God bless Terry Leahy. He’s the first British businessman to have the guts to say it as it is: British education sucks. It’s built to fail its students and only gives the country a bleek future. Yet no one understands what the reason for this lack of quality education or high-class students is. Apparently, politicians (and there’s your first problem) who run the education system have forgotten the basic principle of garbage in garbage out and businesses have become so accustomed to incompetence that they simply assume it is the norm. Well, it’s not in many other countries across the world.

Without sounding arrogant, my first job in the UK was in many ways frustrating because of the lack of relevant education my colleagues had in their school and university days. It wasn’t that they were stupid: it was that they just did not know. Why? Because their basic education failed them. I recently ran into a student who’s in a joint program between NYU and one of Massachusetts most prestigious universities. She was on a visit to Oxford and her comments were, to say the least, rather unflattering of the legendary Oxford. Generally, I don’t think Britain has dealt well with the fact that other countries have taken the lead in education and research, and this arrogance may have a lot to do with why the quality of students is constantly poor and the education always out of date.

Without criticizing UK politicians or bureaucracy (because they never solve any problems), I’m going to try and sum up the basic reasons why education in Britain has taken a fall for the worst. Take this from someone who is educated in a third world country on a British education platform, then went on for further studies to the US and now lives and works in the British system. So, I believe I have my bearings right. It’s my blog, so your thoughts are relevant, but not necessarily correct.

1. For God’s sake, value it. British schools and universities have become the accepted second-rate institutions for ‘quality’ education. It is understood by all British students and graduates that their education is of absolutely no use in the practical world. So if you go on the job, you will need to sit for professional education certifications. Why is that? Why isn’t university education fit for professional jobs. And if it’s not, what IS the point of this education. You see this happening in the accounting field, for instance, where students skip university and simply sit for CIMA or ACCA exams to become accountants, and those who did their accounting degrees are not accountants. Who is to blame here, the student or the system?
2. Following on from the lack of value, the curriculum needs some serious updating. If you’ve got a college degree, it should teach you what is right and what you need, not what used to be right when’sun never set on the British empire’. Nowadays, in Winter, the sun is set for most of the time. Things change, but education has not evolved.
3. The methodology simply sucks and does not work. During my O and A Levels, the one thing I was taught was that you must memorise to pass the exam. What the hell for? Things you memorise are easily forgotten. Things you understand are not. Doesn’t anyone get this? Cramming for an exam is useless. Applying what you learnt in real life simulations is effective. That’s why American education is good and effective. That’s why most Indian education is disappointing. That’s why the standard of British education has fallen.
4. Stop promoting cheating and fraud. I haven’t seen promotion of academic fraud become a commercially and legally viable business in any country but the United Kingdom. Look at oragnisations like Academic Knowledge (http://www.academicknowledge.com) and Prospect Solution (http://www.prospectsolution.com), who claim to do business research but IN FACT get students to submit briefs of home work, exam questions and dissertations, which they charge their students for and outsource across the globe to get done. Who would have thought that students could outsource their homework. Well, they do. Universities know it but don’t want to do anything about it because they keep making money, as do these fraudsters. Students become more and more incompetent. Who’s losing out, Britain?
5. Please mind your english. Have you ever looked at an email trail between managers and executives in a British business? I will bet you that 70% of the emails have incorrect grammar, weak or poor sentence structure, or simply a bunch of malarkey put together for no one to understand. In my job, emails and documents were purposefully written incorrectly or in incomprehensibly bad english so no one could understand what was being said. If that is the goal of language, then the medium of education delivery has to be changed.
6. Take the bureaucracy out of it. For God’s sake, I know England loves bureaucracy. But why ruin the education system with it? Make it simple and stop rewarding your teachers on exam score. It’s a ridiculous system, for the incompetent by the stupid!
7. Stop overprotecting and pampering kids. The value of discipline from a professor or teacher is invaluable. It is absolutely priceless. In this country and in other first world nations where teachers have to teach by the law, discipline has gone down the drain. Teachers can’t shout at kids. Professors can’t discipline students. Discipline = education. Maybe that’s the ONLY old value the British education system needs to preserve, but if students can sue schools for being rowdy and getting slapped and walk away with settlements,  we need to revisit the legal system too.
8. Abolish professional education. Yes, do it! Start with the Office of Government and Commerce and let professional fraternities like ACCA, CIMA, ICAEW, CFA, IMA, IFA, etc. etc. be fraternities only. Take away their educational credentials (many of which are simply poor but are marketed better than university education and so carry more value) and you will be forced to offer better education in schools and universities.
9. Don’t feel sorry for students. Give them a challenge. That’s how they get better.
10. Sack Private Tutors. Yes, sack them. Gives these teachers incentive to offer real education at school, not privately at home. It will probably also solve the issue of pedophile teachers to quite an extent.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said on this issue. I can think of a list of 10 more reasons why the education sucks and what needs to be done to address the problem. The question, however, is whether someone is actually interested in fixing this issue. Frankly, I don’t know it is in anyone’s interest to fix this problem. ‘Universities’ will have to accept the reality of their low standards, academic fraud promoting companies will go out of business, private tutors (these are prime examples of those who can’t do, teach) will become jobless and all of the UK will have to accept who truly sad this whole state of affairs is. Is Britain bold enough? I don’t think so, even though I hope so.

Until October 2009, I was a GoDaddy Partner / Wild West Domains Reseller, and although I made some money by selling their hundreds and thousands of unneeded services, I had a very hard time pushing a product which I myself had serious doubts about.

