[Yes, it's a re-hash of this rant. ed.]

As a computer geek, I’m supposed to be suffused with enthusiasm and excitement over the features of the latest software. By rights, I should be the one carrying the techno-tablets down from the mountain, telling you how the latest in frobnalising ephemetry is going to change everyone’s life. I’m the one supposed to show you where to sign up and what to do with it once you’ve got it.

I have a confession to make: I hate most software.

90% of software is crap. As author Theodore Sturgeon famously said, that’s because 90% of everything is crap.

I save a particular loathing for word processors. For any but the simplest tasks, their interfaces are utterly ridiculous. I haven’t liked a word processing interface since WordPerfect circa version 5, which ran on DOS (remember DOS?). If I had my own way, I’d still be using it.

Why, after over 20 years of development, do word processors suck so badly? Mostly, it’s because of the WYSIWYG approach. What You See Is What You Get, besides being one of the most ghastly marketing acronyms to see the light of day in the digital era, is ultimately a lie. It was a lie back in the early 1990s when it first hit the mainstream, and it remains a lie today. The fact of the matter is that trying to do structuring, page layout and content creation at the same time is a mug’s game. Even on a medium as well understood as paper, it’s just too hard to control all the variables with the tools available and still have a comprehensible interface.

Ask yourself, how many times have you had to reprint a report, just because you have to hit ENTER a few more times just to get a title or a table onto the right page? How many pointless hours have you spent keeping a manually generated table of contents up to date? Make a change on page 3, and now you have to re-calculate the page numbering on the entire thing.

The real sin that word processors are guilty of is not that they’re trying to do WYSIWYG – okay it is that they’re trying to do WYSIWYG, but they way they go about it makes it even worse. Rather than insisting that the user enter data, structure it and then lay it out, they cram everything into the same step, short-circuiting each of those tasks, and in some cases rendering them next to impossible to achieve.

The concept of a workflow seems to be lost on software designers.

Learning how to write, then structure, then format a document (or even just doing each through its own interface) is easier to accomplish than the all-in approach we use today. For whatever reason, though, we users are deemed too dumb to create a document without knowing what it’s going to look like right now, and for our sins, that’s what we’ve become. And so we are stuck with word processors that are terrible at structuring and page layout as well as being second-rate text authoring interfaces. They do nothing well, and many things poorly, in no small part because of the inherent complexity of trying to do three things at once.

Advanced users know this already: You can apply styles to a document which, in theory at least, allow you to avoid this kind of thing. But nobody takes the time to teach you this, because, honestly, they want to create the impression that all you have to do to create a professional document is to start writing.

Ask yourself: Which is more important – the words you write or the font they’re in?

It doesn’t help that every word processor’s technical implementation is poor. The Word 2003 document format is little better than a binary dump of memory at a particular moment in time. That means that even if you do apply styles and proper formatting, they’re still prone to getting corrupted, or interpreted differently from one version of the software to the next.

There’s no changing any of this, of course. The horse is miles away, and anyway the barn burned down in the previous millennium. We’ll be dealing with stupid formatting issues for years to come. We will continue to be unable to properly structure a document past about the 80th percentile, which is worse than not at all. We will continue to deal with visual formatting as our only means to infer context and structure, leaving us with very little capacity to do anything useful with the bloody things except to print them out and leave them on someone’s desk.

We could be doing so much more. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to take a bunch of documents gathered during the course of a piece of work and simply dump them into a database? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could share the contents of a folder on the Internet in such a way that everything is automagically organised, searchable and yes, even moderately useful to others?

It’s possible, you know, even easy. Or it would be easy if we could just have software that didn’t make it easier to ignore useful formatting tools than to use them.

Doing proper formatting is not rocket science. It’s a simple matter of taking a little time to set a few properties before you start writing. Once you’ve got decent styles, you have them for life. From then on, if you want to use a heading, you don’t have to change the font size, then bold your text, then tab it in. One little click will do all that for you.

Much of the web works this way. And despite the fact that most early web authoring tools tried to turn themselves into word processors (somehow they imagined that their warts would be seen as beauty marks), the tide has since turned against them. These days, style and content are understood to be two different things.

If I had my way, we’d just stop using word processors at all. We’d start doing everything on the web and never print again. I’m more than half serious about this, actually. At least on the Web, the idea that content and presentation are separate things isn’t heresy. At least on the Web, we can archive, search, contextualise, comment, plan, structure and collaborate without having to wade through steaming piles of cruft all the time.

At least on the Web, we can choose which steaming piles we step into.

I wish I could start recommending that people stop using Word as an authoring medium. There are far better, simpler tools for every task, and the word processor has been appropriate for exactly none of them for too long now.

Sometimes you have to destroy the document in order to save it.

