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I'm against anyone who gets too xenophobic or protective of "jobs in my country". Jobs should be filled according to the needs of a company and all aspects that lead to the definition of "needs" should be taken into account. While I am staunchly loyal to the UK, if a job is better filled outside of it then I see that as a problem with the UK if it can not justify that job being offered here rather than any other country. if another country can offer a company a better package, then that is good for that country. It could be Wales, Ireland, France, India, USA or Australia (surely that is why Robbie has gone back home). This means, in my opinion, those who work outside these shores and deliver some service back to the UK were picked because they are the person for the job, especially when they have to deliver to multiple countries!! Working for Microsoft has made me realise just how multi-cultural the world is and how diverse the talent pool can be. In my job I have worked with people from...

I saw this and just thought it was very silly. I do need to point out that this is a personal opinion and not one that represents Microsoft or that of its employees. However I do think that this idea ranks right up there with "everyone should write their own software" which an certain Open Source advocate once said to me. So let me get this right, the reasons why people like pre-loaded software are: Machines can be turned on and used OEM supplied software is supported by the same people who supplied the hardware, so one stop show OEM software is great value and often less than retail software Drivers and add-on software are all provided in the box so no searching around to set the system up More tools in the box from 3rd party vendors No technical knowledge required to set up machine The reasons why OEMs like pre-loaded software are: Machine will be usable as soon as turned on making happy customers Easier to support a known installation configuration Financial incentive from some 3rd party software...

I just had to share with you the back end of my weekend and why it made Monday such a disaster. All was well on Sunday, I went sailing, then about 4pm my back decided to jump back into the land of extreme pain. OK, so 1 member of the household down. About 8pm Lizzy, my 1 year old, started throwing up... not good... and it carried on through the night. One rug in the bin, 5+ changes of night clothes for her and more. All with me unable to do much due to back pain and my wife phobic about people being sick. Two members of the household down. Next morning, we get some quality sleep from about 6am until about 7:30am when Molly, my eldest, tells us she is not feeling well and she has an upset tummy and a temperature. We decide that she is not faking it, so off from school for her and now food for a while. Three members down and one left standing. About 7pm Mel, my wife, goes to put something in the bin, trips over the rug and slips. "Ouch" she said (and a few more colourful words too), took off her rings...

This is a rant and it is my opinion and does not reflect that of Microsoft or others - It is my Opinion! From 1992 to 1995 I had to write document converters - I had to pick apart binary file formats and translate them to another format. It was hard work and I JUST WISHED people would create a largely encompassing standard for documents that was documented so I did not have to do all the work myself. Role forward to today, Office is still the prominent document format (which is now documented on http://msdn.microsoft.com ), but there is a new kid in town that encompass everything that an Office document is and more. This is the Open XML document format. People have cried for years that they wanted the Office Document standard to become more than a defacto standard, they wanted it to become a format an open standard. It was always going to be large, but to cover all the features and functions available in Office, it would have to be. There is no point in the standard being something different to that used in Office...

OK, so this is really simple. I'm off on my holidays for two weeks and I won't be updating the site (I do have some posts that will appear, but nothing will be topical as I won't be writing anything during that time). If you want to make MY life easier and have your comment posted for others to see, before you post a comment to the blog, go create an account, sign in, and then post a comment - unless it comes under scrutiny from the spam or rude word filter it will get published. Thanks - I hope you all have a lovely time on your holidays this summer (is it summer??). ttfn David

One of my University lecturers help at the London Science Museum to build the Babbage difference engine around twenty years ago. Engines like this which is very mechanical based are obviously simple ways to implement functions of modern cpus in nano technology. It was a a nice surprise to see the article " Antique engines inspire nano chip " where we see that this is progressing. “The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers. ”What we are proposing is a new type of computing architecture that is only based on nano-mechanical elements,” said Professor Robert Blick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the journal paper. “We are not going to compete with high-speed silicon, but where we are competitive is for all of those mundane applications where you need microprocessors which can be slow and cheap as well.” ttfn David Technorati Tags: Nano Technology , Babbage , Difference Engine

While I was at Star Wars Celebration Europe I managed to spend quite a bit of my unearned bonus on bits of "art". Some I will put pride of place on my wall, others will go in a tube because I don't have enough wall space. Here is what I bought (I just photographed them and then used a tool to remove the perspective from the photos, but don't expect print quality images): From Steven D Anderson the "Dark Avenger" poster, signed by him and one of 250 (11 / 250) and the little post card of the two ladies with blasters. Next up was Joe Corroney - I love his work especially since he also does some of the Star Wars comics. He has a web site http://JoeCorroney.com and his Star Wars blog can be found at http://blogs.starwars.com/joecorroney/70 . As you can see from the pictures on the left, I was lucky enough to not only get number 20 of 250 from his collection, but also the ORIGINAL PENCIL drawing that made this great poster. WOW, amazing and top. This is my best treasure from this event....

