Lunchtime conversation: UPS has decided its drivers are not going to turn left any more. (Apparently they haven’t backed up - reversed - for years.) Saving money through geographical planning. GPS systems don’t know about the amount of time a left turn takes compared to a right one (reverse as needed for UK).

This segued into a conversation about business models and how people decide what to charge for. For example, said one guy, take all those sites that give you, say, 10 wiki pages free but charge for an account that gives you up to 100 wiki pages. Well, wiki pages are text, and they don’t take up much space or bandwidth, so what’s being charged for isn’t actually resource-expensive. Why not find things users really want that *do* cost something to provide? (Which also then prevents, say, Google from coming along and stomping all over you like Bambi Meets Godzilla and promising everybody 1,000 free wiki pages just to scoop up all the traffic.)

Same guy also made the point that often there are hidden costs we don’t register. For example: processing power is cheap. Cheap does not equal easy. “So’s walking, but it still takes a long time.” You add cheap processors - and also expensive communications and integration problems. Plenty of obvious gotchas here for government computing.

wg