Fred's Space

Getting an iPhone 3G in Australia has been a long wait with a wonderful surprise at the end. Like so many things Steve Jobs has done in 30 years of innovation, there's a strange combination of secrecy and publicity surrounding every launch. It was that way with the Macintosh in January 1984. It was remarkably similar last year with the US launch of the iPhone. Anticipated, much speculated in the press, almost no pre-launch PR from Apple. A huge frenzy of pent-up demand among the customers.

I decided against standing in line on the night before the iPhone 3G became generally available in 20-odd countries around the world. July in Melbourne can be a wintry time at the best. The night of July 10/11 was particularly cold, windy and damp. As it turned out, that was a good decision. Systems melted down on July 11 with the rush and there were delays in all 3 of the Australian carriers offering iPhone 3G. Some phones couldn't be activated for many hours after purchase. Apparently, this happened all over the world.

I did go into a telco retail shop in downtown Melbourne on the following Saturday morning. It was a very circumspect affair. We were 2 of the 8 people waiting for the door to open at 9am. When we got to the shop 5-10 minutes beforehand, there were only 4. We were immediately served by a nice young lady who explained that the day before there had been system difficulties. She tried to manage my expectations down to a level she could easily deliver to, but I was impatient and persistent. I had waited for an iPhone for 4 years.

Eventually, after a couple of attempts, my number was ported from a competing telco and my iPhone 3G was activated. I selected a few accessories from the very limited range in the shop and went to the point-of-sale. We were out of the shop in about 2 hours very relieved that I had a functioning device and service. The combination of excitement, frustration and satisfaction was intense and unfamiliar. I can't remember getting that emotional about a technology toy in many, many years.

After a short drive home, I got all the accessories unboxed and plugged in. I then proceeded to register the phone through iTunes, buy some music and apps and subscribe to MobileMe - Apple's re-branded .Mac service to do push email, calendar, contacts and cloud-storage. It was absolutely simple and straight-forward. Everything was done in a few minutes without looking at a manual or touching a customer support service. Satiated and hungry, we went out for lunch.

We drove up into the country for a Saturday night in a Manor house near the mountains. The 3G service from the dominant telco in Australia performed flawlessly. The iPhone 3G on this network ran at full speed in all the locations we stayed at - including a ski-resort on the Sunday. At no place along the way did I ever lose signal entirely (no mean feat for a network that's only a year or two old). I managed to use 1GB of data traffic within the first 24 hrs and most of that was in the bush. The GPS + 3G location finder found me in a bedroom in a manor house in the country on the weekend as easily as it did in my living room at home yesterday.

Facebook and The New York Times were the first two applications I used heavily. I downloaded the Facebook app thru iTunes on my work (Windows XP) PC connected to my home broadband. I did the NYT app over the air in the country on the 3G network. Both recognised me as an existing Internet customer of some years instantly and almost without intervention. I was posting mobile photo-blogs within minutes. The resolution of the iPhone screen (160 dpi) makes reading the paper a dream. I even found out how do to a screen-shot yesterday:

Since the weekend, I've been filling out the content. More music, video, podcasts and audiobooks. More mail & contacts in MobileMe from the various email services I use - Lotus Notes at work, Google gmail, Yahoo mail, MSN LiveMail, email from my local broadband provider. Getting the relationships between services right and functional has been rather more straight-forward than I'd imagined. There's even a pre-announcement from IBM's Lotus group about a forthcoming product for Apple's iPhone.

There's a ton of free Wi-Fi hotspots around that the phone recognises. Getting my home Wi-Fi network in order proved to be a much bigger challenge than I'd imagined. Someone from the telco will be coming to fix that next Monday. It seems that my PayTV, home phone, home broadband and now home wireless network - all from the same company - need some special attention to all work together. Good thing they're not charging me for that remediation service. That would be something to complain about.

