on the BBC News site. The reasons being:

a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else.

Finally BECTA get off their ass and do something about it. This was news back in 2002 before I had even started up Mac-Sys. One school I had dealings with (as a free consultant) was that they were being forced to go for a 3-5 year deal where they needed to pay for every PC in the building despite NONE of them being able to run Windows XP (most of them struggled with Windows 95) and the remainder being Macs. Yet the advisor from the board said they would have to pay for Office and XP for every computer whether it was capable of running the software or not. This would include whether the machine was running older versions of Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

Never mind the absolute hash that Classroom 2000 became where teachers found that their laptops were suddenly not covered under labour costs and so many lost their laptops altogether. And installations were often left half-completed (the school I was dealing with had their school rooms HALF-CABLED and I went in and did a patch job so they could actually use the network). Schools may also be better off buying their own ADSL connection and a NetNanny style proxy due to the costs and draconian firewalls involved in the C2K network. Plus C2K’s partners in this, SX3 (now Northgate) were charging hundreds of pounds for callout to look at the problem. It’s one thing being expensive when you’re offering a boutique service but C2K are administering a network of PCs which are locked down tighter than a wallet from Ballymena. How can they be more expensive????

C2K’s policies in this regard, as well as the fear, uncertainty and doubt that they espoused was one of the reasons that my company stopped working with Education markets. We’d respond if called but the amount of time and effort spent in building a relationship, hammering down a set of requirements only to have it cancelled at the last minute and given out to a box shifter just killed our enthusiasm for it. I really used to care about the state of education technology in Northern Ireland as a whole. Now I’m concentrating on making sure my kids are okay.

Tags: Annoyances, Commentary, infurious, politics by mj
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% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
% killall Dock

[This is a hint to take away the daft reflections in the Leopard Dock]

Tags: Hacks, Mac, infurious by mj
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John Welch writes (in his Oc 27th entries) about people who upgrade to Leopard and then whine about how their software, which they need to do their jobs, stops working.

Boo, fucking, hoo.

While the rest of us are either waiting for the updates or finding workarounds (and considering small companies who manage to get their updates out in time), Mister Upgrade Moron is sitting outside playing with his poo-poo.

[I’d add a feed link but he’s moving to MT4 and I can’t find one!)

Tags: Annoyances, Mac by mj
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