So with all the news of the $1.5B (that’s billions with a B) US lottery win, people are inevitably talking about how they would spend such an incredible sum of money. I’m not even in the US, let alone buying lottery tickets, but what the heck.

I’m not the type to quit my job and be a tourist for the rest of my life, or set up my own foundation, or whatever. There is one thing I like to spend money on, though, and that is cars. Without further ado, here is my dream garage.

Bugatti EB 110

This is a criminally under-rated supercar, and I want to take it in and cuddle it. Okay, the looks are challenging from some angles, and the nose especially dates the car, but I think that, if anything, it looks better now than when it was new - and the rear three-quarters view is, to my eyes at least, the definition of supercar pr0n.

Obviously I’ve never driven one, nor even seen one in real life, but that’s part of the supercar mystique. EVO approved, as did Michael Schumacher, and that’s good enough for me to dream.

Lightspeed Classic 911

Hot-rod 911s are where it’s at right now. Singer are probably the best-known in this space, but their approach is so extreme that it’s a little off-putting. Lightspeed Classic seem to have a more reasonable approach, but with equally sensational results for all practical purposes.

I’d need to sit down with them & spec out my ideal car, but this picture shows some of the key elements, with the ducktail spoiler, flared arches, and Fuchs alloys.

Citroen DS

I’m just going to let the pictures speak for themselves - except to add that this is the only car that could live up to the name "goddess".

Superformance Daytona Coupe

Okay, it’s a replica, but not as you know it. This thing was approved by Carroll Shelby himself as a "continuation" car. I also like the idea of modern technology combined with old-school style. Plus, this is the "race car" of the collection, and the idea of stuffing an original Shelby Daytona Coupe into the Armco around the Nurburgring or whatever just doesn’t bear thinking about.

That Kamm tail, too…

Unimog

I have an unreasonable¹ lust for a ‘60s Unimog, but with an uprated engine and creature comforts. This would be for tooling around my chalet in the Alps, obviously. I’d love to get the ICON guys to do this one for me.

Ferrari 575 Fiorano

The Ferrari 550/575 is to my eyes the best-looking of the Ferrari GTs. The 599 is certainly purposeful, but the design is a bit too busy for me. Of course, the GTs with the V12 engine in front driving the rear wheels are the only "proper" Ferraris; all these mid-engined V8s are a modern aberration. After all, Enzo Ferrari himself famously said "The horse doesn’t push the cart, it pulls it!".

Ford Model A-based hot rod

I just love the looks of these things. I know they’re probably terrible to drive, but there are other cars in this garage for that!

1969 Mercury Marauder

Gotta have a muscle car! Again, this one is mainly about looks and cruising, but I’d want the engine tickled to make sure I could do burnouts and other muscle-car stuff.

Morgan Plus 8

Who doesn’t love a car that has major chassis elements still made of wood? I don’t think you can beat this for open-top motoring.

…and as a daily driver (not that the others would be garage queens, but this is for getting the groceries), an Audi RS6 Avant.

The idea here is to organise the garage by category, with only one car of each type. That one car is not supposed to be the "ultimate" or anything like that, just the car that I would really most like to own for that purpose.

What’s in your dream garage?

It was a shock to hear about David Bowie's death this morning. In his constant reinventions, he had somehow managed to appear ageless. Lemmy's death at the end of last year, while equally sudden, was hardly unexpected, but Bowie's departure seemed - to me at least - to come out of the blue.

I can't say I am a superfan; maybe I'm too young, but I was always more into artists inspired by Bowie (which is pretty much anyone worth listening to) rather than the man himself. However, when I first travelled to Berlin, I made a point of seeking out the old watchtower which was (purportedly) the one immortalised in Heroes. It's a strange location, behind what was still at the time the brand new Sony centre at Potsdamer Platz. The traces of Bowie's Berlin were rapidly disappearing, although the scars of the Wall were still very much in evidence, especially from the U-Bahn.

It was strange to stand there, between the gleaming glass towers and the ruins of the Luftwaffe HQ, with this watchtower neatly bookended between them in time and space, and to think about what Berlin had seen over the last century and the strange conjunction of circumstances that had brought Bowie there and led him to write that song.

RIP, Starman.