They are like chalk and cheese when you 1st meet them. I'm not going to say how, but read their blogs and I know that you will know what I mean. Both have good business sense and both are nice to people they like (I count my self in this camp most of the time). Vlad is a little more outgoing with people he doesn't like , while Karl is more of an organisation basher when they do bad (I'm just sorry it was Microsoft). Both are amazing people and business people (yes, both, not just one or the other) and since they are over the pond, I am less likely to see them with any frequency compared to the many, many, many people this side of the pond. There are others, Susan B, Dean and even Jeff although we never got much time to talk. I hope to personally say "bye for now" to people in the UK. Karl recently said some amazing things about me and I wanted to publicly say thank-you. If you have met him, you will know that his is not the loudest man in the room, yet has insight enough to make everyone...

On Saturday, 7/07/07, MSN sponsored Live Earth, The Concert for a Climate in Crisis . This 24-hour global event featured more than 150 of the world’s top bands performing on all seven continents, with concerts in Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Istanbul, London, New York, and other cities around the world. There have been many, many critics of the Live Earth concert ("all the pop stars traveling leaves a huge carbon footprint" , "there was not 2 billion people watching", "why should we believe the pop stars", " climate change is not real, not even the scientists can agree "), but even if the world is not about to blow up, surely being better to the planet is good for us, great for our children and sometimes a matter of survival for other people and animals in the more extreme climates. If you have missed everything that Live Earth was about, go have a look at the SoapBox video here . An interesting blog on the whole should we shouldn't we explore these types of events can be...

Congratulations to Susanne on her impending job move. She is the best UK SMB Girl out there :-) She often keeps Microsoft straight with her views and I will always be grateful for her honest conversation and being a good friend. Anyway, as always you can go to her blog, but here is an extract. Note, she is still the UK SMB Girl and not just a Westcoast employee, so remember to treat her as a person and not just a support line for Westcoast. But you can’t take SMB out of the girl! July is going to be a busy time for me, I’m off to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to speak at the Small Business Symposium (hope to see you there!) and I’m also off to pastures new in terms of my career. After being with Readycrest for seven years (well really since I was 13 when the sales office was my bedroom!) I’m taking a change in career and will be working with Westcoast Distribution as their Microsoft Channel Development Manager with a specific focus on the SBSC community. I’m not going to talk much more about Westcoast...

I'm obviously in a little bit of a carefree mood as I am going to offer my personal opinion on one of the Internet greats. Google has built an amazing advertising business through search, but their company slogan of "Do no evil" seems to be more "deny any evil doing". Lets be honest, Google is a business, like any other who's primary aim is to live longer, grow bigger and feed shareholders. I have seen a few things that Google do that I don't like. I don't like them reading my e-mails, the meta data of the documents I have, my every browser move. These have been discussed by others many times before, but this week I have seen two storied that smacked of "sorry we got it wrong... its not our fault". I remember the reaction when I said sorry on the blog and it seems that a little bit of that humble pie is needed elsewhere (and more at Microsoft obviously). The two areas I am thinking about are their Checkout tool and their mapping tools. The Register, who I have had...

Hello everyone - I'm back, as they say. I managed to fill my inbox while away, so stopped getting mail on Friday. I do have lots still to process, so it will be a little slow. If you want to see the photos, pop along to http://uksbsguy.com/photos/sailing/default.aspx ttfn David

Now I have never been good at expressing things that get under my skin, so if this seems awkward, so be it. There was once a man who helped invent the modern day database. In doing so he gave me a career in computers that has changed my life, and countless others. I have had a couple of meetings with Jim and was always in awe of the thoughts and processing that went on in his mind. He could stretch from super computing problems to how data should be made more useable in small businesses. In the one day we spoke about the complete database needs of the UK for all health matters - diagnosis through to information sharing and then discussed how data should be shared and sliced in a 6 man business - and he still ran rings around me, even though 8 years ago I was designing and benchmarking databases up to 170TB and I have been focusing deeply on small business needs for the last four. If you don't know about Jim, have a look at 426 documents that reference him in the acedemic search or read what he was looking at on...