You have three options to make more money:

1. Lower costs.
2. Sell more of the same stuff.
3. Make new types of stuff to sell.

In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can’t catch more fish because you don’t have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell.

These are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT propositions.

If you lower costs, you don’t increase the overall size of the market. If there’s $5B in sales, you can make more of that $5B by lowering your costs. This isn’t entirely true: elasticity of demand might increase revenue because lowering costs means you can lower the price, so more people may be able to afford it, and perhaps this new number * new price means more revenue than old number * old price.

Competing by lowering costs starts a race to the bottom on prices, turning your product into a commodity where different manufacturers compete to sell it for the lowest price. This fundamentally threatens the overall sustainability of the product because down that path lies short-sighted cost-cutting, offshoring of labour and environmental hazards, and all sorts of not just morally dubious but also legally and long-term-financially dubious actions.

If you innovate to improve quality or produce entirely new products, then you can increase the market size. So you could take fish sales from $5B to $7B without triggering that race to the bottom. You didn’t have to take more fish from the sea, but instead sold the fish you did catch for more money. This route encompasses higher-value uses (sushi vs fish food) and out-of-the-box thinking like fish oil supplements.

That this happens in the liberal arts is understandable. But there’s also a move afoot to reject Computer Science degrees: “go straight into a startup!” people say. I used to oppose this: university taught me what I was doing when I programmed. It didn’t make me a good programmer (though it sorted out some dodgy techniques I had as a self-taught kid) but it taught me how to think about solving problems, to recognize common problems, and to understand the different dimensions of tradeoffs all through languages, operating systems, databases, networking, and more.

So I was in favour of CS. “Go to uni!” I would say.

Past tense.

This weekend I met with a recent CS grad and we talked about what he should do. He had signed up for Honours, then realized he wasn’t interested by the research. And, talking to him, I realized he’d had the wrong approach to university. I had also had the wrong approach to university.

The right approach is to learn as much as you can. For a few years you have a lower pressure to earn, you have wide-open license to stretch your thinking in as many directions as you can, you have huge resources and opportunities around you, and you can do anything.

I came close: I had fun. I played with early Internet services, was hired to write some (learning sockets as I went), set up regional mirrors of software archives, and got caught up in the early web. None of this was deliberate (I never sat down and said “I will try as many Internet services as I can; this Internet thing will be big!”) it just happened to be the right thing for me.

My friend, however, didn’t even come close. He fell into the same trap that most people at university fall into: he thought the goal was to get the degree.

“Fuck no!” I told him. The degree is a side-effect! If you learn as much as you can, expand your mind, discover what interests you, and chase it as far as you can, you’ll get the degree (assuming you also spend some time studying). But to fuck around OUTSIDE university instead of learning, so as to do “the minimum amount of work necessary to pass” (my words, not his) — that’s a mistake.

But nobody tells the kids this. Of course, being kids, perhaps they wouldn’t respond. Education, like youth, is wasted on the young. I stay in touch with a few CS lecturers and they all bemoan the cohorts of students who aren’t interested in the subject, only “will this be on the final exam?”.

This young fellow I was talking to, he came out with the usual patchy set of skills. University didn’t actually teach him much that was directly useful. If he goes and joins a company, he’s going to have to hustle for a year or so to get his programming act together and be useful. University teaches that various computational things exist, but until you’ve used them in anger and had them ingrained into your way of thinking, you’re not going to be a good programmer. It’s the difference between having to struggle to conjugate verbs in a foreign language vs having that stuff be automatic and reflexive. It’s not muscle memory, but it has to become so.

Of course, rightly, universities don’t pretend to be producing useful programmers. “We teach high-level concepts,” they say, just as I did. But the high-level concepts that I learned were useful to me: what an operating system has to do and how you might divide the labour, how to describe and process regularity (hello, regular expressions!), the challenges of randomness and linearity as exemplified by the different approaches to memory management that I’d encounter in various programming languages, etc. The classes I tuned out (AI, for example), I wish I’d paid more attention to now! The stuff he learned, though, struggled to be useful: the description he gave of his HCI class didn’t seem to be coupled at all to the design considerations in my world. I think there’s a minimum amount of useful you have to be, and I wonder what the distribution of useful is across different university CS programs.

