Such as: would implementing that idea actually cost Ryanarse money, or profits?

When Michael O’Leary makes a stupid pronouncement, the media seems happy to repeat it. None seems happy to examine it and throw it back at O’Leary to ask whether he has lost his mind and is trying to annoy his shareholders as well.

For instance: charging people to use the toilet. (That’s a Google search link: the top link at the moment is to an April 2010 story saying that Ryanair is going ahead with it… and the third link is from February 2009, with “pilots aghast at proposal to bring in £1 charge”, which shows you how long this story has been bing-bonging around the mediasphere.

Let’s examine this the way it should be examined: from a business standpoint. If Ryanarse starts charging for access to the toilet, I think it will lose money. Here’s why.

1) emptying the toilet reservoirs (known, charmingly, as the “honey tanks”) is a fixed cost. It’s done at the end of every flight. And the toilets are on aircraft are never in a wonderful state.

If Ryanarse starts charging for the toilet, fewer people will use it. Obviously. It may also have to do more cleanups from parents of young children who run out of money. It’ll also have to get staff to watch over the toilet to make sure people don’t hold doors open for each other - which will be unpopular with the aircrew, since nobody like to be toilet cop.

So it will get a bit of money from people paying to use the toilet, though there will be fewer visits - meaning that the fixed cost, cleaning the toilet reservoir, will only be slightly offset by the takings. And aircrew will have two new grievances: cleanup and toilet cop rota.

But while Ryanarse makes some money from selling toilet access, it will lose money from sales of coffee, tea and other liquids. This is stupid, because it already has the highest prices for coffee and tea and food according to a 2008 survey by Which? Holiday:

The Irish airline charges £2.50 for a bottle of water and £2.50 for a cup of coffee while a small bottle of red wine costs £5.00.

Why will it lose there? Because people will think “Hmm, if I drink this coffee I’ll have to pay for letting it out too.” So the passengers won’t buy the coffee or use the toilet. Ryanarse is suddenly losing money: the profit it used to make on coffee/tea sales. And that is pure profit: apart from heating the water, pretty much everything that it buys for coffee/tea - instant coffee, teabags - can be reused on another flight if it isn’t used. Whereas the toilet reservoirs have to be emptied every time; it is actually more efficient to encourage their use - that way, you get your money’s worth for the cleaning services.

Michael O’Leary - who I think is despicable; if you want to think of the future driven by his credo, imagine Adam Smith’s invisible hand slapping the human face forever - ought to be able to see that charging for access to the toilet is a stupid move, economically. It would actually make better business sense to announce that the “toilet charge” will be rescinded - and raise the price on coffee and tea. In fact, expect it.

And if O’Leary is too stupid to see it, then perhaps his shareholders could show him this blogpost.

And finally, to the business press: next time O’Leary puts forward a stupid idea like this, ask whether it can make business sense. Think about fixed costs and operating costs. And quiz him. When he can see he’s going to lose, he caves in. I think if this is implemented, it will be a money-loser. But you’d need to ask the hard questions - how many drinks are sold per flight before, how many after, what’s the take - to know whether, when Ryanarse announces it’s not implementing (or is withdrawing) these charges, precisely why it’s doing it.

My suggestion: it won’t be because of an outbreak of warmth in O’Leary’s heart, which I imagine as a coal-black thing that would make Lord Voldemort shudder.

A couple of notable phrases: “Microsoft’s failure in this market is unusual..” and at the end that “In the long term though functionality is sure to win out over form”. Debate among yourselves whether this was just history talking…

Handheld computers

BY CHARLES ARTHUR

Technology Editor

Handheld computers cannot do what most people want them to. This may seem surprising, given that millions of models using operating systems from Palm, Psion and Microsoft have been sold since 1984, when the British company Psion introduced its first handheld model.

But all are severely limited compared to the expectations placed upon them, which can be traced back to two sources: the 1960s TV series Star Trek, and the hit BBC radio series first broadcast in the 1970s, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy written by Douglas Adams. Only at the turn of the [21st] century does it look like people will soon be able to buy products with the facilities that people have been hankering after for decades.

The sight in the 1960s of William Shatner as Captain Kirk landing on alien planets and flipping out a palm-sized machine which could act as a radio, intelligent locator and general categoriser of knowledge had a subtle effect on the baby boomers’ belief about what computers of the future could and should do. It was voice-activated, and context- and location-sensitive. Similarly, in the radio series, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was actually the name of a computerised guidebook. It contained as much information as the galactic hitchhiker could need. While its indexing method was hopeless by any standards - the traveller had to look up a number in the index and enter that in order to get the corresponding entry (”so bad it could have been designed by Microsoft,” Adams later quipped) - it did create the belief that someday one could build a handheld machine able to hold all the knowledge not just in the world, but in the galaxy. And if aliens had them, why shouldn’t we?

The reality of the first retail products was rather different. The Psion 1, the brainchild of David Potter, was launched in 1984. It had a mighty 10K of non-volatile memory, an alphabetic keypad and a one-line 16-character LCD screen. Entering data was tedious. It would not have passed muster with Captain Kirk. However its descendants are now widely used by people in jobs requiring simple data collection, notably including traffic wardens.

In August 1993 Apple Computer launched its $700 Newton, which seemed at the time to promise at least some Star Trek functionality. It had handwriting recognition software able to “learn” your specific cursive style; there were promises of wireless communications and word processing.

It turned out to be an example of the computer industry’s occasional hubris. The software did learn your writing style, but often failed to interpret the letters correctly. The Newton was a flop (officially abandoned in 1998, but dead some years earlier) which poisoned the well for entrepreneurs in the US handheld market for some years. Bill Gates of Microsoft reckoned it put the market for such products back by two years. (Probaly an underestimate.) Palm Computing, founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky in 1992, only managed to survive by selling itself to the modem maker US Robotics early in 1996.

However, in the UK and Europe Psion was thriving, and had developed its Psion Organiser 3 series, which had a miniature keyboard and inbuilt software including limited word processing, a calendar, contacts book and spreadsheet. It looked like a miniaturised version of a laptop computer, and proved very successful in its local market.

But on the west coast of the US, Hawkins and Dubinsky were developing a palm-sized machine which would have some, at least, of the ease of use both of Captain Kirk’s communicator and The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Hawkins envisaged a machine - which later became the Palm series - that would not stand alone, but would synchronise and back up its files with a standard PC. Thus it would not have to do everything; only have enough functionality to be useful while out of touch with the PC.

For data entry, he developed a shorthand cursive system called “Graffiti” which all Palm users have to learn. He tested the ergonomics of the product by carving a block of wood into a size and shape that he could carry comfortably around in his pocket. Function and form thus developed in parallel.

