How to buy IT

Its a pretty fair bet that The Register's new content management solution will work, that their site will not suffer unfeasible amounts of downtime during the rebuild and that they've save a fortune by going to an Open Source product. One day big corporations will realise that shelling out hundreds of thousands for the traditional enterprise toolkits is not the way to do this. Find something that works, hire some people who can use it and get on with it.

Web technology is not difficult and for the most part doesn't come close to having high complexity tasks involved. It can and should be done on the cheap whenever possible. I await the Registers case study with interest.

The Matrix Reloaded (some spoilers included)

Since everyone is reviewing this here are my thoughts on what's certainly the most talked about film at the moment. It wasn't that good. Out went ground breaking special effects, in came effects we've all seen before. Out went Keanu Reeves looking confused for a whole film and a plot laced with dubious philosophy and in came... no wait, that stuff was still there.

Somehow this movie just didn't cut it for me. First time round the Matrix involved a poor plot but fantastic special effects, action sequences and a uber-cool look we hadn't seen before. This was just more of the same, and fundamentally there was nothing in the film to make you care about it. Neo is attacked by swarms of agents - we don't care as we know he can handle them, Zion is under threat - who cares, we hardly get to see it and it's not a very sympathetic place. The machines are divided between themselves, who cares, it's hard to see how any of this affects our heroes. Bombs explode, bullets whizz by, Kung Fu is performed and at the end of the day my heartrate barely changed.

They could have done so much better. The ultimate denoument where the workings of the Matrix and meaning of the One are explained was good, but the stuff leading up to it was weak, pseudo intellectualism masquerading as deep philosophy. The society of the machines has fantastic potential for developing characters and groups, but aside from the hugely enjoyable Twins all we get are by the numbers Hollywood henchmen.

In the end the Wachowski brothers have accomplished little more than anyone else with a similar budget and background in directing could have done. There are no claims to genius here, the fight choreography doesn't really open up as well as John Woo's stuff, the panorama's don't compare to the stuff Ridley Scott comes out with and the action sequences were stock Hollywood stuff plus last years special effects. If I was them I'd have worked overtime for a new effect to compare with bullet time, it was the innovation we loved, the newness of it, not the fact that time stood still as things moved around. Nothing new here I'm afraid.

Don't even get me started on the superman sequences and the bloody Merovingian...

Free speech?

Over on the other side of the pond Doc is all up in arms about plans to deregulate the media. The (increasingly political) Register have an even more extreme point of view.

Class war part 32456983

The news that the number of state school pupils coming to Oxford is down this year is sure to hit the headlines again. I've got a few comments on this...

With students already being forced to pay more for their education and carry more debt, wouldn't you expect a migration away from one of the most expensive cities in the UK? Starting with those least able to pay? You can trade in three years of Oxford and brideshead revisited for three years of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle or Birmingham - party towns with respected universities, and rents that are between 40 and 60% of the Oxford ones.

There is still no evidence that the Oxford selection process for undergraduates is biased in any way about anything. It turns out that if 40% of acceptances are from state schools its because so were 40% of applications, the same goes for women, ethnic minorities, disabled, left wing, right wing... you get the idea. The problem is all in the image.

When the chancellor of the exchequer picks a fight with the university on the grounds that its elitist what people remember is just that. Never mind that he was wrong about that and pretty much everything else he said at the time.

Straight outta the Matrix

Since Tad and Lucky had both taken this quiz I thought I'd give it a go and what do I get?

Neo

So was it told about the long dark coat, shaved head and sunglasses, or did it just know? And all that time I wanted to be Morpheus.

Case teaching

Case teaching at Oxford is a bit of an odd affair. Actually working through a case, start to finish is a bit of an oddity. More often they become topics for discussion, pulled in to illustrate points or show theory being put into practice. It's certainly only the guest lecturers who turn them into the centrepiece of any given lecture.

Today we had a visiting lecturer from LBS, formerly at Wharton and possibly Harvard (I forget) who took us through the Snapple case, on which he is apparently some kind of expert. Now, give the man his due it was entertaining stuff. He was lively, animated, and opinionated. He wrote things on the board and ploughed relentlessly through his notes, he had a gameplan for the next hour and he was not to be deflected. Questions rained down on the class, we quickly realised that all the answers were written on the pages of the case, look at the page, read something off and hey presto, you're in the good books. Hardly any need to think at all.

