Holiday season is there again, so many people go abroad for a holliday. With this, people start travelling with their phones, which is good for your connectivity but hurts many people's wallets pretty quickly, even when you think you are well-prepared. 

GSM Roaming is a great thing: it allows you to be contacted under your own number with your own phone wherever you are on the planet. It does come at its price though: you have to pay for it. Many people who travel frequently hate roaming prices. Some go as far as calling roaming charges a scam. I certainly am not a fan of roaming charges so I usually evade them by "borrowing" bandwith from nearby wireless access points.

Lately, under "some" presure of the European Commission, the roaming charges have been slashed by the European operators. To the European Commission, it was an important issue: being able to have an European Union without borders als means that phone respects the same principle. This pressure resulted in T-Mobile dropping its roaming charges by 80% from about 12 euro per megabyte to about 2,5 euro per megabyte. Vodafone did the same thing a couple of days later.

Even with these slashed priceplans, roaming is still too expensive to use abroad without consideration. Most plans have small tricks in them as connection charges (T-Mobile) or Block Rounding, which generally result in pretty significant cost then a connection is used only infrequent, for example for polling e-mail or refreshing RSS-feeds. Polling e-mail every 30 minutes can cost you to 2 euro's a day, without retrieving any e-mail at all. Sounds like small cash, but revieve some attachments and you quickly find out the bill starts running.

Looks like everybody should be happy travelling around Europe using cheap wireless internet. Not really. In fact I got an SMS from T-Mobile telling me:

Dear T-Mobile Customer,

Please be carefull with using mobile internet abroad. The costs are not covered in your subscription.

A very nice advice. Many people are accustomed to using mobile internet while travelling around their own country, forgetting that different rules apply when travelling abroad. So warning these people is nice, especially since it does get a lot of people into trouble. Although disabling GPRS is quite a challenge, people are at least warned.

There are other options for people: you can use a priceplans that promise unlimited data transfer. Problem with these plans is that people really expect that flat-fee really means flat-fee, regardless of limits or other legal stuff. Although this unlimited rarely means "without limits" in practice, when travelling the world one quickly finds out that one quickly is pretty limited by a contract and that you run a pretty steep tab rather quickly. A couple of weeks ago an IT-consultant watched some video and mp3's on his laptop, using his PDA as modem and his "unlimited" data plan. This resulted in a bill of about 50.000 euro. After some legal struggle it was reduced to about 400 euros. So that is a write-off of about 50.000 euro for this incident. That is a lot of money not being made here. So unlimited data plans aren't without limits.

So much for trading and travelling throughout Europe without limitation. That is the thing that still amazes me the most: I use both T-Mobile and Vodafone, two huge players in Europe, and I generally can roam using their own networks. They position themselves as European players, but as a customer I don't see any advantage comming from that. Yes I can use a T-Mobile/Vodafone network but still you have to triple-check if you don't use too much bandwith throughout a month otherwise you generate gigantic costs. What is the added value of using the "home" network in that scenario? Companies like Vodafone still consder 120Mb per month as unlimited when you are abroad. Try to pick up e-mail with some attachments when travelling and it is gone. In a time where a word-document is at least 250Kb, and 1 Mb when it contains any drawings, you can't be serious about a 120 Mb limit per month. Transparent cost throughout Europe, without any limitation, that is what I call added value from an European operator.

Posted on Monday 14 of July, 2008 [08:40:39 UTC]

In my book, DNV is a big organization. I have around 8000 colleagues spread around the globe in approximatly  200 offices. We are a true global company operating 24 hours a day. Normally me and my colleagues aren't bothered by this: our offices operate relatively independant and we communicate only if we have a cool project that are better suited for colleagues that belong to another office. So basically you get the upsides of a small company with the cool projects of a big one, with almost no downsides.

Today I discovered one downside of our company. One of my less intelligent colleagues abroad e-mailed basically the entire company that he was leaving us permanently. He mentioned that it actually wasn't his choice to leave and started to thank almost his entire office for the support during his brief working period at DNV. Unless you have won an academy award, there is no reason to thank people in such a public manner. There certainly is no reason to thank people when you are fired, because that is the obvious thing that happened. I can think of many reasons, but lack of intelligent behaviour is the first thing that comes to mind. Unless you are the CEO, there certainly is no reason to tell the entire company you are leaving.