Over the 3 years that I’ve been selling Wild West or GoDaddy Services, I tried many different hosts, and I recommended GoDaddy hosting to many small businesses, because for a website that doesn’t really drive traffic, GoDaddy pricing really isn’t all that bad.  However, I’ve never been too convinced about their hosting services and some of the functionality that comes along with it and today, I will give you the inside story, based purely on experience, as to why you should not use GoDaddy for hosting a website if you plan to build a reputable website.

So why haven’t I been comfortable selling GoDaddy Hosting?  Well, put simply, because it just sucks.  It fails terribly when it comes to speed, reliability and user friendliness, and if you ever have to depend on their customer service, well, you may have to ask Jesus to intervene, because GoDaddy or Wild West Domains Customer service is really, really lost.  So lost, in fact, that they do need a Messiah for enlightenment.

Hosting with GoDaddy?  Better Make Time…

Let’s put it this way: access to the GoDaddy Hosting Panel was so slow that at times I could brew a cup of good old Spiced Indian Tea before the page would load.  It’s one thing to have the front end run slow, but to log in, create email addresses, or use their file manager, or create databases with their custom interface was the most painful experience I have ever had as a web designer.  In addition, if you ever had to log on to the customized phpMyAdmin interface to access the MySQL Databases, well, you’d have to go make some more tea.  Run time between queries with phpMyAdmin is very slow, and it makes for an over all pathetic experience as a webmaster.

Now, when you’re running the front end, it’s just as bad.  I switched to several different packages as a reseller: from VPS Hosting to Semi Dedicated to Economy to Deluxe.  They all run at stone-age speeds, and the front end experience is so bad, especially if you’re querying a database, that the website may occasionally time out.  That’s bad news for those of us who wanted to do testing on the server, because oh my, we wasted some mighty precious time.  In any case, it made for a bad user experience, especially if you’re running an ecommerce site, as no user wants to wait 3 minutes for the next window to load.  AJAX could act as saving grace, but the minute your AJAX application would query your sever, well, you’re at GoDaddy’s mercy; and let me tell you, they really are running their hosting service like they’re in the Wild Wild West.

One of the reasons the database access is so painfully slow is that it sits behind an SSL connection.  This is a rather silly move, as most successful hosts don’t employ it simply because it can drastically slow down the performance, of, say, a massive wordpress blog that could be pulling along the lines of 70 queries a page. 

70 MySQL Queries, you say?

With GoDaddy, they claim to be able to monitor the simultaneous number of connections to the MySQL Database and the simultaneous number of active visitors (whatever in the hell that means) on the website.  Now, GoDaddy staff isn’t clear on this, but apparently, if you have more than 50 consecutive MySQL Connectinos or 50 active users, well,  you’re fucked.  You’ll get a 503 site temporarily down error, and it can last for over an hour, because apparently, you have 50 active users who are consecutively glued to the MySQL Database.  How awesome is that?  And yet, neither google analytics or extreme tracking could detect more than 1500 pageviews in a day @ that point.  But these daddy goners had their own agenda.  According to some of the intellects at Wild West customer support, the number of open MySQL DB connections or the number of consecutive visitors would change based on which package you had, where as some claimed to have no knowledge of any such thing.  But nobody really knew what triggered this 503 error.  Apparently, as it turns out, all the staff needs maintenance.

FTP Access, you say?

This one really pissed me off.  No more than 2 simultaneous FTP connections, and no FTP connections lasts more than a 120 seconds.  So, if you’re testing on the server, you’re fucked!  And if you’re hosting multiple sites on the account, you’re penetrated twice because more than one webmaster can’t upload files to the FTP server.  That’s just bad; really, really bad.

Email?

Well, the folks over at GoDaddy may have developed their own email interface, but they still don’t have control over spam.  Either that, or they’ve got too much.  While I was at Wild West, I had several clients complain about their clients complain about how their emails would net get delivered, and the folks over in Scottsdale, Arizona really had it out for everyone.  At times they’ll block hotmail email, even if originates from a valid SPF policy domain, and if you ever emailed them, they were just about as useful as, well, useless.  Besides, if you didn’t pay extra money, you only got 10 MB per email inbox!  Hello!  Free email comes with 2 GB now.  I know you guys are from the same state as McCain, but please keep up with what’s happening!!

Installing Applications

If you’re buying a third party software like an eCommerce Solution or blog etc., please let the party you’re buying from know you’re using GoDaddy, Wild West or Secure Server services, because for so called ’security’ reasons, their settings are all screwed up. For instance, with several ecommerce providers, you’ll have to point to a specific URL to be able to use the curl() function in php with GoDaddy & Co., and it can be very frustrating if you’re new to this stuff and don’t know that your host is the one that’s been screwing you over for hours while you kept thinking your code was all screwed up.  

Worst of all things with GoDaddy is the overall experience if you are a professional.  Just like Sage has mesmerized the UK with it’s marketing and taken over as the defacto accounting software despite being the worst accounting package on the market, GoDaddy with Wild West has marketed itself extremely well, with thousands of affiliates, to the point where they can easily trap the newbie consumer with absolutely low quality service.  Well, I’ll be having no more ofana part to play in  that crime.

If you’re a starter, go with GoDaddy.  If you want good, reliable hosting that works, go for cluster based hosting, and please don’t go with Servage.  I’ve already cussed them out on this website a couple of years ago.  I have finally settled with IMountain.com Solar powered Hosting, and they’re not paying me to write this, which is why there’s no link to them in this post.  I’ve been using iMountain for a few months now, and I can tell you that I’ve been pleased with their speed, FTP, customer service, etc. etc.  They’re not about giving you fancy marketing stuff or spending too much time writing their own cluttered interface.  They’re using respected software in the hosting industry to run their service, and it comes with great speed.  It’s not the cheapest hosting you’ll find, but it is definitely worth the money.

