The time for narrow-minded self-interest is over

Sunday, 07 February 2010 08:52

This week it came to light that there have been senior people at Microsoft who have blocked, or tried to block new products from the company on the grounds that they hadn’t come from their own department.

Now it’s widely known that different departments within Microsoft don’t talk to each other. Examples of this are SkyDrive and Mesh, two competing products that don’t interoperate, SkyDrive / Mesh and Office Online which don’t work together yet (though there is at least hope with this one as SkyDrive is being integrated into Office 2010), Zune and Windows, Windows and Windows Mobile, XBox and Windows Games… the list just goes on and on.

Then let’s take Google, with one of the biggest portfolios of free and online applications, absolutely none of which talk to one another.

The internal politics of large corporations like Microsoft and Google makes them look more and more like the British Civil Service every day. For instance, take this quote from sitcom Yes Minister, with the minister talking to his permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby on the subject of Europe.

Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well in the past?
Hacker: That’s all ancient history, surely?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it’s just like old times.

But now we need to look forward to what’s in the best interest of the consumer, and what these companies need to do with their platforms and hardware.

Despite Windows 7 coming bundled with Windows Mobile Device Centre, my phone, the HTC Touch HD, required an update to this software despite the phone coming out many months before Windows 7 was released. If I want to plug an iPod into my computer, which incidididdlydentally I don’t, then this device won’t just work natively with Windows, nor will any MP3 player or mobile video device, despite being little more than a USB storage device with a headphone out jack.

But it’s when we get to cloud computing that this lack of connectedness really galls me. I can’t edit a document in Google Docs that’s stored in Skydrive, or a photo in Pixlr that’s stored in a Picassa online gallery, or Flickr, or Skydrive, or Mesh. I can’t do a great many things that I’d like to do. And this isn’t just a case of companies locking me into their own services either, as I said earlier, the services from Microsoft and Google for example, won’t even talk to each other. It’s all incredibly frustrating.

Now we all know that these companies are run by the accountants and lawyers (the only people who ever make any real money) and this is where we need standards bodies like the IEEE and open-source foundations such as Mozilla more than ever. We desperately need standards for these things.

As an example let’s look at at the recent work done by the EU to standardise mobile phone chargers. From 2012 all chargers in the EU will be micro-USB, even Apple and their proprietary socket format. This isn’t something the EU forced them to do, but every mobile phone company in Europe has jumped on board willingly and helped to thrash out a sensible standard that will greatly reduce waste from millions of phone chargers being thrown away each year.

For decades now, companies have been able to work together to develop web standards, and standards bodies have helped facilitate these. It’s all been brilliant.

Now we need a new set of standards, one for connected devices and how they interact with operating systems, and another for web apps, and how they connect with each other.

The first of these will make sure that you can plug any device into any computer and it’ll just work, no fuss, no third party drivers, no extra software, nothing. The latter will make sure you finally will be able to edit a file on Google Docs that’s stored in SkyDrive. The time for narrow-minded self-interest is over!

But will this happen? It certainly won’t happen on its own. I believe the time has come for consumers to stand up and tell these corporations unashamedly that the time has come for new standards.

To this end I’ve set up a new Facebook Group which I encourage you all to join. Maybe this small gesture will be enough to get the corporations talking seriously to each other for the benefit of us all.

You can join the Facebook group here.