The Palm operating system was hugely popular, even though the basic machine only offered a calendar, address book, task (”To-do”) and notes list, plus a calculator and search system. Its success stemmed from its ability to coordinate with a PC; the openness of the operating system; and the coincidental rise of the Internet. The first point meant users could access their databases more easily than with tiny keyboards; the second that software developers could write programs to enhance the machine; and the third, that those programs could be widely and quickly distributed. Psion, with its EPOC operating system, had attracted some software developers but was held back by its European location (where Internet development lagged by a couple of years compared to the US) and lack of connectivity to PCs.

Launched early in 1996, the first Palm computer sold 1 million units in 18 months. In 1998 Hawkins and Dubinsky left with Ed Colligan, marketing head of Palm: they were dismayed by the slow working of the monolithic 3Com, which had bought US Robotics. They set up their own company Handspring, and licensed the Palm OS, which then had 80 per cent of the world market, served by 100,000 developers, while Psion and Microsoft scrabbled over the remainder.

Microsoft’s failure in this market is unusual, but seems to stem from its WindowsCE operating system (renamed and rebuilt as PocketPC in spring 2000) being too complex for the limited power of the machines. WindowsCE is used in petrol pumps and set-top boxes for decoding digital TV signals.

The future promises rapid change. Until 2000, handheld computers sat apart from mobile phones: an address list on one could not be transferred to another. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen noted, this is absurdly inconvenient. Mobile phones are no good for noting data (such as phone numbers) while you are in a call; but handhelds have been little use for making phone calls.

But Handspring especially has been forcing the pace, as its Visor machines, which use the Palm OS, include a slot called the “Springboard” where the user can plug in items such as a camera, memory module and - from autumn 2000 - a GSM modem.

That abruptly made the Handspring into the potential killer combination of handheld address list and mobile phone. Palm rapidly announced that by the end of 2000, all of its products would have wireless capability. Separately, IBM demonstrated a version of a Palm machine with an add-on board which gave it voice recognition capability, using the ViaVoice technology. Suddenly, the humble handheld was beginning to look like the machine which would be able to do everything.

But mobile phone makers and Psion are not finished. The so-called “third generation” of mobile phones, which will have high-speed data connections, were being designed in 2000, and the Symbian consortium (which uses the Epoc OS) won a contract to provide the OS for a number of phone companies.

What was still unclear at the end of 2000 was whether handheld computers would swallow mobile phones, or vice-versa. The handhelds had the functionality; the mobile phones had the usability. However the mobiles rapidly lost that edge as new WAP (Wireless Applications Protocol) phones attempting to squeeze Internet interactivity into a few lines of a monochrome LCD screen. In some respects, it was a step back to 1984. But the market’s explosive growth may mean that there is room for everyone to survive. In the long term though functionality is sure to win out over form.

end//

The cause, as we all know, is companies that gather lists of journalists, assign vague labels (”technology”) and then pimp those lists to all sorts of PR companies. Meaning that the puzzled (to begin with) journalists get bombarded with emails about all sorts of “technology” topics, from heavy plant machinery to web apps for diets to which company has won a contract to do the voice and computer networking for Company X. (The latest to annoy me again in this way is Cision, which keeps pimping my email in this way. I really dislike them. I’ve search my very large email repository for emails sent via Cision, and NOT A SINGLE ONE has been useful or relevant. That’s quite a non-achievement.)

This is always done with no regard or interest or even checking as to whether the journalist is interested, or has ever written about this topic. That’s because, of course, it costs the PR nothing to send the email; the annoyed journalists’ wasted time simply doesn’t show up on the balance sheet. (One can make similar points about environmental degradation and the economy, but that might be conflating the trivial and the important.) An economist would tell you that the journalist and the environment both fall into that plain category of “externalities”, aka “I don’t mind, and you don’t matter”.

So here’s how I explained it to a PR person in an email. I’d asked them to stop sending me their irrelevant rubbish. The PR person wrote back with what he thought was a stout defence.

PR person: I sent this release to you on the basis that your readers might be interested in how a company like XXXorganises its [computer] network, despite this type of story not being your main focus.

In other words, what the PR person was saying was this: “Despite the fact that you’ve never written about the topic, haven’t written anything else that looks like that subject, and haven’t written anything about any of the other scores of emails that we’ve sent you. It was just nice and easy and since you didn’t come round to our offices and actually kick us, you must have been really enjoying receiving them.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. Should I spam every PR company with requests for interviews with everyone I want to talk to - film stars, rock musicians, top technologists - even if those PR companies don’t handle those sorts of clients or subjects? Should I send out an email every week to every PR person and company in my contacts book saying “Look, I’d really like an interview with Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, Sergey Brin and Larry Page - can you sort that out?”

No, because it would be a complete waste of time for virtually everyone. But it would be trivially easy - I could set up a computer script that would do it without my interaction. Or I could just put a few different names in each week.

Imagine what it would be like to be in PR: as a recipient, you’d ignore it at first, but if every journalist did it, you might find it wearying. And then you might begin by asking the journalist to stop.

It should be so simple: know the journalist (by reading what they write about), then determine the email that they might be interested in receiving. But the externality problem in PRs and journalists is huge. I’ve written about it before. I just wish that some of the people who send out these pointless emails would stop, but of course it’s the worst ones who ignore it, and it’s the worst practitioners who pimp ever-expanding lists of email addresses. Sturgeon’s Law is alive and well.

See, I love it when you can come back to things after ten years. Count the things that have come true.

BY CHARLES ARTHUR
Technology Editor

Doorknobs that talk, computers that you swallow and phones that don’t ring if there’s nobody to answer them will all be reality within 10 years, according to Professor Nicholas Negroponte, director of the world-famous MIT Media Laboratory, and one of the best-known of Internet gurus.
Addressing the theme of how computing will pervade our lives, Professor Negroponte said: “You may wonder about how computing could possibly affect something like a doorknob. But if you think about it, an intelligent doorknob would be a really useful thing.
“You would not need keys: it could identify you by your fingerprints, and perhaps confirm your identity by asking a question - ‘What’s your mother’s maiden name?’ for example. Why would you need keys anymore?”
The smart doorknob could also accept parcel deliveries - and perhaps sign digitally for them; “and maybe it could let the dog out, and then let it back in while keeping out the other nine dogs following it.”
The technology required to do that is already sufficiently miniaturised, he said: such “embedded” systems could surround us. “We will have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of embedded chips around us, all intercommunicating,” he predicted to an audience in London.
Professor Negroponte, author of the book “Being Digital”, espouses the view that anything which can be expressed as computer “bits” - such as words, images, video, designs, music - will eventually be transmitted in that form across the world, speeding up transactions and cutting costs. Human activity consists either of manipulating “atoms” - irreducibly physical objects - or “bits”, which contain ideas or symbols. His forecasts have been largely confirmed, especially by the move of music to new digital formats such as MP3 and the rise of electronic commerce.
As computers shrink and become pervasive over the next decade, the sort of information they can access will grow, he forecast. “I you want a really futuristic product for 10 years hence - you’ll have computers that you eat, one per day. It will contain devices and sensors which will record all your anatomical measurements, what’s going on inside you, and relay them to a black box that you wear on your belt. If it passes through you, no problem - swallow another.”
The value of such systems is evident if you consider the problems presently faced by doctors, he said: “Today, you go and say something is wrong, and you tell the doctor a story about how you felt perhaps 12 hours ago, which you can only imprecisely recall. From that, a doctor is meant to make a careful diagnosis and recommend a solution. This may be unfortunate timing after the Egypt Air crash, but I have wondered for a long time: why don’t we have black boxes? Then we could take them to the doctor, and they could read them to see what was wrong with us.”
Professor Negroponte also foresees telephone handsets becoming smarter. “Why do phones ring?” he wondered. “If there’s nobody there, no one will answer. Phones should be built smart enough to know if there’s nobody there. And if there is someone there, they should be able to answer them, like a good butler, and find out who is calling and why, and only then decide whether to get our attention.”
But there are still some giant steps to be made for the average user of computers, he admitted. “Who would have believed, ten years ago, that big segments of the population would spend between £1,000 and £2,000 on their own computers - and that those machines would reduce people to tears once or twice a week?”

