Kill the home computer! Viva!

A reasonable, basic, start-up desktop PC with all the necessary accessories and running Microsoft Windows’ notoriously atrocious Vista will set you back at least R8 000. Add in broadband connectivity and the mandatory ball-and-chain contracts, and the whole rigmarole will put a ten-to-twelve-grand hole in your family savings. That’s right now. Tomorrow it will be 20% more.

If you prefer the portability of a laptop, add 50% to the price tag. Plus 20%.

Then there are all the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-adware, password protectors, download accelerators, spam-fighters, media players, flash memory chips, headphones, UPS, external hard drives … and on and on and on. You will need some specialist software –_accounting, photo-editing, CAD, DTP; depending on what you want to do with the stuff in the first place. Settling on a round budget-busting financial millstone of R20 000.00 is probably a fair call. That’s right now. Tomorrow it will be 20% more.

You’re supposed to have some sort of guarantee on everything, though the duration and extent of coverage depends largely on your dealer. And what you get for your guarantee is not guaranteed. For instance, despite Windows and other Microsoft monopoly software such as Office being about as dependable as an ANC service delivery promise, you only get four service calls per product. A realistic service guarantee would be four service calls a month. That has been my experience over the past 16 years.

In the perilous world of IT, you’re supposed to have a helluva lot of things. Peace of mind is definitely — and quite deliberately — not one of them. You have no right to peace of mind when you’re at war & fighting just to stay alive.

Despite knowing my way around a keyboard and mouse, I am no computer fundi. In fact, try as I may and spending at least 50 hours a week working with what is euphemistically called “information technology”, I simply cannot keep pace.

Back in 1980 the futurist John Naisbitt said that, had automotive technology progressed as fast as computer technology had, a Rolls-Royce would cost about $100 and travel about 100 000 miles on a gallon of gasoline. Then he added that one would also be able to fit six of them on the head of a pin.

But even he couldn’t factor in the size and nature of the IT industry that would mushroom out from dropping the home computer. Nor the impact of the internet.

In SA, the closest we have to a John Naisbitt is Clem Sunter, but he has wisely steered clear of the IT war. Wisely, because from where I sit and type and move my cursor, and bang my desk in frustration, this country’s IT industry — at every level — is in as shocking a state of disarray and deliberate duplicity as the ruling ANC.

The little guy consumer is like Custer at Little Big Horn. So they may not kill you physically, but they will in every other way possible. There is not a single supplier of any kind who is worthy of trust. The first immutable law of terrorism: trust no one!

The lack of an independent, reliable start-to-finish hardware manufacturing industry means the machinery is beyond the means of 85% of the population and galloping further and further out of reach. Software development is patchy and irrelevant at best and almost entirely dependent on the megalithic platforms — not one of which has a trustworthy service ethic in place. Even the so-called Open Source stuff is so dumbed down as to rank with Jack & Jill kindergarten readers, and completely unsupported.

While big corporate consumers have the financial muscle to negotiate acceptable service levels, the home user and small business are at the capricious, vicious whim of Microsoft, Linux, Apple, Incredible Connection, Matrix or Dial-a-Nerd. All of these are as hugely overpriced as are their products. Guarantees are seldom worth the paper they’re printed on and the little guy does not even feature in the grand plans. Aside from being obsolete the moment you plug it in, your fuel costs alone in shuttling your box back and forth every month for repairs will match its sale price within 12 months. Couple that to the fact that no machine is ever repaired in less than three days; more commonly two weeks. Two weeks of enforced leave. Like being sent to Abu Graid or Guantanamo Bay just coz your PC’s built-in obsolescence gotcha.

I am gobsmacked by the fact that nowhere in SA is there a trustworthy, independent source of information on what to buy. The smallest spaza shop has eight magazines on motor cars, five on motorbikes, and at least 18 on breastfeeding-vs-formula. Eight-year-olds can read and understand these things. Not a thing on IT. There are bucket loads of trash about the latest, extravagantly priced shoot-em-up games (see where the thinking is?), but nothing on fixing the latest Microsoft update that keeps crashing your system or why Internet Explorer 7 will not operate.

Try scouring the local internet and you come up with mahala too. The wise guys have joined the enemy and are charging exorbitant prices for their advice. It is indeed only on the vicious kill-the-consumer battlefield of Computernator, IT (as in Stephen King’s novel) telecommunicannihilation that I am in sympathy with Vavi and Blade and the other communists. Regulate, regulate! Viva legislation viva!

Our national cellular networks remind one more of a 15-year-old schoolboy’s “beard” (complete with pimples and blackheads) than of a state-of-the-art telecommunications grid. The woefully inadequate broadband internet connectivity has ensured we are still well and truly 40 places off the global pace and with Poison Ivy at the helm will probably linger longer on the bench — forever the bridesmaid, never the bride.

I have learnt to distrust Microsoft, Acer, HP, Sahara, Samsung, Panasonic and Dell entirely because

every

interaction has been a disaster of vastly overpriced products that have not lived up to their hype and costly but effectively useless back-up “service”. I simply cannot afford anything from Apple — at all. They have no idea that this is Africa. In the unlikely event that you can afford an Apple, any Apple, it will be like buying a Jaguar XE for touring the Richtersveld.

I visit Indelible Dysfunction only to talk to the kids and other customers because the staff members usually stare blankly at me when I ask questions. The customers though are great — like the 12-year-old Afrikaans kid who gave me what Dial-a-Nerd would have charged R1 800 for (and taken a week to complete) in the space of five minutes — complete with notes written neatly in my notebook (the paper-and-pen kind). His name is Hennie and he arguably knows more than the entire staff complement of Incredibles on the West Rand — definitely more than the three palookahs at Clearwater Mall.

What saddens me even more about the dismal state of our IT industry is that right now is the best possible time to rise to the challenge of the international financial meltdown. But the industry believes its own spin and is treating it all as business as usual, which puts everything out of reach … waaaaaaay out of reach.

Telkom is nothing less than a national disgrace. Vodacom and MTN rely on their customers to demonstrate (at the customer’s expense) how patchy their coverage is and how criminally overpriced their wireless broadband fishnets are. CellC can only offer a now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t coverage, and Neotel has so far fallen kilometres short of its promises. They will probably not last past July next year. And so the tale of woe continues.

“Mad” Frankie Fraser, the notorious London hit man, thug and buddy of the Kray brothers, used to say: “It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice”. Then he would kill you.

Our computer, IT and telecommunications industry is much the same — despite Shuttleworth (ominously silent right now) and groups such as Softline. Like millions of ANC supporters who have yet to see a flushing crapper in their backyard, let alone service delivery, we aren’t seeing the promise of IT on the ground.

Yet that is precisely wherein the future of SA lies. And we have missed the boat entirely.

Though it is a strain of the killer Africavirus of extractive exploitative economies built on markets that actively discourage investment in manufacturing and is anti- everything related to quality customer service, it is really quite sad.

In the anti-consumer terror war in SA the grass is all but dead. We have nothing at all to be proud of and even less to trust.