Mast ruling puts phone giant on hold
Hutchison has come in for much criticism over the rollout of its third-generation mobile network in Britain. Critics say transfer rates are slower than advertised, the costs are too high and, most critically, network reception is poor.
All that could get even worse thanks to a technophobic High Court ruling last week. Citing 'public perception of danger to health', a Hampshire council last year turned down Hutchison's application to erect a mobile mast. Hutchison won an appeal against the findings, and went off and built its mast. The affair would have ended there, but a local mother-to-be decided to sue the company - and won.
Unless Hutchison wins a final appeal, the ruling could open the floodgates to similar Nimby (not in my backyard) suits all over the country, wiping out not just nascent 3G networks, but old-fashioned 2G ones as well.
Suddenly, Richard Li Tzar-kai's British Wi-Fi licences are starting to look like a very prescient investment.
Speaking at last week's big Gartner group conference, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was asked why American Windows users have to pay 10 times the price for their software that people from Thailand pay. Mr Ballmer's reply may have seemed charitable to his audience in Florida but would have surprised anyone watching the webcast from Thailand.
'We did an experiment in a very poor country to see whether or not actually having a low price on software with a very low end, not very good PC would actually stimulate consumer interest and uptake in a very poor country. The data on it is very mixed. The uptake on the offer from the Thai government has been quite low,' he said.
The 'experiment' was launched just weeks after the Thai government introduced its People's PC project, aiming to sell a million low-cost Linux PCs within a year. Thailand may have much poverty, but it hardly ranks among the world's poorest nations. If helping the poor was Microsoft's real intention, why not look across the Mekong to Burma, Laos or Cambodia?
Mr Ballmer also raised eyebrows with some swipes at China's software industry. Laying into Linux, he decided to bash the free operating system by association. 'Why should code that may get written randomly, by some hacker in China and distributed to some open source project, why is its pedigree, by definition, somehow better than the pedigree of something that is written in a controlled fashion? I don't buy that,' he said.
'The fact that somebody in the middle of the night in China who you don't know 'patched' it, you don't know the quality of that; there's nothing per se that says there should be integrity that comes out of that process.'
This would not be the first time that Mr Ballmer has used red-under-the bed scare tactics against free software. Three years ago, he told analysts that Linux had 'the characteristics of communism'.
But considering Beijing's sensitivity toward large foreign software firms, maybe it would be better if Mr Ballmer stuck to knocking Thailand.
