Its Been a while

Well - time sure does fly by ! After several very busy months, Christmas of 2007 has passed and the New Year is rapidly approaching. We have settled in very comfortably, the boys are home for the holiday season and all is well in our very little part of the world. I have let people know I will be retiring 'officially' in late Q1/early Q2 of 2008 - the end of May is looking pretty good actually as Sean will be graduating from Trent about that time, and also it will free up the summer for doing more work around the house.

2008 should be a most interesting year !

California West Coast

I had my first opportunity in some years to spend some time on the California coastal cities of San Francisco and San Diego. The weather was better than The Netherlands for sure, and while I didn't get a chance to spend a lot of time outdoors, it was still quite pleasant. My wife Donna joined me in San Francisco on her way to link up with the boys in Ontario. I'll admit it was not the most direct route to take to get from Rotterdam to Toronto, but the cost was not too bad and she was able to spend some time in the downtown area, doing a bit of shopping and of course visiting the local Hard Rock Cafe. We now have been to just about all of them - and to catch the few remaining ones have seriously discussed booking vacation to cover them off. While this may sound silly (and undoubtedly is) on the other hand it provides us an excuse to go somewhere new that we otherwise would not have bothered trying, and in that respect does make some slight sense (to us at least !).With business concluded on San Francisco, and Donna safely sent on her way to Toronto, I went on to San Diego for the Desktop Linux Summit. This was the fourth time it had been held and is advertised as being the only conference dedicated to the desktop - I can't confirm or deny that, but it clearly is at least a Linspire conference which is a bit of a pity. While other vendors were there (most notably Novell, Ubantu and Red Hat), Linspire did manage to get a lot of the airtime.

Over all the conference was interesting - Linux folks and Apple folks both seem to feel as though they are being conspired against by Microsoft which while possibly being true, still makes them seem to be a bit shrill in their protestations. On the other hand, the 'home brew' attitude reminded me of a college campus with a ton of energy and enthusiasm by most of the people there - many of whom had longer hair than I did ! The funny thing about the event is that it is clear there is a growing gap between the open source 'free is good' community, and the commercial Linux folks trying to figure out how to make a living with what is clearly a solid product. From a commercial perspective I suspect many of the folks in the room just didn't get it yet - free isn't the answer as for a corporation as the real costs are in the support, maintenance, training, network hardware, desktops and servers required to support an enterprise. Saving a few bucks on desktop software doesn't by itself make it an attractive proposition. In point of fact, the delta total cost of ownership between a 100,000 user base Microsoft and Linux installation is about the same, so for most companies there is little incentive to change, as any savings that do exist would get burnt up in the migration costs. Having said that, for the consumer market I think there is finally a real range of solid usable choices available from the good folks at Linspire, Xandros, Ubantu, Red Hat and most interestingly Novell. The Novell Suse release 10 which is due out later this summer is one I'd recommend and plan to pick up for my own personal use. It by far is the most complete and most visually appealing release I've seen (I currently run Xandros and Linspire at home together with Microsoft). Novell have really done some great work on the OpenOffice space to get a very high degree of compatability with MS Word, Excel etc. and if you connect your iPod or plug in a DVD it will work. Something to keep an eye on.

Another item to keep an eye on is what could be a real game changer - services. The one I find most interesting is the new activity by former CEO of Linspire Michael Robertson who has launched yet another startup called AjaxOS (see http://www.ajaxlaunch.com/) - no this is not a new type of household cleaner, although it could take a few established vendors to the cleaners if successful. If you assume that highspeed network connectivity is a given, then having an operating system independent suite of applications delivered via your internet browser makes a lot of sense as a) you have access from anywhere, b) its very simple and c) it is a cheaper possibly more robust model than the traditional fat client. The AjaxOS folks have a Word and Excel lookalike, a drawing package, a music player, and a video editor - add Google Gmail and Calendar to the mix plus a couple of other Google applications and you have a full featured desktop without requiring anything more than a browser enabled appliance. Could be interesting.

And I was able to locate the Hard Rock Cafe in San Diego so over all, it was a total success !

A bit of this - a bit of that !

Well - it has been a while since I have updated this so certainly it seems to be time. Much has happened in the past month so I'll just touch on the highlights:

• CEBIT in Hanover Germany was very good and I enjoyed it a lot. The sheer size of the show is over whelming with some 6200 vendors in about 28 buildings. I was looking for innovative technology solutions not quite ready for prime time, and certainly there were several to choose from in the areas of data analysis, personal use devices, visualization tools and collaboration technology. Well worth while and I'm already looking forward to next year.