Oh. And while I was writing that, I noticed - from the FTP transfer that was going on to do a second comparison - that there are a ton of spam pages in the site. Sodding hackers.

Anyway. I downloaded the entire blog content, and then ran a diff - that is, Filemerge (which comes with the Apple Developer Tools, free on your OSX install disk). It compares the content of any set of files, or directories.

Of course the site I’d downloaded was pretty old, and had been upgraded loads of times, so there were loads of files that were on the left (old) and not on the right (new). They just hadn’t been deleted.

Slogging on… I came across a Wordpress page which explains which files have been deleted in the move up from 2.7 to 2.8. It’s a useful list and I was working my way through it. Slowly.

By now I’d got to blog/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/skins/o2k7/ and was starting to marvel at how deep Wordpress is. When I came across a rather odd one - ui.php - which had the interesting opening:

Codz by angel(4ngel)

Make in China

Web: http://www.4ngel.net

Hmm, is it very likely that a valid Wordpress file would really have that sort of comment? And more telling was that when you loaded it in a PHP editor with live PHP generation, you get this:

Which in essence says: oh, lordy, you’ve been hacked.

Much digging around followed. It’s a fascinating file: it allows the hacker to download your database, and possibly upload chunks as well. I’m going to have to do an SQL dump now to see whether the content of older posts has been hacked (a favourite trick, apparently).

I also discovered a slew of website pages hidden in a directory called “Online” in the “Default” theme folder - which of course every Wordpress install will generally have, so that’s a smart place to put it. (That also makes it a good one to delete.)

But as far as I can tell, the site is clean now. My best guess for how they did this is that it was one of the Wordpress weaknesses via user registration - this one? This one? There are so many to choose from - and that it’s been sitting there for an age, just waiting to be exploited, or perhaps being exploited and I didn’t spot it. (Certainly neither Google’s indexing nor I discovered the hack of the /default/images folder - which is intriguing. Have you checked that folder lately?)

I hope this is the end of the tale. I’m not pinning everything on it though.

One other point: thanks again to Stefan Pause, who has helped a lot on this (what’s your site, Stefan?) I’m now alerted to the Wordpress Exploit Scanner plugin, which will look through your site and find any suspicious CSS, HTML or similar. It reckons that there’s nothing suspicious in the older posts. Good-o, though I’d like to (and will) make sure myself.

Endnote: interestingly, Google won’t allow the ui.php file to be emailed, even in zip form. (I wanted to send it to my web host to explain what I’d found and tell them to search for it.) So obviously Google Mail’s already got some sort of hashing going on to detect malware being passed around. Impressive.

The hackers? Boring, really, that this sort of endless diversion from site to site is how they make their money. All that enthusiasm and knowledge and ability, turned to trying to persuade people lacking self-esteem to buy pills of unknown quality from sites of extremely dubious status. Isn’t there something better we could do with all our time here?

Super-endnote: And then I find another file - this one at /wp-includes/Text/Renderer/Diff/ where there was one called online.php (a bit of a clue by now, because it’s all about “online” crap these guys are selling.)

The WP Exploit Scanner tipped me off - it notes that it’s a base_64 command, which usually means “something to hide”.

And so it proves: here’s the picture you get

(You can see the full-size thing at Flickr.) And hey - what is it about hackers and the black backgrounds? Too much watching the Matrix, I think. Forget it, guys - you’re not The One, you’re pushing junk pills.

What’s interesting this time though is that the person doing it has decided to be a bit more subtle. Rather than doing it all by hand, he’s clearly decided that automation is the thing.

And so the inserted spam-generating code is just one line of PHP. One line!

Ah, but it’s clever - it’s a base64_decode (ie, a string of encoded stuff) which is then enclosed in an eval() statement.

So PHP decodes the base_64 stuff and then does what it’s told by that statement.

And what it’s told to evaluate is to get the content of a URL: http://weberneedle.com/pictures/header/h/freeourdata.org.uk.html.

Weberneedle, in case you’re wondering, is part of Weber Medical. Obviously, it’s been hacked.

The spam is pointing to two directories - http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/fans/Thomas9385 and http://www.anats.org.au/statechapters/act/images/online/canadian/. They’ve been hacked too. (Oh, Anats - the Australian National Association of Teachers of Singing. You’re offering links to a lot more than singing, I’m afraid.)

But it would be interesting to know how many more sites weberneedle’s hacked directory is pointing to.

And the bigger question is: how many sites out there have been hacked? In the course of my experiences alone I’ve come across half a dozen. (And I’m still trying to locate and close the hole in our server that makes this possible, of course. It’s annoying, but not disastrously so.) How many millions (and yes, I mean millions) of sites are there out there which have been exploited in this way, and which are therefore pointing to stuff they never realised?

At some stage there’s going to have to be a massive clearup - but I can’t imagine it happening. You’d pretty much have to turn the web off and on again.

Well, there’s a hacker attacking the Free Our Data site (not, apparently, blog), but we’re not on timesharing yet. Detecting what they’ve done is a lot easier: they stuff loads of pharma spam into the bottom of the front page (not, to repeat, the blog front page, nor any of the links).

The spam, which comes after the closing /html bracket, hides itself using “font style=’position: absolute;overflow: hidden;height: 0;width: 0″ and then points to a slew of links at http://www.math.utsa.edu/~eduenez/modules/Cataloger. (I’ve nofollowed the link so search engines won’t go there.) However, if you try to access that directory, it’s blank. (Blank via curl too, so there isn’t anything at all.)