In about 4 months, I’ve only had downtime for a couple of hours one day, and this is the day it took a couple of hours for me to get a response out of them.  But as it turns out, the problem was that someone had a launched a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on one of the servers, and they were busy trying to counter it.  For those of you who’re not familiar with DDoS, it’s somewhat equivalent in cyberspace to what Israel is currently doing to Palestine; you can hardly blame them for fighting the terrorist off before responding, eh?

But that’s IMountain.com.  With GoDaddy and Wild West Domains, I’ve never been able to figure out why I got a 503 error three times a week!

Well, if I was to be concise as I usually am in matters of business, I’d say because they suck.  Bad service, zero customer service and  terrible customer support make for a recipe for an airline that will crash: Qatar Airways, the worlds only fake star airline.

Well, it is typical of the Arab world, isn’t it.  Tie that in with the low life typical customer service staff in London, and you have the ideal combination that hell will possibly comprise of: Arab business mentality coupled with British competence; God help us.  That’s right, I’m racist.  Get over it.

So, what is wrong with Qatar Airways?  Let’s start here:

• Qatar airways will charge you upto GBP 800 extra for wanting to stay over in Doha, Qatar if that’s where the aeroplane stops.  That’s right.  These low life single digit IQ camel riding airline running Islam insulting scumbags will charge you extra money to increase the tourism to Doha, which apparently the Royal family there is trying excessively hard to promote.  well, there you go.  Qatar Airways, a fine example of communication engineering between owner and management; a prime example of efficient business management by Arabs.

• Qatar Airways staff in London / Manchester is, well, like almost any other similar business, fucking stupid.  I talked to some probably stupid frustrated woman  who, when asked why the fuck she was being such a dumb bitch had absolutely no answer.  Well how could she; she couldn’t give me her name when I asked her for it. Dumb bitch.

• Qatar Airways staff lies.  Flat out.  Another classic example of Arab owned business with British style customer service.  These booboo monkeys will only give you an 0870 number to call for bookings and reservations, and they will deliberately make you hold.  I think it is because these low life camel riding sand sluts of customer service or bookings and reservation agents get commission by the minute.  Both the dumb fuck dude and the stupid bitch woman had the audacity to tell me that I was mistaken if I thought that there is no 02 or 01 for Qatar fucking dumpways in the UK.  Well, there are about 7 such numbers.  And for those of you who want them, here they are:
  London:  020 73992566 / 67 / 68 / 69 / 70 / 72 / 77,  Manchester: 0161 8385399

• Lastly, these Islamic insulting fundamentalist promoting dishonest infidels have robbed me of 400 sterling.  What can I say?

I hope Qatar Airways crashes as a business, and I honestly pray that their scumbag employees, well, there is a reason why they will stay in the job of answering a phone all their lives, eh?

Now, I feel better.  If you don’t like this post, well, tough fucking shit; and if you’re from Qatar Airways, well, even more tough.

I want to add that no disrespect is meant to any Arabs here. I do have great respect for many Arabs in general, but I stand by my comments about the Qatar Airways, the way it is run and their entire attitude in general. I would rather pay an extra £100 and fly emirates rather than go with Qatar Air. Maybe it’s just my luck, but the comments here make it clear that others have had similar experiences. After all, my comments about business culture in the Arab world were based on experiences in Dubai. Being in Britain doesn’t help either. Now, if you’re from Oman or Kuwait, I will have good things to say, because there’s a world of difference even between Arab countries and the people that come from there.

There is a reason today why accounting for big business is so complex, tedious, and requires a large staff of people to manage; and you’d be surprised, it’s not because so many people are needed or because the work is too difficult; it is simply because most big businesses fail to utilize the tools available to them and are unable to maximize the efficiency and productivity that they can get out of such tools.

Over the years, I have consulted for several small businesses. Most of them were moving into that phase from a very mom-n-pop setup to becoming an established small business, where they were going to start implementing some formal accounting procedures, have proper policies, and were going to get organized because that it is what it would take for them to be able to keep up with the amount of business they were getting. It is worth saying that even in large businesses, it is the fallacy of management, as it is in some medium and small sized firms too, that each departmental head ends up treating his/her department like an individual business unit, and that’s a big deviation from what the goal originally was when any such department was setup. It is, therefore, imperative that businesses at all times keep in mind that the costs formal accounting, formal policy, statutory compliance, management accounting etc. are all overheads, and if they are not managed, they can seriously cut into the bottom line profit of any business.

So, why is there such a disconnect in accounting; costs are soaring high, compliance is becoming more and more difficult, and every year, the financial statements for public and private companies become more difficult to read and understand. You would think, that with all the state-of-the art software and information systems available to and affordable by such businesses, they can reduce the their costs, drive efficiency into their accounting policies and procedures, and efficiently produce GAAP, SOX or whatever-it-is-that-you-need-to compliant statements, and spend more time and resources simplifying the information for potential investor and outside parties with a vested interest. Of course, the latter doesn’t happen for a multitude of reasons, but we shall steer clear of that discussion. After all, the whole premise of this article is based on the Corporation not being evil, and what changes it needs to go through to harness the power of modern financial information systems.

There several ERP type solutions available to big business today. Oracle, JD Edwards (now owned by Oracle) and SAP are the three market leading ERP Solutions, and if they are used right, a big business can do wonders with it. The problem, however, is that just purchasing any of these solutions is not going to be enough. Hundreds and thousands of hours have to be spent on customizing and developing the blank platform that these solutions provide, and it is in this department that most big businesses fail.