• the Strategic News Service dinner in London (see http://www.tapsns.com/london/2006/index.php ). For anyone that follows Mark Anderson and can get by his sometimes overly pompous style, I recommend trying to catch him in person at least once as he is often right on the money and quite a good speaker. He is just recently back from China and like most folks who have visited there came away impressed with what he saw. Its often said, and I think possibly not far off the mark, that if your children are not considering picking up Chinese as a second language, then its possible they may be disadvantaged in the next twenty years. The scale of what is happening today in China defies belief and shows little sign of slowing down.


• My real boss and I are getting ready to move back to Canada this summer - we are both looking forward to doing so, as while the past six years here in Europe have been great, there really is no place quite like home and of course both boys are in Canada at university. We are in the process of having our home in Calgary updated, and working long distance with the various suppliers is proving to be interesting - so far, so good though and things seem to be moving along well.


• This week we have been in Spain at one of our time-shares and the weather has been great. We are just down the coast from Gibraltar and can actually see "The Rock "quite clearly from here. The unit we are staying in has a high speed internet connection so being able to work without interruption, and in very pleasant surroundings has been quite relaxing.

The next few months will be quite busy - I'll try to capture some notes here as things move along.

Troy (and Istanbul !)

Since a very young age, I have wanted to visit the site of the city of Troy made famous in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. I can’t recall where I first read about it – possibly in the How and Why Wonder book series from the early 60’s (my favourite was number 5001 on Dinosaurs). On our previous visit to Istanbul in March of 2005, my wife and I focused on the old quarter, Galata, Levant and managed to visit the major attractions as well as hired a taxi to take a visit along the north side of the city to see the remains of the original fortifications that even today are truly impressive. These massive stone and brick walls were originally constructed in 412 AD (!) and spanned 6.5 KM between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. For a good over view of the history of the city, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul , and also check out a few of the photos I took which can be seen at http://www.sandyfamily.com/2005/Istanbul/album.html.

Just before New Year's, I saw a really cheap fare for travelling from Amsterdam to Istanbul, and decided to take the plunge to see Troy! We arrived at Ataturk airport this past Monday, and stayed at the very nice Empire Hotel, which is a member of the Best Western hotel chain and right at the foot of the Topkapi Palace. The hotel is within easy walking distance of the major things to be seen in the old quarter, has very helpful staff, nice rooms and reasonable prices. Recommended.

While this was our second visit to Istanbul, it was the first for my son, so we spent a day in the city checking out a few of the bigger sites – for me the first place to start in Istanbul is the Hagia Sophia which truly has to be seen to be believed. Originally built in 537 AD under the direction of the Christian Roman Emperor Justinian, it has been pretty much in continuous service since then – till 1453 as a church, as a mosque till 1934 and since then as a museum. While the dome is slightly smaller than that of the Pantheon in Rome, it is still today listed as being the fourth largest cathedral in the world - pretty good for something almost 1,470 years old !. A must see. As well we also checked out the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern and then the Grand Bazaar followed by the Spice Bazaar.

On Wednesday we travelled to Troy – and it needs to be said that unless you are really interested in these sorts of things, to the casual viewer, it at first looks to be just a pile of broken rubble. Making sense of it either requires a guide or some advance reading. It is also worth mentioning that to get there from Istanbul is about 4.5 hours by car over bad roads, and to top it off we had a really bad driver (really poor driving skills, no English, worse attitude), although the vehicle itself was quite comfortable. A few phones calls to the hotel to find someone who spoke the language got him somewhat sorted out, but it made for a long day and should not have been required.
For me, the most striking thing about the Troy site was how compact it was – I’d guess not much more than a soccer pitch in area located on a very pronounced hill which drops away steeply to the north and west sides to the plains below. The surrounding area is quite level with the area to the south and further east developing into rolling hills. The sea is easily visible not very far off to the north and west. Standing on top of the ruins, and with a bit of imagination, one can easily visualise how it must have looked at the time of the Trojan War as described by Homer which is assumed to have been about 1193 BC or roughly 3200 years ago. Of course, as a location Troy was destroyed and then rebuilt many times over and the original settlement is thought to have been established about 3000 BC and occupied more or less continuously through till about 500 AD or so. As a result, there are many Troy’s to be excavated – currently thought to number 9 all together, but with many sub-categories. It should keep archaeologists busy for decades . For additional detail about Troy and the excavations ongoing at the site, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy .

For me, the visit was the perfect birthday present.

KLM - Somewhat Reliable, But Really Predictable

As a frequent flier I get to fly with many different airlines, and it is always interesting to note the many differences in service offerings between them. When I first moved to The Netherlands in 2000, I was amazed at how poor the KLM flight service was as compared to other airlines I had regularly been using – these being mainly Air Canada, but also USA airlines like Continental, AA and United plus Brazil’s Varig airline, Singapore Airlines and a few others. I knew (and still know) people who just point blank refused to use KLM, and while the reasons may differ somewhat in the specifics, there is still today a consistant theme - KLM really just doesn't understand customer service. This isn't limited to just KLM I suppose, as the topic of ‘customer service’ in general, always seems to eventually pop up at after work conversations amongst EXPATS based in NL. The general observation (and recognising that generalities are dangerous) is that Dutch customer facing businesses often seem to apply a noticeably different customer service standard, than what is normally expected in North America, or indeed many other parts of the world.

Lets be clear – for an occasional flier just going for a bit of a holiday its really the cost that counts and you don’t generally expect to be pampered too much. There are many airlines working the low end of the fare range, and in The Netherlands KLM. Transavia and Martinair each offer affordable economy fares, zero leg room, potentially DVT (deep vein thrombosis) inducing seating and cardboard food (in some cases for an additional fee !) at about the same levels of competitiveness. For business class travel though, you do expect a bit more. In 2000, after having flown business class regularly with Air Canada and Continental, it was a real shock to experience the poor food and even worse in-flight service of KLM. The only compensating factor was these cute little houses they handed out in business class, each of which was full of Dutch gin ! Today, I’m pleased to say the food is now up to where Air Canada and Continental were five years ago, and they do still offer the little houses, but that customer service gene for the most part still seems to be missing. You can easily test this by asking for something slightly out of the ordinary and invariably you will hear, in the most starched and proper manner something like: “ that is not allowed,” or "its not possible", and perhaps also, after a short pause for emphasis, “we have to follow the rules you know !”. They just don’t get it, and I think my view is supported by what I see at http://www.airlinequality.com/index.htm and also http://www.freddieawards.com/ which are two major travel industry quality ranking and award organisations. Scanning both the 'Freddie Awards', and the 'Airline Quality' sites, you will note KLM seldom (never ?) features as being a winner in the service quality area against its peers.

Here’s a few specific items KLM could consider if they wanted to improve their ranking:

• I regularly see empty business class seats on KLM flights and when I’ve asked why they don’t upgrade frequent flier members who might be elsewhere on the flight, or indeed others willing to buy an upgrade with mileage/points I’ve been told a) it was not possible (you hear 'its not possible' a lot) as they had the wrong fare type for upgrades or b) they could not pick between fliers, and rather than upgrade one they preferred to upgrade none (true story - I was told this on a flight from Aruba to Amsterdam !!). If I were KLM, I’d take a page from Continental’s play book and upgrade the frequent fliers regardless of fare class as by definition they are your best customers and therefore potentially your best allies.


• Rebadge a few rules as ‘guidelines’ - empower the gate agents and lounge guards to exercise some customer focused thinking (although this may require injecting some people coming from ‘customer focused’ cultures into the staff mix), and reward them for doing so. I’ve seen instances of lounges being almost empty, but Silver and Platinum level people being turned away as they wanted to take in more than one guest – this has personally happened to me a couple of times when accompanied by my wife and two boys (of course if they were infants, I suppose it wouldn’t be an issue – perhaps next time I’ll carry them !). It makes little sense to restrict access to your frequent fliers if the lounge is not busy, and it would buy a lot of good will. Alternatively, offer lounge pass memberships either for sale, or for mileage/point redemption - members would buy them purely for the convenience and use them either for themselves, family members or as gifts. Continental does this today.


• Make the Platinum level mean something – at the moment, there really is next to no added benefit having a KLM Platinum level membership (other than the low budget membership card from which all the printing rubs off after you’ve had it a short while) . Take a page from Virgin, BA or Singapore Airlines and make the top tier membership actually worth having.

And finally:

• Just once I would love to see the KLM priority tagged luggage off the plane and onto the carousal ahead of all the other checked luggage – it may never happen in my lifetime, but I can dream !