But if you try to access one of the links, especially via curl, you find a page that includes the text “Home Page of Eduardo Dueñez” with a load of guff generated by CMS Made Simple version 1.3.1. Hello, CMS Made Simple! Your stuff is used by spammers and scammers! Do you feel happier now?

(The real Eduado Dueñez lives here, by the way - he’s an assistant maths professor at UTSA. Might email him, actually.)

However, closer examination shows that it loads a Javascript (at that then redirects you to its pharma if you are not a search engine.

I’ve found this spam in there and killed it a couple of times, and it’s come back. That’s worrying of course - it suggests that this is drive-by, automated hacking that is done when the links are found to have been removed from Free Our Data, or against some schedule.

So I still have some way to go in discovering what’s going on. There seem to be plenty of other sites out there which have also been hit - so it must be an automated drive-by, at a guess.

But what? There’s a faint possibility that it’s a PHP hack - my own site (here) is unaffected, and uses a bit less.

Notable how many of these forecasts - for the music industry, notably not the book industry - have come true. Why, how farsighted of me to see things that were right in front of my face.

What I’ve always and consistently said is that the music industry should have worked with Napster: encouraged it to become a paid-for service (say, a monthly fee) and take a slice of revenue based on reproduction rights according to which songs are swapped.

Sort of what it’s ended up doing with Spotify, in fact - except this is nine years and millions of pounds/dollars of lost sales later.

But first, a little bit of Sugar to leaven your day. Remember, this ran in April 2000, and the article following in July 2000. Don’t want you getting the wrong idea.

—

BY CHARLES ARTHUR
Technology Editor

Alan Sugar really hoped that it would all turn out right yesterday. He even made a rare appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme, sounding uncomfortable answering questions about his Amstrad company’s new product.

Why? Because if Amstrad were a pop group, people would go about asking each other “What was the name of their last hit?”Alan Michael Sugar badly wants Amstrad (the name stands for AMS Trading, set up in 1968 when he was 21) to recapture the halcyon days of the 1980s.

Then, it seemed to dominate the consumer electronics market, making BSkyB’s satellite receivers, PCs which sold by the thousand, and a range of hi-fi and video systems which though never pretty (and sometimes not too reliable) had made the gruff, bearded Sugar into a household name and a media icon for the rough diamond who kept sparkling. The stock market loved him too: his company was worth £1.2 billion at its peak in 1988. This, for a man whose first electrical product (in 1970) was the £17.70 Amstrad 8000 amplifier which he later described aas “the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever seen in my life” and the 1976 EX range of radio tuners with a meter to indicate the sound quality - which always showed as perfect, no matter what it really was.

The trouble is that lately when the Amstrad button has been pressed, it has showed up anything but perfect. The hit computers of 1984, which sold hundreds of thousands, could not succeed today. After failing to merge with the handheld computer maker Psion in 1996, in 1997 he spun off the company’s most effective side, the computer maker Viglen, leaving Amstrad to focus on consumer electronics. Since then it has not come remotely close to hitting the big time.

So it mattered to Amstrad that people should notice the introduction of a product that he promised would “bring e-mail to the mass market for the first time” and “become the all-in-one communications centre in the home”. Days ahead of the launch, City journalists had pronounced that it would be “the most important mass-market electronic product since [Amstrad] kick-started Britain’s personal computer market 15 years ago… a revolutionary electronic device for surfing the Web.”

But as it turned out, it was none of those things. For £80 you get the “em@iler”, a fixed (rather than mobile) phone which will send and receive email and faxes. There is no subscription charge for the email service - but you will have to submit to adverts beamed to the phone’s small screen which you will not be able to turn off.

Attractive? Perhaps not when compared to BT’s Easicom 1000, launched last March. It costs £80. It sends and received email. You can also use its small screen to browse the Web - which you can’t with the Amstrad em@iler. BT claims to have sold 80,000 in the past year and expects to sell another 220,000 in the next 12 months. And you won’t get ads. Furthermore, these days one would not expect to have to pay for Internet access, since there are hundreds of subscription-free Internet service providers.

But forget all that; what did the City think? Unfortunately, the City hated it. “I can’t get excited about it,” a market-maker in Amstrad shares said after the initial stock-market announcement. Amstrad’s stock promptly lost one-sixth of its value, ending the day at 505p, after months when it had gradually risen.

So does this mean the end for one of the barrow boy legends of consumer electronics? Has Alan Sugar lost his magic touch?

When it comes to the Internet, Mr Sugar has always seemed cautious in an area where one must be a risk taker. A year ago he wrote in a newspaper column that the Internet revolution “could all go pear-shaped” - which could still come true, but is not the ideal stance from which to develop market-winning products. The development cycle for new Internet consumer products is now measured in weeks rather than months or years.

Mr Sugar remains confident. Millions of British homes do not have a computer or modem. He hopes to sell a million, and thinks that with the adverts, “If we run 20 ads a month and if we’re able to charge somebody 15p (per user) then we are in the money.” But if nobody buys the phones, then the money will stay resolutely away. The quality button may say that it is perfect. But underneath, the truth may be rather different.
end//

—-

BY CHARLES ARTHUR
Technology Editor

Unlike most of the people you will meet in these pages, Shawn Fanning never intended to achieve global domination. But also unlike most of the people here, he has truly managed to threaten an entire $10 billion global industry, without ever meaning to. If ever there were an accidental revolutionary, it’s Fanning. Though of course you won’t be surprised to hear that the catalyst for his position is the Internet.

Until late 1998 he was just another computer studies student at North West University in Boston. He had never written any software for the Windows operating system, but Fanning got interested when his roommate began complaining about the problems of using his PC to track down MP3 files - which compress CD-quality music into small, downloadable files - from Websites, and saw the chance to try his hand at his chosen profession.

To help his friend out he wrote a program called Napster (based on his Internet nickname, itself derived from his short-cut hairstyle). It was his first real programming challenge, one on which he worked for days at a time - often not pausing for sleep.

Once completed, and released onto the Internet in January 1999, it was a piece of magic. It can tell you what MP3s an individual user connected to the Net has on their computer - and start copying it from that machine if you want. No payment necessary or requested, either for the Napster program itself or, more importantly, for carrying out the download.

If you have a standard home modem, it will take you between 7 and 10 minutes to download a three-minute MP3-compressed song. A standard 45-minute album would require a few hours. Total cost to a British user, a couple of pounds.

Compared to a CD, there’s no discernible loss in sound quality: the MP3 algorithm is designed to keep frequencies that the ear is sensitive to, and ignore unimportant ones.

The big difference of course is that you haven’t paid £10 or more to a record company or retailer for the music, which you can now listen to endlessly and download into a palm-sized portable MP3 player, essentially a microcomputer dedicated to replaying MP3 files.