I'm waiting for my next phone bill with some trepidation. I'm sure I've been a heavier user of the 3G service this month than I plan to be over time. No Wi-Fi at home will do that. After the home & work Wi-Fi issues are sorted out, I'm sure I'll be as satisfied economically as I am functionally. I never thought a phone could have so much of a computer in it, despite all my time in the industry. Undoubtedly, my next step (excuse the pun) will be to the SDK to write my first app. But that'll be another post.

The game has been changed. The device you carry in your pocket has now become the phone, email, browser, blogger, social-networking and location-service device. No other device seems to have captured the public imagination like Apple's iPhone. The iPhone 3G is a wonderful upgrade to a wonderful concept. Sure, the camera could be better - but I already have a really good (12 MP) camera. Sure it could do videos, but my other camera does that just fine. Sure there's always more to do, but I figure they'll get around to that in successive releases, For me, I'm delighted.

Bill Gates' widely-reported departure from Microsoft yesterday is the kind of event that aptly evokes cliches like "end of an era". Demonised by many, revered by others, Gates' exit has been a remarkably gradual and more importantly a managed affair. As a Microsoft employee of 5-10 years ago, I recall the beginning of the end vividly. Despite working for IBM, I've been personally touched by the moment.

Steve Ballmer has been the (rather unimpressive) CEO for the last 8 years. I understand from insiders that Bill & Steve first spoke about Gates retiring in 2004. Ray Ozzie, arguably the best hire at Microsoft in recent times, has been doing the Chief Software Architect job for some time now. Since it was announced 2 years ago, there have been endless pieces in the media on Bill leaving from almost every angle. Over the last week, the media coverage has been extraordinary, particularly in blogs.

But it's not just a media feeding frenzy. Just 2 days ago, a former colleague from Microsoft in Melbourne retired after 15 years. I wasn't the only one of the "old guard" at his small invitation-only farewell celebration. A few of them still work there; only 3 of us don't. Despite the intimacy of the gathering, the guy leaving couldn't help himself making an oblique reference to Gates "having his Microsoft chip removed too". The mood in the room was palpable.

Both Steve & Bill were brought to tears in public at the handing-over of a scrapbook on the final day. They're not the only ones weeping. Ballmer and his team have their work cut out for them. New threats to (and opportunities for) Microsoft are everywhere - Google & Apple among them. The majority of the senior leadership in Redmond are long-time employees. The company is bigger than ever. Can the old guard change something so big and commercially successful?

Calls for Ballmer to retire are mounting. The disappointment with Windows Vista alone would have brought any other CEO unstuck. It has certainly cost some senior execs their jobs. Renewal may well need to come with new blood at the top. Changing the company sooner rather than later is widely thought to be a decisive factor in its future. Shedding the tarnish of the anti-trust case(s) will need some serious successful delivery of new and better products & services, not just marketing, PR and perception-management. Buying Yahoo was never going to do it.

If "cloud computing" and wireless handheld devices are the future, no wonder Google & Apple are doing so well. Eric Schmidt & Steve Jobs must feel just wonderful, as they were both roundly beaten when they competed with Microsoft before. Personally, I've been waiting for Microsoft to offer me me everything as an online consumer that they offered me as an online employee. 5 years after leaving Microsoft. I'm still waiting for much of it.

Change doesn't often happen until the pain of staying the same exceeds the perceived worst-case pain of change. If that day comes for Microsoft, as it did for IBM in their near-death experience of the early 1990s, it will be traumatic. Maybe a changing of the guard will help.

The 20th Century will be remembered as the American century. In 1900, Britain was the one truly global superpower in every way. At the turn of the millennium, it was the United States. Eight short years later, that's changing. This month, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek releases his new book The Post American World. It's a great chronicle of how the decline in the relative standing of the US in the world community. As he says up front "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."

Zakaria isn't the first to comment on the comparative rise and fall of nations. Paul Kennedy of Yale and the LSE wrote about it from a political & economic perspective in his 1987 book, "The Rise & Fall of The Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000". Michael Porter of Harvard wrote about it from an economic perspective in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article. He later developed these ideas into a book. What makes Zakaria's commentary so relevant is the historical context.

