John Spencer talks to Tim Pearson Chief Executive of RM. RM is the largest
most successful supplier of ICT to the UK education market and, for good measure, is British too. Tim has been there from the start and so is really now Mr RM. This autumn he gave the school ICT world a jolt when RM announced its Asus miniBook. It retails to schools for only £169 and runs Open Source software throughout. The miniBook has preceded an avalanche of new products and new thinking.
JS: You were part of RM during the heady, exciting days of the first computers
in ordinary schools, viz the big black 480z; do you think we'll have so much fun ever again?
TP: Not quite from the start, but I have been here since before the launch of the 480Z in 1981.
There were two things I really liked about that time: you knew you were at the start of a new technology that had a long way to go – we were developing the first low cost microcomputer network with Digital Research and Zilog at the time; and also, the levels of abstraction in the technology were sufficiently few that one person could have a chance of understanding pretty much everything that was going on in a system.
Nowadays – whilst I am sad enough to say that I miss the joys of assembler programming, in binary – the upside is you can start to produce really powerful and nice looking software much more easily.
JS: Did you anticipate that the Asus Minibook (aka EeePC ) would sell out within two days of it's launch?
TP: Inside the company it has been the subject of a public joke between me and our Chief Operating Officer. Last August, I said that we would sell ten-times the number he had forecast. As this became the subject of a very public £10 bet, he set his team the task of meeting my target less one! More seriously, it's been hard to forecast when we have no real experience selling at this price point before, neither have we ever sold a machine with a Linux-based client OS before.
Getting sufficient quantities to meet demand has been very hard – in fact, I don'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 our Web site though. We have now started taking orders for an XP version as well, but we’ve not shipped any of those yet.
JS: Do you think that the difference between FOSS and proprietary software is something that is understood by purchasers in the education sector, moreover is it important in any way that it is?
TP: No and No!
It's important to take yourself out of our techie world and into the world of 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.
Does it matter? No not really. 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!
JS: The Open Source software world is founded on collaborative enterprise and community projects. Do these kinds of phrase find resonance with RM's emerging thinking now that FOSS plays a significant role in your software portfolio?
TP: Thus far not; going forward possibly. Let me explain. Software will continue to support both 'proprietary' and Open Source models. There’s an analogy – if you have a group of friends who play in a band and make great music for their own pleasure, then it's really nice to hear them play at the local pub or in a local community centre. It's definitely a 'feel good' experience to listen to them, knowing that they are doing it for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of entertaining others. Does that mean we should regard The London Symphony Orchestra as last-century's-immoral-music-for-dollars-business-model? Well no, they try and do different things and there is nothing wrong with professionals expecting to get a living wage for what they do.
I think what is to come in software will be different though. In the market that RM serves, there aren't many teachers who want to contribute to overall community progress by doing some coding on the Linux kernel. However, as the range of tools for developing content improves and high quality interactive content development becomes no more difficult than, say, driving PowerPoint , we will see far more community based activity. RM, through our 3T subsidiary, is developing tools under the name FUSE that are attempting to allow just such a revolution.
We have also developed some of our core software, like our Web based schools MIS system IntegrisG2, so its front end will run on all the major Web browser and its servers can be operated using either Microsoft or Open Source operating systems and databases – this is because we will see different jurisdictions around the world wanting to use all of those environments.
JS: Could you see RM working together with the OSS community on education projects? Even, dare I say it, have you considered releasing some of your star software such as EasyTeach under the GPL?
TP: I certainly could see us working with the OSS community and we have in the past discussed the possibility of releasing some software on GPL. That doesn't mean that everything we can do will be like this though or that we might do it soon, but I certainly can see opportunities.
As I said earlier though, I’m more interested in teachers using an ‘open source’ approach to collaborate in creating learning resources, perhaps using something like our FUSE tools. Few teachers are motivated to build code – but they’re all interested in better ways of teaching and learning, and they’re all interested in working with and learning from their colleagues.
JS: I know that you have many concerns about patent restrictions, what is exercising you most in this area at present?
TP: I know it might be strange to hear me say it, but I 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.
If you compare this ‘patent blackmail’ with how competition authorities treat price fixing (think: suits with arrows on), we have got the balance wrong. This is not a trivial matter for businesses either, we are almost forced into a spiral of lodging more patents so we have an armoury to threaten back anyone that comes to threaten us. This results in lots of money for lawyers and no real advance for society. I don't have any of our 2500 staff trawling the patent office for major advances as, again, the bar is too low, most of what is there is trivial.
Again, if I were Prime Minister for a day, I'd make patents restricted to really valuable, really novel advances (I know that is hard to measure but I do think there are ways). Not all industries are the same, if you look at big-pharma, where they might spend 10 years on a single molecule – working out what might work synthesising it, testing it, being able to scale production – I think they have a better case for protection than someone that came up with a cool search algorithm over lunch.
JS: The Minibook uses the rather well finished Xandros Linux OS (I have one of my own). Xandros signed a 'no sue' agreement with Microsoft last year do you think this will be a necessary trend for other OSS companies?
TP: I suspect not, it was certainly not part of our consideration either way.
What are your views on bridging the so called 'digital divide'? I know RM has made several moves to supply rugged laptops to the less privileged in the past and are trialling handheld devices at the moment. Do you see the new generation of sub notebooks such as the Minibook, coupled with Open Source software, as a critical development in this direction?
TP: 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.
JS: Becta, with whom I know you work closely, often gets a lot of flack from the
small innovative Open Source companies with regard to the absence of a level playing field enshrined in their procurement frameworks. Do you think the smaller companies are unreasonable to feel shut out?
TP: I think that for major supply of managed services or mission critical products and services, then it is inevitable that you need to be of a certain size to credibly stand behind the liabilities that you are signing on to. This is a reality of IT procurement the world over, not something of Becta’s making., you should see some of the contracts we are expected to sign elsewhere in the world!
I think to have an effective voice then it is essential that smaller companies join BESA the trade association who can influence on their behalf.
JS: There is much discussion nowadays about interoperability and open standards.
What contribution to this goal do you think can be best made by RM? For
example there is much talk about the open document format. Would you like
to see schools moving in that direction?
TP: 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.
In the UK we are in a situation where I think Becta is not very keen for industry to set the standards, but does not seem to be setting a blazing trail to do it themselves. They are making progress – for example, in whiteboard interoperability – but in the key areas of major platform interoperability, we are waiting and waiting. It seems like a missed opportunity. Note that I really don't think this is about open document standards – they will be decided on a much bigger stage than the UK education market. This is about the specific standards for use in educational technology, things like SIF or IMS.
JS: Finally, RM has been the only ICT supplier at the BETT show for the previous two years to have addressed the issue of power consumption by computers in schools.
How do you foresee the future development and importance of green computing in schools?
TP: 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!
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.
ICT spending in UK schools is unsustainable but it could be cut by 90% with the help of Open Source software and the latest innovations in personal computing dubbed NetBooks. 