This person did. He told the world. That results in one simple e-mail. unless you put the entire mailinglist in the TO-field instead of the BCC. That i actually this persons most stupid mistake.  Since the holliday season has started in our part of the world, a lot of out-of-office assistants are active. They will respond with a reply for each and every person on this huge list, warning us that they will not respond in a timely manner. This becomes a phenonom called "e-mail storm": huge clouds of e-mails of "valid" e-mail being generated by humans/systems about a subject. Luckily, I did not have to face all these out-of-office replies on my mobile since they ended up in one of my many junk-boxes (I am a fan of Server side e-mail filtering to keep my focus on important e-mail in my inbox). Since I only download these junk-boxes on my desktop, I was able to deal with this quite efficiently (select all, delete) as soon as my alert of my mailbox being full reached me. I thought that was the worst part of this story.

How wrong I was. There is a second wave comming. Some colleagues got aggravated by this e-mail. Some even got so aggravated that they started sending e-mails demanding they should be taken off this mailing-list, CC-ed to the entire mailinglist. First of all: they were e-mailed based on being member of "all employees in DNV in country X" mail-groups, so removal from all of these lists basically means you are fired. Secondly, by responding they contributed to these problems instead of letting it pass. So there it is, a tribute to human stupidity, like lemmings jointly jumping off a cliff, people started demanding to be taken off a list that didn't exist. A couple of hunderd people did that.

That wasn't it I am affraid. Then there was the bit more intelligent e-mails from people kindly asking all the previous e-mailers to stop e-mailing because they made the problem worse by e-mailing. Yes, that is the third wave. These people did not realize that they again were creating yet another e-mail in an already big flood. I didn't count them exactly, but I guess it was yet another couple of hunderd people doing that.

Unfortunatly, I am affected by these replies from the second and third wave. This is because they aren't an out-of-office reply and they also are directly sent to me, according to Exchange/Outlook. That is actually a huge problem with Exchange: if you are member of a mail-group it will treat you as an individual and not as one of the many group members. So all e-mails adressed to a group are treated as being adressed directly to you. Effectively any filter that blocks non-personal e-mail will fail unless you explicitly name the group and the sender didn't expand the group before sending.

Besides extremely long synchronization times, I was forced to deal with these e-mails on my mobile device. What a huge dissappointment that was. On a desktop, you can filter and then select all (the person in question added something to the subject I assume is something like "Farewell" in his local language). But on a mobile you have to select them one by one, deleting them one by one. A tedious job, but necessary when you want to precent your device and mailbox from flooding. In such cases a mobile device simply is not an ideal tool for the job, its' capabilities are too limited to do mass-selection and mass-deletion of e-mails.

At least someone has left a lasting impression when leaving the company.....

Posted on Monday 30 of June, 2008 [22:40:35 UTC]

My business phone uses Vodafone, which is the second largest telco in the Netherlands. They have pretty decent coverage, but they do have their trouble, which I found out today.

It started with recieving a voicemail message. This happens more often. but this time it was almost a day late. Strange thing is thaI had dialed my voicemail a couple of hours before I recieved the SMS, and there was nothing there. It was literally that my voicemail was delayed for a day. That is extremely annoying because generally when people call, they have some pressing matter. As was with this case since somebody wanted to move a meeting. Not returning such a voicemail does lead to logistical problems.

And then the trouble really started...

First my e-mail synchronization failed. Vodafone did not accept my password for GPRS anymore. It did result in an error message every 30 minutes. Annoying, but not critical in my life: I can live without e-mail and internet.

Then I noticed that I couldn't make any phone calls anymore. No matter how I dialed the number was rejected. I even gave the device a Soft Reset to get it going. That usually gets the hardware back into shape. It didn't. I turned the device completely off and turned it on again. It didn't help either. With a couple of phone calls to make after a long day of meetings I wasn't looking forward to making those calls tomorrow.

