IT educationalist Tim Pearson talks

Pearson who attended the Harvard University Business School Advanced Management Program and is past Chairman of the Internet Service Providers Association, is to retire from the education computing specialist RM at the end of September, being succeeded  in a hard act to follow, by Terry Sweeney.  Pearson wants to move to Northern Scotland with his family after more than six years as CEO and 27 year at the company.  In March John Spencer interviews him and the following  excerpts show some of this IT livewire's thoughts and personality, not to mention humour.

The Asus success joke
Inside the company the Asus has been the subject of a public joke between him and the Chief Operating Officer. Last August, Pearson said that they would sell ten-times the number he had forecast. As this became the subject of a very public £10 bet, the COO  set his team the task of meeting my target, less one! More seriously, it's been hard to forecast having no real experience selling at this price point before, neither had they ever sold a machine with a Linux-based client OS before.

Getting sufficient quantities to meet demand has been very hard – in fact, he doesn't think we’ve had free stock since we launched last year. We do our best to give a realistic forecast of lead time on a daily basis on the Web site though. RM has now started taking orders for an XP version as well, but it has not shipped any of those yet.

On Open systems
"A typical head teacher or subject teacher as a generality, they’re worried about benefits to their pupils and costs to their school, the term FOSS doesn't mean much to most of them. This is a factual observation, not a judgemental one. Sure, school and authority technical staff understand completely, but this is a tiny minority of the 500,000 school staff out there.

"On the Board at RM we have two of the World's top educationalists – Sir Mike Tomlinson and Professor Tim Brighouse. When you use terms like GNU, Linux and Open Source with them, well they are slightly intrigued that such things exists, but it does not capture their interest. What they want to talk about is how these things are used in schools – and why pupils get a better deal as a result.

"It would be wrong to say that the miniBook success proves Linux is better than Microsoft. I know some of your readers will hate me saying it, but I suspect many users might prefer a Microsoft operating system.

"Where Microsoft should be worried though is that users are saying: look, at this price point, with a full-featured Web browser, combined with the small form factor and solid state disk, the operating system is 'good enough'. There you are, now I have offended just about everyone in the world of IT in a single paragraph!"

On intellectual property
" I [have] felt for a long time that intellectual property protection across the world is too biased in favour of businesses, in a counter productive way. I like copyright because it is simple, understandable, and non-bureaucratic but, if I were Prime Minister for a day, I'd limit its term to, say, 20 years for all works and provide the UK with clearer fair-use rights than the EU, UK or US have now.

"As far as patents go, they are a simple bargain between society and inventors: we’ll give you a limited monopoly in exchange for publishing your invention and bringing advances publicly to society. That sounds fair enough when it is applied to major advances; unfortunately, the bar is set far too low and so in all jurisdictions, but particularly the US, it seems that we allow trivial patents to become instruments of blackmail. Always remember, we live in a world which has awarded a patent to swinging sideways on a swing."

"Products like the miniBook absolutely are powerful weapons against the digital divide. They’re affordable, usable and attractive – perhaps even ‘cool’. I think what we have learnt is that there is a space between traditionally full featured portables, and smartphones that is a good space for getting everyone online – devices that have a small but credible keyboard and screen and support one of the mainstream browsers are generally a good way forward."

Encouraging standards
" I think that if there were a few more techies in government and a few less lawyers we would not be where we are! This is probably the subject that annoys me more than any other. Policy makers in general just do not seem to understand the open goal that they are missing by not allowing or encouraging standards to be set for education interoperability. The UK has had the most advanced supply industry for educational IT of any nation in the world; we risk losing that position because policy makers neither seem to know nor understand the dynamics around setting technical standards.

"My favourite example is the USB port. Those of us who can count to 1023 on our fingers (210-1) can probably still remember the sinking feeling when a friend, neighbour or colleague asked us to sort out something that needed to be connected to the PC via RS232C – dip switches, command line driver switches and cable genders would all need to be messed around with in between mumbled incantations to the Gods to make stuff work. Then a group of industry people got together and defined the USB port. Overnight the chances of plugging a peripheral in and having it work first time went from 5% to 85%. It also grew the market as people were more ready to design and buy peripherals.

At a (very) macro level, you just have to pray that we don't keep discovering new oil reserves. We all know that the human race as a collective is sufficiently lacking of self-discipline that, if we find it, we will burn it!

Importance of green computing in schools
At a (very) micro level there are three interlinked variables that affect our users: noise, heat and power consumption. A typical classroom in the UK is not, and will not be, air conditioned. It’s not actually illegal, but it is hard to construct a new school building within current building guidance that has air conditioned classrooms. Thirty computers and monitors in a classroom purchased in 2005 probably consumed close to 8KW of electricity and turned that into heat – 30 pupils add another 3KW - So that is why heat is an issue for our customers.

If you look at a typical desktop computer it has at least three fans (to get rid of all the heat) and sometimes as many as five. If you have 30 computers in a classroom that is at least 90 fans – and if you push the ambient noise level up then there is plenty of good, solid, evidence about how the learning in the classroom becomes less effective. So if you can lower power consumption you can have fewer fans and less heat and better learning!

Looking at both ends of the scale then – those are the two reasons why we have spent more than three years focusing engineering effort on lowering power consumption. We have come a long way – we are down to complete system consumption of below 80W today and we are already working on systems for 2009 with a further step reduction. Our target for next year is to get a complete system from our ecoquiet range, including monitor, down to 50W or less. We have just launched an ecoquiet server and are working on other products.

P.S. We don't just do this to flog kit. We have also got our car fleet to an average of 44mpg, and we lowered our internal electricity consumption by more than 10% last year, and are doing twenty other things all in the same area –these are driven by all of our staff rather than just the management team.

Full and delightful interview at: http://tinyurl.com/4wahab
Source: http://www.sharecast.com/