Post case though and I'm sitting here wondering what I learned. One hour of case study later here is what was taught

1. Market research is a useful starting point when branding a product
2. Most brands get started by accident
3. Its not about brands, its always about a Brand

To take these one at a time I've rarely seen a company that couldn't produce market research to explain it's latest dumb idea, and there was no discussion of what makes research good, bad or indifferent, of the kind of questions you should ask or the manner in which you should interpret the results. Just a maxim, research is good. In fact research often just tells you that what consumers want today they'll want again tomorrow. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

While many entrepreneurs do indeed end up with a brand largely by accident. (a powerbrand in this case) plenty of people plan brands very deliberately. Dr Peppers' Raging Cow, Hutchinson Whampoas' 3 and Mercedes / Swatches' Smart Car all spring to mind as recent examples.

The last point is just a nice bit of rhetoric. The case study method, good way to pass the time or intellectually stimulating? Discuss.

Ethical oil?

I'm currently drafting the first couple of sections for my groups project on corporate responsibility. We're supposed to prepare a corporate responsibility plan, a set of implementation recommendations and a description of likely opposition to our ideas and way for overcoming this. My group has chosen to prepare a piece on an oil company, currently going by the name of Exoff.

This is a fairly tricky thing to do. Framing general principles in a manner that means they can't be twisted out of all recognition, but still retain some tangible meaning is hard going. Slightly harder going though is doing this for real. One member of the group worked with a major oil company in China and outlined a series of dilemmas for us that made it easy to see just how easy it is for companies to give into the temptation to do something wrong and why western companies may well feel like their ethical ideals hold them back in developing (and under-regulated markets).

Could be worse though. You could be the British Home Secretary, trying to fight back the overwhelming temptation to introduce ID cards and pander to the knee jerk xenophobia of the 'Great' British Public.

About time too

Looks like US lawmakers are planning to crack down on spam. While this is a good thing in itself I imagine it won't be long before spammers relocate to less well governed nations. Of course if top level ISP's would get their act together and crack down on this we could probably cut the spam problem in half in a matter of months, but as long as there's money in bandwidth...

The Mathematical Bridge

There are many interesting things about travelling with a class full of MBA's. One was the reason our Chinese students got so interested in the Mathematical Bridge in Cambridge. It's claimed this bridge was designed by Newton in a manner that required no bolts, nails, screws or anything else. Later the bridge was taken apart to find out how it worked, but subsequently could not be reassembled and today is held together by bolts. This however was not why the Chinese students were interested.

It turns out that in 1928 one of China's most famous poets, Xu Zhimo, wrote a poem about his time in Cambridge, and it's considered a masterpiece in China. I'm also told this translation doesn't do it justice. Seems nice enough to me...

The Mathematical Bridge

Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Quietly I wave good-bye
To the rosy clouds in the western sky.

The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their reflections on the shimmering waves
Always linger in the depth of my heart.

The floating heart growing in the sludge
Sways leisurely under the water;
In the gentle waves of Cambridge
I would be a water plant!

That pool under the shade of elm trees
Holds not water but the rainbow from the sky;
Shattered to pieces among the duck weeds
Is the sediment of a rainbow-like dream?

To seek a dream?
Just to pole a boat upstream
To where the green grass is more verdant;
Or to have the boat fully loaded with starlight
And sing aloud in the splendour of starlight.

But I cannot sing aloud
Quietness is my farewell music;
Even summer insects keep silence for me
Silent is Cambridge tonight!

Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Gently I flick my sleeves
Not even a wisp of cloud will I bring away

Blogs at Harvard

So Harvard take on Dave Winer to sort out their thinking about IT and Law or something and lo and behold this happens

Its looking increasingly as if I'll be around in Oxford over the summer and I'd like to lean on a few people to try and get things like this happening. I'd also like to start a project to produce a new kind of case study. One from which you could learn a little more, and which might bear more resemblence to the real world. Which reminds me, on Tuesday we've got a guest lecturer from LBS coming in who apparantly is an expert in both the 'harvard case study method' and 'the snapple case'. Yes, that's right, this man is known for his ability to take a class through a single case study, thirty or so sides of A4 devoted to the manufacture, marketing and distribution of a range of soft drinks. I know Adam Smith said it was good, but isn't this level of specialisation getting a bit much?