It’s not surprising that two things have happened. The music industry is having a collective heart attack at seeing its future revenue streams (which it insists are essential for developing and marketing new bands and artists) cut off; and computer users around the world are taking to Napster with delight. No more having to pay what they see as inflated prices for songs. In fact, no more paying at all, unless you want to spend the money to get the CD with lyrics, liner notes, photographs and the rest.

Clearly, the two business models cannot coexist. Either the record industry gets paid when you take possession of a track, or it has to find some new way of collecting its money.

Just in case you’re thinking it won’t happen to your company, consider that this is a key example of what happens when a conventional business based on making things which carry information collides with the Net. (The book industry faces a similar challenge; only the fact that reading from a screen is 50 per cent slower than from a printed page is preserving it from a Napster-like destruction at present.)

The other key lesson is about what succeeds on the Net. Even by Internet standards, Napster has been a phenomenon, with a user base of up to 10 million who have downloaded it since Fanning released the first version. And that number is growing, the company claims, by between 5 and 25 per cent each week. That makes its user base roughly equal to that of AOL, the world’s biggest Internet service provider. (AOL users can use Napster, just like anyone with Net access.)

Yet there is no business involved in Napster: no money changes hands, not even for the program, which is free. So what’s the lesson? It is this: on the Internet, if you can find something which lets consumers communicate with each other without mediation, it will explode. Imagine if you had been the person who invented email. Napster isn’t quite that, but among the younger generation, it’s not far off.

In December 1999 the music business took its first step against Napster. The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the big labels, sued the company for “contributory and vicarious copyright infringement”. That suit will finally come to court a week from today [WED] in a Northern Californian court.

Even before that, Napster had been sued successfully by the heavy metal group Metallica (ironically, Fanning’s favourite group) and the rap artist Dr Dre. They forced the company to prevent hundreds of thousands of fans from using its servers. (Many of those fans, it is thought, simply wiped all traces of Napster from their PCs and then downloaded a fresh copy of the program and logged in again under a different name.) Metallica fans were, to put it politely, annoyed. Bad PR? Absolutely, says Alan McGee, discoverer of the supergroup Oasis. McGee sold half of his Creation Records company to Sony but then got out completely last year, tired of working under a multinational. “”How stupid of Metallica to in effect sue 300,000 of their fans,” he remarked after the case.

How does Fanning react to all this? With multi-million dollar lawuits looming he is presently incommunicado, at least as far as the press is concerned. But his opinions remain consistent through months of interviews. Is it intended to destroy the music industry? “It was… to create a music community,” he told ZD Net in March. “I thought it was pretty exciting just in terms of the technology.”

But isn’t it theft, what all those people are doing? “I can’t really discuss that,” he told the Observer in May. He thought the service would benefit independent bands without record label deals who could make their MP3s available for download without going through intermediaries such as MP3.com, a commercial Website which very definitely does store MP3s - and recently had to pay the record industry $40m in a settlement which allows it to play MP3s of known artists through its site.

The MP3.com decision was a small chink of light for the RIAA’s members. In 1998 it lost a significant case against Diamond Multimedia, which makes the Rio MP3 handheld player - effectively a Walkman for the MP3 generation. The RIAA sued Diamond and lost. “The RIAA suing us was the best piece of publicity we ever got,” says Nick Caddick, Rio’s senior European marketing manager.

The RIAA lost because, as happened before when the copyright industries sued over cassette recorders and VCRs, a judge ruled that there was a legitimate use for the products - making your own recordings of your own work. Because that legitimate use exists, the product cannot be banned, even though it can be used to abuse copyright, for example by making copies of records. It would be up to the record companies to police anyone making copies. They capitulated.

Similarly, Sony was sued by the film and TV companies when it introduced the Betamax VCR in the 1970s; the same argument was used and prevailed.

One of the arguments the company (formed last summer as Fanning was persuaded by his family to try to capitalise on his invention; in May it received $15m of venture capital funding) is putting forward in its defence is the same one: you could use it to give people access to non-copyrighted work. The fact that millions of people don’t use it that way really isn’t Napster’s fault, because it does not control what is downloaded. Nor does it store any music.

Not only does it have heavyweight arguments in its favour; Napster also has a heavyweight lawyer: David Boies, better known for his remarkable demolition job of Microsoft for breaking antitrust laws: he was the lead lawyer for the US Department of Justice. He won that case. Now he is again, in a sense, representing millions of consumers against powerful forces ranged against them.

Boies, who is in private practice, filed Napster’s defence against the RIAA case earlier this month. Besides various affidavits from members of the (independent) record industry declaring how pleased they are with Napster, he put up a number of independent planks on which the defence will rest. One is that the US’s 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) allows individuals to share a song with as many people as they want, as long as it is a noncommercial use. (The RIAA riposted last Friday that the AHRA specifically mentions “a household and its normal circle of friends, rather than the public.”)

But Napster is also hitting back, defending itself by alleging that the record industry is acting in an anti-trust manner: by blocking new means of distributing music (that is, online and directly between users) the industry is misusing its copyright privileges, Boies said; and under (an obscure) antitrust doctrine, that would mean the industry cannot sue Napster. (The RIAA was silent. Few people argue antitrust law with Boies.)

The RIAA’s principal riposte last Friday was that Napster “uses euphemisms like ’sharing’ to avoid the real issue. The truth is, the making and distributing of unauthorised copies of copyrighted works by Napster users is not ’sharing’, any more than stealing apples from your neighbour’s tree is ’sharing’.”

The music industry has a basic problem with the whole Napster model. But in part that is because it has been so amazingly slow to realise what was happening in the digital landscape.

Besides the lawsuits, music business people like to deny that the public really likes MP3s. Last week, Nick Raymonde, the A&R (artists and repertoire) director at BMG Music, one of the biggest music companies, said in an interview that MP3 “is not a particularly good format technically” and “I don’t really see a lot of kids walking around with MP3 players yet”. As for Napster, he thinks it “a nuisance. I’d rather go and buy a CD. I don’t use it at all because, if it was a band I liked, I’d feel as if I was stealing from them.” One wonders who has it totally wrong: Mr Raymonde, or the millions of Napster users. There’s also the fact that the industry claims furiously that Napster is already depressing CD sales (one recent study claimed that CD sales within a few miles of US universities, where Napster is most commonly used, have fallen; the company riposted with studies showing rising sales.)

Belatedly, the record industry is moving towards an accommodation with the millions of people who are already online. But its problem is that while those moves might have made sense a few years ago, today they look retrograde. For instance, earlier this week EMI began offering downloads of work by Pink Floyd (including its seminal Dark Side of the Moon), Frank Sinatra and rap stars NWA, among 100 other albums and 200-plus singles.

Great; except that you’ll need a particular program to hear the music, and another program to make sure you’re obeying your download licence, and you won’t just be able to swap it around between computers (if you have more than one) and MP3 players. Basically it’ll be a pain.

