What a CEO Would Really Write in His Blog

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

My fellow BBC World Service commentator, Lucy Kellaway, lays into Reuters CEO Tom Glocer as the worst case of vapid CEO blogging (via the BBC’s Richard Sambrook). Harsh, because Glocer seems to be a cut above the rest of the old media but she has a point: Blogs are about being honest and authentic, and I’ve seen few CEOs manage to do this. Although the results would be entertaining, if they for once did try not to please but to vent (which is the real distinction between a faux blog and a real one). Here’s an early draft of what a CEO like Mr. Glocer might have written if he could:

Had to fire half the news department today. Would have fired the other half too, had they actually been in the office. They weren’t; as it was 3.30 in the afternoon they were mostly unwell in The Ink Stained Spike so I had to get Mrs. Marpool, the Chief Hot Refreshing Beverage Delivery Officer (formerly the tea lady), to pass on the news to them. Doubtless the old fools will be telling each other war stories and mocking my blogging style. The savvier ones will be pulling up my MySpace page on their 3.5G enabled, beer-splattered laptops and making rude remarks about my dog. Bottom feeders. They’ve probably never heard of Debussy. Pffft.

God I hate journalists. The ones who were in the office sat staring at their Grecian 2000 editing terminals as I broke the news to them, either patheticlaly hoping I’d notice their dedication and spare them, or else because they couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. They’ve brought it on themselves. Ten years ago they could have bought a copy of Microsoft for Dummies from Dillons. But no. They thought they were all still safe, sacred cows in the face of the digital sandstorm (gosh, that’s good that. Might save that for the final version.) Journalists. They’re either gung ho foreign correspondents who can’t stop filing stories no one will read, or burned out subs with faces like a rhino’s armpit (gosh, that is good!) who take most of the afternoon to sub a palm oil report.

Anyway, good riddance to the lot of them. Nothing they could do that a floor full of eager Bangaloreans (Bangalorans? Bangalorii? Bangaloris? Bangalorish? Please check this before you post it on the blog, Edna) couldn’t do at a tenth the price.

Anyway, unlikely to see a CEO rabbiting on like that, so we should stop dreaming. Anyway, I’m still upset with Lucy for suggesting in the same piece that signing off an email with ‘best’ is somehow unacceptable. I do it all the time, although I fear it’s a throwback to my own hackish past, when we wrote our Reuters service messages (open wire emails, as it were, visible to all) in telegraphese, as if there was still a premium on word count. Hence “best regards” either became “brgds” or just good old “best”. I still do it, and will continue to do so until Lucy tells me not to.

Best, Jeremy

Podcast on Gadgets

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

Here’s something I recorded for the BBC World Service Business Daily show on gadgets. Email me if you’d like the transcript.

If you want to subscribe to an RSS feed of this podcast you can do so here, or it can be found on iTunes. My Loose Wire column for The Wall Street Journal Asia and WSJ.com, can be found here (subscription only; sorry.) 

Thanks for listening, and comments, as ever, welcome. 

To listen to Business Daily on the radio, tune into BBC World Service at the following times, or click here.

Australasia: Mon-Fri 0141*, 0741

East Asia: Mon-Fri 0041, 1441

South Asia: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741

East Africa: Mon-Fri 1941

West Africa: Mon-Fri 1541*

Middle East: Mon-Fri 0141*, 1141*

Europe: Mon-Fri 0741, 2132

Americas: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741, 1041, 2132. 

My pieces usually appear on Wednesdays.

Blog Off(line)

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still like to edit my blogs from a client, not from the webpage itself. It’s probably something to do with the temperamental connections I get in this neck of the woods, but I’m always convinced my ramblings are going to disappear into the ether unless they’re somehow being saved on my computer,  not on someone else’s. What’s more, I hate the fact that Control+k doesn’t always mean insert a hyperlink. It should in every language, every situation. Really.

So it’s simple. A blogging tool (or client, if you want to be fancy) simply allows you to create, edit and update your blog postings without being online. You can fiddle with them, hone them, just as I’m not doing with this one, until you get a decent connection, and then you press the button and thwang, your post is posted. No openings of browsers; no waiting for connections before the muse strikes. Thwang. I love ’em.

Problem  is, there aren’t many of them and I’ve not seen a decent list of them in one place. So, I’ve updated my 2.5 year old directory of blogging software to fill this hole in the market, and even thrown in a Mac client or two too, to keep my friend Mark happy. What I didn’t do was to include any Linux ones; I know they exist but I couldn’t find one I liked last time. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ubuntu folks soon enough. Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in tool now; see this post and the comments for a perspective on this.