Britain's power was predicated on a traditional model of imperial rule. As they saying of those days went, "The sun never set on the British Empire". America's power has been different. To be sure, the US has fought many times on foreign soil. Spectacular victories in two world wars were followed by a stalemate in Korea and a loss in Vietnam. Yet the Americanisation of Europe and Asia (to say nothing of Latin America) have been more cultural and socio-economic than political. Even in Japan, where Gen. Mc Arthur wrote the constitution for the new de-militarised nation, the Japanese seemed to Americanise their nation themselves and over time. They were not a colony later given "home rule" in the sense that Britain ruled India.

The emerging global culture of the late-20th century is distinctly American. It has all the hallmarks of US middle-class consumer society. It embodies the aspirations of the American dream - upward social and economic mobility. It has localised flavours - particularly in India and China - but it is surprisingly uniform across the emerging middle-class of an increasingly urbanised world. What began with Coca-Cola and hamburgers has become a global phenomena; a kind of Pax Americana.

This global form of the American Dream is under severe and increasing threat. The War on Terror and the terrorism that precipitated it is only one sign. American standing abroad is as low as it's ever been. American economic and financial influence is waning rapidly. Their cultural leadership of the 20th Century is yielding to new forms of emerging culture. Most visibly, American consumerism is no longer the aspirational goal for many people. The excesses of American society - economic, social and political - are all too visible to the rest of the world now.

To be sure, Zakaria is right. China & India have accelerated past the US. Japan did almost as well in the years after the Second World War. Today, the US grows at 3-5%; China's growth is at 10-12%. The way America overtook Britain in the 20th Century is the same as the way China & India will overtake America in the 21st Century: growth. Here's a historical comparison of growth and a GDP forecast (in 2003 dollars) going forward to 2050:

The message is clear. Over the 50 years 2000-2050, American GDP is set to triple while China's grows by 40 times to exceed America's. In the same time, Indian GDP will approach that of the US and exceed Japan & Germany's combined by over 250%.

Whilst America (and Europe) are under economic siege from China & India, this is only part of the story. In the two generations ahead, China & India will produce billions of new middle-class consumers. Together with the rest of the emerging economies in Brazil, Russia and elsewhere, this may approach 3 billion new consumers in the global market. Assuming UN population forecasts, this means an additional 30% of humanity will become middle-class, urban consumers - many for the first time in history. This is the essence of the issue Zakaria discusses: hyper-growth in socio-economic mobility.

The cultural, political and environmental dimensions of this are staggering. In a world of 9-10 Billion people in 2050, two-thirds to three-quarters may live in cities. 4.5-5.0 Billion of these may live middle-class consumer-society lives. Only 400-450 million of them will be American. Fewer than 700 million of them will be European. Many of the remainder will be Chinese, Indian, South American, Arab and African.

As Gandhi once said of the British in India, "300 thousand Englishmen cannot control 300 million Indians...". Perhaps, in the same way, 400 million Americans cannot control 4 Billion other middle-class people...

White was always the colour of Christmas for me when I was a young boy in NYC and Western Europe. It certainly was when my father grew up in Northern Canada. Not so for my mother growing up in Egypt. It never has been for my wife or 4 nieces - all born and raised in Australia. When my family moved to London in the early-70s, snow at Christmas-time was rare. When we moved to Australia a couple of years later, the whole summer-time Christmas thing was hard to deal with. In some ways, it still is.

Even weirder for me growing up were the Xmas trips abroad. When I was 9, we visited my grandfather in Uganda only a few miles from the Equator. A couple of years later, I spent Christmas in the Alps in Europe. In my teens, we spent a couple of December/January vacations near Cape Town, South Africa. Tropical and summer holidays just didn't seem to belong at Christmas-time.