But the real kicker is this: you’ll still have to pay for it. EMI intends to sell the digital music, via a new set of online retailers, for as much as the physical album.

An EMI spokeswoman said, “We want to learn what the users want, how they find the user experience.” Actually, it’s right down the digital road, at www.napster.com. You get it for free and then you decide if you’d like the physical CD too.

The amazingly slow-moving and inept reaction of the industry led Carolyn Kantor, senior vice-president of MP3.com, to say that “the music industry is a $40 billion industry locked in a $10 billion body.” By which she means that by resisting new forms of distribution that resemble Napster, it is cutting itself off from huge potential sources of revenue. “Progress is about embracing new forms of digital music distribution,” she told a London conference on the future of music in May. “Look at the film industry - it has found a way to take one product through a huge life cycle, where you pay to see a film, then you can see the film as pay-er-view on cable, then you can hire a video, and finally it’s on TV for free. But the music industry hasn’t created a model that let them make their money beyond the first release of the product.”

If Napster wins its case, the effect on the industry will be dramatic. MP3 sharing will become endemic. There is no technical way to prevent CD tracks from being turned into MP3s. Internet access is speeding up - so that in a few years, downloading a 5 Mb file (ie a four-minute MP3 song) will take less than a minute. That’s faster than it takes to actually transform the CD track into an MP3, meaning that using Napster will be preferable to buying the CD. The record industry’s only recourse would be to sue every Napster user individually. As McGee might observe, what a brilliant way to piss off your customers.

“In the short term, the industry badly needs some transparency about its prices,” admits one music executive, who asked to stay anonymous. “People are going to want to know how much the artist is getting if they buy a song, rather than download it. For the fans, that might work. But as long as all you see is the single price tag, and you don’t know how much goes to the record shop and how much to the record label and how much to the artist, you assume nothing goes to the musicians.” That attitude has been fostered by artists such as Courtney Love and Chuck D (of rap group Public Enemy) who have publicly declared that it is the record labels who are the pirates, not the fans or Napster. A growing number of bands are also using MP3s - and some even using Napster - to distribute some of their music, aiming to make money from live performances, merchandise and spin-offs. The music becomes something you just do. It’s a future-oriented way of making money that the record industry seems calamitously unready for.

Napster too is preparing itself for the future: last week it announced it had hired - “stolen” was the nose-tweaking word it preferred - an executive from one of the record companies that is suing it. Keith Bernstein started as operations director on Monday, joining from Seagram-Universal, the world’s biggest record label and a sworn enemy of Napster, which earlier this year hired an A&M legal affairs executive.

For yes, what if the RIAA wins the decision? “We’ll appeal,” said a Napster PR. “There will be a lengthy appeals process. You know, these things can just go on and on. We’re going to be around for years.” The question now is, will the record industry?

end///

–

So here’s what I learnt:

1. Posh Spice gave him an interview that effectively saved the magazine on its relaunch because it was exclusive, and newspapers picked it up.
2. paparazzi send you lots of photos all the time and you have to choose between them. Some of them aren’t very nice really.
3. Simon Cowell smokes Kool cigarettes.
4. PR people sometimes are helpful in getting stories, but sometimes they block you, which can be annoying.
5. Portakabin wrote a legal letter to Heat pointing out that the word “Portakabin” should be capitalised and only applied to its products. Other similar-functioning things should be called “portable toilets”. At Heat they found this letter amusing.
6. Some celebs are very talkative. Others aren’t. Film stars are very untalkative and try to control publicity about themselves.
7. Heat goes to press on Friday night and is printed on Saturdays, which can be a bother when Big Brother is on because people get evicted on Friday night.
8. Big Brother was - is? - very popular with Heat’s readers.
9. Sometimes celebrities tell bare-faced lies to you in interviews.
10. He doesn’t drink, except when he has real problems or wins a really big prize.

Things I didn’t learn from Frith’s book:

1. what effect the rise of the internet has had on celebrity magazines. By the end (finally, in spring 2008, after editing since 2000) he’s quietly mentioning that circulation has fallen from its peak. But although he does mention too that Heat set up a website (heatworld.com, apparently) and that it would post stories there, there’s no indication of how important the growth of celeb-spotting websites is to Heat. Has it taken circulation away? Become an important source of stories? What? Nary a mention.
2. what the real commercial pressures were on him. While everything was going up, you’d expect that he could do no wrong. He does mention that Heat was constantly chasing after OK! - the Richard Desmond-owned magazine which kept doing celeb buyups (such as Ashley and Cheryl Cole’s wedding). How is it that OK! had so much more heft with the celebs?
3. what he really, honestly thought of the whole celebrity culture thing. He mentions a couple of times that he would think of the celebs he featured as like playthings - it brings to mind a quote from Shakespeare about gods and wanton children - but the suggestion is that at the end (around new year of 2008) he suddenly got sick of it all, as Amy Whitehouse and Briney Spears imploded. (The two of them, and the paparazzi pictures, seem - from the book’s narrative - to have driven him to early retirement.)
4. any idea of what he thinks of the people he had to deal with. Is Simon Cowell a wicked manipulator, who thought Gareth Gates would be the winner of Pop Idol (Will Young won, you’ll recall), or just someone who likes a fag and lunch from time to time?
5. how he really viewed the difference between national newspapers - especially the tabloids - and what he was doing. Celeb exposes in the tabs are fodder to follow up; but there’s hardly ever a clear idea of whether he viewed Heat as a vehicle for finding stuff out before others, even though he had ex-journos from the Sun and the News of the World working there.
6. why he didn’t elevate Heat’s complaint that some models were dangerously (for their health, for mimicking readers’ health) thin from a repeated trope into a full-blown campaign. Did he propose it and get knocked back at the executive level? Did the idea simply never occur (even though magazines all over the place try campaigns of one sort of another)? Did he shy away from the political necessity involved?
7. whether he liked (or thought of) the idea of including readers’ mobile-phone-snapped photos of celebs out and about.
8. what his special skills are. He must have some - you don’t take a magazine from the ground floor to the penthouse and keep it there without being especially brilliant at something. I guessed that it might be keeping on the right side of people (PR people, celebs, staff, managers) and always being engaging and listening to them. (Yes, yes, I’d love to have that trait too.) But I’m only guessing - there’s no way of knowing what he really brought to the table.

Actually the list - both lists - could go on and on. It’s a breathless stream; I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone could be so puppy-doggishly enthusiastic and unworried as Frith. As I read further and further in, and noted how he seemed to avoid those difficult judgements - about Cowell, for example, who surely deserves some commentary on how he used or dropped winners of Pop Idol and, subsequently, X Factor (followed by some reflection on Frith’s part about how he was effectively doing the same as Cowell to the graduates of the Big Brother house) - a suspicion began to grow:

He’s not judging them - in fact he’s holding back all but the foolish detail - because he doesn’t want to get into anyone’s bad books. These are people who he might need to give him a job in the future.