But I do tend to agree with the somewhat irritable sounding commenter called HolidayCornwall who complained back in December 2005 about the absence of ‘software which can organise my blogs posting schedule which are mostly related to english language’. Of course, I was too gallant to suggest they first focus on mastering the English language before they start looking for complex blogging clients. Besides, the link they posted from, Littlewood Farm in Bodmin, looks so inviting all feelings of being a churl are banished. (Can a churl be banished? What is churl, exactly? Apparently, according to the American Heritage dictionary, it’s a boorish, rude person, or, alternatively, a mediaeval English peasant. Or both, I suppose. Excellent; they didn’t mess about with their insults in those days. “Churl, bring me some more toner and two copies of Windows XP SP2. And stop looking so dang churlish. Honestly”)

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off track here. I was talking about blogging tools. Oh, and the lack of a really decent blog organizer. I would love to have one that kept all my postings in an offline database, that I could update when the feeling arose. Is there something like that, or am just Bodmin? (You’ll either have to live in Cornwall or watched Doc Martin to get that.)

Blog Off(line)

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still like to edit my blogs from a client, not from the webpage itself. It’s probably something to do with the temperamental connections I get in this neck of the woods, but I’m always convinced my ramblings are going to disappear into the ether unless they’re somehow being saved on my computer,  not on someone else’s. What’s more, I hate the fact that Control+k doesn’t always mean insert a hyperlink. It should in every language, every situation. Really.

So it’s simple. A blogging tool (or client, if you want to be fancy) simply allows you to create, edit and update your blog postings without being online. You can fiddle with them, hone them, just as I’m not doing with this one, until you get a decent connection, and then you press the button and thwang, your post is posted. No openings of browsers; no waiting for connections before the muse strikes. Thwang. I love ’em.

Problem  is, there aren’t many of them and I’ve not seen a decent list of them in one place. So, I’ve updated my 2.5 year old directory of blogging software to fill this hole in the market, and even thrown in a Mac client or two too, to keep my friend Mark happy. What I didn’t do was to include any Linux ones; I know they exist but I couldn’t find one I liked last time. I’m sure I’ll hear from Ubuntu folks soon enough. Oh, and Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in tool now; see this post and the comments for a perspective on this.

But I do tend to agree with the somewhat irritable sounding commenter called HolidayCornwall who complained back in December 2005 about the absence of ‘software which can organise my blogs posting schedule which are mostly related to english language’. Of course, I was too gallant to suggest they first focus on mastering the English language before they start looking for complex blogging clients. Besides, the link they posted from, Littlewood Farm in Bodmin, looks so inviting all feelings of being a churl are banished. (Can a churl be banished? What is churl, exactly? Apparently, according to the American Heritage dictionary, it’s a boorish, rude person, or, alternatively, a mediaeval English peasant. Or both, I suppose. Excellent; they didn’t mess about with their insults in those days. “Churl, bring me some more toner and two copies of Windows XP SP2. And stop looking so dang churlish. Honestly”)

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off track here. I was talking about blogging tools. Oh, and the lack of a really decent blog organizer. I would love to have one that kept all my postings in an offline database, that I could update when the feeling arose. Is there something like that, or am just Bodmin? (You’ll either have to live in Cornwall or watched Doc Martin to get that.)

Piracy Helps Some Countries Grow

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

One can only imagine Bill Gates’ discomfort: Standing silently as the Romanian president told the world that pirated Microsoft software helped his country become what it is:

Pirated Microsoft Corp software helped Romania to build a vibrant technology industry, Romanian President Traian Basescu told the company’s co-founder Bill Gates on Thursday.

“Piracy,” Reuters quoted him as saying during a joint news conference to mark the opening of a Microsoft global technical center in the Romanian capital, “helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania.” True, but as Reuters points out, 70 percent of software used in Romania is pirated and salesmen still visit office buildings in central Bucharest to sell pirated CDs and DVDs.

(And to be fair to the prez, he did actually call piracy “a bad thing”, according to another report by the AP, and said that “became in the end an investment in friendship toward Microsoft and Bill Gates, an investment in educating the young generation in Romania which created the Romanians’ friendship with the computer.”)

Actually I’ve long had the sneaking suspicion that (a) this is true. In places like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines etc, the impressive and attractively priced range of pirated software available raises local savvy and interest in computing. When you can buy 100 software titles for the price of a Coke, what’s not to like? And this brings me to (b): the likes Microsoft, I suspect, actually don’t mind this situation too much, or at least may not hate it as much as they say.

I’m not the first to suggest this: Microsoft knows it can’t sell legit copies of Windows or Office to every user in these places. So it gives away what it can, or at least sells at a steep discount, to youngsters. Businesses it tries to wrestle to the ground. The rest it writes off. Sure, it would be great if lots of people bought legit copies, but better that younger people are getting hooked on it, rather than to the opposition (Linux, Ubuntu etc.) One day they’ll pay.

I’ve often wondered, for example, whether folk like Adobe and Microsoft actually aren’t at cross purposes. Sure, they’re both members of the Business Software Alliance, but whereas Microsoft know that it’s better to get a nation hooked on Windows even if it’s on pirate copies than to crack down and plunge it into the hands of the Open Source brigade, for Adobe it’s a different story. No one is really going to buy a copy of Photoshop ($400-$700), so the idea of getting them hooked doesn’t really count. Better to crack down as hard as possible, so those few who really do need it cough up. Better 10 legit copies sold now than 100 possible sales later.

Is that why Bill didn’t say anything?