I still distrust the “just go to a startup!” people, though. There’s a huge industry whose raw ingredients are programmers. Only a few of them regard those programmers as a resource to be developed instead of exploited. “If you’re a good programmer, skip university and go to a startup” may be right for a handful of people, but for most kids it could easily reduce the probability that they will ever become a great programmer. The leisure to learn at university is NOT afforded you at a startup. The people telling you to join a startup do not have your best interest in mind. And, of course, startups require you to solve a problem–the only problems kids have are getting laid and scoring weed, and those were (not coincidentally) well solved by Mark Zuckerberg.

So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what’s occupying my mind now.

When I look forward to the world they’ll come of age in, I don’t see a world with careers like people had in the 60s. I do see a future in which they’ll have to be self-reliant, know how money works, know how to sell, to start and run a business. That argues for startup, or some kind of financial experience. But they should also know how to learn, to think about the general not just the specific, to analyse. Traditionally, they’d acquire those skills at university. Will they do so in the future?

I don’t know whether I’ll steer my kids toward uni. I’m trying hard to give them business experience before they leave school. I just sat down with Mr 12 and we ran through this month’s set of board papers for a real company, talking about what’s on the agenda and why, and getting our heads around the financials to see what stories they tell about the company’s performance. It was great to have a discussion of the differing risks of fixed-price vs time & materials, see them come up again in the CEO report, and then reflected in the financials.

In the end it’s up to the kid whether university makes sense for them, but if it looks like it’s on the cards then I plan to:

1. Take them on research trips around the various universities to find out what courses are offered relevant to their interests and see how they map to practitioners,
2. Remind them that university isn’t about having a piece of paper at the end, it’s about what you can learn getting it.

No transcription, as my notes consisted of a scrawled mindmap. Talk embedded below.

What do you want to do when you grow up? with Nat Torkington from SummerOfTech on Vimeo.

Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here.

Let’s get nostalgic for a bit. It’s the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little.

Whose first computer was a mainframe? Whose was a mini? Whose first experience was through punched cards? Who had a microcomputer, like a BBC Micro or Spectrum? Whose first was a PC?

My first computer was a Commodore 64. 64K of RAM, not enough colours, great programmable audio, built-in BASIC …. The reset switch was a paperclip across two of the terminals in the exposed cartridge port. That was where I first played text adventure games …. Loved it.

You’ve probably got warm feelings about your first computer too. It’s like a first love, but you never break up. It won’t burn your t-shirts and cut your face out of photos. It might not boot up any more, but who here doesn’t have that problem sometimes?

My C64 lead to a PC and then into Victoria University’s Computer Science degree starting in 1990, where I got to explore a VMS box and then a shiny new SGI Unix machine, and to download Linux (my verdict was “what a pain to get installed!”).

In my time at Vic, on those VMS and Unix boxes, I got to play with the Internet at a time when most people hadn’t heard of it. You young folks here, there was a time when most people hadn’t heard of the Internet. We had text games to telnet into, programs to download, and Usenet to post messages to.

I was one of the first New Zealand users of the web when it was released, and I successfully convinced the IT department to let me build the shiny new “Campus Wide Information System” on the web instead of on gopher. Lots of fun, discovering all sorts of things along the way:
– the anonymity of the net is great–nobody knows you’re a nineteen year-old from New Zealand, not even Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen.
– you do not want to be the sole conduit for an entire organization’s web site
– but at the same time, it’s hellish to teach people how to put things onto the web (particularly if “export from Microsoft Word using hard-coded styles” is your markup technology)
– no matter how much effort you’re poured into your website, no matter how many new things you’ve done, it will always be described as “shit”

Fortunately this has all changed. *cough*

From there I went to America, worked for a startup, wrote a book (“The Perl Cookbook”), got married (on a MUD), helped along the Perl project, and worked for O’Reilly Media. They make those books with animals on the covers. Their basic business is talk to a lot of people, find the weak signals that show something big is coming, then have books and conferences ready when the masses discover the trend. They did this with the web, with open source, with web services, with web 2.0, and now with the Gov 2.0 open government work.

At O’Reilly, I was running some of their conferences. The bit I still love most about conferences is that moment when, for the first time, a group forms–people who didn’t realize they had something in common get together.