I tend to assume that things I know are obvious and widely known, and so I don’t often bother to document them. However, I noticed that a couple of different people did not know this particular very useful trick, so I thought I would share it here for anyone else who might find it useful.

The trick (I refuse to call it a "hack", or even worse, a "life hack") is useful if you often need to type the same snippets of text on an Apple device, whether it’s an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac. You can do this using only built-in tools from Apple, with no need to install additional components or mess with anything under the hood.

On a Mac, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Text. Here you can create the shortcuts that will be useful to you. You should have one defined already, which replaces "omw" with "On my way!".

Simply click the + button at the bottom of the window to add your own snippets. I have a couple for my phone number and email address, so that I can simply type "mynum" or "mygmail" to have those appear, with no fear of typos.

This is of course even more useful on an iPhone, where the small keyboard can make it frustrating to type when you can’t rely on autocorrect - and doubly frustrating to type phone numbers in the middle of other text. On an iPhone (or an iPad), go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement, and then tap the + to enter your own snippets.

The cherry on the cake of usefulness is that the text snippets will sync over iCloud, so any snippets you set up on one of your devices should be available on all your other devices too.

Enjoy!

The sour taste in my espresso this morning is courtesy of yet another dudebro tech VC, opining about how ties are uncool, maaaaann! and basically nobody should write on LinkedIn.

If you have a tie on in 2015, it probably means you are a salesman in a non-transparent industry and are generally not to be trusted at any cost. When I see a tie on somebody, I get that funny feeling you get right before the dentist. Let’s face it, the people left wearing ties every day are the confidence-men stealing your money. Think insurance, financial services, bad shoes and, of course, car salesmen.

Well now.

I am on record as not only a tie wearer, but also a tie apologist. To quote myself once again:

In fact, suits & ties are actually the ultimate nerd apparel. You have to put some effort into shopping, sure, and they tend to cost a bit more than a random vendor T-shirt and ancient combats, but the advantage is that you can thereafter completely forget about wondering what to wear. You can get dressed in the dark and be sure that the results will be perfectly presentable. If you want you can go to a little bit more effort and inject some personality into the process, but the great thing is that you don’t have to. By wearing a suit & tie, you lead people to pay attention to what you say and do, not to what you are wearing. And isn’t that the whole point?

This mindset of "distrust anyone dressed like a grown-up" is just one more symptom of the Revenge of the Nerds chauvinism that is rife in the tech industry. The nerds complain about being victimised by the jocks, but it’s not the victimisation itself that they object to, it’s just being on the receiving end of it. "They mocked me for dressing differently from them, but now I mock them for dressing differently from me! Haha, I win!"

No, no you don’t win. You just look like an overgrown, entitled man-child. Grown-ups wear ties as a sign of respect to one another. If some sleaze balls wear suits & ties, that is because they are trying to fake that respect - but just because something is faked, does not mean that it’s not aping something real.

If I visit a customer or a prospect, I am a guest, and I dress and act appropriately. I’m not more "genuine" or "passionate" if I show up in jeans, sneakers and a Zuckerberg-approved hoodie. If I’m doing it right, my passion and competence will show regardless of what I wear. Today, wearing a hoodie to work is not transgressive or cool - it’s just imitating a more successful person. And let’s not even pretend that your hoodie doesn’t get judged for materials, cut, brand, etc., as much or more than suits ever were.

Basically, he is wilfully misunderstanding what people use LinkedIn for and why they would want to write there. Yes, it’s an advertising tool - that’s what we are all there for! LinkedIn is buttoned-down, professional me - although I like to think that I still put some personality in there. Twitter is where I let it all hang out, and talk about what I am up to at work right beside books, music, and whatever has got the Internet in a bunch lately.

Amusingly, Dudebro VC's piece ends up being an example of exactly the sort of writing he decries, since it’s a listicle:

1) LinkedIn has become a giant branded entertainment platform for selling us crappy fake expertise.

2) Crappy writing

3) No real authentic sentiment

4) LinkedIn notifications are predatory

The real kicker is at the end, though, where he says that it’s perfectly okay for him to write a listicle, because it’s not on LinkedIn, plus he got paid for it and doesn’t care about how many times it gets viewed.

