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Please find below an interesting article found on the BBC’s IT site.

• Author Robert Peston
• 26 Mar 07, 08:55 AM

Dear Bill Gates

First, the apology. Having complained here on 6 February that your new Vista operating system was driving me bonkers, it would have been polite to give you an update before now.

And had I been a little less self-obsessed, I would have commiserated with you for the wobble in your share price a few weeks ago when your chief executive warned that Wall Street’s estimates of revenues from Vista in the coming year were over the top (though analysts still expect Vista to generate comfortably over $15bn of sales in the year from June 2007).

But in delaying my progress report, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I assumed that Vista would soon become compatible with the assorted tools of my trade, so I could write you a belated note of congratulation.

In fact my Vista experience has gone from bad to worse. One of your engineers has informed me that my HP iPAQ PocketPC will never be compatible with Vista, even though the software it runs is Microsoft software. Hey ho. That’s an expensive and serviceable bit of kit written off prematurely.

Your engineer has however held out the tantalising prospect that Olympus may produce new drivers such that I would eventually be able to transfer sound files from my digital voice recorder to my new Vista laptop. But so far, those drivers are proving a bit elusive and my digital recorder may also become redundant.

But as economists say, there’s no point in obsessing over spilt milk. However, here’s what almost sent me over the edge this weekend.

I installed Office XP on my new laptop, and have been puzzled and irked that Outlook will not save sign-on passwords. It means I have to type in my passwords every time I check my e-mail accounts for new mail.

For weeks I’ve been investigating possible fixes to this annoying glitch. But yesterday I came across an explanation from someone called the Microsoft AppCompat Guy, on Microsoft’s discussion forum for “General Windows Vista Development Issues”.

This is what AppCompat Guy says: “This was a difficult deliberate choice. During the development of Vista, it was discovered that the password storage algorithm used by Outlook was too weak to protect your data from future, potential attacks. Both the security and application compatibility teams decided that protecting your data outweighed the inconvenience of having to retype your passwords. As the appcompat representative, I can assure you this was not a decision we took lightly… ”

So just to be clear, Microsoft has created a new operating system that isn’t properly compatible with a best-selling, still perfectly useable version of its own software. Which of course provides quite a powerful incentive for me to spend up to £99.99 on upgrading to Microsoft Outlook 2007 – except that in my current mood, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.

In a way you’re to be congratulated. Vista should provide a significant boost to Microsoft’s cash flow, from sales of the basic operating system and sales of new versions of other Microsoft software, like Outlook, that are presumably designed to work brilliantly with it. Also there’ll be incremental revenue for the whole computer industry, as customers like me are forced to replace accessories like my HP PDA, which has been Vista’d into obsolescence.

To put it in personal terms, the £650 I spent to replace a dead laptop may lead me to spend a further £400 or so, just so that I can continue to do with my laptop what I expect to be able to do with it.

All of which sounds like good news for you and the IT industry in general.

Except that I’m left with the uneasy feeling that I’ve been ever-so-elegantly mugged. Presumably there’s no connection between your recent sales downgrade and what you might call the negative goodwill generated for customers like me.

Hasta la vista, as they say

More and more people work remotely

Is a new breed of wireless worker emerging? asks Bill Thompson.

I am, it seems, a neo-nomad. Or perhaps a digital bedouin, if you prefer something that makes the computing connection more obvious.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle recently reporter Dan Fost claims that a new generation of IT workers has grown up, people who turn a laptop, a wireless connection and a caf.© into an office and work wherever they happen to be.

Since he covers the Bay Area, just north of Silicon Valley, his focus is on website developers, programmers and of course entrepreneurs pushing their Web 2.0 startups. He distinguishes them from traditional freelancers because of their close engagement with technology and use of the latest generation of web-based tools in their working lives.

Yet the name would seem to apply just as well outside the hothouse atmosphere of San Francisco, and I think it should be extended to cover a broader range of workers than just the high-tech startups because it refers to an attitude and a way of organising daily life rather than to any specific technology.