You see, customizing JD Edwards, SAP or Oracle requires:

- Extensive Business Planning
- Serious Systems Analysis & Design Knowledge
- Minimum interference from IT Staff during these two phases
- Input and involvement of Accounting & Finance Staff

I have seen too many businesses that will purchase an expensive, fancy piece of software and pressure their IT Department to get it up and running in a week! It doesn’t work like that, and it will never work like that. Here is how, in a nutshell, an installation:

Once you’ve decided that your business is growing to the point where you need an extensive piece of software, it’s time to get your act together.

Map your business requirements, systems and workflows. This is absolutely the most important part of the process of implementing a massive information / financial system. If you don’t know where your data flows from, WHAT EXACTLY that data is, where it comes and from and where it will go, and how it is transformed from data to understandable information, you’ll never be able to utilize the software the way it was meant to be used. Most businesses that skip this entire process and take a “develop as you use/grow” approach toward customizing and evolving ERP software like JD Edwards or SAP will suffer massive problems, to the point where they will have so much legendary data of one sort, that they will end up hiring an extra person to manually manage every additional feature that they could have initially built into the financial information system.

Systems Analysis & Design. This is where your hardcore IT Department needs to stay out. Might I suggest that the purpose and goal of most IT Departments is to TECHNICALLY do and make possible what is asked of them, instead of taking on a more hands-on approach to changing processes to keep more control in their hands. You see, ultimately, the end user, who in this case is your accounting and finance staff, or sales staff, has to use the software, and the requirements should come from them, and should not be translated to what the IT Department thinks they are. That’s why you need a systems analyst, to map the business requirements with what is technologically feasible, and ultimately, what is more cost effective, letting IT have it their own way and hiring extra staff (and paying for the software), or just paying for the software and making do with existing staff? When I finished as a student and started my career, people used to laugh at the concept of a systems analyst, and the ultimate mockery of the system analyst profession was made of by the Computer Science geeks, most of who make up IT Departments. Although the culture has now changed, I cannot tell you how many gazillions of dollars this lack of analysis has cost Corporations around the globe. Somebody has to bridge the gap between business and technology, and I can assure you, your IT Department will never be able to do it.

Well, I’ve said enough about this, haven’t I?

Yes, please! These are the people who will be using your financial information system. They know what is needed, and they know WHY they need it too. So, when you buy software and develop it for them to use, shouldn’t they be the ones directing the development of such a software. I cannot believe how many businesses simply leave out the end user when planning on making big changes to their accounting and finance software systems, and to efficiently make such a change and plan for growth and more of this tedious accounting work, it would do good to solicit these users for advice before making the blunder and hiring 15 extra staff members!

Remember, the teams that design, implement and support need to be separate from each other, because if they’re not, the on single team will ultimately try to make it’s life easier and profitable in the long run. That means you’ll waste thousands on software, get crappy design, and will end up paying to hire people to do things manually. Might as well skip the ERP software purchase.

I recently wrote an article about why London will never be New York. The article was met with lots of positive and negative criticism; some love London, and others love New York. One gentleman was so furious he dubbed me an American who doesn’t know any better, because New York is nothing but a concrete jungle (as opposed to Liverpool Street or Holborn?). Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions.

As some of you may already know, I have spent a couple of years in Dubai. Although my experienced, possibly jaded opinion says that London will never become New York, I can comfortably tell you why, and how, Dubai may one day actually become London, and take away a good chunk of the tourists that come to London (that’s great for some Londoners, eh!).

Living in Dubai made me quite Anti-Arab, and on many occasions, anti Muslim. Ultimately, I was extremely frustrated with the general incompetence of systems, the bad quality of service, general lack of common sense and common courtesy, and people’s undying, inevitible ability to do everything wrong an average of three times before getting it right. Hoarding money, overcharging, ripping off residents and immigrants, lying, cheating, deceiving, and not thinking through what the hell it is that they’re doing are among some of the common mistakes they made in Dubai. I’m sure they still make them. When I lived in Dubai, I compared everything, civil infrastructure, Information Technology, shopping experience, quality of life, cost of living, etc. with the US, and Dubai lost on practically every ground. I was never sure where the Arabs & Muslims had come up with their system, their costing & pricing, their inefficient ideas, and their con-like way of life in Dubai. I used to blame them and their kind for it.

And now, I realize, that on some level, I owe them an apology for criticizing them for making Dubai the way it is. Well, maybe not. But what I have realized is that comparing Dubai, or any other part of the world for that matter, with the US way was a mistake. I knew nobody in the Muslim world (except maybe Iran) would make effort to reinvent or recreate the wheel, but I always assumed that Dubai was trying to mimic New York (with Sheikh Zayed Road being their pride and all), but they failed miserably. Well, that was my mistake. I hadn’t experienced London yet.

And now that I have, well, Dubai is really not that bad. When I compare the way of life in London to the way of life in the United States, I see the same fallacies that I saw in Dubai. The same traditional cultural hoardiness, sticking to culture and tradition (which nobody really knows much about, in London or Dubai - don’t get me wrong, there are people who do, but most are pretty lost), sitting on money, enjoying other people’s misery, lying, deceiving the public, being overcrowded, etc. etc. My, I thought, am I making the same mistake that I did in Dubai?

Probably. Comparing London and New York is not necessarily fair. The cities emerged differently, were built by different people with different visions and served different purposes in different cultures for different people with different mentalities and ideologies. But Dubai, gosh! Dubai is a hotter, modern, dusty, inexpensive, (maybe) glamorous (dare I say), cleaner (definitely!) version of London. How, you ask?