The weather all over the world has changed a lot over my lifetime. 40 years ago, summer and winter were very distinct and predictable seasons in the US, EU and Australia. There was a rhythm to the seasons and the calendar was the metronome. For the last 10 summers in Australia, water-shortage is the key theme. In Europe and America, heat-waves and storm seasons top the news. Last year - North & South - there was hardly any ski season at all.

The last time we spent Christmas in Europe was 2003. The summer prior, there was a heat wave that killed people in Paris. The Christmas prior to that, ski-fields in Switzerland at 2000m were brown. Late December and early January 2003 was a wonderful time to be near the Italian border in SW Switzerland. Over a metre of snow fell in one night. The resorts all turned on a great set of festivities in a picture-postcard surrounding. The colours of Christmas were all those of the traditional Northern holiday season.

Climate change and Christmas time are now colliding together. The UN Conference on Climate Change held in Bali this week is a major focus all over the world. There's a particularly sharp focus on it here in Australia. The new federal government elected a week or so ago had ratified the Kyoto Protocol as its first act. The new Prime Minister leads Australia's delegation in Bali. The new Minister for Climate Change and Water said on the radio this morning that this puts Australia in a position to lead in the discussions on a post-Kyoto treaty. In Bali, the announcement that Australia was ratifying Kyoto was met with thunderous applause.

Meanwhile, back in Switzerland, the bankers have made it very difficult for the tourism industry to invest in any primarily ski-oriented infrastructure below 2000m. It's more than a reaction to a bad 2006/7 season; it's the financial services side to climate change concerns. That makes the resorts with ski-fields 2500-4000m all the more desirable, both as a destination for skiers and an opportunity for investors and financiers. I wonder how long it will take before plowing vast amounts of money into marginal ski fields in Australia and New Zealand dries up.

The talk-fest in Bali and the decision of Swiss Bankers has more in common than Christmas-time. International commercial sentiment is hungry for certainty on the way forward on climate change policy and legislation. The insurance industry in the US is now a huge force to be reckoned with in this context. I guess Cyclone Katrina really brought the financial cost into relief for them. The human cost of a broken relief effort by the government agencies was certainly well-publicised by Al Gore and the media.

A post-Kyoto world will be another factor changing the colours of Christmas. The insane consumer spending in developed economies may be curtailed by cost factors of environment being priced into globally produced merchandise. Made in China could become carbon-anathema, for moral, social and political reasons, regardless of cost and price. President Bush must be feeling very isolated this Christmas.

For me, I hope there's still snow at Christmas for some years to come somewhere where I can celebrate it as I used to when I was a boy. This year, we're going back to a place I love. I remember it as a boy with all the hope and promise of Christmas morning. I have some very fond recent memories too - my 40th birthday and a trip 3 years ago. I'm sure I'll bring back good memories from this trip too. A white Christmas is a privilege.

Recently, I started a new job at IBM. It strangely reminded me of joining Microsoft a decade ago:

• Running into lots of people I'd worked with in several former lives in several other places
• Getting a few company-provided things: laptop, car park, business card, credit card and cell phone
• Becoming a member of a number of extended teams; locally, regionally and globally 
• Being allocated a set of customers and getting up to speed with their recent account activity

Many folks have told me that tier-one US technology vendors have much more in common than I thought. I'm beginning to see what they mean. At least IBM & Microsoft both have a strong sense of identity built into their culture. They also both have deeply entrenched ways of doing things supported by common worldwide business-processes and a company-standard technology infrastructure.

Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft grew up from being a very-high-growth young company into a more mature, slower-growth company. In the mid-1990s, The Internet in general and the Web in particular was transforming the ICT industry. By 1997, Microsoft was fully engaged in removing paper from its business. Their then-COO (Bob Herbold) led an effort to commonize business process across the Microsoft world. He began by devising a global shared standard business vocabulary and a common data taxonomy for all Microsoft subsidiaries. A worldwide Intranet connected to a single SAP ERP instance was the chosen solution set. Later, a globally-deployed Siebel CRM became part of the toolset. Other applications, for things like electronic procurement, sales management and time & expenses, ran off the SAP/Siebel engines on the corporate Intranet.