Firstly, this is insultingly disingenuous. Writing this sort of flamebait, custom-designed to go viral and provoke reactions¹ and then making a big show of turning away and not watching the ensuing furore is a cheap trick - but one that is perfectly in line with the rest of the piece.

Secondly, this is pretty transparently elitist. He's attempting to pull up the ladder behind him, mocking anyone who has not achieved his supposed level of clout in the industry. What he is saying with this piece is, if you’re a big shot, you can wear a hoodie to work and be paid for your opinions. If you have to dress professionally and are still having to work hard to get your opinions out there, you’re a loser.

Just in case you thought Martin Schkreli - he of the 5000% drug price increases and one-off Wu-Tang Clan albums - was an outlier: now you know that he is not. There are plenty of utter tools in VC.

I also took special pleasure in cross-posting this piece to LinkedIn Pulse, just to make my point one more time.

Image by Olu Eletu via Unsplash

Everyone who cares probably knew this already, but I just discovered something cool with iOS multitasking.

If you have an iPad Air 2 or an iPad Pro, you can run two apps side by side on the screen. I was doing this so that I could listen to music via YouTube while twittering, because Apple in their wisdom mute Safari if it's backgrounded. You have to do proper multi-tasking, not just slide-over, which is why this only works on those two models.

I was already pretty happy with my solution, devoting untold amounts of innovation and computing horsepower to wasting time more efficiently than ever before - and then I clicked on a link in Twitter, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up to me.

Now normally if you click a link in Twitter for iOS when it's running in full-screen mode, the linked page opens in an embedded mini-browser, which is of course the Wrong Thing.

If on the other hand you click a link while Twitter is running side by side with Safari, the linked page opens directly in a new Safari tab!

Amazing, right? Right?

Okay, this is a pretty niche use case, but it makes me unreasonably happy. I hope this post is useful to someone else, too.

Is IT getting too easy?

I was listening to the latest episode of the excellent Exponent podcast, where the topic of PC gaming up. The hosts were discussing the rise of the Steam platform, and ascribed it primarily to convenience.

PC gamers used to build custom rigs, worrying about thermal profiles and harried by IRQ conflicts. They would then get their games - on physical media! in boxes! - and install them, then immediately patch the game, their video drivers, and possibly several other things. Because of all this, gaming was a demanding and niche pastime.

With solutions like Steam and the decline of the custom-built PC in favour of self-contained laptops, the level of convenience rose enormously. Something like Steam could never have risen to be a $1.5B business twenty years ago. However, I do wonder if we are losing some necessary skills to convenience.

When Steam appeared on the scene, everyone knew what it was doing and enjoyed the convenience of not having to do it themselves. Very quickly though, new gamers came on the scene who had not experience the old ways. All they knew was downloading games from Steam and having everything taken care of for them, even including updates and patches as they became available. Even mods, which had always been tricky to install and always came with the exciting potential to blow away your install, became easy with Steam.

Of course the skills required to be a gamer are of limited macroeconomic utility. It could be argued that keeping gamers busy chasing down IRQ conflicts would prevent them from embarrassing themselves in public (ahem Gamergate ahem), but there is a wider point. The same choice of convenience over detail plays out in enterprise IT as well, where sysadmin skills are getting harder to find.

Gamers used to need to know the precise version of the driver of their graphics card. Now, many gamers barely know whether they have one. In the same way, sysadmins used to have deep knowledge of what was behind the door of their server room, while now all they know is the login to the corporate AWS account. Meanwhile, key bits of infrastructure are still running on obsolete operating systems that nobody knows how to operate any more.

So as the consumerisation of IT rolls inexorably on, will IT users at all levels turn into Eloi relying on a handful of BOfH Morlocks to keep everything running?

Or is this like vintage car people claiming carburettors added character to engines that was lost when electronic fuel injection made the whole thing too easy?

Image by MootCreative via morgueFile

Young people these days, am I right?

We have fallen upon evil times,

And the world has waxed very old and wicked.

Politics are very corrupt.

Children are no longer respectful to their parents.

Author: Naram Sin, King of Chaldea. Date: 3800 B.C.¹

I don’t know how long is too long to be in sales, but I have now been doing it for long enough that I can look down at young whippersnappers and their naivety.