And this is where that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon comes out. Yes, on the net nobody knows you’re a dog. But when you get everyone together in person at a conference, as you do here, … well, to lapse into lolcat: different dog is different.

Let me explicit about this: we’re at a sausagefest. And this is not a reflection of the fine people at NZCS. Our industry is a sausagefest, far more men than women. Women are between 10-30% of CS classes at university, depending on who you talk to and what level you’re measuring. But don’t worry, if you’re in the software business then you’re alright: in open source, it’s 1.5%.

Right now, this can go two ways. One way is to ask why this is so, who’s to blame. This is the path where we all get defensive, fold our arms, and say “stop attacking me, I’m not an asshole, this isn’t my fault, I didn’t set out to build or perpetuate a misogynist class structure, this is bullshit, women can choose and they choose not to work in computing, I don’t see there’s a problem at all, Torkington’s a jerk, what a disaster”.

I don’t like the path of blame. Blame is an attack, and attacks provoke defense, and defense short-circuits rational thought and the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, and we’re not any better off.

So rather than have you all thinking about blame and looking for victims and oppressors, I want you to forget that crap. That’s solving a headache with an AK-47. Let’s agree not to see this as a finger-pointing battle.

I’m going to let you in on two related secrets: gender is just the tip of the iceberg, and this is a *huge* fucking opportunity.

Any of you know the Myers-Briggs tests? I think they’re science-infused astrology but there are plenty of people who swear by them. And if you go to your developers and you give them the Myers-Briggs test, you will find something odd: they’re almost all INTJ or INTP. Those two categories account for 5% of the general population, but nearly 100% of the computer programming crowd. And, it just happens, most INTJ and INTPs are men.

There are great efforts afoot to recruit more women into computer science classes at university. To do that, though, you really need to get girls into computing in high school. Given how grunty teenage boys can be, you almost have to get the girls into computing in primary school (back when they tend to have better textual and conceptual skills than boys) so they’ll do it at high school.

But there are some interesting signs that the things you have to do to get women into computing is how you get more *people* into computing. That is, the things that drive away women are driving away shiploads of men too. Let me say this clearly:

If we change our culture so we attract more *people*, we’ll get more men and more women coming in.

In open source software we like to pat ourselves on the back that we’ve built a meritocracy. We hide behind this, pretending it’s impersonal. The best coders thrive, the weak wither away, and it’s as Darwin intended. This is often treated as license to be an asshole. The culture this builds is poisonous to those who don’t look, sound, or act like the folks who are already programmers. I can see the ComputerWorld journalist scribbling away furiously, so I want to make it clear that I’m not saying all programmers, or even all open source programmers are assholes, I’m exaggerating for effect.

But many programmers and many projects and many teachers and many classes aren’t welcoming to beginner programmers. This isn’t universally the case–there are projects showing us how to do it.

One of my favorite examples of this is Dreamwidth. It’s an open source project for blogging software, a fork of LiveJournal, serving over 200,000 users. Thirty of their forty developers are women. They do this by being friendly: they encourage new contributors (“little devils”). They work hard at being welcoming, they don’t assume people will feel confident enough to contribute and take the usual curt feedback.

Deep down, I had always assumed coding required this kind of special aptitude, something that I just didn’t have and never would. It lost its forbidding mystique when I learned that people I had assumed to be super-coders (surely born with keyboard attached!) had only started training a year ago. People without any prior experience! Women! Like me! Jesus! It’s like a barrier broke down in my mind.

But very few of these Dreamwidth developers are typical programmers. By changing the culture, they attracted more *people* to being programmers. And this is our huge opportunity: to get more people into programming.

I volunteered in our local school, teaching 8 year old kids how to program. I got asked “why!?” Parents thought I was turning their kids into 8 year old Bill Gates, not the rich Bill Gates, just the dorky and deeply unsocial Bill Gates.

I think it’s important because the jobs most folks want to have are the jobs that work with information. It’s like driving a car these days–you gotta know how to change the oil, fill the tank, top up the fluids, change a tire. If you don’t, you’ll be hugely less efficient in how you use that car. Same with a computer: all very well to shuffle information in spreadsheets and reports, but if you spend a day doing something that would have taken 5m to code and a second to run … you’re wasting human potential.