I assumed my phone hardware had an issue so I switched the SIM cards of my two phones. Amazingly after that trick both phones worked fine. I made my calls and switched the SIM back again to their original phones. Strangely enough, my business phone broke down again. Only logical explanation was that the phone in combination of the SIM/Network had a problem. Would be extremely logical except for the fact that I carry around two identical phones.

The solution had to be in the difference between my personal phone and my business phone. One of the major differences between them is that my business phone is connected to the Exchange server and it will look for it as soon as it boots. My personal phone connects to the internet only once every hour. After disabling the GPRS modem connection I could make phone calls. Somehow the dialog of GPRS triggered something on the phone or the network to reject my phone completely.

After disabling the GPRS, I made a call to our helpdesk. Vodafone had "some minor trouble" in their network as they called it, which produced this kind of behaviour. To be honest, I am a bit dissapointed by their lack of understanding the importance of not being able to make calls.....

Posted on Tuesday 24 of June, 2008 [22:32:44 UTC]

A couple of days ago Apple introduced the version 2 of their Iphone, along with its Exchange interface, making it ready for business applications. I am not going to talk about the fact that competative platforms (Windows Mobile and Symbian) offer more functionality and are a better platform for independent software developers. What I am going to talk about is the things I see as important shortcommings of the Windows Mobile OS were Apple has done a better job for us, the user. As an IT professional I see a clear common theme in all shortcommings: Microsoft is feature driven while Apple is quality driven.

As a log term Windows Mobile user (almost 10 years), you learn to cope with all these little quircks in an operating system. You are conditioned to its ways to the extreme: eventually odd behaviour becomes default way of working. It requires a fundamentally different implementation to help pinpoint the idiocracies that were introduced during these years.

A huge learning point for Microsoft, in my humble opinion, is that build quality is more important than features. The iPhone does not have many features. But what it does, it does very well. One of the best examples of lacking quality is memory management: a core element of any operating system and a job you have to do really well in order to prevent a device from crashing continously. Apples' approach is as simple as it is effective: you have one application running and the rest is unloaded from memory. Windows Mobile is a multitasking operating system (allowing multiple applications to run simultanously) and memory management is supposed to unload applications automatically when needed, requiring no user intervention. In reality is buggy at best. In fact it is so buggy that the biggest distributor (HTC) has crippled the OS to the extent that multitasking is almost absent. As a response to this, Microsoft introduced a bandaid by adding yet another application/feature to kill memory hogging applications. Fixing memory management would be the hard road, adding nothing to the "new features" list, but also the high quality one.

A major point for me is perfection and consistency. When you are a fanatic GTD fan, you also plan tasks in the future. Windows Mobile 6 has undergone a change in the way they deal with future tasks: they considered future tasks to be active as well. Whether you agree or disagree with this is not the point. The point is that the totals on your today screen do not count future tasks as active, while the task view does show the future taks. This kind of inconsistency the result of sloppy applied change management procedures and it is confusing to the end user.

Another point is consistency. Usability experts always point out that consistency is a primairy requirement for usability. With Apple, there is only one way of doing something, and this is implemented consistently throughout the entire user interface. With Windows Mobile, you will find all possible ssolutions. A simple operation like "cut-copy-paste" is implemented in four different ways in the OS:

• In Word and Excel it is part of the main menu when you use the right softkey, as well as the possibility to use it during tap-and-hold for all actions
• In the Messenger, Contacts, tasks and Calendar application, you can paste through tap-and-hold, and the rest is accessible through the right softkey under the "edit" submenu.
• In Internet Explorer you can use the "sub-menu "edit" behind the right softkey or tap-and-hold.
• In the inbox, you can only use tap-and-hold

This is a good way to confuse a user. This kind of ambigious implementations have grown into the OS but are never corrected version after version. Apple hos done a much better job in that respect.

Another point is the usability with one finger. The iPhone is really designed to handle that. Windows Mobile was never really designed to handle that. Sometimes people say an application is finger-friendly, but it never seems to reach the level of true finger oriented navigation. To me, the best example is the "Favorites" section of Mobile Internet Explorer. It is based on the same metaphor as its desktop brother. However, when using a finger you don't have the same precision as a mouse. The D-Pad sounds like an alternative but isn't: you have to scroll down through each and every submenu before you end at the bottom. Nobody ever thought about using a same look like the program files (showing them as a big icons) or the Apple way.

