The computer has cre­ated a wealth of new employment opportu­nities and has changed the working lives of millions.

But so did the invention of the motor car. And perhaps what I am seeing in the workplace today par­allels what happened in those first few years of the automobile.

The first drivers were also the mechanics and often the assemblers of their own vehicles.

The first computer users often built or assembled at least part of their machine and wrote the soft­ware to run it.

By the time the First World War had begun, the motor car was be­coming an almost commonplace sight, but it was still reserved for the rich, the daring and the skilled.

By the time the 286 was on the market, certain far-sighted people were learning new saleable skills on the computer, investing in them­selves and the future. Often, what they attempted to do was virtually impossible, requiring workarounds, a little programming knowledge and lots of late nights.

By the mid-twenties, Henry Ford had made the car almost com­monplace, at least in America. It re­quired strength and a little skill to get it going, but it ran (slowly) most of the time. It wasn’t a comfortable trip, but it got you there.

The 386 introduced a new di­mension to computing. It was priced well, reasonably quick and offered many applications. The complexity of DOS was never far away, but applications were getting easier to use and this new graphical interface thing was well-established and looked like catching on at long last.

By the thirties, the motor car had matured. And the change was amazing. In the space of a few years the car had become a luxurious ex­perience, often powered by sophis­ticated supercharged engines and driven through exotic transmis­sions. Ordinary people had ordi­nary cars, and at the higher levels of society, professional chauffeurs were common. These chauffeurs were skilled drivers and able me­chanics. Those less professional souls who owned or drove an auto­mobile in the course of their busi­ness or pleasure were now required to be licensed. Skills in carburettor tuning, distributor sanding, tyre changing and general maintenance were still mandatory.

Where are we now in comput­ing? In my opinion, somewhere be­tween the twenties and thirties.

The average workers believe that by some magical process, sitting down in front of a computer and turning it on will somehow create a magic “knowledge transfer beam” that will shoot information into their heads. With a wave of the mouse, they believe everything will become clear. That by sitting in front of the PC they will absorb all the knowledge they need through osmosis. These people, as far as I can see, constitute the majority of all office workers, and the greater majority of the Public Service in NSW.

The trouble is that they don’t have to be licensed to drive, they don’t have enough interest in themselves or their job to master the programs they use, they refuse to put any of their own precious time into developing the skills they need, and they are constantly calling for the NRMA (our AAA, a.k.a. the PC support person) and telling them that the damn car is broken.

The NRMA of course, discovers that they’ve left the handbrake on, or have let the car run out of water or oil.

We’ve given the people new tools, but those tools still require skills that the average office worker isn’t prepared to develop. It’s a problem that only enforced train­ing will alleviate, and only if the employees actually decide that it is in their best interests to LEARN, but I would sug­gest that the money spent on train­ing will be the best money a busi­ness can ever spend.

What really irritates me, though, are the people who are passing themselves off as computer profes­sionals. In my own business I’ve seen PC support people who knew nothing about software, I’ve seen supposed illustrators who were flummoxed if you gave them an un­usual graphics file, and I’ve seen operators of all kinds of programs who never learned the shortcuts, never picked up the speed and nev­er bothered to learn anything at all about the “car” they were driving.

And it really irritates me to pay a “chauffeur”, then watch him buck, jerk and weave the car down the road at two kilometres an hour.

I’d really like to believe that the next generation will be more skilled — but I think, increasingly, we’ll be faced with Nintendo-taught “ex­perts”, and corporate training will become even more critical.

Talk about opening your proverbial can of worms !!

What can Bigpond to to “get my business” – not the sort of question that you get every day, especially from a company like Telstra.

It’s only because of who asked the question (@JonoH) that I’m even taking the time to consider the question.

Those that know me know full well how my “relationship” with Telstra has been rather “strained” over the years – excessively high pricing and shoddy customer service mainly, and that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 1223 voice recognition service !

But since the question has been asked, and out of respect for the person who asked it, I thought I’d try to put some facts and figures together to see how their current ADSL plans stack up against my current provider.

My current ISP is Exetel – many people will berate them because of their support (which I don’t need), but there are two reasons I stick with them.

First is pricing – I get an ADSL1 connection (8192 down, 384 up – in reality not much better than 7100 down, 384 up), 36Gb of data between 12:00 and 02:00, and another 54Gb of data between 02:00 and 12:00 – all for $79/month. Throw in a free VoIP number ($0.10 untimed calls nationally) and a VoIP Fax number (fax/email gateway – $0.01 a page) and it’s a good package. And uploaded data IS NOT COUNTED.

Add to all of the above a very reasonable charge of $3.00 per Gigabyte if I go over either limit (which I occasionally do when a new Linux distro needs downloading) and I have an affordable package. Shaping is not an option, as I do a lot of remote support for companies and friends, and at $3/Gb I know how much I’m going to have to pay.

Second – the service. Exetel block NOTHING – they sell me a data connection and what I do with it is up to me. I can run my own webserver, mail server, SQL databases, SMTP server – virtually whatever I like that I can accomplish with that ADSL conenction. The only proviso is that I do nothing ILLEGAL with it – if I do they’ll hang me out to dry if I get caught, and rightly so too. They resell ADSL1 bandwidth from Optus  because the ADSL2 DSLAM in my exchange is Telstra and they don’t wholesale ADSL2 to anyone else (or didn’t until recently).

Let’s see what Bigpond can offer for the same speed and data.

Checking their ADSL1 plans, I find I can get my 100Gb of monthly data for $129.95 – already $50/month more than Exetel. No VoIP, no fax, nothing. And uploaded data is COUNTED as part of your data cap, whereas Exetel ignore what you upload.

Add to that you get shaped to 64kbps if you hit the monthly data limit, essentially making the service useless for anything but basic email – remember the bad old days of dial-up ?

So to @JonoH’s question – what can Bigpond do to get my business ?  Here’s a list;

More as they come to mind.