How do you teach kids to program? Easy. Use a system called scratch. scratch.mit.edu — very simple to use, drag and drop actions and loops and so on, the pieces connect like Lego, you can’t have a syntax error. I love it, and the kids did too — they built games, stories, toys, demos, even a book review, and girls did better than boys.

So it’s not that we don’t have programming tools suitable for 8 year olds, it’s not that girls can’t do it, it’s not that they don’t want to do it. We need to do a few things:
– teach the teachers,
– change the culture so we don’t drive them off when they’re ready to program socially,
– make them love it.

Loving the field is more than knowing how program. It’s the difference between a day job and a passion. Some folks are motivated by abstract problems, intellectual challenges. These are the people who have historically populated our industry.

But we’re realizing now that these people aren’t the only people we need. Silicon Valley is littered with the smoldering wrecks of companies founded by technical people. For every Google, there’s a thousand anonymous failures.

Because we don’t distinguish clearly between technology and industry. We treat the two as the same, but they’re not. And this comes to the heart of the topic today, innovation.

Invention is not innovation. Invention is discovering something new, doing something for the first time. It’s the thrill of exploration, of research, of the unknown. It’s technical. It’s scientific. It’s often solitary.

It’s not innovation.

Innovation is building a new business or product line. It’s sales, marketing, channels, cash-flow management, interaction design, user experience, iteration on product, new markets, making the first sale, ….

Research is proving something can be done, once, no matter how long it takes. Business is doing something that people want, consistently and repeatedly, for profit. These are very different.

We need people with these skills in our business. In our industry.

Paul Graham, early Lisp guy, wrote the code that became Yahoo! Stores, now runs an incubator called the Y Combinator, he was asked the secret to a good career. He said you have two paths to greatness: you pick one topic and go deep, drilling down into the details until you’re the best; or you pick two topics and occupy the intersection. There are many more intersections, and there’s less competition so it’s easier to be great at an intersection.

How do we get people into the industry. There’s no single magic bullet–if there were, we’d have found it by now. I think we need to do two things better:

1) Talk about the exciting big possibilities in our field. Google Goggles, when everyone goes “wow!” … I saw a device for shipping audio lessons around famers in Africa, where you can record your own advice and share the lessons by sneakernet. Changing people’s lives, making science fiction real, that’s the exciting stuff.

2) Offer people the turning points that let them turn towards computers. We’ve built a great culture that turns them *away*, let’s get them in.

I reached out to some of my friends from my time in America, people who had become successful. What were the opportunities that they had that got them into the field and let them be successful?

There were themes. First, it was getting your first computer. Full-time immersion in the tool makes you better at it. Part-time, shared access … less so.

Craig Nevill-Manning clipped garlic when he was 14 to get his computer.

Chad Dickerson worked at a small regional newspaper by night, but his employer had an amazing scheme where every employee was allowed to buy a computer with the company discount, all interest-free. He was making $7/h and was able to buy a $3500+ computer.

Brenda Wallace, a great Wellington coder, got her start when her Dad went to Australia in 1980 and came back with a TRS80.

Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr, also had a TRS80 when she was 10. She didn’t start off going down the computer industry path, but when her life made that possible in 1995 (“I’m broke, I’m in San Francisco, I’ve seen the Internet and know my way around programming computers, it’s ridiculously easy to get a job as a web developer”) she taught herself, entered the industry, and was away.

This is why I love projects like OLPC that get laptops into the hands of kids. The good folks at Point England School are inspirational: they’re working on a project to get laptops and connectivity into the hands of their students and their community. They know it’s not just hardware now, it’s connectivity that matters too.

Second, it was someone taking a chance on them, believing in them.

Danah Boyd, who is now knows more about social use of computers by teens than anybody else, and has a PhD in the topic to boot, she had a great mentor at Brown University, someone who talked her off the quitting ledge, steered her into computer science and humanities.

Gina Bianchini, who was CEO of Ning and of other companies, acknowledged her two cofounders: Mark Kvamme and then Marc Andreessen.