Half an hour’s walk down a muddy mountain trail lies Ranwadi School. It recently received nearly a million Australian dollars in upgrades. The school has always been a beacon to PENAMA province’s brightest students. Now, due to strong support, solid administration and high quality resources, Ranwadi is stronger than ever.

I walked down to the school one rainy morning to provide assistance with a computer that had been acting up. A spyware infection had damaged some system files and the machine could no longer start. I spent about an hour re-installing the operating system software on the machine, and everything was fine.

Well, it should have been, anyway….

When we restarted the machine to complete the configuration, the software – purchased overseas by the donor – needed to be ‘activated’. It said it needed to contact the company that manufactured it in order to make sure that the software hadn’t been pirated.

Fair enough. As there is only one telephone line in the campus – it’s the only one for several kilometres – we unplugged the machine, carried it to the admin building, connected it there and started the activation process.

Nothing worked. The software just didn’t understand where it was. It wanted to use the local network to connect to the Internet, but there was no local network. If we told it to use the modem, it wanted to dial the US directly. It apologised for the fact that this was patently impossible, but gave us no alternative.

In the end, a little ingenuity and some extra hardware saved the day. We dialed up to the Internet through someone else’s laptop, then connected the PC to it via a ‘fake’ network built from odds and ends lying about. This was just enough to allow the newly installed operating system to phone home and ensure its corporate masters that it was being used in accordance with its license terms.

In all, the repair process took us a few hours. The costs in terms of time lost were somewhat greater, however, because the computer had sat unused for some days until someone came along with enough experience to diagnose and fix the problem. It would have been longer if I hadn’t happened along. We also disrupted work in the administration office for about an hour as we futzed about with cables and rigged up our ‘kiaman network’.

I can’t help but feel a little nervous about the fragility of the setup. Last August, in a similarly-titled column, I argued that we need to find hardware that suits our particular needs here in Vanuatu. The same is true of the software that runs on these machines.

Vanuatu can be roughly divided into three categories: First come Vila and Santo, with a fairly healthy (if modest) local economy, and therefore very good access to power, telephone and Internet. Next, the provincial centres of Lakatoro, Saratamata, and the Lenakel/Isangel area are each improving markedly in terms of power supply and telephone services. It’s expected that they will see reliable Internet access before long. Low levels of economic activity mean that access to these resources is not universal, but at least they exist.

The last section consists of the rest of Vanuatu – the islands and villages where 80% of the population reside. Power is only intermittently available, often only by burning costly and hard-to-obtain fuel to power unreliable generators. Telephone service is expensive, relative to income, and difficult to access. The Internet is a pipe dream.

Improving communications for people in Vila and Santo can be done fairly easily, because these towns have a great deal in common with towns throughout the developing world. Models developed elsewhere can be copied and pasted here with only nominal adaptation. The government and its private sector partners have demonstrated their commitment to this, and we’ll soon see the first fruits of their labours.

The provincial centres of Lakatoro, Saratamata and Isangel present some challenges. The problem of improving communications services here can be attacked two ways: We can invest disproportionate amounts of money and resources into their development in an effort to bring them up to the same level of economic, or we can tailor-make a series of scaled-down, incremental measures that will provide improvements on a gradual but more cost-efficient basis.

The first course is the one taken by Canada and the US during their development period. With little regard for cost, they made it a national priority to provide communications to every single household in the nation. The wisdom of such a commitment has been borne out by the vast increase in economic activity that resulted, providing more than commensurate return on the investment.

But Vanuatu has only a tiny fraction of the resources that these nascent giants had at the time. An alternative might be to take a more tactical approach, to build a simpler communications infrastructure based on commodity hardware that meets the present need, and which can be upgraded when the time is right.

The development challenges at the village level are of the same nature as those experienced in our second-category towns, only they are more pronounced in every way. So pronounced, indeed, that we can’t contemplate huge North American-style infrastructure works nationwide. Even a comprehensive roll-out of low-cost, basic communications will prove a challenge to all concerned.

So why, then, do we assume that what’s good for Vila is good for Lalwari? Why do we try to use the same software on the same PCs, with the same power requirements and the same support needs as we do in Vila? Not to put too fine a point on it, this approach will never work. Not, that is, unless we find our way to making a massive investment in rural infrastructure at immense cost.

The typical argument provided to justify this one-size-fits-all approach is that we don’t have the special knowledge and skills to stray from the beaten path. Fair enough, but if we accept this argument, we should accept as well that we don’t have knowledge, skills or resources enough to stay on it, either. When even the most trivial problem can render a computer unusable for days down in Ranwadi, how can we ever hope to keep one running in Lalwari?

The simple answer is that we can’t – at least, not using the tools we currently have at hand. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t run computers in Lalwari, either. We only need to accept that the knowledge and skills we need are special, appropriate to our unique situation.

