Keeping tabs on Microsoft

...divide up a problem that you look at, to begin with, and think, "That is absolutely impossible" — how to divide that into a set of achievable objectives that you can timetable and project manage.

All that is the same, whether that is a government agency, whether it's a large commercial enterprise or a class of students you have to explain things to.

So the skill set you've acquired is transferable across a broad spectrum?
People are people. I do an awful lot of teaching police officers how to investigate high-tech crimes. The mantra for that is the same for all that I do: "People are people."

I've dealt with IBM. Let's say, you don't deal with IBM. You deal with a small set of people who you know within IBM. I worked for a number of years as a salesman and as a sales manager, and you learn very, very quickly that it's people who you are dealing with.

What type of companies did you work for in the US?
I worked for two companies. I worked for a California-based software development company specialising in networking technology called Locust Technology, where I was head of consulting. And then later, I worked for Honeywell Bull. It's a large French group with a number of different roles… Towards the end I was a fellow, which is an advisory post within the organization.

The idea [of a fellow] is to have someone with the technical wherewithal and commercial wherewithal to understand what the company should be doing, and to lead relationships between that company and government, and partner organisations, and research-based organisations. My role was talk to partners, go and talk to government and go and talk to advisory bodies and to build an understanding, from a technology perspective, about what should Bull be doing in order to be at the right place at the right time.

What do think should be the proper role of government from a theoretical perspective?
The 10,000-foot view: Government exists to foster a society within which the governed wish to live. You elect a particular party, or elect a particular type of government, based on a majority view within a society as to what you want. I would say I am a relativist on that. What is right in some areas is not right anywhere else, because of the perspective of the society.

That, for me, came home very, very much working part-time in England, part-time in France and part-time in America, where there are three wholly different views on how government policy as a whole should work. Government policy in America is predominately laissez-faire and predominately big business, and knows what big business wants to do — It produces something that people want to buy, therefore it must be good, therefore they should be encouraged to do it.

In France, there is slightly different view — at least when I was working there. In France, there was much more government direction of where things should go. Probably, Britain has got the midway point. We've got things that are best served by government policy — like health, pensions, road transport, infrastructure, those types of things. Businesses tend to be regulated, but not overly regulated — not to the same degree where things are regulated elsewhere.

Years from now, will you look back and say this was a highlight of your career?
I do so many different things. I'm a writer, I'm an academic, I'm a researcher, I'm a teacher, I'm a father, I'm a friend — what can I say? I have never defined myself in terms of the jobs that I do, because — certainly in the last 20 years — I've not really had a job as such.

In all of the roles I've done, I've tended just to be me. I've tended to do lots of different things. If I were to think of myself from a career point of view, I'm a writer, I'm a thinker. I would never sit down and say I want to be remembered as the "world's best programmer" or "world's best businessman," or world's best whatever. But if I want to be remembered for something, I would say writing is what I enjoy most: so, writing.