The Tories like technology. They increasingly seem to think IT is going to help them win the General Election due next year. And they might be right – in fact, getting behind the tech sector would not be a bad policy for anyone to pursue, as Labour has already realised with its Digital Britain plan.

But, as I have written before, the Conservatives seem to be bring with them the same optimistic naivety that has blighted the Labour government’s IT track record.

The Times today reports that the Tories could bring in a policy that would see NHS patients storing their electronic medical records on web-based private sector systems run by the likes of Microsoft and Google.

The Times claims this as an exclusive, despite the fact David Cameron announced the concept in April and Computing wrote about it at the time, but I digress.

The newspaper quotes a Tory source saying: “We’re thinking about how in government the architecture of technology needs to change, with people ‘owning’ their own data, including their health records.”

The idea of citizens owning their own data is welcomed, it’s a concept that could work, and was first suggested in a different context by former HBOS chief executive James Crosby in a report on ID cards he produced for the Treasury two years ago (which was pretty much ignored by the Home Office at the time, but I digress again).

But to think that simply letting people put their medical records online will be easier or cut costs is disturbingly naïve.

The questions that would need to be addressed pour out:

• Will people have to pay?

• If not, how would Microsoft and Google make money? By charging the NHS? By selling data? By selling contextualized adverts to be viewed alongside your records? (“Over 45? Have you thought about Botox yet?” Honestly, the mind boggles…)
• What about connecting to GPs’ existing systems?
• How would a medical professional know which service hosts a patient’s records – especially if that patient is in a critical condition or unconscious?
• What about security – what guarantees are there that a Microsoft/Google system is more secure than one run by government?
• What if Google suffers a temporary crash, as it did with its Gmail email service earlier this year – thus rendering patient records inaccessible?
• How would private sector online applications be integrated with other NHS systems such as electronic prescriptions?
• How much work would be required to re-develop Microsoft and Google’s online health records systems to conform to NHS practices – a challenge that has proved to be a major problem for the US suppliers of packaged software currently trying to implement the National Programme for IT?
• And who would actually own the data and be legally responsible for its protection?

I could go on.

Labour should have learned by now the downside of technology over-optimism. Tony Blair rightly saw that IT-enabled change was the key to transforming public services and his government set out down that road with enthusiasm. But they soon discovered that delivery was a rather more complex affair.

Politically-driven deadlines for IT projects have inevitably slipped. And where politics over-rode IT, such as the disastrously rushed tax credits system, everyone suffered as projects went live too soon.

I’m sure there are votes – and certainly attractive national newspaper headlines – to be gained by populist ideas such as giving electronic patient records to Google. Come to think about it, while you’re at it, why not make them available through Apple’s iPhone app store?

As the NHS is already finding out to its cost, introducing e-records is a massively complex task, and just by stamping the names Google or Microsoft all over them does not make them any cheaper, easier, or more likely to succeed.

When culture secretary Ben Bradshaw finished his speech introducing the Digital Britain report to Parliament, his Tory shadow stood up and dismissed the report as a “disappointment”.

Over the next few days you will undoubtedly hear other vested interests proclaiming the faults of the wide-ranging plan, pointing out its deficiencies, omissions and flaws.

My advice would be to keep the well-worn phrase “you can’t please all of the people all of the time” in mind as you assess the responses.

If you put aside the inevitable quibbles about individual proposals and recommendations, this is a hugely ambitious programme and frankly the government deserves congratulation for attempting it. If there is one major criticism I would make, it is to ask why we waited so long for such a report.

If Digital Britain is implemented as planned, it will help the UK take a huge step forward in putting technology at the heart of our economy, our workplaces and our lives – something that Computing has called for more times than I can remember, and which can only benefit the IT profession.

The £6 per year “broadband tax” to fund rollout of next-generation networks will attract a lot of headlines and controversy, but if it helps deliver superfast connectivity, it will be worth it.

There will be cynicism – from me included – about a lot of the proposals, especially relating to skills development, that resemble too many past, failed initiatives.

And there will be those who question the commitment to online public services, universal broadband and digital inclusion after even Ofcom research has shown there is a significant minority of people in the UK who have no interest in going online whatsoever.