Today’s example is actually a perfect storm of sorts, involving Silicon Valley VCs, a Bitcoin startup, and large enterprise processes. I was listening to the a16z podcast, which as usual is about equally irritating and enlightening. The guest on this particular episode was one Adam Ludwin, whose claim to fame is as the founder of a Bitcoin - sorry, blockchain startup, called Chain.

I find the techno-utopianism of everything associated with Bitcoin to be jarring at the best of times, but Ludwin and Chain have an interesting angle on it. Instead of enabling drug dealers and software extortionists, they are trying to enable large financial institutions to carry out their business using the blockchain, instead of the weird semi-analogue hodgepodge of processes that banks run on today.

I’m not going to get too deeply into what Chain are up to - if you want to find out about that, you can go listen to the episode. What I found jarring was his surprise at what he found when selling into those large financial institutions. Anyone who has spent time selling into large enterprises could have told him this, but apparently he had to learn it the hard way.

For the benefit of everyone else, here are a couple of key points.

Executive Sponsorship

Nothing gets done without buy-in from the CEO. (direct link to relevant quote in podcast)

NO REALLY STOP THE PRESSES HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

Let’s get real: moving anything that is currently working to unproven technology such as the blockchain is going to require strong executive sponsorship. This is not unique to the financial industry, either. Whenever there is an existing process in place that works, however creakily, there is resistance to any proposed solution.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this resistance: the existing process has been refined over time and is well understood, including its failure modes. The proposed new solution, however, is by definition unproven, and will almost certainly require a period of acclimatisation before it becomes as reliable as what went before, let along delivering additional value.

Graphic stolen from Ben Evans

The people who are least likely to see the problem with the way things have always been done are the people who are in charge of that existing process. They are trapped on a local maximum, and while they may accept the theoretical existence of higher maxima elsewhere, to reach them they would have to cross a valley of lower service, lower user satisfaction, possibly lower bonuses, and even perhaps place their jobs at risk.

This is why the most fearsome competitor that you face when pitching anything transformative is not That Other Company, but the Do-Nothing Corporation. You need a very good answer to the question "why do anything?" before you can even get to "why do this?", "why now?", and eventually, "why do it with this company?".

People in upper management, on the other hand, are there specifically to take a strategic view, accepting tactical defeats in the name of the ultimate strategic victory. If you want to change anything that is required for a company to operate, you will need strong executive sponsorship: someone who not only knows the current state, but understands why it cannot continue, and is willing to engage with you to investigate alternatives.

What is tricky for many people just getting into enterprise sales is that the initial pattern often looks the same with and without sponsorship: an evaluation, a proof of concept, a pilot project, or an engagement with the innovation lab. There will be meetings with architects, CTOs, requests for this and that, strategy sessions, deep dives, and workshops.

The key point, though, is that precisely none of this frenzied activity will actually lead to a deal and a production implementation without that executive sponsorship. Green sales people can waste a lot of time and resources going through these motions and not achieve any results because they missed that all-important first step.

On the other hand, once you have a sponsor who can make things happen for you, the evaluation will go that much more smoothly. Partly this is because you can call on your executive sponsor to sort out the inevitable brown M&Ms sorts of problems, but mostly it is because they will clarify what is an actual business requirement versus technical curiosity or "nice to have" feature.

So far so good, right? Well, if it were that simple, everyone would be doing it. The other issue is that it can be difficult to find anyone that has visibility into the whole process - which is the other point I want to discuss.

Distributed Knowledge

"At any given institution, it’s very very rare to find someone who actually knows how the whole thing works." (direct link to relevant quote in podcast)

This is something else that people don’t always get when they begin dealing with large organisations. Very few people have visibility into the whole problem². Here is an example from my own past:

Years ago, I was the tech guy on a team selling to a mobile telco. As part of our business case, we were trying to quantify the impact of downtime on a system that activated SIM cards. We had some numbers from IT, but they were incomplete. We rounded them out with some numbers from the helpdesk, but we kept feeling we were missing something. Finally, the sales guy stopped off at a couple of corner shops that sold the SIM cards, and found that the impact was far greater than anyone imagined. It turned out that the shops rarely activated the SIM cards with the customer in the shop, but did them all in a batch at closing time. This created the overload spikes which were taking the central system down, but it also meant that the downtime was costing far more than anyone imagined.