These are just examples, but they illustrate the symptoms found in a challenged product. What you get is a Windows Mobile phone that has a lot of rough edges, I just mentioned the most prominent ones, while you actually want a phone that simply works. It simply isn't the perfection in the details you want. Problem is that Microsoft has a thrive for adding features to an already overloaded product, instead of polishing what is already there.

Like a marriage, long term users come to accept the flaws of their device. However, novice users may not be so patient and choose the new kid on the block that does work as expected out of the box. In order to compete, Microsoft has to change its mental model from the "adding features" attitude to "perfecting what is there" attitude quickly.

Posted on Monday 16 of June, 2008 [22:59:00 UTC]

The company I work for is looking to reduce its environmental footprint on a global scale. We could plant some trees and have a good feeling about ourselves, but that is only small incremenatal change that will not help us towards a sustainable future. We have to do more than that. This is challenging since real change requires us employees to stop doing things, change doing things or make us do new things. True reduction of environmental impact requires us, the employees, to start changing our behaviour on a daily basis.

As a company of around 8000 employees globally, most of them being modern nomads, our biggest environmental impact probably is travelling. On average in the BeNeLux offices, we travel between 25.000 to 40.000 kilometers per employee per year, depening on the role. That is a lot of gasoline being burned. Although travelling is a necessity of our job, we do think we can make it more environmentally friendly.

As one of the many countries, we started to look to reduce our footprint on a local scale. One of the things we can't do, given our company culture, is force people to change their behaviour. So what we are looking for, in order to change peoples' behaviour, is policies and stimuli inside these policies. It is easier to enable greener options and stimulate their use, than to punish people for being environmental criminals.

First point we looked at was the absolute necessity of travelling. Teleconferencing for meetings is a valid alternative for many meetings, reducing the travel alltogether. Although it isn't the same as being in the room, it does save tremendous time and energy. Anither option s working from home. Allowing people to work from home was already accepted practice, but stimulating it further is something that does require some trust in employees. By stimulating teleconferencing and teleworking, we actually will save both the environment and money.

Economics and environment seem to conflict when travel is unavoidable, at least at first glance. Leasing greener cars will only help a small bit, making people drive smaller cars also helps, but real green travelling comes from not taking the car in the first place. This was something that our previous employee guidlines do not seem to allow. Aside some exotic employees (of which I am one of them) we never considered public transport as a structural option for all employees. Given, some employees carry along so much equipment that public transport is completely infeasable, but the remaining group is significant.

Getting people into public transport sounds economically infeasible, especially when they use it once every month or so and also own a company lease car. However, the math goes on beyond just adding the train ticket to the expense sheet. Public transport generally is a bit less efficient than a car. On the positive side travelling to major cities might be much faster by train than by car. Another advantage is that it saves the cost of parking. But the major winner here is that people can continue to work while travelling.

This working while travelling quickly turns around the table in favor of public transport. There is some controversy here. It is in fact the "effeciency vs. effectiveness" debate. Driving your own car to and from your appointments might be the easiest and fastest way of getting around, it certainly requires less planning, but it isn't the most effective one. Although people try to work while driving a car, both activities require significant attention and thus collide. Public transport is less effecient: it requires more planning and generally it is a bit slower and less flexible. However, you can almost fully focus on the job at hand.

Allowing people to travel by public transport when work allows can save tremendous amounts of money. A study at a Dutch consulting company has shown that even when people are billable for 25% of their travel time, they are making money for the company instead of spending it. They earned about $1 per kilometer travelled by working, instead of spending $50 by driving a car. One of the largest banks in the Netherlands took the same approach and saved 2,6 million kilometers per year, where only 21% of the employees actively participated.

To help people work while travelling on public transport, we are considering supplying them with GPRS cards. This will allow them to handle e-mail and do other work as well, making us more productive and keep us happy as well (remember the 75% of non-productive time).

Our new policies can only open doors, me and my fellow employees will have to step through them on our own. It requires a change of mind for both employees and management. We all have to learn that there are other alternatives to our normal patterns.

Posted on Wednesday 04 of June, 2008 [22:33:58 UTC]