But as report author Lord Carter said: “Digital Britain is a statement of intent and ambition, a commitment to infrastructure and access, and an overdue recognition of the industrial importance of the creative industries."

The plan is best viewed as a whole, and indeed this may be judged greater than the sum of its parts, which will be pulled apart and scrutinised and in some cases no doubt discarded. It’s a first step and mistakes will inevitably be made along the way.

But come on – IT industry, digital industry, creative industries, ask yourselves: This is far, far better than the nothing we have been used to.

Click here for more Computing coverage of Digital Britain.

I’ve had a brief play with Bing today, Microsoft’s newly-rebranded homage to Chandler from Friends, and I can’t honestly say I see myself changing my search engine habits.

Already, there is no shortage of reviews of the site that go into far more detail than I have done, and have tested and compared a range of different search terms to see if Bing out-Googles Google.

And perhaps, for some people, reading one of those reviews, or conducting your own personal tests on subjects dear to your online hearts, may cause a personal Damascene conversion from whichever search tool you currently prefer.

But frankly, I doubt it will do so for many people.

Microsoft’s problem is that search is no longer a technical thing – in fact, by definition, it is the exact opposite.

The vast majority of web users are not techies or geeks or even IT hobbyists, they are ordinary people who use a search engine – and primarily that means Google – because it takes all the complexity out of using the internet.

You can explain all the technical and presentational reasons why Bing might be better than Google, as Microsoft no doubt will, and you can try rebranding the whole shebang (shebing?) as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, as Microsoft has done – but most people just won’t care.

Microsoft is not competing with Google here, it is competing with two mighty foes who have been strong friends of Redmond-developed software for many years – inertia and habit.

Most people who have Google as their home page are about as likely to switch elsewhere as they would change from Coke to Pepsi. Died-in-the-wool Tory voters won’t change to Labour even if their MP personally invoiced them for his duck house. If the only car you have ever driven is a Ford, you won’t be buying Renault any time soon (and certainly not GM).

Google is just too much an easy part of the average – and by “average” I mean “not an IT expert” – user’s web habits, and few will be that bothered. For them, it’s not Bing, but Boring.

There is still only one way Microsoft can seriously challenge Google in search – they tried it once, the rumours won’t go away, and you can bet it’s still on the cards one day – and that is to merge Bing with Yahoo search.

There will be plenty written in the next few weeks about Bing – the re-named, re-developed Microsoft search engine that Redmond hopes might, just, finally, allow it to grab back some of Google’s market share and web advertising clout.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but at the end of the day, it’s just a search engine. SO last phase of the internet.

The irony is that while Microsoft is effectively proving to the world that it is playing catch-up – even if there may be a few technological innovations in Bing – Google, meanwhile, is presenting a convincing vision of the next big thing on the web.

Two big announcements from this week’s Google Developer Conference show that the company appears to be well ahead of Microsoft in its thinking.

First, Google demonstrated how it plans to use HTML 5 – the new version of the ubiquitous web development language that is aimed at allowing the creation of browser-based applications that rival operating-system based software for functionality and usability.

As the web becomes the way that consumers and business use technology, so it makes sense to develop your applications for a browser rather than a complex, hardware-bound environment like, ooh, Windows for example.

Next comes Google Wave, a tool that has been created to answer the question: “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" according to Google software engineering manager Lars Rasmussen. 

If you want more technical details, I will happily defer to the excellent Tim O’Reilly in his blog entry here, but in essence Google Wave is about redesigning our everyday communication and collaboration tools, such as email and instant messaging, for a future in the cloud.

Wave allows developers to build applications for real-time collaboration and interaction. It claims to try to mimic the way we interact face to face. And it brings together every major internet and technology trend, from cloud to social media to wikis to email and more, into a coherent, managed, human-oriented concept.

Let’s face it, at no time in the history of IT has software been developed with the way people naturally interact in mind – we have had to learn the ways to interact with software based upon the technological constraints of the time.

I can’t honestly say I’ve been excited about the emergence of a new search engine, and particularly a new search brand, at any time in my IT career.