Well, London is built with one aim and one goal in mind: impress those who visit and take as much money as you can from them. But what you build is what you get, i.e., that is also the mentality of the people who live there. I’ll continue this attitude of the people later, but Dubai does impress a lot of tourists, and with the certain allure it has created, people spend a lot of their money in Dubai, which what their ultimate goal is.

Dubai is ultimately built by the British. You see British civil engineering at work in the Dubai road infrastructure, you see the British bureaucracy/systems in place when dealing with most day-to-day things (getting a landline telephone - the equivalent of BT in Dubai is Etisalat, getting a mobile phone, paying your bills, banking, etc.). Basically, Dubai is a carbon copy of British systems, and that’s because it’s built by the British. In that British re-creation of Dubai, you see some efforts to rectify the mistakes in London, and as a result of that, the wow factor that Dubai offers for some people may be more than what London can offer. Of course, Dubai doesn’t really have a history, and it will always fall short of London in that department.

But where Dubai really succeeds is in having used the American system to successfully market. It seems like they may have solicited the British and other European nations for help when it came to developing their city, but the Arabs know and believe that no one is better at positive marketing than the United States, and this could be the one biggest factor why Dubai can cause quite a dent in London’s tourist revenues.

So, how does Dubai compare with London?

Just Visiting?

When you’re visiting or passing through, be it for leisure or business, you want it to be cheap, efficient and fun. You want to be pampered and you want to feel important, and you definitely want to make the most of it, right?

Hotels

Okay, London has a fine line of great hotels, but then so does Dubai. In fact, with the Burj ul Arab, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Madinat Jumeirah, Royal Mirage and a plethora of others, Dubai has a collection of modern five star hotels with a traditional touch that will dazzle just about any visitor. What else? Dubai offers add ons with your hotel service like buttlers, which will make even the most seasoned traveler feel like a king. Dubai can do this because they’ll charge you over GBP 500 per night for your hotel room, while the guy who will carry your luggage, clean up, and do all the dirty work will get paid less than GBP 300 a month! That may be a violation of human rights on some level, but it certainly works well for visitors and tourists. I remember an uncle of mine telling me about his visit to Grosvenor House in London in the 80s, and how he had to carry his bags up to the room himself. In Dubai, you’d never do that.

Shopping & Fashion

There were days when the world came to London for shopping for the latest fashions and gadgets. People still come to London for that, but I’m not sure they come with the same expectation or enthusiasm anymore. Dubai has successfully marketed and built itself several world class shopping centres, and interestingly enough, some products may even cost you more in Dubai than they would in London. But that’s not true of all the products, especially once you learn the right areas and the right places to shop in Dubai. Even though I’ve seen that the same shops in Dubai don’t get the latest products that they would stock in London or New York, Dubai has definitely entered this market, and quite possibly has a much better pricing position than London for a multitude of reasons (no tax, no excise and customs etc.).

We know that the fashion headquarters of the world are London, Paris, Milan, New York and maybe Los Angeles. Dubai has made a serious effort to enter this market, and they’ve certainly gotten somewhere. Dubai regularly hosts fashion shows, and the biggest designers do not mind hosting and displaying their products in Dubai. That’s a big attraction for tourists and visitors, as trivial as that may be for some of us practical people.

Living or Working in Dubai?

If you move to Dubai from London, you won’t find much of a difference in the culture. Neither of these places are by any means American in Corporate Culture, and that may very well be a cultural and traditional gap for the best. Londoners will not find it very different in Dubai, except that if you go to Dubai from London, chances are you will get VIP treatment and your quality of life may improve, although for someone who is well settled in London, the kind of life Dubai offers may very well be trivial.

The area Dubai lacks in professionally is, well, professionalism. There is a serious lack of professionally competent people in Dubai, and although London has its fair share of incompetence, it generally has a much better employee set than Dubai. So, naturally, for the striving, aspiring person, London has more to offer: access to a bigger market, access to more resources, better facilties, etc. etc.

Education, you say?

Education is certainly a developing area in Dubai, but it’s no where close to being acceptable at this point. I won’t say any more in this section, except that London and it’s surrounding areas house some of the world’s best educational institutions. Dubai doesn’t have any decent higher education yet, but I believe it is in the works.

Cleanliness

Well, Dubai takes the lead here easily. It’s very clean, especially the areas all the tourists and western people visit. All such areas are practically spotless, although they come at the expense of slave labour. Of course, most people are oblivious to things such as slave labour, so this is a big plus point for Dubai. Parts of London have become extremely filthy, and I needn’t comment more on this. I said plenty about it in the article that compared London with New York, and there’s no point in repeating myself.

Traffic

What can I say? Both London and Dubai suck. Road tax is killer. Tolls are killer. London has better public transportation, but Dubai intend to roll out their fancy planned metro in 2009. That will certainly create cultural and class issues in Dubai, the effect of which remains to be seen. This blending of the racial discrimination of the east and west sides of the Dubai Creek could make or break the comfortable working class of Dubai.

Why won’t Dubai Compete with New York?

Quite simply, because Dubai isn’t marketing itself as an American city. It offers facilties like London, it offers services like London. The flat, housing and apartments feel more like London than they do like any part of New York or other American cities. But Dubai is using the grace of New York. It is painting itself the metropolitan image that London lacks, and it’s doing a fantastic job.