After all, he was only 38 when he left Heat (to go where? Where has he turned up since? Answers in the comments please). There’s a lot more to do. Hell, I wouldn’t write a memoir telling all if I were in his position. But I might think, as I wrote, of how the landscape was changing, and perhaps even inject some of that into the book. (Update: he’s been appointed editor of Time Out - thanks Louise in the comments - as of Friday 24 July 2009 - just the time I was finishing off reading his book. Which reinforces all those suspicions, then.)

I find it hard to believe too that he really kept a contemporaneous diary of life on Heat. You have to be a severely organised person to do that; Piers Morgan’s alleged “diary” The Insider was demonstrably written well after the fact. (Morgan’s claim to have described Cherie Blair and her new-age guru as members of the “Axis of Evil” at a No.10 dinner before the phrase came into use is telling. Durr.) I think that Frith left the job and then had to slog back through the issues, and recall what things had happened when. If he did keep a diary, well, I’m impressed, amazed and even more surprised that it doesn’t have any sort of reflection. Most people are reflective in their diary. Also, most people when writing a diary don’t shift about between tenses within a sentence or paragraph in the way that Frith frequently does. Which to me is another clue that it’s a post-op job.

The one place where you really need Frith to have a bit of insight is in the days after the foolish and infamous “stickers” issue - the one which had giveaway stickers such as “I’m not on drugs, I’m bipolar” (an oblique - to me - reference to Kerry Katona, who denied repeatedly she was taking drugs while some, um, journalists on a tabloid got her bang to rights) and, calamitously, “Harvey wants to eat me” - referring to Jordan’s multiply disabled child.

Wow. The effects of that issue - which Frith, formerly of Smash Hits (and who brought pretty much that sensibility to Heat: have fun, take nobody seriously; except life isn’t like that) thought would just be a laugh - were nuclear. Suddenly the radio, TV and newspapers wanted to talk to him. The phone would ring. Reporters came to Emap to ask him questions. But he could get other people to answer the phone. He could get security to turn away the reporters. Even so, the pressure on him for a week or more was immense.

But in that time, he wasn’t pursued by paparazzi; he wasn’t doorstepped. Let’s crank it up: he didn’t have semi-professional photographers whose rent payments depend on selling a photo to magazines and websites around the world walking three steps in front of him taking pictures constantly and shouting his name - and swearwords - to try to get a photo of him. He didn’t have notes shoved through his letterbox. His relatives weren’t bothered. His partner didn’t get calls. Snatched shots of him walking to and from work weren’t posted with big circles pointing to his clothing mistakes.

In short, he never really found out what it was like to be on the receiving end of what he - well, created is the wrong word, but of the flames that Heat helped to fan. And so he never sits down and thinks “what the hell have I done to these people, if this is what it’s like for me?”

Instead it’s left to Amy and Britney, whose travails (and constant stream of papped photos showing Frith the underside of the world; he swears, for example, that he won’t feature anything about Kate Moss and Pete Doherty because he thinks they’re scuzzy) finally show him that it’s not fun any more. For him, that is. Obviously, for them the fun of ordinary living went out of it a long time back.

It’s a pity, because Frith could have given such a marvellous insider view: how you really turn a failing magazine around - including the extent to which better advertising and marketing play a part, and how much editorial budget makes a difference (for those celebrity buyups) - and then how you keep a small but dedicated staff going even while they’re constantly No.2.

But somehow the emptiness of the book is summed up, for me, by the jacket quote provided by Cowell. It’s the only such quote on the book - surprising, if Frith knew so many people and won so many favours; you’d think they’d be happy to be quoted. But no, Cowell’s sits alone.

And it is this: “Nobody knows celebrities like Mark Frith.”

Think about it for a moment. Why didn’t he say “Nobody knows celebrities as well as Mark Frith”? It doesn’t quite mean the same, what he said. There’s a subtle implication - if it’s indeed direct from Cowell - of “there are no celebrities who are like Mark Frith”. Or, equally, “Mark Frith knows celebrities, but not as anyone else does.” Which might include him, Cowell, who knows a few.

The more you untangle, the more tangled it gets. The more you look, the less there is. It’s entirely apposite for the book. You go looking for something but you find there’s nothing when you arrive. There’s no there, there.

A bit like modern celebrity, in fact.

It’s been a long time since I was at Wimbledon. I attended every single day between 1985 to 1992 inclusive, and that included the Monday final of the doubles in 1992 when McEnroe won with Michael Stich. (Goes away to check. Yup. Correct. Memory doesn’t fail there.) I’d also attended the second week of every French Open in that period. In 1991 I went and reported on every Grand Slam event - Australian, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open. The 1991 US event was particularly notable for Jimmy Connors’s amazing run to the semifinals, where his strange flat shots befuddled player after player used to topspin madness. “Does Connors have the perfect game to play guys like you?” I asked Paul Haarhuis, whom Connors had beaten. The slightly testy reply: “If he did, everyone would play like that, wouldn’t they?”

But by then I’d got kind of bored with the game: it didn’t seem to have the zing and excitement I’d liked in the early years. So I just gave it up, pretty much cold turkey, and didn’t go back. But that was after six years of seeing every Wimbledon final from the press seats, which are slightly above and behind the Royal Box. A great place to be: saw Pat Cash climb up the roof to celebrate his 1987 win, for example.

Fast-forward to a couple of years ago. I still wasn’t interested in tennis, which seemed to me to reach a nadir beneath words with Pete Sampras’s ascent: he turned it into a serve, volley, go home game. And he had the personality of a plank.

Then I read a piece by Martina Navratilova about some guy called Roger Federer. Specifically, this:

I was lucky enough to play mixed doubles with him in Hong Kong at an exhibition in January this year. When they asked me if I wanted to play doubles with Roger, I asked, “great, how much do I have to pay you?”. It was a real treat because he was simply a joy to be on the court with. Then he asked me to practise with him and I got to hit for 45 minutes just one on one, which was phenomenal because I really got to feel how he hits the ball.

When Martina says things like that, everyone should listen. If she wants to be on the court with someone, that’s someone worth paying a lot of attention to. When I was covering the circuit she and Steffi Graf were the only two women whose press conferences were consistently interesting, because they were. So - why the fuss about Federer, Martina?

When he hits his forehand he can hook it so that he can go cross-court or down the line, tailing away from you because of all the topspin. He can hit a forehand cross-court so that it jumps at your body, which is effective on any surface but particularly on grass because it’s almost as though he’s inducing a bad bounce because he makes the ball jump differently and that’s what his kick-serve does as well.