But the vision that Google is this week presenting of a new model of software applications oriented around the web and around real-time real life, is the first time I’ve been vaguely excited by a new technology for a while.

It’s also a vision that doesn’t need PCs or bloated operating systems, doesn’t need hefty software development environments, and bypasses the need for complex PC-based applications. In short, a vision that doesn’t need what Microsoft has been so good at for the past 30 years.

Microsoft is going Bing, but if it doesn’t open its eyes it might one day soon be going bang.

* Obscure blog title reference explained here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036912/

I don’t want to get party political, but if David Cameron’s aims for saving money by cancelling government IT projects are anything to go by, voters need to scrutinise Tory plans for cost cuts elsewhere to test their veracity.

Cameron told his party’s Spring Forum yesterday that, as part of his plans to cut public spending, he would: “Scrap the ID cards scheme. Cancel the ContactPoint database,” and highlighted “over twelve billion wasted on the NHS computer.”

Good, populist, vote-winning statements for the party faithful, of course. And not the first time those three IT projects have been singled out by the Opposition for special attention if they were to win the next General Election. Previously though, the objections have been mainly political, not financial.

Politically, there is always a case to be made.

Financially, as a way to cut public spending, the argument doesn’t stack up so well.

With ID cards – much of the project is going towards overhauling the passport system and introducing biometric passports, which is an international obligation. And at some point, a government of any hue has to tackle the problem of electronic identity management. So we might not have ID cards, but it would not save much cash.

ContactPoint, the controversial children’s database, is already live. Not much to be saved there apart from a few maintenance and service fees.

And as its critics are loath to acknowledge, £12bn is not being wasted on “the NHS computer”. That figure covers a range of projects, many of which are already complete and successful, and none of that cash is being spent until working systems are delivered, so it’s hardly going to waste.

Cameron also said: “One part of it is the electronic patient records system - a central state-run database designed to let GPs, hospital doctors and nurses share your medical notes. Now I want you to imagine how we’d have gone about it, if we’d had the chance. We would have said: today, you don’t need a massive central computer to do this.”

Erm, there isn’t going to be a massive central computer to do this. Every NHS region will have its own system, linked together by the NHS Spine.

“A web-based version of the government’s bureaucratic scheme, services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault, cost virtually nothing to run” said Cameron.

Now come on, can you honestly see anyone being happy with Microsoft or Google being given the go-ahead to store our most sensitive personal medical records? Privacy campaigners would have a field day. Or that either provider would house 60 million UK records for "virtually nothing"? And besides, those services are designed for a very different US healthcare system.

Now I’m not standing up for Labour here – far from it. Their record of IT spending certainly deserves the closest scrutiny. It's hard to single out the Tories without sounding party political, but that's not my point.

My concern is that if the Tories think that scrapping a couple of politically-controversial IT systems and asking Microsoft to store our health records is central to their plans to save the economy, then such naivety deserves being seriously questioned.

Well, not many people saw that one coming – least of all perhaps IBM.

Larry Ellison’s pockets seem to be full of endless funds as he snaps up Sun Microsystems for $7.4bn and instantly turns Oracle from a software supplier to a genuine rival to IBM.

For some time now, Ellison has identified Big Blue as the competitor he is most gunning for, and with Sun’s hardware lineup at his disposal he is now even better placed to take aim.

Sun has of course struggled to make money from its server products for some time, but Ellison will strip away the sacred cows in Sun’s business, cut costs, and focus on the areas that his acquisition has always been good at – technical and engineering excellence. Hardware margins become less of an issue when they are bundled in with highly profitable database, middleware and application software. Sun’s drive into open source envisioned a future of free software running on profitable hardware – which was never going to happen. Oracle recognises the commodity nature of even the best bits of kit.

Meanwhile, Oracle gets its hands on Java – probably the most valuable aspect of the purchase. Oracle’s software already runs on Java, but the potential for the programming language is even greater – it is increasingly the de facto standard for Web 2.0 development and for mobile applications. Oracle immediately opens up a whole new market to play in and dominate.

