That's a lot of very specific technologies there. Many people with all of them out there?

The writing was on the wall long before then.

Blackberry's biggest selling point was half-decent email integration. At the time, nobody had a mobile IMAP client worth a damn - and even if they did, Blackberry offered features that weren't possible with IMAP (eg. remote wipe, policy enforcement).

Exchange 2003 - yes, 2003 - integrated ActiveSync. Now, while there weren't any ActiveSync capable phones worth a damn either - and wouldn't be for some years - the technology had promise:

• No need for a third-party server, it's integrated with Exchange.
• No need to be tied to a particular handset manufacturer.
• No need for email to pass through the black box that is BES.

Granted, it wasn't as featureful as Blackberry Enterprise Server - but except for very specific industries, how many companies really care about being able to turn on or off every damn feature the phone offers?

It was only a matter of time before someone introduced a smartphone that spoke ActiveSync without functioning like complete arse. Did Blackberry recognise this and look for ways to make their products stand out regardless? Did they hell.

I've been saying something very similar for a few weeks.

Governments have a habit of disliking things that involve vast amounts of money flowing around that they can neither control nor tax. Yet Bitcoin is the perfect currency for allowing uncontrolled, untaxed transactions worth billions. The instability might be a bit of a problem, but if I'm going to top up a Bitcoin wallet now and use it to pay for goods within the hour, I don't really care what it's doing a week next Tuesday.

How it'll ultimately play out I don't know - I can see pressure being put on the likes of Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT et al to block any transactions to Bitcoin processors, ultimately making it very difficult to get money out of Bitcoin - which wouldn't do the value any favours at all.

Both you and the poster you're replying to have a point.

Certainly in the UK (and I wouldn't be surprised to find it in the US, for similar reasons), the accountancy industry is in bit of a panic. Software that does 90% of what they do has finally become cheap and accessible enough for pretty much anyone.

All of a sudden, Dave down the street starts offering accountancy services at a 40% discount (which he makes possible by having the cheapest kid fresh out of school punch numbers into a computer - or even outsource punching numbers into a computer to someone in a much cheaper country). Your accountant is stuck with a problem: How does he persuade his clients that it's worth using him rather than going to Dave down the street? As far as his clients are concerned, both people are doing the exact same job, it's just that one is much cheaper.

Copying Dave and cutting prices is only going to go one way - all other things being equal, clients will choose one or other of them more-or-less at random and they'll be sharing a much smaller pie. Which is only going to get smaller as the software becomes more sophisticated and the clients think "Why do I need an accountant at all? I can sign up to use the software and do it myself". But accountants are subject to the same foibles as anyone else, so there's no shortage of them doing exactly this.

Some accountants aren't doing this. They're looking at providing business advice and using ever more inventive ways of twisting tax law to save their clients money. They're not cutting their fees at all - instead, they're looking to do more things that justify their fees and even jacking them up. It's dead easy to charge a client £4,000 if you've just saved them £10,000.

People like your good self clearly see the value in this. Lots of people don't see this value - either because they have simpler lives and hence the value doesn't exist or because they're quite short-sighted.

Precisely my thinking.

There's two possible scenarios if you set up such a canary, these are:

  1. You wind up in front of a judge. The judge shrugs his shoulders, says "He's got a point. Nothing in the law that says he's obliged to continue updating that "canary", as he calls it, and nothing in your letter that explicitly demanded he do that either". You walk free.
  2. The judge says "Whoah. Hang on a minute. The whole point of this law is to ensure that these letters are kept secret. I can see what he's doing - he's trying to come up with a clever way of following the letter of the law while totally ignoring the spirit. Well, that doesn't wash with me. Give me a couple of weeks - I need to read through the sentencing options to see what I'm gonna do with this guy. What should you do with your man? Oh, throw him in a cell, he'll be okay there. I'll call you back next month".

Think it won't happen? The judge's job is to interpret the law and apply it as best he can. Sometimes there will be scenarios which the law as written doesn't entirely cater for - which is where the idea of the spirit of the law comes in. It can happen, and even with a clever lawyer fighting your corner, there's every possibility it will happen. If you're taking ideas from sites like this and plan on using them to keep you out of prison - well, sooner you than me.

Absolutely right. Over the last decade or so, much of Microsoft's sales & marketing hasn't actually been done by Microsoft at all.

They haven't needed to.

"We're starting to receive files in formats we can't open" does it for them.

Historically, that resulted in Office upgrades; they're now using that leverage to push other upgrades (Office 2013 requires Windows 7 and Outlook 2013 requires Exchange 2007 or later). In the process, they're losing customers - Office 2013 starts to look like quite an expensive upgrade when you suddenly need to rip out your entire infrastructure

With any luck, the companies providing line of business software will refuse to support their product on XP.

> (The less charitable way of viewing it is that Debian sat back and let others do the heavy lifting).

Maybe. But doing the heavy lifting isn't really what Debian does. Frankly, they don't have the money.

Thing is, much of this isn't particularly sophisticated.

Hell, even the most basic change control process forces you to think about how you're going to do the job, what the criteria are for successful completion and how you're going to back out if there's the remotest sign of anything going wrong. That's noddy stuff you learn in a 3 day intensive ITIL course with zero real-world experience; there is precisely zero excuse for a trading firm not doing all that and more besides.

It's not as simple as "badly-tested code" - it's actually "badly-designed deployment procedure and insufficient oversight".

TFA is light on details, but other articles have picked up the details and explained them a bit better: basically, Knight Capital were running their code on a cluster of 8 nodes.

They used a flag to signal a module to run. A particular module had been out of use for some years, so the flag to signal that module was re-used for a new module.

With me so far? OK, this is all very nice. Except when they updated their cluster, one of the nodes was missed. It still had the legacy module on there.

From this point on, their cluster was a disaster waiting to happen. Once the flag was triggered, all 8 nodes did exactly what they were supposed to do based on the code they were running - but because one of them was out of sync with the code it was meant to be running, it did something else entirely. Everything else cascaded from there.

It would have been relatively trivial to add some sort of oversight to the system so as to stop it fast if what it was doing versus what it was meant to be doing were two different things - but Knight didn't do this.

I find this particularly ironic as I want David Cameron investigated over the Snowden Files.

"When asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files - after first reminding us that they had backup copies in other parts of the world over which we have no jurisdiction. My national security advisor still insisted those files be destroyed, and now you all know why - it was so I could later use this action for my own political purposes."

FTF David Cameron.

Already happened, to great bemusement on the part of the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/21/nsa-nick-clegg-guardian-leaked-files

Doubt it.

I'm offering evens that this purchase has just one plan in mind: Asset-strip the company.

I'd agree that complacency killed the company - but I'd disagree that "ignoring the iPhone" was the issue.

I'd say that "ignoring Exchange ActiveSync" was the issue. A cursory glance at Exchange ActiveSync would have told anyone who cared to look that here is a feature that is aimed squarely at replacing BES/Blackberry with EAS/(insert non-blackberry phone here). With the added bonus that as it's integrated with Exchange, there's no need to buy, install and manage a third-party product.

Yeah, OK, EAS may not be as sophisticated in terms of setting up device policies as BES, but the number of organisations that care about all those fancy "Look, gran!" features could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

From that point, it was only ever a matter of time before a phone manufacturer built a phone that integrated with EAS and didn't suck. Did RIM look at this and take account of it? Did they hell.