Fancy skyscrapers, a tube / subway system, big roads and highways, the world’s biggest businesses (even if they don’t any business and get rent free buildings to fool everyone else), and the image of success. It’s a very well told lie, and a perfectly created fassad, created by the British and Europeans for and by the Europeans, and you can see it has been a successful venture so far. How long it lasts will be interesting, but Dubai may never make it because it’s very difficult to gain a sense of ownership or ‘homeliness’ in Dubai. A place that will never call you its citizen, a kingship that will never treat you as one of its own, will never get the dedication of the people who reside there to make money; it’s that simple.

Where Dubai Fails?

Well, there are several pitfalls Dubai needs to overcome before it can consider competing with London. Among them, a legal system, decent education, more condusive laws for business people, and less lying.

Major businesss in Dubai were given free buildings to move in in areas like Dubai Internet City, so that other striving and aspiring businessmen follow and pay the outrageous fees. The fassad worked, but I don’t know when people will start to see it isn’t what it claims to be. Most of the businesses, even if they are functioning in other countries, fail to take off in Dubai because they’ve bought into this lie. This needs to stop; Dubai needs to help develop business inside rather than make it fail.

Laws are important. Company law that is 4 sheets of A4 paper typed in 12 point font with more grammatical mistakes than my 2nd grade english paper will not suffice for complex international business. After all, how long will businesses settle disputes in and according to the law of the United Kingdom in Dubai? Lawyers are full of crap, trying to offer you legal help on law that’s 4 pages wrong. Please don’t fall for this trap in Dubai. Lawyers are pathetic everywhere, but in countries where implementation of law is non-existent, and even worse, in countries like the UAE where law is non-existent, lawyers need to be booted.

Dubai needs to be less racist. The racism and discrimination is unacceptable at all levels of human decency; just because you’re brown or Indian doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be respected; Arabs certainly don’t have the right to disrespect anyone; let’s avoid this discussion, shall we? But Dubai needs to be weary of this; once the metro in Dubai is complete, it could lead to a blending of the eastern and western population of Dubai, that could make the latter very uncomfortable, and I’m not sure Dubai has a ‘plan b’ for that.

There’s a lot more to be said on this, but it can’t be said without me not being nice. I’ll take up more issues in the future, but I think if Dubai keeps on the right track and focuses on the right things, it may very well compete with London. It is likely that Dubai will overcome its fallacies, although there certainly are no guarantees about when and how. Then again, given the level of competence in Dubai, London may not have too much to worry about.

 Loading …

Hundreds of webmasters and web designers choose to use ZenCart of OSCart to set up their or their clients’ stores on the web. I myself have setup quite a few shopping stores, and I’m here to tell you that using OS Cart or Zencart just because they are free is not always the best decision.

My personal item of choice is eCommerce Templates. It’s not free, but it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, and it will get you everything you need for a shopping store, in probably half the time as OSCart & ZenCart will.

I’ve recently spent some time trying to play with and configure both ZenCart and OSCart, and they’re both quite a mess. The support is sketchy for both of them, as is the pattern in which support is provided. They don’t necessarily come ‘built-in’ with any payment providers, and you have to use add-ons to get them to work with different payment providers and different shipping providers, and finding and installing the right add on can be quite a hassle because, well, they’re written by the creators of zencart or oscart, but by other independent developers.

Please note that my goal here is not to undermine the pros of open-source, as I am a big fan of open source, despite being a microsoft partner. But read on, and I shall tell you why I think you shouldn’t waste too much time troubling yourself with either ZenCart or OS Cart, when you can be up and running with eCommerce Templates in a few hours.

The Pricing & Income Factor

Okay, so OS Cart and ZenCart (I’ll be calling them OSC and ZC from now on) are free. eCommerce templates may run you round about $ 150.00. My experience? On average I can have a shopping store up and running on eCommerce Templates to MY design in less one, inefficient working day. With OSC and ZC, it was a painful operation, and it took me a few days to wrap my arms around the template. In addition, I think the coding model for both OSC & AC is rather sketchy, especially when compared with eCommerce Templates.

Now, let’s do the math. A client hires you to put together a shopping store. You choose one of the free solutions to make an extra $150.00. It takes you three days to make the store, and you’ve fixed a price of, say, $ 1,850 with your client. Three working days means 24 hours, which would be mean that you made an average of $77 per hour, which really isn’t that bad. Now, let’s say you used eCommerce Templates, you can have the same store ready in 8 hours, and if it is your very first store, it really shouldn’t take you more than 12 hours, or you shouldn’t do this for a living. Now, let’s do the math here. You pay $ 150 for an eCommerce Template, and spend 12 hours designing the store. That means you made a whopping $ 142 per hour, which is practically DOUBLE of what you would make if you used OSCart or ZenCart. If that isn’t incentive to sway away from these two packages, I don’t know what else is.

Avoid Tedious Coding, anyone?

There are many of us out there who don’t mind spending time digging into the code, because for some of us it’s actually productive. But i really don’t like to do that when I could be using my time more efficiently, i.e., completing the work that I’m actually getting paid for. With eCommerce Templates, you have one big plus that you don’t with the others. You do not have to be familiar with PHP or ASP templating in any way, shape or form, because their templates come built in for the piece of software that you want to use to do your design, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, Frontpage, and if you’re not faint of heart, purely CSS & XHTML compliant templates too. That makes it much easier for those who like to stick to familiar territory to “edit” the design.

In addition, if you like to use photoshop to do your design work, you can continue to do that with eCommerce Templates, and simply integrate the “ecommerce” portion of their template/design into yours. You can choose their simple template design for this, and when you’re done slicing up your own design in photoshop, open the files up in your editor of choice, and paste the no more than 3-5 lines of code to get the shopping cart functionality on your pages. It really is that easy. The store at Asif Nawaz Consulting, on http://www.asifnawaz.net/consulting/shopping_store/ is a prime example of something like this, and although it’s not the most flashy of designs, it is a perfect example fo the functionality you can get with eCommerce Templates.