Mitchell Baker, who runs Mozilla and was the “chief lizard wrangler” who got the source code to Netscape out of AOL and into the hands of developers who could eventually build Firefox … Jim Barksdale who took a risk. “I think he knew I had a bunch of capabilities, and Mozilla was a quirky thing that i would fit with”

Andy Baio, who sold Upcoming to Yahoo! and whose blog is hugely influential and who was CTO of Kickstarter,

2000: With *very* limited experience, a Slashdot-loving geek took a chance on me and I was hired to code Perl at a web design firm in L.A, changing the trajectory of my career forever.  In the next week, I taught myself a crash course with a copy of the Perl Cookbook and the Camel book, and fell in love.

Danese Cooper, the CTO for the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, gave props to the person who offered me a job at Apple back when you could get “on-the-job” training to transition from “French Major” to “Technologist”

This is giving someone a go because you see something in them. When I organized conferences, I organized sausagefests because I chose people whom I knew were good. Which meant my pool was limited to those whom I knew. Which meant, because we’re all like this, they were people like me. When I decided I wanted to change that, I brought women into the program committee, trusted their recommendations, and eventually turned the chair of the conference over to a woman.

There was talk yesterday about internships. I love the Summer of Tech they run in Wellington. The numbers are amazing: 2/3 of students go on to jobs at the company they interned with. The common thread between internships, computers for kids, talking about the good things of our industry, and giving people opportunities is to create on-ramps.

I challenge you to think about how you personally can create on-ramps.

Can you volunteer to teach programming or entrepreneurship at a local school? I’m happy to tell you what I did, it’s dead simple and worked well. There are lots of other successful programs you can emulate.

Can you set up a cheap hardware plan for your school, maybe identify the cheap netbooks, loan plan, etc.?

Can you change how you respond in your workplace to newbies and silly questions?

Can you be conscious of your human unconscious bias towards people like you, and you reach out to make change–ask someone who’s not like you for recommendations or advice?

Can you take a chance on someone?

Can you build a mentoring and supportive environment for people who would ordinarily be bounced off?

There are things we can do now to change the demographics of ICT innovation in New Zealand. Some of those things are the big national programs that are hard work and take a long time. But many of them start with individuals. We can give many more people the same experience of their first computer, and a rich and rewarding career in our industry.

Gandhi: be the change in the world you want to see.

[thanks to Brenda, Skud, Val, and Allison for their patient and selfless work with me over the years. Anything good in my talk will have come from them, anything bogus will be mine alone.]

• Networking is important—often there are other groups doing similar things that are happy to piggy-back on projects or contribute resource. Before you start, understand your resource requirement and allow for growth, especially if updating/collecting info for the community. It’s easy to contact and update for 60 organisations, a lot harder for 3,000.
• Depth of relationship allows for more engagement and vulnerability.
• Keep raising the bar!
• “Personal” rewards from community involvement translates to professional reward and back again.
• Always have a back-up person—don’t be your own single point of failure.
• It can be important to reward people for participating in your online community.
• Go where your community already is, rather than expect them to come to a new ‘community’ that you just set up.
• Forums take 6+ months to establish momentum.
• Wikis suck.
• Comments at the bottom of pages of content fail to engage passive readers.
• Whatever you’re doing—whether it be in the online or offline world—you need to provide an “authentic” experience or voice for your audiences and community.
• You need strong reasons to make building a community worthwhile. It can take a lot of time and resource.
• I like the idea of incentives for users. e.g., points and rewards. For example, in our wiki originally we got a lot of new users to contribute through making the stats viewable. They could view numbers of changes made by users and a top 10. This lead to a competitive environment, especially with the boys. I had forgotten about that so am thinking how we can get that going again. Am interested in Shelley’s “submit a tag”, how that works. A problem we have is meaningless tags.
• I learned that preparation and planning should play a more important role than technology.
• Exposure to a wide range of online communities can teach us a lot about how people interact online.
• We had great success and learned a lot by piloting community interaction with small self-selected groups before trying to interface with the wider community. Benefits: tools are tested and tweaked; people from the pilot are great at kicking the wider community off.
• Be very proactive about responding to criticisms/suggestions by pointing out ways that the commenter/critic can get involved in doing something with their suggestion and solving their problem.
• Why? Social capital; information; value; connections. How? Authentically; where they already hang out; on their terms; multiple (appropriate) platforms. Who? By the community; for the community …
• Go to where your community are already hanging out to engage with them.
• Decentralise your community management by using your community.
• Who the customer is, what they want, what they need is key. Once the purpose is clear, that drives every other decision.
• Do you really need to do this? What will work best for your users? When will you stop if it isn’t working?
• Take-away: you need a community manager; build it and they won’t come!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write down their advice!