Of course, the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, Office, Exchange and SQL Server were always the technology platform. I always felt sorry for the CIO at Microsoft; they were compelled to implement the core-business, mission-critical services on early releases of the newest Microsoft product set whilst providing a world-class IT utility. The Microsoft Way, as it was known, was defined by these paperless common processes implemented through the standard tools & latest technologies. This, combined with Microsoft's extraordinarily leveraged business model, was a key to their ability to scale their business. It was a far cry from how Microsoft used to run in the early 1990s - a mainframe, a lot of AS/400 applications, Microsoft Mail, a huge number of disconnected Word/Excel/PowerPoint files on lots of file/print servers and a whole lot of paper.

These days at IBM, I sense similar (but different) changes are afoot. It's early days for me to tell what this all will mean, but I have a feeling of deja-vu about it. I guess time will tell. Using Lotus Notes these days after using Microsoft Outlook for over a decade has been one of the most visible changes.

For at least the last ten years, IBM and Microsoft have led the industry in the development of the Web Services standards. The WS-* stack is now becoming mature and complete. Nearly every major vendor and a growing number of the larger customers have embraced Web Services and the corresponding Service-Oriented Architecture. Recent editions of IBM's Websphere and Microsoft's .NET product sets implement either all or most of these standards. SAP (among many others) are aggressively adopting both SOA & WS-* in future products.

I wonder when global companies like IBM & Microsoft will run (mostly) on Web Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture. The challenges are significant. Moving to SAP/Siebel and the Intranet during the 1990s at Microsoft was largely beneficial. I have high hopes for the transition to Web Services and WS-* in the enterprise going forward.

Technological innovation seems to follow a pattern: things that initially exist alone in isolation start to work together and end up working in a seamless way. This is true of almost all the technical advances of the last century or so. Cars, electricity, telegraph and telephones started their journey along this path in the late-nineteenth century. Radio followed closely behind. Household consumer appliances, like vacuum-cleaners and washing machines, came after that. Television, although "invented" in 1929, really didn't take off until after the War. They started out being distinct, stand-alone things that became better integrated as they came into everyday use. For instance, radios & telephones are regularly fitted to cars; some even have TVs.

A whole host of technological innovations are now working together better, like TV over the 3G Wireless Internet onto a mobile phone with a computer in it. The common term for this kind of integration is "convergence". But there's something much deeper behind all this - a fundamental change in the way that things in general work together. At the heart of all this is a profound kind of interoperability provided by digital technology - semiconductor hardware, standards-compliant software and ubiquitous high-speed communications. There are more computers in cars today than there are in the houses in which they're garaged. An airplane, like the Airbus A380, has more software (about 1 billion lines of code) than most companies. More and more, all of these things are linked together by optical fibres, satellites and cellular networks that move a staggering amount of data around the world.

The poster-child of reliable interoperability is the telephone. Even electricity has not attained that level of service. The ability to call from one phone to another anywhere, any time is taken for granted by billions of people worldwide. Email is nowhere near as dependable. Instant messaging and various other communications tools are far behind that. The ability of computers and their software to talk to other computers and their software is a long, long way behind that. The more advanced the technology becomes, it seems, the harder it is to get it to work together. That's why there is such a booming industry in "systems integration" and "enterprise application integration". Getting email to work as well as telephones is still a goal for many. Getting software in general to work together as well as telephones, remains a lofty goal which need a lot of work for a long time.

While the opportunity seems insurmountable, getting software to interoperate is also enormously attractive for many reasons. Digital hardware, software and communications have become pervasive in the developed world over the last 2 decades. It is being adopted aggressively in large scale in some of the emerging economies, like China and India. In coming decades, some 3 billion additional consumers are forecast to join the digital revolution. Personal computers, digital TV and radio and a host of other devices will connect more than half of humanity over the next generation, much as mobile phones do today. As these consumers become more affluent, they will likely consume more digital services. As the telecommunications networks become more widespread and capable, more services will be provided. As more of these communications facilities become wireless and higher speed, many of these services will be available to mobile devices, much as Internet-access services today have become more wireless and faster.