As one of the millions of people who work wherever they happen to find themselves, relying on a laptop and a wireless connection for all their computing needs, I certainly live a nomadic lifestyle, pitching my virtual camp wherever I happen to find myself.

And I’d rather be a neo-nomad than a laptop warrior, a term which was clearly designed to make corporate executives feel that the evenings spent in dull business hotels in Utrecht preparing the monthly sales figures had some heroic aspect.

Nomads certainly have lots of places to settle for an hour or two of work.

The main advantages of independents are that the coffee is sometimes exceptionally good and the wireless is often provided free

One of my favourites is Brill on Exmouth Market in central London, partly because it is also a record store – it used to be Clerkenwell Records – but mostly because there is a bench outside that I can sit on to pick up my e-mail if I’m just passing on my way to nearby City University.

I reckon I’m in there often enough as a paying customer to get away with the occasional freeloading session, although customers who nurse a single latte for hours while they work away, chatting on Skype and spending no money, aren’t good for business. I try to pay my way wherever I’m sitting.

As usual with trend-spotting there is a massive temptation to introduce arbitrary distinctions and claim that they represent fundamental divisions between sub-groups.

Are the people who choose to work in a branch of Starbucks really more “corporate” than those who prefer independent cafes, for example?

Or does it just come down to which caf.© is nearest to home or which is cheapest? What about those who will use any space they can find that offers wireless access and space to sit?

The main advantages of independents are that the coffee is sometimes exceptionally good and the wireless is often provided free as a way of pulling in customers, but the large chains can be comforting in a strange city where the focus is on linking up with online friends and not sampling local colour.

Cafes aren’t the only option, of course.

There’s free wireless in the bar at the Arts Picturehouse here in Cambridge, but if you want to get away from either caffeine or alcohol then there is a growing number of shared workspaces offering people a chance to escape the isolation of the home office without the noise and pressure to buy coffee that you get in even the most welcoming caf.©.

But wherever you happen to be, it’s the pattern of working life that defines a nomad, with no office, colleagues who are largely engaged with online and often a number of overlapping projects to be juggled and managed at the same time.

The term neo-nomad has actually been around for a while. Researcher Yasmine Abbas calls her blog neo-nomad, and she has been writing about what she calls “digitally geared people on the move” since 2005.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

My good friend Simon runs an online recruitment company and it has operated as a hybrid business since it started.

There is a real office, and meetings take place there, but in general the team work remotely from wherever they happen to find themselves, whether that’s in Brighton, Suffolk or Australia.

It has been effective so far, and there was no way that the core team would all have moved to the same city or worked together in an office.

It may be a lot harder as they expand, though, simply because many of the online tools we currently use do not scale as well as an office floor in a well-designed system. Using instant messaging and project management tools is fine with five or 10 people, but a lot harder with 50 or a 100.

Neo-nomads and digital bedouins sound very exciting, but we mustn’t forget that this will only ever be a viable way of working for a small, skilled and privileged minority of people.

Most of us, most of the time, will work for organisations that require us to be in a certain place at a certain time in order to be a member of a team carrying out assigned tasks, including making and serving lattes in cafes.

It may be useful to look at the way the unwired among us work, and the patterns that emerge could be useful in developing working practices that are more humane and more productive, but we need to treat the neo nomads – and I include myself – as the digital equivalent of Formula One racing cars.

They are flashy, expensive and fast, and though they help develop new technologies nobody would suggest that we all drive one.

For one thing, there’s no space in an F1 car for a laptop, never mind the weekly shopping.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

First day back today from our fact finding mission in deepest Brittany (France not Spears).  We stayed at a Gite owned and run by Phil and Naomi Curtis – http://www.gites-pontivy.com/

We have decided that this will be the centre of our search for property as soon as we have sold our home here in the UK. Thanks to Naomi we managed to get our daughter into the local school for a trial and she loved it, only complaining when it was time to collect her.

Over the four days we were there we travelled to various towns and areas to sample the local sights and food and enjoy the lack of stress required to drive around such a large country.

Over the next few days as I get back into the flow of everyday work I will bring this blog up to date.  Tomorrow I will be introducing our new 388 page office furniture catalogue so please call back.