Santa and the SA Internet …

The SA Internet works, after a fashion. It’s a little like my Uncle Stanley who appears normal, although a tiny bit slow, until the family Christmas lunch where his behaviour is just strange enough for you to realise that some distance is good, especially the way he is holding his knife and fork. It works well enough for folk to get a hint of its potential. (The SA Internet, not Uncle Stanley.)

I was reminded of this during the past week as I studied 910 Warrior websites. Sitting on my heater in my icy garret (scorched buttocks and goose-pimpled everything else) I came face to face with my past.

I don’t know a single person in the UK who does not have an ADSL line. (You can even get it free as part of your SKY (the local DSTV) or mobile phone subscription.) They use Internet for everything – booking tickets for shows, buying anything from books to groceries, travel bookings, timetables, paying taxes, paying fines, researching prices, getting the news and the gossip, phoning across the galaxy, and everything else. My morning coffee shoppe is full of PC lugging road warriors.

The result is a very, very competitive Internet infrastructure. Everybody has it. So everybody uses it.

This changes the way we look at it as a business tool. People here accept that it makes life easier, that it can automate large chunks of business, and that it can save lots of money. Last week I ordered a Dell laptop. They promised two week delivery but delivered it within a week. So here I am at my local coffee shoppe, wanting to write Petes Weekly – but with no decent word-processor to hand.

(Haven’t gotten around to installing Microsoft Word: which is huge, eats processor, and the new version has changed just enough to confuse me a lot.) Instead I am using Google Docs – the Google online alternative to MS Office. Most of my clients in SA are still debating whether it’s worth testing because their lines are so inconsistent, while I have been using it very happily for a year.

(Four team members around the world, each needing MS Office at Microsoft’s usual giveaway prices, and you get an inkling of how much we’re saving. Multiply all the PCs in your office by that same cost, and replace their software with the free Google option, and you too could be saving a fortune – without worrying about the upgrades and renewals and vexing visits from the Business Software Alliance Gendarmerie.)

Telkom (despite their recent charitable price reductions) is still hugely expensive, and even more hugely unreliable. They’ve set the price bar so high that a potential competitor need only be marginally cheaper while offering the same service, or marginally better while charging the same price, to be assured of future riches. More than anything, however, it’s the inconsistency that is the challenge.

Why risk using Google Docs when there is every chance that nobody is going to work in the office this week while Telkom try and find enough copper to beat a new path to your door? All of which makes SA somewhat less than competitive technologically. (UK workers need a very cheap PC without much processing power because it need only act as a terminal into the Internet, whereas SA workers need a lot more power and software to get almost as much work done. That’s expensive.)

This means that we South Africans should look at it from a different angle. The technology may be more expensive and less reliable, BUT, we individuals are less expensive and more reliable! Minimum wage in the UK, for example, is R100/hour – and that’s for a 16 year old Mac-Working recently arrived Polish ex-farmhand. Anybody capable of multitasking (like speaking while breathing and chewing gum) demands a premium rate.

In SA terms that UK minimum wage is not too shabby. (R100/hour x 8hours x 20days = R16,000/month.) Which begs the question: why are there so few of us selling our services – our time – via the Internet? The Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese are doing it. And, at R100/hour, heck even I could afford Telkom’s prices!

I hope you have an amazing holiday break. I hope it is safe, fun, and filled with the people you love. And, more than anything, I hope that Santa arrives in a red bikini to bring you everything you’ve wished for this year, with chocolate sprinkles. In my case he looked like my Uncle Stanley and arrived on Omar the camel because no reindeer are allowed to visit my blue-tongue-infested county at this time.

That’s life in the UK for you.