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Editor's Manifesto: Tony, meet Bill - don't mention the mainframe

Posted by admin on Sat, 01/01/2000 - 13:24
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On first glance, the casual admission in former Prime Minister Tony Blair's newly published memoirs that in an attempt to do the famous Charm Thing with a certain Bill Gates, he “got all [his] terminology mixed up” and asked the software tyrant how his mainframe was makes him look like a bit of a dork.

But on second glance, it's actually the people reportedly in the room who were mortified by the Tonester's “gaffe” that end up looking ridiculous. That's no less than a certain David Milliband and other allegedly "beautiful young people" in the office who, we are told, ended up having conniptions of embarrassment on Blair's behalf.

You know what? You did fine, Tony. I have no way of knowing nowadays, but certainly at one time Microsoft had, if not a mainframe, then certainly a very big minicomputer at home base helping to run its central accounts. Why? It's one of the biggest (and certainly the richest) publicly traded corporations on the planet – and such organisations tend to use, quite properly, Big Iron to run their back offices. What's the problem here? (It probably uses a supercomputer now, but the point is it doesn't just run Financials on a standalone PC – capice?)
 
I doubt very much that was the basis for Blair's comment – he got it wrong, accessing a mental file called 'computer company' and finding in it one imagines various labels like 'floppy disc,' 'hardware' and 'mainframe'. His job being at the time running the country not sourcing ICT, I think we can forgive him that one. (Maybe not Iraq... sorry, couldn't resist that.)
 
Now back to the people in the room. I suspect that New Labour second rankers as they all were at the time – and now, like it or not, the first rank – knew a lot more about what Gates' firm did than was maybe good for us all. I'm talking bewitchment – I'm talking putting your hands in the money bucket and splashing it all over suppliers because you are convinced that some special gobbledeegook will solve all your transformational government problems.
 
Those days are, one suspects, behind us now. But whichever Oxbridge-educated candidate ends up heading the [fill in appropriate temporal adjective] Labour come the end of September -  not a one of whom has had a career outside academe or professional politics -  let's hope they'll be worrying less about the right nomenclature for enterprise computing platforms and more about policies that might get some more wealth-creating industry back in the country. Or something.
 
Let's close with yet one more way of looking at this minor but suggestive scene. Gates and Blair: two consummate leaders, wholly expert in what they did, masters of their briefs, with depths (to some, surprising) of commitment to making the world a better place, adaptable, successful and plain lucky.
 
I bet Bill had a little chuckle at the mainframe slip - then sat down with this Brit politician dude and found that he connected a lot more with him than some of the geeks in the room who actually knew what Windows was.