And make no mistake, the right tools exist. There are flourishing communities on the Internet who daily share their experience and knowledge concerning development in areas every bit as challenging as Lalwari. They use software and operating systems that have been tried and tested in these areas, whose usefulness, robustness and supportability is proven.

Most importantly, this software doesn’t create silly barriers to its own users by demanding to ‘phone home’ to the mother company by means unavailable anywhere but in the developed world. The same tools that work for us in the village can work with few if any changes in everywhere else. If we work from the bottom up, we actually can make one size fit all of us.

Microsoft is not the only company to come to the sudden realisation that there are about 5 billion people out there who don’t buy their product. Many major IT corporations have taken a look at the mature European and North American markets and decided to begin developing markets elsewhere in the world.

It’s a great opportunity for them. Junior and intermediate managers trying to make a name for themselves are leading the exploration. Rather than navigate the shark-infested waters of corporate HQ, they’re establishing new territories, trying out new tactics and creating new opportunities for themselves and their customers.

This is not a bad thing in and of itself. But it does need to be understood.

The world of IT is undergoing the same shift in emphasis and momentum as industrialism underwent in the late 19th Century. Having reached critical mass in the developed world, technology was exported to the developing world, most notably into India, Japan and, to a lesser degree, China. They profited immensely, but the social cost was high.

It was largely due to technological mastery that the great colonial powers managed to control huge parts of the globe. Their communications and logistical capabilities were well beyond anything their opponents could muster, and their industrialised military ensured that they dominated wherever they set foot.

In fairness, this latest excursion into the ‘wilds’ of the developing world is much more benign than the conquests of the 19th century. Nonetheless, the goals are the same: expansion of business opportunities and profits through the creation of new products and markets.

It’s not necessary – or possible – to pass judgement on the process as a whole. Regardless of how we might feel about it, it’s happening now, and no one can stop it. This strategic change in approach offers Vanuatu a valuable opportunity and at one and the same time creates challenges that need to be understood and addressed.

Let’s unwrap the Microsoft offer then, and try to tease out the implications….

Low-Cost Software Licenses

Affordable software licenses are a very good thing. Something that many people don’t realise is that breaking a license agreement by installing pirate software is just as illegal in Vanuatu as it is anywhere else in the world. You can get away with it for now, but that will change. Besides, it’s only right that people should receive payment for their work.

But what software would Education be getting? The official answer is that it would be for cut-down versions of Windows and Office, which would be missing some features that people have come to rely on. As for server licenses, which are many times more expensive than client software, the only thing the Microsoft would say was that they would ‘look into it.’

A particularly sticky issue is scope: How long will Microsoft continue to offer these cheap licenses? Would Education end up paying tomorrow for something that is free today? The issue of perpetual licensing was discussed, without any commitment from Microsoft.
These licenses would be available to schools and other educational facilities, but not to the Ministry itself, nor any related administrative offices. The cost of integrating central systems with these new PCs and servers was not discussed.

Free Hardware

The Microsoft representative spoke of a remarkably ambitious plan to purchase ‘hundreds’ of new PCs and servers for Malapoa College, VIT and other institutions, to install Microsoft software on them, to provide training and support for years. There was limited discussion, however, about support issues, technical capacity of existing staff and the carrying capacity of Vanuatu’s ICT capacity as a whole.

Other unanswered questions included our rural schools’ ability to run PCs at all, issues of Internet access or any kind of communications, for that matter. There was no detail available concerning the actual use of these computers. How would they be integrated into the existing curriculum? And what about service and repair?

The issue of exclusivity was also not discussed in detail. If Microsoft provides the hardware, will there be any limitations on what gets installed? What if we decide to use Firefox and not Internet Explorer? What if we want to integrate the OLPC laptop in with these systems? Contracts with other countries have required the exclusive use of Microsoft products, a condition that would certainly prove far too restrictive for Vanuatu’s unique requirements.

A New Colonialism

Most significantly of all, the issues of freedom, self-determination and appropriate technologies were not on the table at all. Global corporatism is very much the ‘New World Order’ described by George Bush senior in the late 1980s. It’s not necessary to like it or hate it, but it is both healthy and wise for people in Vanuatu to consider what this new colonialism means.

People today are wiser in the ways of the world than they were. They are better positioned to determine their own fate, and they are better equipped to achieve it. A more positive, less overtly dominating global environment also means that we have a great deal more leverage than we did before. We can effectively pick and choose which elements of this new world order we want, or where the choice is compulsory, we can at least have some say in how things get done in our corner of the world.

This offer from Microsoft is generous, and Vanuatu would do well to consider it carefully. But there’s no need for us to accept it whole hog and without first making sure that every aspect of it will work well for us today and continue to work well for us in the future.