In that situation, when we asked the IT team, they described the part of the problem that they saw. Actually, it was more complex than that; we had to speak to a number of dedicated teams within IT, from servers, to databases, to middleware, to networks - but at least we were able to find people within IT who did have visibility across the IT parts of the problem. The main point, though, is that as far as IT was concerned, everything was fine. The parts that they saw were doing fine, all of their indicators were in the green except for a couple, and they believed themselves to be on track to address those.

Support had an idea that something was wrong, but it was only at certain times, and at other times everything was fine, so the problem seemed to be contained.

Meanwhile, in the corner shops, customers were getting frustrated and picking up the competitors’ SIM cards instead, because they could actually activate those and use them to make phone calls.

It turned out that literally nobody within the company understood the entire end-to-end process. This was a core business process: we were dealing with a mobile telco, and the process we were analysing was the activation of new subscriber SIM cards. One of the key metrics that the company measured itself against was churn, the difference between customers acquired versus those lost to their competition - so customer acquisition was a critical step, and yet nobody truly understood the entire process of how new customers were acquired.

What I learned is that this is normal. The sorts of processes that modern business runs on are too complex to be understood in their entirety - not when there are a hundred and one other tasks demanding people’s attention. When selling to these organisations, we need to ensure that we understand what we are proposing that they replace - and this means talking to many different people, because nobody sees the whole picture.

People working inside complex processes are busy with individual trees, and not necessarily focusing on the entire forest. Vice versa, if we are to propose that foresters change how they manage their trees, we had better have a pretty comprehensive picture of why.

Anyway, if you are a brash startup planning to sell into large corporations, just be aware that there is a lot going on inside those buildings - and much of it even makes sense, if you take the time to understand it. Selling to enterprise is different from selling to consumers or SMB, and needs to be approached with different tools.

Image by Jakub Sejkora via Unsplash

There has been a long-running complaint that equipping the entry-level iPhone with only 16GB of storage is not only cheap, but wrong-headed because owners will have a bad user experience. Most of the time, the example people bring up is operating system upgrades, with people forced to stay on older iOS releases because they don’t have enough free space to perform the upgrade¹.

As per their usual tight-lipped policy, Apple has not said anything about precisely why it is that they continue to keep the 16GB models around. The general assumption has been that the idea is to offer a (relatively) low entry price for the iPhone range to get as many people as possible through the door.

Today, though, I overheard a conversation that illustrated a different reason why Apple might want to increase the storage in that bottom-tier device sooner rather than later. Someone recommended an album, someone else searched for it on iTunes, hit "Buy" - and was told that they did not have enough space. When storage limits are preventing sales, this is a problem.

One obvious quibble would be to ask how many owners of entry-level devices spend significant sums in the iTunes Store (or would do if they had the free space available). This overlooks the fact that these days, a significant number of iPhones are actually corporate-owned or at least -funded. Because the owner is not the user, it is not possible to infer the user’s purchasing power or willingness based on the device they have. Companies may well opt for limited storage because that’s all that is required for work purposes, even though employees would be willing to fill additional space with personal data, given the chance.

Bottom line: it’s high time for the bottom storage tier to move up to 32GB. I would also argue that when they do this, Apple should eat the difference and not raise prices, because their margin is big enough and the parts cost is so small. The improvement in user experience would pay for itself in Tim Cook’s beloved "customer sat", without even allowing for increased revenue per user (ARPU) as people are able and willing to fill up some of that free space.

I finally got hold of my new Apple TV. The timing was not ideal, as it arrived on Monday - but I had left early on Monday morning for a week-long trip abroad, so I only got to set it up on Friday morning. I wasn’t exactly worried about spoilers, though, so I went ahead and read many of the early reaction reviews. My reaction was similar to what Michael Rockwell describes:

Reviews of the new Apple TV started showing up on Wednesday of last week with deliveries of the device starting to arrive on Friday. I wholeheartedly expected to see overwhelmingly positive reactions from reviewers and owners in my Twitter timeline. But what I saw instead was a barrage of complaints about what I'd consider to be relatively minuscule pain points about the experience.

