Anglosphere not all good - The Edge
Transnational progressivism slammed - The Edge
Sustainable Development "palliative" - The Edge
What would you do with nine dead hijackers? - The Captain
Cuthbertson in two minds - shock - Conservative Commentary
Rate your politics - pretty graphics - Conservative Commentary
Say goodbye to mowing the lawn - Samizdata
Big Brother won't work - Mr Happy?

Over on Libertarian Samizdata Brian Micklethwait compares BT unfavourably with stationery supplier Viking Direct. He puts the difference down to regulation. I don't agree, the fact that BT is regulated and Viking unregulated is only one of the major differences between the two.

The first, and most obvious is that BT does a whole load more than Viking. Viking just sells things. OK, there are hell of a lot of products but each one has a code and if that's proving difficult just flick to the right page of the brochure. The salesman does not need any particular skills. BT, on the other hand, sells all sorts of different things to people in many different telecoms configurations. Some are domestic, some business. Some are existing customers, some with a rival. What I am saying is that BT faces far more permutations. A single call could be about just about anything. The problem is that you can't train every single member of staff to deal with every single issue. Thus you have to route calls, thus you need dialtones and bad music.

The second, is the business about Brian's 5 favourite numbers. He is of course, right, that one bit of BT does know (or could work out) what his 5 favourite numbers are but that does not mean that the bit that phoned up does.

So, why don't they tell one another? It sounds obvious which it is. It sounds easy which it is not. When executives start mooting projects like this other executives start saying "well, can't you just add this bit of data in? And this bit. And this bit" Pretty soon you are talking about a pretty big project with enormous databases and a lot of different departments and a lot of different computer systems. Pretty soon everything is getting very political, very complicated and very expensive. The computer industry has a name for this type of exercise: Customer Relationship Management, CRM. CRM is a relatively new discipline and is characterised by a expensive, long-term projects which often fail.

By the way, the difficulty that even private sector companies have in getting all (or even some) of the information in the same place at the same time is one of the reasons I am rather sanguine about the state's attempts to put all our information on computer. If the private sector finds it difficult, what chance the government?