No wonder the press release describes Java as “the most important software Oracle has ever acquired”, ahead of BEA, PeopleSoft, Siebel and all the many other software suppliers the company has purchased in recent years.

IBM reportedly pulled out of talks to buy Sun because it would not stump up enough cash. Oracle will be hoping that stepping into the breach will cost IBM far more in the long term.

If a police CCTV camera had captured sneaky images of protesters provoking riots or causing damage during last week’s G20 marches in London, you can bet there would have been an outcry.

“Big brother,” they would have yelled. “It’s the surveillance state,” would have been the cry.

Yet when a passer-by captures on camera (and sells to a national newspaper) footage of a police office scandalously attacking an innocent man who happened to walk home through the protest route, and who minutes later died of a heart attack, it is a triumph for democracy.

Sorry, but the reality is, you can’t have it both ways.

Quite possibly, the tragic shots of the late Ian Tomlinson were taken on a mobile phone, of the type that most of us wander around with these days, each of us capable of filming whatever we see in the street and posting it on YouTube.

In the same way, we can take photos of whatever we like and many of us post those on Flickr or Picasa or Facebook for the world to see. But if Google takes a picture of your house and puts it on Street View, that is deemed an invasion of privacy.

I understand, of course, the fundamental difference between the opposing situations here.

One is an act by an individual, unlikely in the majority of cases to be noticed by many people other than their friends and online contacts.

The other is a major organisation – whether a company or a government – undertaking an industrial-scale, systematic approach.

Ultimately, like so much in the privacy debate, it boils down to trust. Most of us assume an implied trust in the individual, that they are taking pictures of videos for their own (relatively) private purposes. But we do not trust corporations or arms of the state, because they are big, untouchable, and out to get us (or so the conspiracists would have us believe).

Yet you cannot have one law for the large, and another for the small.

You can say that us plucky mobile phone users are watching the watchers, standing up for the individual against the might of the state. Very fair point. But does a police CCTV camera that catches a murderer, or prevents some other serious crime, not exist to protect the individual too?

The surveillance state debate is a critical one that is yet to be fully addressed. But it is too simplistic to point fingers only at the government. To resolve the privacy challenge, it is just as important to look at ourselves.

Sun Microsystems has always been a favourite of journalists for its wonderfully headline-friendly name. “Sun rises…”, “Sun sets…”, “Sun shines a light on…” – maybe it doesn’t exactly challenge the skills of a subeditor, but you have to have something to cling on to.

Much like the company itself, which seems unsure whether to cling on to its independence or submit to the reality that the stock markets – and apparently IBM – do not think it is worth as much as Sun’s executives would like to think.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Sun – and not only for the chance it gives to recycle an old Nik Kershaw song into the headline for this blog post.

While Sun has in many ways typified the Silicon Valley culture – especially since Jonathan Schwartz and his ponytail took over as chief executive - there has always been something rather British about its recent progress.

Like many British firms, Sun has always had great technical skills, top-notch engineers, and excellent products – but has never quite managed to get the marketing right.

Like many British firms, Sun has seen the trends and innovations before others – its longstanding strapline of “the network is the computer” might just as well have said “it’s the internet, stupid”– but has never quite managed to make the most of such insights.

And like many British firms, its quirkiness and spikiness has made it a thorn in the side of bigger, more successful competitors – founder Scott McNealy’s constant chiding of Microsoft, for example – but has ended up being little more than an irritation to them.

Besides, you have to like a company that for many years was led by a man – McNealy – who names his children after cars: Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. It was never going to be the same after the ponytail.

But the sad truth is that for the past eight years Sun has thrashed around trying to make itself relevant again, as losses continued and its rivals strode ahead.

At its peak in the heyday of the dot com boom, Sun servers were de rigueur for every online startup. It was said at the time that as long as your business plan showed Sun servers at the heart of any new web business, the venture capital cash would roll in.

Sun was wrapped up in the excitement and hype of the time, flying journalists from all around the world to New York launches of even the most incremental of technical developments. I was lucky enough to be taken on one such event in 2000, and even in a time of such excess, it defined the phrase “no expense spared”.

