Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT

Published: 01/09/2009 | Last Revision: 07/07/2010

Silly Season

Summer is traditionally the Silly Season, when news-starved pressrooms and overheated industry executives get carried away. As autumn leaves start to fall, Short Cuts looks back at an entertaining few months. Headline of the season was the admirably direct “Investors: Steve Ballmer’s a Failure”, which was especially eye-catching given that it appeared on the website of MSNBC, which is half-owned by Microsoft Corp (CEO: Steve Ballmer). This seemed roughly equivalent to The Times running a “Rupert Murdoch’s an old fool” story, which even we’d say was taking editorial independence a bit far. It turned out to be a demolish-the-proposition item, listing a few of Mad Dog’s shortcomings before concluding that he’s nevertheless a “smart, ruthless competitor who has a record for winning over the very long term.” However the turnaround was five paragraphs in, meaning that the average Web site visitor, who reads two paragraphs at most, will have gone away thinking that MSNBC considers Steve a wuss. Perhaps someone should have a word with the Redmond newsroom.

HP hard men

How female EDS employees must look under HP’s strict new dress code. Or we may have got that wrong.

Last year we wondered whether the ultra-corporate EDS might be a bit too tough for (relatively) laid-back Californian outfit HP to digest. In fact HP’s management seems to have been rampaging through its new acquisition like Rambo on steroids, slashing pay and benefits like there’s no tomorrow (while presumably offering no tomorrow as the alternative option). Computerweekly.com headlined this as “EDS staff face life-changing pay cuts”, which seemed fair enough given that the cuts were 50 per cent, even if the source did turn out to be “one email” from a disgruntled EDS employee, and HP was only trying to make EDS and HP salary levels roughly comparable (which says something for either EDS or HP salary levels). The cruelty may not, however, have ended there. One rumour we heard was that HP were resurrecting EDS’s infamous dress code, only this time in reverse, obliging women employees to wear beards and men pony-tails (or it might be the other way round). Either way, you read it here first. Roll on Autumn.

No laughing matter

Second best headline of the season was Computerworld.com’s “Microsoft banned from selling Word”. As they pointed out, this sounded like a joke, but it was in fact an injunction issued by the Eastern District Court in Texas. The plaintiff was Canadian firm i4i, which owns a patent on “separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document” and claimed Microsoft had pinched the idea in its Open XML document format.

If enforced, the injunction would only prevent Microsoft from selling versions of Word that support the docx format, so the whole thing could be a plot by UI extremists to get Office 2007’s much-loathed ribbon toolbar off the shelves. On the other hand the “separate manipulation” thing sounds a bit like the XML evangelists’ “separating content from presentation” mantra, so i4i may just have patented Web 2.0 and we’re all in trouble. However that would be a bit like the time BT tried to enforce a patent on the hyperlink, a claim it quietly dropped after finding itself the hate figure du jour of the entire Internet community.

Keeping up appearances

Poor Microsoft got itself into hot water yet again recently when it was caught doctoring a marketing photo to replace an African-American gentleman with someone of an, er, whiter disposition for the Polish market.

Here at Short Cuts we support Microsoft, and know how tough it can be adapting to the norms of different cultures. Accordingly we’d like to offer our own piece of picture-editing, designed to present a more acceptable image of the company in many of the world’s markets (i.e. all of them). Feel free to use it, guys.