The complaints I have seen focus mainly on text input. The issue is that all the letters are on a single row, so you end up swiping left and right a lot to enter text. This is somewhat mitigated by the super-easy initial setup, where the Apple TV simply asks you to place your phone near it and picks up your Apple ID, wifi settings, and so on from the phone. Inexplicably, it made me enter my Apple ID password again to set up Home Sharing, though, and the input process was indeed mildly annoying. However, at least in password fields the numbers and punctuation marks appear on a second row, and you can go up and down between rows without having to scroll all the way to the end, so IMHO it’s no worse than any other on-screen text input method. Also, you don’t really enter a lot of text after the initial setup process, so the pain is pretty contained.

On the old Apple TV you could get around the pain by using the Remote app on iOS, which then let you use your iPhone, or even better, your iPad’s soft keyboard to enter text. Unfortunately, the Remote app has not yet been updated to support the new Apple TV.

My own complaint is different. No matter what I do, Siri remains stubbornly disabled.

This is some bullshit from Apple: Siri won't work on #AppleTV in Italy even if language & region are en-us or en-gb: https://t.co/rNo7e463Ay

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) November 6, 2015

It seems that Apple have only made Siri available on the Apple TV in certain countries. At time of writing, the list is as follows:

• English (Australia, Canada, UK, US)

• German (Germany)

• French (France)

• Spanish (Spain)

• Japanese (Japan)

I gather that this limitation is because they want to train Siri to pronounce media titles and artists’ names correctly for each locale. However, the way they have implemented it is, as I stated in my hot reaction tweet above, bullshit¹.

I spent some time attempting to fool the Apple TV into enabling Siri by setting language and region combos that were supported, disabling Location Services, and so on. Nothing I tried got past it - it seems to be going exclusively by the country of the iTunes Store account, so I can choose whether to have Siri or the Store, but not both.

Why can’t big companies understand that some people live in Region A, but want their media from Locale B? If I set everything up to be in en-GB, you don’t need to worry about Siri mangling anything, because it will be speaking the Queen’s English².

Unfortunately Apple is not new to this particular brand of bullshit¹. The iTunes Store forces users to register to the country where their credit card bills are sent. This means that all the catalogues, curated selections, promotional offers and whatnot are specific to that country. In my case, I consume most of my media - books, films, music, etc. - in English, and so the front page of the Italian iTunes Store is utterly useless to me.

It gets worse, though. Sometimes something is not available to me for no apparent reason, even though it is in the UK or US iTunes Store, and available in Italy from other (legal) sources. There is of course never any explanation of why this might be. A few times I have asked writers if they could shed any light (thinking of ongoing international rights negotiations, that sort of thing), and none have yet had any answer - although all have been unfailingly polite and usually suggested alternatives.

The worst, though, is the subtle differences. Animation movies in general, and Pixar movies in particular, are often available in the iTunes Store with only one audio track, which is the Italian dub. If you buy the DVD you get the original English as well, but Apple in its wisdom will only sell you the dub - even though almost every other film in the Store has multiple audio tracks.

Just to be clear, this is not only Apple’s problem. Another recent offender is OpenTable. OpenTable does not operate in Italy, so reasonably enough, the app is not available in the Italian App Store. However, I spend a lot of time in regions where OpenTable is supported, and web apps on a phone are a faff, so I jumped the fence and got the app on my phone anyway. When I fired it up though, all it would do was to give me a snippy message about only being available in certain countries - despite the fact that I was standing in the middle of the capital city of one of those countries, within stone’s throw of a dozen restaurants that supported OpenTable.

I ended up eating at a restaurant that did not accept OpenTable, and enjoyed an excellent meal without their help.

Michael Rockwell is bullish about the software gremlins in the new Apple TV getting fixed soon:

I have high hopes, though. In a few short months, after Apple's shipped a software update or two, we'll no longer have quite as many criticisms to talk about. What we'll be left with is a well-crafted software platform that could revolutionize the way we think about our TVs, in much the same way the App Store has changed how we think about our telephone. As long as developers build incredible software and Apple continues to focus on improving the experience for users, this is going to be a big deal.

I wish I could be equally bullish about the bullshit¹ regional policies being addressed equally soon, or indeed ever.