Then the dot coms collapsed, and all those thousands of barely-used Sun servers flooded the second-hand market, and the supplier has never fully recovered. It has always retained a strong foothold in financial services and telecoms, but the credit crunch will have only put another nail into that particular market coffin.

Along the way, Sun has constantly tried to move with the times and remain relevant. It became an enthusiastic promoter of open source – but failed to work out how to make money out of it. It offered virtualisation years ahead of VMware, but not on Intel-based servers. It stuck rigidly to the mantra of Sparc processors and its Solaris operating system, but then started selling Intel and AMD and Linux.

Having said that, Sun has established one of the most successful industry standards around – Java. But somehow, yet again, it hasn’t really managed to capitalise fully on that success. If IBM were to eventually succeed in a takeover, it is highly likely Java would be made open source, a move many in the industry have already called for.

So now the firm is effectively “in play” – although neither Sun nor IBM has officially commented on the firms’ widely reported buyout talks. 

Sun has gone from a server powerhouse to a niche player, one that is seen as a solid complement to another vendor’s product range.

It is a shame, in many ways, to see its light go dim. Cue the headlines…

Just last week, I expressed my doubts about the true business value of Twitter, and planned to give the online micro-blogging service a try to see what I could learn.

Well, although I still have some way to go to find evidence of genuine opportunities for business IT managers, I have today experienced my first personal example of what Twitter can do for me as a journalist.

When Google Mail crashed earlier today, the first hint I had was from people Twittering that they couldn’t access the service.

The problems raised obvious concerns for IT leaders over the risks and challenges of cloud computing – what if Google Mail had been part of your corporate IT service, as such online applications increasingly are?

I wanted to get a quick response from analysts commenting on the implications of the story – so I asked my new-found Twitter friends.

Thanks to Peter Thomas, Clive Longbottom of Quocirca, and Jon Collins from Freeform Dynamics, I had a set of excellent expert comment within minutes. You can read the resulting article here.

So, I’m learning…

I am now a Twit. Or is that a Tweet? Or a Twitterer? The fact that I’ve decided to give the social network du jour a go is by no means newsworthy and if anything is a passive response to the suddenly widespread media urging to follow a trend.

It may, admittedly, bring a minor sense of shame in that, as the editor of a major technology publication, I’m coming to this particular party somewhat late (tactfully late, I like to think, and does the party have a kitchen to stand in?).

But I will defend my inability to get to this zeitgeist before it was even a geist, in that Computing is all about business technology and Twitter has yet to demonstrate its relevance or application for business IT users – or its ability to actually make money.

Nonetheless, in media circles it is starting to find its uses. Many of my contacts in the PR world swear by Twitter as a way of sourcing ideas and feedback, for example. One of my colleagues at sister-title VNUnet.com, Rosalie Marshall, has even managed to source an exclusive news story through her Twitter network. But I have to admit, I’m yet to be convinced, so it’s time to give it a go.

Do many IT professionals use Twitter for anything other than personal reasons? We’ve recently started a Twitter feed from Computing.co.uk, where all our articles are posted as Tweets (getting into the lingo now, I hope…). We’ve not publicised it at all, and it’s slowly picked up a few followers, but primarily they are PRs or IT industry types – there’s little evidence of any of the readers of Computing online or in print turning to Twitter as an alternative way to digest our news, analysis and opinion.

I’ve also yet to come across any IT managers considering ways that Twitter can support their corporate technology plans – although I’d be happy for any that are doing so to prove me wrong.

The debate over the role of new social networking tools in business IT has been going on for a couple of years now, first after MySpace, then Facebook, and now Twitter. It feels like everyone knows it will have a use, but nobody has quite found it yet. There’s the obvious networking and collaboration potential – but that is more about an application of technology based upon the principles of such a site, rather than exposing potentially sensitive company conversations to a public web site.

For consumer-facing organisations – or even citizen-facing – there are obvious marketing and communication uses of social networks, but I’d wager that most such initiatives are originating from the marketing department, rather than from IT.

So I find myself in a quandary about Twitter that perhaps many business technology specialists will recognise. I can see there’s something there, I just don’t quite get it yet.

But I’m going to give it a try. Tweet tweet.