Over the last few weeks, the world's governments, bankers, economist and media have been fixated on a Financial Crisis. It seems to have started as a consequence of the sub-prime mortgage practices in the US. This crisis has gripped the world with fear and panic not seen since the 1930s. It seems to be all anyone can talk about.

Some of the dimensions of this crisis are staggering. Trillions of dollars of public money has been injected into the financial system. Politicians of all complexions have become fiscal interventionists. The Swiss and American governments have bailed out their nations' principal private banks. The UK and other European governments have nationalised some failing banks. Governments around the world have put some form of guarantee on deposits to bolster confidence in the system.

Coordinated multilateral action, albeit faltering at first, seems to be working. Central bankers from the world's developed and emerging economies are cooperating in a way not seen since the end of World War II. At the same time, the EU now want to re-write the rules of their financial system to depart from the system agreed at Bretton Woods in 1944. Then, as I believe it will now, the US got what it wanted. But things are very different today than they were in the dying days of the War.

Today, the centre of financial gravity has moved from the US and Europe to Asia. When all the accounting has been done, I believe the recent financial crisis will mark the official transition in that process. It will declare that Asia is wealthier than America or Europe in real net present value terms. It will be a passing of the torch from the old world of money to a new world of money that will dominate this century. It is a stark and sudden way for this to happen but history is full of these disruptive transformations.

Americans, Australians and many Western Europeans have been living well beyond their means for some time now. What started with continuously improving living standards in the post-war generation (largely borne of hard work and savings) became obsessive materialism. What began as 'keeping up with the Joneses in the streets of pre-fab suburbs like Levittown, NY in the late-40s has become almost obscene conspicuous consumption by the upper-middle-class. Even the behaviour of an entire generation (Gen "Y") is profoundly unsustainable in economic and financial terms.

Modern banking was probably invented by the Templars during the Crusades. There's even some suggestion that after Friday 13 October 1307 (Friday the 13th), some Templars & their treasure helped establish the Swiss banking system. In the 1500s, Philip of Spain needed the House of Rothchild in Paris to finance his wars with England. Last century, the American Lend-Lease program was probably the greatest example of buy-now, pay-later. After the War, the web of financial services available to an ever-more prosperous and ever-growing middle-class scaled up into the billions of consumers. Now, as some of the titans of Wall Street, of The City (London), of Zurich and other places fall into insolvency, the road ahead looks very uncertain.

I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard going broke. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people had to pay cash for their houses and cars. I can see an awful lot of "McMansions" selling for a fraction of their construction price. I can see executive compensation retreat from the extraordinary levels it has been at for some years now. I can see a great deal more people (and perhaps and number of different kinds of people) returning to saving part of their net-disposable income as a habit.

But the greatest change I can see is that what constitutes "middle-class" is going to change. It will be much less about a two-car garage in a suburban housing estate with a double-income family with two kids and a dog and/or cat. It'll be much more about living at 75% of household income after tax and making do with less. Who knows, a few billion people saving some money might just repair the world financial crisis better than knee-jerk government intervention.

The first computer I ever bought with my own money was an Apple Macintosh in 1984. Before that, personal computing meant sharing a computer with other people - at school, at work or some other place (like a college dorm room). We had a small townhouse in inner-suburban Melbourne, Australia and an even smaller desk to put it on. I was a road-warrior IT guy and a university student. Macs were an ideal computer - mobile, useful and fun.

We did everything we could to learn about the technology deeply. We went to Apple in the US for developer education, we participated in local and overseas user groups and I read everything I could get my hands on. When Steve Jobs left Apple to form NeXT, we knew something was up and we followed him on his journey. At a shop near Stanford University in Palo Alto, we saw NeXT make it's retail debut and almost bought one. Some of our friends & colleagues bought NeXT cubes and workstations, but we stayed faithful to the Macintosh.

In 1991, we made the decision to switch everything to Windows. It was a traumatic experience. We became VB developers and refocused our business on the Microsoft ecosystem. Some years later, I went to work for Microsoft after over half-a-decade in their Partner community. I bought my last Motorola-CPU Mac in 1992 and never touched that platform again - until recently. I left Microsoft 5 years ago and exited their ecosystem a couple of years ago. It just wasn't what we wanted to do any more.

Now, at IBM, I see some of my colleagues in Australia using Macintoshes as their work computers. It's a supported platform inside the corporate infrastructure, although much of the software we use is still in beta on Mac. I even have one of the Solution Architects in one of my projects using a Mac everyday. Back in 1984, I never thought I'd see Apple Macintosh behind the firewall at IBM. The guys at Lotus are hard at work supporting Macintosh and the iPhone from their whole family products - Notes, Sametime, mobility and so on. Those betas have either gone public or will do so very soon.

For their part, Microsoft have continued and extended their support for the current-generation of Macintoshes and iPhones. Office 2008 for Mac is out and I see my colleagues at IBM using it everyday. The iPhone 3G has ActiveSync natively supported in the software stack. Seems like Macs and iPhones are headed to become first-class corporate citizens sanctified by both IBM and Microsoft!

Of course, Apple has changed remarkably in recent years to make this all happen. Apple's Mac OS/X is an evolution of NeXT's software. Steve Jobs has been back at Apple for over a decade and continues to do a great job. The iPod phenomenon has brought Apple back to commercial health and Macintosh has become a technologically respected platform. Ironically, the Macintosh did this by using IBM's PowerPC CPU for over a decade and more recently by morphing into a great Intel PC. Apple, NeXT software & Intel hardware have come together to produce what Macs are today.

Lately, Intel announced some new CPUs - some mobile processors for notebooks and the "Nehalem" processor dubbed Core i7. I'm waiting for Apple to announce a 17" MacBook Pro. That's the Mac I want to use everyday at work. For my private software development efforts (particularly for the iPhone), I want an Core i7 Mac desktop with a big screen at home. I'm excited and I'm anxious at the same time. I haven't read so much technical literature at the software development and technology infrastructure level for 20 years.

Going back to Mac is about going forward. 5+ years of using a Microsoft Smartphone on a 2G network and over 15 years of using Windows, Office and Exchange on slow Ethernet connected to a ever-growing Internet are over. I stopped using Outlook a couple of years ago and that was the beginning. Using an iPhone on modern 3G network is wonderful. Apparently, using a recent Mac on a fast (100 Mbps 802.11n) wireless network is fantastic. I'm looking forward to it.

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.