Adding a payment provider

Well, let’s say you’ve been using authorize.net for a long time, and now you want to add google checkout functionality. Well, with OSC or ZC, you’ll have to look for the add on, download it, upload it via FTP (and this isn’t that simple, because you have to replace like 5 files over 15 folders), and then, maybe, if all goes as planned, you’ll have the google checkout functionality. With eCommerce Templates, it is much simpler. You sign up with google, log on to the administrator panel at your online store created with ecommerce templates, and simply enter your google API and Account #, and you’re done. It is actually just that simple.

Shipping Options

This is my biggest difficulty with OSC and ZC.  With eCommerce Templates (eCT), you can use UPS, FEdEx or USPS. I haven’t seen Royal mail here yet for UK, but I hope to see that addition soon enough. You can also use weight based or flat rate shipping, depending on what you sell. I’m not sure if you’ve ever made the effort to integrate FedEx or UPS into a web site yourself, but I’m doing it now with DesignerPottery.com, and I can tell you, it’s note a whole lot of fun. Using eCT, you can sign up from inside your admin panel and have UPS shipping up and running in a few minutes. BEWARE, though, if you are hosting through GoDaddy or a Wild West affiliate. You will need to add a couple of variables to your includes file for it to work.

Documentation

The benefit here is that the manual and documentation is detailed and orderly. With OSC and ZC, that was one of my biggest problems. Help online is very sketchy, and nobody wants to spend time weeding through a massive PDF manual to see how something works. The HTML manual and help is easy to use, and you have access to a forum, which discusses almost all of the issues with the product.

Forum Support & Updates

This may be the only downside. eCT periodically releases updates to fix bugs and add functionality, and the updaters cost about $ 25, and they include a 6 month membership on the support forum, where you can directly communicate with their team and other members/users to get your questions resolved. Even if you don’t pay the support fee, you can view everything on the forum. You just can’t ask for help directly. If you don’t want the updaters, you can buy a support subscription, which costs slightly less than the updater, but it’s worth it, because when you’re adding functionality to your client’s store, you will be charging him/her too.

International Compatiblity

Okay, eCT stores are compatible in the US & UK, and I believe elsewhere too, but you do need to check this before you purchase it. In my experience, it works okay for UK based stores too, and it is the only solution that has worked for a UK based store for me without causing me too much heartburn. I’d recommend it to others.

In Conclusion

One thing you must keep in mind is that I have now been using eCT for 5 years, so i am very comfortable with it. Of course, as a new user, there will be a bit of a learning curve, but what I can tell you is that that learning curve will be, at worst, half of what it may be with OSC or ZC. There are solutions out there like CubeCart and XCart, which are free to a point and then they charge you per your requirements, but I don’t have much experience with them.

I’ll be very honest with you: I haven’t tried another solution since I switched to eCT, and that’s because it’s simplicity and scalability attracted me. I highly recommend the product to anyone else.

If you have any questions about the solution, please feel free to ask and clarify them before you buy it, and if you do and it is not too much of a hassel, kindly use the window below to order:

Also, please share with everyone what software you use.

 Loading …

Well, you could say that’s because London is London and New York is New York. Let’s be honest: in the last few years I’ve heard and read various things like London stealing the financial business from New York City, London seeing more growth, London becoming a better all over experience due to immigration and America’s terrorist obsession, etc. etc. But, lets face it, London does not give you the experience New York does, and it never will. Why? Let’s see why.

Filth / Garbage

Well, I’ve been to New York City several times, and I’m not saying it’s like Singapore, but hey, it’s relatively clean, especially when compared to London. Have you seen the trash on the streets of London lately? What’s with all the chewing gum stains on the pavements and the roads? I don’t think New York has that kind of a stain infested issue, does it?

Then, how come people aren’t supposed to clean their dog poo and pee? What in the world is that about? I know this is the land of royalty, but can we please tell people to clean up after their pets? It’s only polite.

Mind you, I’m not saying New York is immaculate, but unless it has become filthier the last few years, I certainly don’t remember it being this dirty. I mean have you been to Marble Arch, Edgware, or Edgware Road lately? I’m sorry, but Edgware reminded me of Karachi for a minute!

Customer Service, you say?

Okay, call me spoilt, but the American saying “the customer is always right” does have its treats. It is so frustrating when you walk into a store in London that no one really gives a damn. The quality of service is horrible. Have you ever been to a bank in London? No one is at the counter, and you have to wait for more than 5 minutes before someone will come to attend to you. It’s the same everywhere you go. Cell phone stores, grocery stores, restaurants, banks, offices, etc., the service is nothing short of horrible.

Customer Service staff, that takes less interest in their lives than probably anyone does, try and lecture you on things like the Data Protection Act and other laws, when they really have no idea what they are talking about. Everyone has an excuse for doing something the wrong way, and no one needs an excuse for not doing anything! It’s a privilege to to get any kind of service in London when you are paying for it. Be it NatWest, Barclays, HSBC, Orange, O2 or any other business, their customer service sucks, which makes for a very unpleasant shopping or service experience.

The US is great at this. I don’t know if it’s because of the out-of-whack US liability laws or simply because they’re smart enough to know that happy customers make good customers, but they do everything it takes to get the job done right. I’m not saying that the level of customer service competence is better in the US, but New York makes for a much more pleasant shopping experience than London. Ask any Brit who’s been to New York. They only have good things to say about it. So many of them want to move there, despite what they think of George Bush and US foreign policy. Well, who can blame them, right?