1. First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can help the rest of NZ grow. The most exciting conversation at the short-lived Digital Development Council was when agriculture and manufacturing and other industries had an honest conversation with representatives of the ICT industry without being sidetracked into the failures or benefits of particular products or vendors.
2. Second, I applaud the idea that ICT can contribute to the lift in national economic performance that the government wants. Lately I’ve been thinking that there are three critical parts to NZ’s industries doing better: (1) make better use of ICT, (2) develop a global focus so our businesses don’t plateau once they get comfortable in the domestic market, (3) lift the skills of the people in leadership and management so that they can deliver on (1) and (2) without shitting on their feet as has happened all too often in the past. The report addresses (1) but I’d say that all three must be tackled together.
3. I don’t like the high-level generalities of the NZICT report. It’s their first report and in many ways is a stake in the ground to say “we’re here, we’re doing good things, we’re on the right side”. That would explain the vague parroting of political objectives (“step-change” is the new “sustainability”). The report is cannily aligned with political objectives (broadband, more efficient public sector, education, R&D) but many of the recommendations are little more than “we will work with you on what you’re already doing in these areas”. Government needs to be shown specific opportunities (e.g., “look to open source database alternatives in these situations”), and there are precious few specifics here.
4. And where there are specifics, they’re not great. For example:
   

   There  has  been  a  move  to  a  more  centralised  approach  to  Government  ICT strategy  managed  by  the Government Technology Services  group  within  the Department  of  Internal  Affairs. NZICT supports this centralised planning approach. It should clarify the strategic objectives of Government ICT spend, and enable consequent research and development opportunities for the industry to take. 

   NZICT proposes that the Government make an “Annual Statement of ICT Priorities”. This will enable transparency, certainty and direction of public sector ICT spending for all stakeholders involved. It will also encourage private sector investment, including research and development. This will stimulate ICT based innovation within the economy.

   Some problems with this: (1) annual is not a timeframe for strategic thought, it’s tactical; (2) annual is not a R&D timeframe, it’s a sales cycle; (3) it’s unclear that an annually-changing long-term strategy would provide any more certainty to investment than exists now; (4) the problem that this would solve isn’t clearly defined. This last failing is near-universal. Very few of the paper’s many recommendations come with a problem statement, and solutions to unknown or poorly-specified problems often turn out to be timebombs, turkeys, or turds.

5. I’m also aware that NZICT is an industry lobby group and as such its offers and advice should be taken with a grain of salt. New Zealand has precious few independent economic voices (New Zealand Institute has served admirably in the past), and NZICT is not one of them. “NZICT  will  establish  a  working  group  with  the Government Technology Services group of the Department of Internal Affairs to develop a programme for improving public sector ICT efficiency, including operational and process cost reduction to an agreed plan and targets” could be read by a cynic as “NZICT members will have privileged access to centralised government IT planners and buyers, bypassing or rendering moot a procurement process that attempts to provide a level playing field”.

So, like most things, it’s a mixed bag. I’d give them 6/10 for speaking with a single voice in such tight harmony with the government’s stated policies. There’s still work to be done in producing something that’s useful, rather than a positioning paper, but this is a promising first step from a new industry lobby group.

When it comes to promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband is better than not having it, but most benefits are likely to come from wiring people up in the first place rather than making existing connections hum faster. In Japan and South Korea over 40% of households have fibre links capable of blazing speeds, but that does not seem to have resulted in more rapid economic growth, or the emergence of new applications unavailable to consumers with ordinary broadband.

This argues for something like the Broadband Investment Fund, which is frozen but not dead (political cryogenics), aimed at getting broadband to places that don’t already have it. I still think NZ needs faster broadband to the home (I am personally far less efficient than I would be if I were in the US with blazing-fast broadband) and that the market has not and will not deliver it, but I wonder whether the mood in Wellington for broadband investment has dissipated now the election is over. It was always going to be bloody hard to do, and as the economy melts down there are many more candidates for investment raising their hands. I have no idea how it will play out, but I’m watching it keenly.