Failure of World Trade Talks

After what seemed like a promising announcement a few days ago, yesterday we learned that the WTO talks had once again failed to reach agreement, after 7 years of negotiations, no less. The implications of this failure are huge, and will lead no doubt to worsening poverty in many parts of the developing world, while the rich west protects its own short term interests once again. If our leaders are incapable of reaching agreement on such important issues, perhaps we should get rid of them and appoint representatives that are better able to do their jobs?

Who said Macbooks weren't robust?

Despite my efforts at looking after my Macbook its once pristine white casing has steadily become increasingly marked and scratched. I'd also read reports that it was not as a robust as many Windows laptops. Well, yesterday afternoon - due to my own failure to zip up my rucksack - my Macbook fell from it to the hard wooden floor (a drop of over 1m) and then proceeded to slide out of its little protective bag and fall, banging and crashing, down a steep and uncarpeted wooden staircase, to finally come to rest on a quarry tiled floor at the bottom of the stairs.

I thought that this would very probably spell the end for my machine, but as I picked it up I noted that the little LED on the front edge was doing its thing, which offered some hope. I rushed off, late to get home, and did not look at the machine until several hours later. On opening the lid I was amazed and relieved to the Macbook come to life. The optical drive made some funny noises (and still does every time the machine wakes) but other than this it appears to be unharmed.

And cosmetically I'm also impressed. No cracks, splits or major damage other than a "bruise" mark indicating a major point of impact on the front right corner. Not bad. Congratulations Apple for for a machine which is not only a joy to use, but which is capable of withstanding some pretty rough handling.

The cost of buying a Mac

Don't get me wrong, I am a dyed in the wool Mac user, and have been since around 1986 when I first got my hands on one of those little compact SE20s. Today I use a G5 iMac and a Macbook, and OS X is clearly the best operating system on the planet for humans. But you increasingly have to look at the price of Apple kit. I paid just shy of £1000 inc. VAT for my Macbook a couple of years a go (the mid-range option with max RAM).

Today you can get a well specced Windows laptop for around £300 (of course you have to suffer Vista or XP unless you go Linux), while the current equivalent of my Macbook currently retails for £829 inc VAT. That is a big differential. Apple has never sought to play in the budget space, but all the same, computing in these cost conscious credit crunchy times is becoming a commodity item, and surely Apple has to respond with a lower cost mobile offering. Remember the hugely well-liked 12" pro laptop of a few years ago? With the phenomenal rise of the Asus EeePC thingy, perhaps its time for Apple to launch a small - say 11" screen super-mini. With a price point of say £399 it would compete effectively with the top end eePC and provide a competitive OS X platform in the mainstream laptop market. Just a thought...

iPlate launched while connection falls over

No, it must be just a coincidence. Even BT would not be that devious and underhand, would they?

On the day the BT iPlate (a little gadget that's supposed to improve your ADSL performance by an average 1.5 Mbps) goes on sale, my connection is playing up big time. Spent most of the morning so far just checking and restarting my router, repeatedly trying to get key websites to appear in my browser, and generally harumphing around out of sheer frustration. 

OK, I get my broadband connection from the ethically sound Phone Co-op (who buy wholesale from Fused Networks or somesuch), and not from BT, but the dark mysteries of Openreach presumably sit behind it all.

Roll on fibre! I don't know about you, but is it not time that UK consumers and SMEs took the bull by the horns and took control of the shambles that is telecoms in the UK. 100Mbps up and down is what I want for my monthly fee please, and I really don't see why I can't have it. Increasingly other places in Europe have it, so why not here in the UK? BT (the incumbent) seems quite happy sweating the copper network for every last drop of profit it can extract from it, and is not keen on getting fibre deployment moving (and looking at it from their perspective you can see why), but that does not help us users one jot. BT needs to take care, else it will find itself surrounded by small "Islands of Fibre" springing up all over the country, and hey presto! no more monopoly. I can't wait. 

In fact I've been developing the notion of community owned fibre for my locality over at ColneValleyFibre.net. Sign up there if you're local and keen to get involved, or interested in investing in a profitable community owned utility cooperative.

BT is missing the point - again

I'm getting increasingly interested in the whole broadband/FTTH debate. On the BBC news site today, talking about the long heralded BT fibre test at Ebbsfleet, where BT appears to be offering performance that will merely "burst" to 100 Mbps down and only 2Mbps upload, a BT spokesperson had the nerve to assume they had a clue about what us consumers want and need by saying that the speeds would be "Higher in fact than anyone currently needs"!