Ofcourse, outsourcing of customer service over the phone is a problem in both cities/countries. But given the fact that the liability of bad service in the US is greater than it is in the UK, US outsourced customer service is much better. I guess this strings from the fact that no major corporations in the US are government owned or government vested, as British Telecom is, say, in the UK.

Who’s more friendly? New Yorkers or Londoners?

Everyone in London is upset most of the time. This may be due to traffic, poverty, expenditure, tourists, or whatever. But hey, New Yorkers are just as fed up of the crap at their end. But my experience is that Americans are generally much more friendly than the British. In school, we used to read of British Hospitality and all that good stuff. Well, most of it has apparently faded, at least in the working class. Who knows why that is. I guess life in London is more difficult than in New York City, which makes for crankier Londoners than New Yorkers.

If you’ve seen the phrase “Welcome to New York” used in movies when something goes wrong with someone in New York, well, it is just as suitable for London, if not more. But maybe Londoners don’t share the same sense of humour!

Rowdy Kids

Okay, this has a lot to do with the low drinking age and the excessive use of drugs. That’s just not cool, because kids get rowdy and rude and puke all over the place in London, which ads more to the existing dirt, which isn’t cool either. I’m not going say too much about this, except that this needs to stop, and infusion of drugs into London teenagers needs to be controlled urgently, because this is not only a hassle for us who live here, but even for those who are visiting for fun.

The Fascination Factor

This may be subjective, but I clearly remember the first time I visited NYC (let’s not count Brooklyn or Queens, shall we?). I stepped out of the Subway Station o 5th Avemue and I stood in awe at skyscraper after skyscraper. The impression that New York makes on a new or first time visitor is far superior to the one that London makes, and Londoners will tell you that. New York is a City that’s built to look like a Metropolis, and it certainly feels like one. London may have big city life, but I think it fails to make that impression that adds to the initial buzz of being in one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

Food

Oh my! New York City has more variety in food than London does. New York City’s portion size is much larger (as is the rest of America’s), and the cost is far less. Also, since I think Americans are far more passionate about eating (compare the obesity rate between the US and UK at 38% and 33 %, respectively), the overall taste and experience of dining and food in New York City is better than in London.

And for those of you who say Americans pig out and don’t enjoy their food, well, the obesity gap isn’t that much, and here is news for some of you: New York City is the world’s first city to ban trans fat in restaurants. That’s right. I think the law kicks in in June, but now who cares more about the health of tourists and residents?

Bloomberg Vs. Livingstone

Come on now, there’s no comparison. The New York Mayor (Michael Bloomberg) is much cooler than London Mayor Ken Livingstone. Bloomberg, that just sounds much cooler than Livingstone. Need I say more?

The Experience (Corporate, mostly)

After having lived in the US for several years (and not really having lived in New York), I think that London, and forgive me for saying this, is like an American village. I’ve already mentioned that London doesn’t feel as Metropolitan as New York; but even Denver or Dallas feel more metropolitan than London. Well, maybe I’ll discount Dallas from that.

There are many reasons for that, but I think a lot of it has to do with British mentality and culture.

The Corporate Culture of London is, at best, outdated, compared to the corporate culture anywhere in the US. The technology in use, the ideology, the methodology all is about 20-25 years behind the US. I think the reason for that is the traditional approach of British Businessmen. They like to stick to what they’re comfortable with, and then British pride knows no end. Since the UK isn’t exactly the pioneer of new technology or British methodologies, British business is hesitant about adapting to it, with the result say, if the CEO or Managing Director of a major corporation has been in charge for 10 years, he technology in place is 10 years old. Until a younger crowd comes to manage the company, the technology won’t change, because each generation, I think, in this country, brings an update to technology and methodologies.

That’s not the case in the US, which is a dynamic environment that thrives on new processes, technologies, and methodologies. Things are always being improved, with the ultimate goal to weed out inefficiencies in the business processes.

When I was in the US, I used to hear how much ahead of the US Europe was in the cell phone market. Well, not really. Just because the US has a different release schedule for mobile phones and they use different cell phone networks doesn’t make their service or technology inferior. London has more mobile/cell phone signal problems than I ever had in the US driving from Colorado to New York. So, you shouldn’t really believe every such thing you hear.

In addition, the US, to this day, and even NYC, provides a positive corporate culture for new entrants. It is an environment where you can get a job or thrive on merit alone, at least upto a comfortable level, if not a super rich level. In London, merit doesn’t really count; you have to know people to get to even very junior places, and that kind of stuff is just not cool. But I think, again, it is something that comes out of the culture of royalty, and although it may be a bad thing, it has become a way of life that the locals are used to. More power to them! I guess as long as you know who you know, what you know is not really important.

Let’s just say that I’m trying to say that the Business Acumen of London is nowhere close to that of New York, or any other major US city. That doesn’t mean the London economy is very small, we’re just talking about business acumen and business intelligence.

Price

In a few words, New York provides MUCH BETTER value for money than London does. Living, shopping, partying, everything in New York City is half price of what it is in London. Throw in the other factors mentioned, and New York makes for a far superior experience.

Okay, this may not have been the most comprehensive guide to London and New York, but it’s just my opinion, which means it may be prejudiced, biased,or simply ill founded. But nonetheless, it is my opinion. Personally, I preferred Denver. It had most of the advantages of a big city without the rutt and problems. But then, it’s neither London nor New York.

What do you think?

 Loading …