He’s got spin on everything, he’s got a heavy slice that stays low, he can float the ball so that it stays low and just dies on the court so you have to create all the pace, or he can knife it so that it skids through. On his groundstrokes he can hit it harder or can hit a cross-court ball that looks like it’s going to be no problem until it suddenly takes off in the other direction after it bounces.

Well, that was good enough for me. So I started watching again. And indeed, Federer is the magic that she said.

But until Friday I hadn’t seen that magic live, and the difference between live and on TV is huge, let me tell you.

Centre Court, of course, is its own special place: far more intimate than you realise from the TV. And indeed, when Federer plays, the magic is there. I was sitting at a place diagonally off one corner, quite high up (so you can confirm the line calls easily), which means it’s hard to see whether the court is open for a pass (that you can see far better when you’re directly behind the court).

With Federer playing Tommy Haas (who always sounds to me like he should be the lead singer of a German heavy metal band), the principal difference between them was the noise when Federer really smacked his forehand. It was a whipcrack, and zinged across the court. Haas gave a good account of himself - as with most pro matches, the difference was only in a few points here and there.

But it’s what the TV doesn’t show you that’s interesting. Such as how between points, if he’s receiving serve, Federer will get any ball down his end from the ballgirl/boy and slice it up the court, lazily floating along with the combined langour and intention of a cruise missile.

Then there’s the way Federer looks slightly grumpily at the court where he was when he lost a point, as though it’s somehow the court’s fault he mishit that forehand. Well, it might have been. But it’s more like a habit.

And boy, do the players have habits. I’d forgotten how they love to do the same things over and over again. Wimbledon could be retitled The Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Challenge. Towel between points: Andy Murray is the champion here. He was wiping his face with the towel even though he had two sweatbands on his wrists. (Pity the ballboys and girls who had to run out to him between every point with the towel outstretched. In their future lives, they’ll make great parents for needy children.)

Which brings us to Murray against Roddick. The expectation was that Murray could win this, since he had a 6-2 record against Roddick, and had previously beaten him handily in three sets at Wimbledon a year or two back.

(Let me just point out to those who might wonder if I know anything about this game these two posts from this blog:

First, in Sept 2007:

Plus Murray has the potential to be one of the top three players in the world if he can get past this year’s injury.

Second, July 2005:

Murray is going to be top 50 within a year, top 10 - likely five - the next one. Talent will out. He made Johansson look quite ordinary for a while at Queen’s.

But Roddick, who has lost a stone recently (so I’m told), wasn’t interested in the past. He came out slamming his serve down.

It’s when you’re up against a big server that your mental strength is really tested, because you have to keep waiting for the little chance to pop up that will let you win the point, break point, game, set.

Roddick was thudding the ball in. But here’s the contrast between Federer and Murray. Haas was bombing his serve too: 126mph or so. OK, so Roddick had about another 10mph on that. But Federer was returning the serve on the baseline. Murray was about three yards back from the baseline.

What you love, if you’re a big server, is a lot of space to aim into. It gives you a feeling of freedom: you can relax. You know where the other person’s going to be, so you can pick your spot and aim for it.

That was Murray’s first big mistake. He didn’t vary where he stood. Even if he had sometimes stood on the baseline - even if it was going to be hopeless - that would have made Roddick think a little bit. If he had stood further back sometimes, so he’d have more of a chance to run at the ball, that would have made a difference. As it was, he remained in the same two places - one for first serve, one for second serve - through the match, and that didn’t help him. It didn’t put any doubt in Roddick’s mind. By contrast, in 1991 I saw McEnroe beat Becker at the Australian Open by basically standing on or even inside the baseline to return serve - bang it back and rush the net. An amazing strategy, and it worked.

Murray’s second big mistake: he wasn’t forcing the rallies. Once the points had gone beyond serve-return, Roddick was typically standing about a yard behind the baseline, driving the ball, being aggressive so that he could dictate the points. Murray, by contrast, was a couple of yards behind the baseline - and it seemed to me that quite a few of the attempted passes that landed in the net failed because he hit them just that bit further back: the ball had begun dropping. Sure, that ignores all the great shots he hit, but tennis at this level is a matter of inches (even less: the Hawkeye call in the fourth-set tiebreaker that would have given Murray a mini-break-back was perhaps half a centimetre out), and you can’t afford to give free shots.

So both those mistakes are essentially the same thing: not

The umpire’s warning in the fourth set for “audible obscenity” was daft - Murray had tried a crosscourt backhand pass, missed it wide, and yelled “No, go for the pass!” (He was down my end, my side, facing away from the umpire.) It was ridiculous; Murray was right to complain, but he held it down well. McEnroe of course would have had the referee on the court in an eyeblink. Times past.

Things you don’t see on TV: when Murray is serving, he takes three balls, and always knocks the extra back to the ballboy/girl with his racket between his legs. Always. (Why do pros take three balls? Because they want the two least fluffy ones. They pick the two least fluffy of the three.)

And then we have Murray’s third mistake, which isn’t so much of a mistake as a failing: his second serve, specifically on the ad (15-0) side. Too much of the time it was too slow, and Roddick could wait for it - expecting it on the backhand, where it would come again and again - and whack it down. From the moment that the first serve plonked into the net (because Murray wasn’t tossing the ball quite high enough) Roddick controlled the point. Too infrequently did Murray mix it up with second serves down the centre, or into the body. (Can’t find a page with that sort of analysis anywhere that would show where the serves landed and so on. Let me know in the comments if it exists.)

Oh yeah, and let’s go back to all the mindless rubbish that was written ahead of the game about Roddick’s tactics:

They last clashed in Doha in January, when Murray easily came out on top 6-4 6-2.

The memory of that defeat led [Larry] Stefanki [Roddick’s coach, and a long time ago John McEnroe’s coach) to suggest on Wednesday that Roddick could try less aggressive tactics this time in a bid to upset the Scot’s rhythm.

Complete rubbish, and utter mind games intended to lead Murray and his team astray: Murray may say he doesn’t read the papers, but it’s a bet that someone there does and that they might make a mention to him in some roundabout way. At least Jeff Tarango - a former player - does himself say that’s rubbish advice, but there’s plenty of papers that just repeated it. Perhaps the nationals need to hire a few people who’ve actually played the game to analyse this stuff.

Anyway, all of this leads us to the final, where we get Mr Five Times Already against Mr Been There Twice But No Titles Yet. It’s hard to see any simple way to pick anyone but Federer here. They’ve played many times, and Federer has the winning habit. The last time Roddick won was in March 08, when I think Federer may have been still recovering from glandular fever.

I think Federer will not make the mistakes that Murray did: he will try to break up Roddick’s rhythm, he won’t give him a consistent place to serve at, and his ground game is awesome to behold.

Anyhow, I’ll be tweeting it at @pokpokclap. Follow me if you’d like.