When the topic of languages comes up in conversation, people are sometimes surprised to hear how many languages I speak. The reactions mainly break down into two different groups:

• Native English speakers: "wow, that is so cool! I could never learn languages…"
• Non-(native)English speakers: "you are so lucky to be able to speak English! you can go anywhere as long as you speak English."

There are a few different things going on here which I want to unpack.

The blonde isn’t really following what is going on

Why learn a language?

While it’s very fashionable for people who speak English as a first language to talk about wanting to learn another language (or wanting their children to), there’s one question I always want to ask: "assuming you learned another language - what would you use it for?"

The big English-speaking countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia) are pretty homogeneous. Aside from a few enclaves (hello, Quebec) relatively few people aside from recent immigrants speaks anything but English as their primary language. If you don’t speak a language frequently with native speakers, you never learn it properly. Worse, if you don’t regularly use even a language that you do know, you will lose it!

The other side of that coin is that everybody else wants to learn English too. If a Finn, a Russian, a Ghanaian, a Mexican, and an Indonesian¹ want to do business together, guess what? They’re all going to speak English to communicate with each other.

The time when international diplomacy was carried out in French is long past. My father-in-law, a mechanical engineer, studied German rather than English, because at the time that was what you learned if you wanted to do Serious Engineering with other Serious Engineers (at least in Europe). No longer!

Who do you speak to?

This leads to my second point. English is easy to keep up as a second language, because English-language content is everywhere. I am raising bilingual kids on the basis that all of their TV, films, books etc. are in English, and they speak Italian out of the house with their friends. This sort of arrangement is easy with English: our cable TV lets us choose different audio tracks, as do media we buy through iTunes. This means we can "enjoy" Paw Patrol, Dora the Explorer, and Daniel Tiger in English, just as if we lived in an English-speaking country. If you still use physical media, DVDs also generally come with several language tracks.

Getting the same access to media in another language is much harder. That same cable subscription only offers a handful of channels where languages other than English are even available, and the content is, ummm, not riveting. It doesn’t help that I don’t watch much TV in the first place, so something has got to really grab me to make me stick with it.

For native English speakers, this means that they are up against a significant block. It’s one thing to say you want to read Borges or Marquez in the original Spanish, and you might even force your way through one book - but when you want to relax, you’ll turn to something fluffier, and that will tend to be in English just because that’s easier to access. The same goes for news. I know, because I’ve tried. I do make a point of picking up paper copies of Die Welt or whatever when I’m in an international airport, but all of my Twitter and RSS stuff is coming in as English - even from people who are not native speakers - and so my online activity is almost entirely anglophone. I will come back to this point, because it’s important too.

Borges all the way (with maybe a Beano tucked inside)

Pity the English!

There is a double-whammy for English speakers, because (at least among European languages) English is about the worst starting language. All the hard edges have been worn off the language, leaving no real structured grammar to speak of, so learning a second language starting only from English is twice as hard because students have to learn both the concept of an adverb and how an adverb actually works in whatever language they are learning, all at the same time.

This reminds me of one my favourite quotes, from James Nicoll:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Back to grammar! I remember studying German in a class full of English people. It took me a while to figure out why all of them were struggling with what were, to me, pretty basic and obvious concepts. The answer was simply that having learned Italian at school, I had spent literally years breaking down sentences into their component parts (analisi logica), and had then taken that even further in studying Latin and classical Greek. As annoying as this was (and as poor a student as I was!) at the time, it was an invaluable foundation for learning other languages.

Not having been exposed to real grammar before, English-speakers are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to learning any second language. This same topic came up in a recent episode of the Futuropolis by Popular Science: Talk Emoji to Me.

Language is a circle

Bottom line: languages are not magical. I love learning languages as a hobby, and I am enabled to do that by background, education, and no doubt some native aptitude². Languages have certainly helped me in my career, because even people who can communicate perfectly well in English appreciate when somebody goes to the effort of learning their language well enough to conduct the meeting that way.

The reason this worked, though, was that languages were another circle for me. I was the person who could do X and had a background in Y, and could also do it in language Z. If I had only had the language skills, I would not have got anywhere. If your choice is between learning a skill and learning a language, nowadays the skill is almost certainly the better investment.

Unless you just enjoy language, in which case I’ll see you out there, making friends with people at the bar, tripping over false friends hilariously, and generally enjoying myself with languages.