What utter rubbish. How does BT know what we might need in terms of speed. I know for a fact that the paltry 0.3-1.5 Mbps that my "up to 8Mbps" connection delivers is not what I need. If i want to download a 2GB movie file I'd like to get that file as quickly as possible. 100Mbps sounds pretty useful to me.

BT really is doing itself no favours with its current stance on this whole issue. Why doesn't it actually take the time to talk to its customers, and then respond by doing something really excellent and useful, rather than bleating about the cost of fibre roll-out, and capping the performance even in its own trials! Fibre can deliver at least 100Mbps up and down. Think what that sort of upload performance could do for online entrepreneurial activity, to say nothing of two way video calling, e-care services, and community safety issues. Just what they are doing in Neunen with 100Mbps up and down.

Make no mistake, BT is not at all interested in delivering a world class solution into the UK. It is interested in lining its own pockets and those of its investors by sweating the copper asset to the last. Even the Ebbsfleet trial is using a fibre topology which is inherently anti-competitive, militates against unbundling, and delivers a second class service to consumers.

Fibre - done right - offers some fantastic benefits to consumers, business and our communities at large. Make no mistake, if we wait for BT to deliver, we will be waiting for some time to come, and we will end up with a second rate service. 

If you want something doing properly, do it yourself. There has never been a better opportunity to communities to take control of their own communications technology and build a network of community level, community owned fibre networks. 

Bye bye BT.

Reflecting on the global credit crunch

I've been thinking about the "credit crunch" that seems to be rolling around the world's financial markets creating all sorts of havoc.

For me this whole debacle highlights the critical flaws in a global financial system which appears to be essentially founded not on trust but on greed. Had the financial institutions that originally exposed themselves to the risks of the so-called sub-prime lending market acted responsibly and with due regard to their customers and other stakeholders, rather than being driven by naked greed, the financial markets would not be in the situation they now find themselves in. Greed has failed, and has exposed the fact that there is little or no trust between these financial institutions, so all the financial institutions are now unwilling to lend to their fellow institutions for fear of skeletons in the closet.

Instead it appears that it is down to the taxpayer to bail out these people, as governments in the UK and the US seem to be pouring public money in to create desperately needed liquidity in the markets.

Maybe I'm missing the point here, so please correct me, but it sort of feels like yet another market failure, and one right at the heart of the capitalist machine.

Has Balfe gone bonkers?

Today's Independent on Sunday reports that Cameron has recruited Labour defector Richard Balfe to woo the "trade union and co-operative movement". A quick heads-up to Messrs. Balfe and Cameron: this is not a single movement. The unions don't really understand co-operatives, and indeed are very wary of worker co-operatives, often perceiving them to undermine the role and power of the unions. And while there are undoubtedly plenty of unionistas within the Co-operative movement there are equally a good number of us that view the trade unions as not being up to speed on a whole range of issues, and as so focused on their own survival that they can't see the bigger picture on employee engagement, ownership and control.

While Cameron's tactics are undoubtedly interesting - and there are many people within the co-operative movement who are not natural Labour supporters, and who may view his approach as attractive, I really can't see it having any major impact, other than perhaps contributing to a polarisation within the co-operative movement.

The article goes on to report that Balfe said "...under David Cameron's leadership the Conservative Party has shown that it has the ideas and vision to harness the co-operative movement in a way that can really benefit society." Wow. That sort of language is certainly not going to get him too far. It is the co-operative movement that has the ideas and vision, not the Conservative Party. It is the co-operative movement that for at least the last twenty years has been making the running about how co-operative approaches can provide solutions to many of the socio-economic problems we seem to struggle with in the UK, and more widely. And as for the Tories "harnessing" the co-operative movement - how I laughed!

In general I welcome the trend towards an ongoing and constructive dialogue between the co-operative movement and all of the major parties. The old-school approach of being wedded to Labour is no longer relevant or helpful, and has held the co-operative movement back in the UK. In the US for example, co-operatives are far more apolitical in their nature (with some exceptions). But if Cameron and Balfe really want to engage with the co-operative movement, they need to listen to us, listen to what we have been saying for decades now about how to do things properly, and provide us with the resources to enable us to put our vision into practice. The notion of a parallel conservative co-operative movement run by the Tory party is daft, and simply won't deliver any significant outcomes quickly enough.