The Changes in the Living Room and changes in pocket devices are a harbinger of this change, but getting an HD video off a digital camera (or phone) and onto a HD TV screen at home just isn't easy yet. For enterprises, Web Services standards are the beginning of getting software in general to work together, but getting a doctor, an insurance company, a pathology lab and a pharmacist to collaborate on a person's healthcare is almost impossible today. There's some promising work going on in supply-chain integration now, but I can't easily sign-up to an integrated ERP, CRM & supply-chain solution that just works with my trading partners. Most concerning, I'm not convinced that the 1 billion lines of code on the Airbus A380 all work together inside the airplane just yet.

When I can email my HD video from my seat in a future airplane to my Mom on the ground and be confident that she can watch it on her TV, I'll be more convinced that things work together better. When my health record in Australia shows up in a doctor's office in a ski-resort in the US or Europe, I'll feel better. When the systems integration business starts shrinking, I'll know something good is happening. I hope all of that happens before I die...

Men's clothing has always had lots of pockets. We carry our keys, wallets and, these days, our mobile phones in them. More recently, there's been a few more digital gadgets in these pockets: music players, cameras, a wireless email device and the odd smartcard or two.

Some folks have rationalized these gadgets into a fewer number of more capable devices. The phones with camera, music player & wireless email capabilities, the so-called smartphones, are really getting around. Phones that you can watch television on are beginning to become popular. Phones with GPS navigation facilities are starting to emerge. There are many more of these sorts of things to come, like Apple's iPhone.

More and more, these pocket devices talk to your car. Many cars come with a wireless link to a phone so you don't have to plug and unplug it every time you get in and out.  An iPod-integration kit can let you control you pocket music player from you car audio system. Some cars allow a whole raft of devices to be plugged in at once and are fully incorporated into a vehicle-based voice-recognition system.

Some cars even have a digital wireless key which recognizes you as you approach, opens the door and adjusts the seat, mirrors and sometimes the steering wheel to you personal settings. Some pocket devices, like smartcards and proximity cards, talk to things like building security systems, credit card machines and to your PC. Many television set-top boxes have smartcards in them. These digital identity & access control devices provide strong security with convenience.

Some of the payment-card people are taking things one step further. Points-of-sale are fitted with a proximity reader that lets you pay for things in a shop by putting a card close by. Some furniture manufacturers are going in another direction, letting you change the battery in a range of handheld devices by placing them on an area of a desk or table without plugging them in. Both these things present the ultimate convenience of being able to do things without appearing to have done anything at all.

Almost all these handheld devices get services from some network or another - the phone network or the Internet, the electronics payment network or the electricity network. Some plug into a cradle that attaches to you PC which in turn plugs into the Internet. Increasingly these networks are becoming wireless, high-speed and available in a growing number of places.

In the not too-distant future, a pocket device will become so capable that it will be your portable electronic life - a wallet, keys, phone, HD (video) camera, email, payment and all-round useful thing. The challenges are to make them as easy-to-use as their everyday components are. Advances in touch-based interfaces will be helped by better voice-recognition. If it knows who and where you are, services on the network can help it become much more useful. Security & privacy of the device itself will be helped by incorporating strong biometric authentication & authorization technologies.

In a world of many billions of these kinds of devices, the provision of services over the networks will change dramatically. Nokia has some great concept videos of how this might look on YouTube. It'll encourage many service providers across and between industries and governments to re-focus on customers' wants & needs rather than their own views of how to provide goods and services. It will also take social networking to the next level.

This kind of collaboration and cooperation is the next productivity and convenience revolution. It will save so many people from moving from place to place so much, which has to be good for the planet. It will empower a younger generation to have influence over an older generation, which has to be good for the future. It will also speed things up without making everyone feel so frantically rushed and tired all the time. That's got to be good for us all.