Internet Explorer 6 was a major advance on its predecessors as an application development platform. What’s more it was effectively ubiquitous – Microsoft gave it away with Windows and everybody had Windows.

In the corporate environment, this meant that IT departments could write client applications for the browser instead of using Visual Basic or worse, Java. These browser-based applications needed no roll-out programme and no desktop provisioning – both expensive headaches.

Whoopee! said corporate IT departments, and rushed to develop applications for the new platform.

Roll the clock forward to today and the folly of that approach is clear. Corporates are now stuck using those same client applications because either they can’t afford to develop new ones, or they bought a third-party application that is still business-critical, or the developers have left the company and they simply dare not touch the code. And those applications only work on Internet Explorer 6 because it turned out it wasn’t a de facto standard after all, it was a proprietary cul de sac.

So I sit every day at a desk in a bank, trying to use Internet Explorer 6 in a world where most people have given up trying to retain compatibility with this out-dated platform. And around the world there are millions like me whose employers or clients are saddled with this dinosaur because of an expensive mistake made years ago.

Why do I believe we are in danger of making the same mistake again?

The number of applications developed for the iPhone is astonishing. People develop for this platform because it is better than its predecessors. And although it is not quite ubiquitous, it certainly has a market share that makes the potential audience for an iPhone application very attractive indeed.

This has not escaped the notice of corporate IT departments. I imagine client applications for the company CRM system are being developed right now for the mobile salesforce of thousands of companies.

And so history repeats itself. The iPhone is a proprietary platform whose future is not yet clear. It could set a de facto standard for future mobile platforms. Maybe. I think it more likely that Android and Windows Phone 7 will go their own way. And corporates will have bought into applications for a platform that will go away before the business requirement does.

By all means buy or write applications for the iPhone, but please factor in the cost of replacing those applications in a few years. I don’t want to be carrying round a five-year-old iPhone in 2015 just because my company depends on an application that only runs on that old thing.

This brings into question whether Swann’s presence in the table is due to his being a genuine world-class all-rounder or, on the other hand, a statistical anomaly.

In my first post I talked about what makes an all-rounder. The underlying principle is that the player should merit selection as either a batsman or a bowler. If he is unable to do one or the other for a given match, is he still worth picking?

On this basis I think calling Swann an all-rounder is a bit of a stretch. If he couldn’t bowl he wouldn’t play. His usual batting position is 9, which he may feel is unfair but reflects the consistent opinion of a number of captains and coaches since 2008.

So why is he in the table? My batting criterion is an average over 30. If I raised this to (say) 35 I would be excluding Ian Botham, Shaun Pollock, Andrew Flintoff, Kapil Dev and Chris Cairns. All world class all-rounders according to conventional wisdom.

His average reflects the number of not outs in his 21 test innings. Here is how his average has changed since the start of his career:

Graeme Swann's batting average

I think it will settle in the low- to mid-thirties for the remainder of his career. The peak of 45 was a result of two significant not-out innings in 2009 (63* against West Indies and 47* against Australia) and I don’t think he’ll approach those heights again. But if he keeps above 30 he’ll stay in my table.

So are the criteria wrong? How can I exclude a player like Swann when his figures bear comparison with the best of all time? All I can think of is  excluding players who bat at 9, 10 or 11 in the batting order. This seems even more arbitrary than my existing criteria and I don’t like it much.

Any ideas?

Since then he has played 2 more tests against India and is competing in a third against New Zealand. His bowling continues to impress and he has another 10 wickets to his name since I last wrote, meaning he now easily qualifies for his bowling both on aggregate and average. Not bad for a 22-year-old.

His batting, however, wasn’t doing him any favours as an all-rounder with scores of 17, 17, 34 and 7 in the games against India. All this changed yesterday when he enjoyed a whirlwind partnership of 145 with Mahmudullah and was unlucky to be dismissed for 87, bringing his test average up to 30.24. As I write, then, he is one of the World’s Best All-Rounders.

He is joined as a debutant in the table by Graeme Swann, who has also qualified since my last post:

(I’ve omitted the pre-war players this time)

Dan Vettori has slipped down a place. There are now four current players in the table. I don’t know of anybody else who’s near to qualifying except perhaps Stuart Broad. Any suggestions?

Dominic,

I’m sorry if this email is, in any way (from the subject down to the signature) offensive, bothering, time wasting or anything like that to you. The sole purpose of this email is to better understand some things about your kind of career/profession, which is also mine. Furthermore, I’m not asking for anything besides information — and from your site I infer that you like to share your thoughts, so…

First, let me introduce myself. I’m a consultant working for a multi-national company. My specialty is System Architecture, and while the title is vague, what I actually do is design systems through the use of UML diagrams, a lot of documenting, etc. Usually I spend even more time implementing stuff, from C/C++ to bash shells to C# to COBOL even. I’m very fond of technology, and I chose my career when I was very young — about 10 years old. Back then my desire was to work with videogames (like most children with such love for gadgets and computers, I guess) but since I live in Brazil, I was forced to abandon that path some years ago.

I stumbled upon your website when looking for the maximum theoretical limit for the length of an email address. I needed that piece of information to define an entity in my database, and I wanted a number that was right from theory. When reading the article on the site, however, something struck me as odd. Your profile, on the left portion of the page, read “IT director”. But I was reading a purely technical article! That’s incredible. Here, both at my company and, as far as I can tell, my country, techies doesn’t go too far up companies hierarchies. So I decided that you were not, in fact, what I call “techie”. You are probably more, a guy with both systems expertise and managing skills. Still, such a profile doesn’t make much sense to me.

In my company, after as little as 5 years, you can get a managing position. And when that happens, it’s no longer expected that the worker learns how to implement specific things. In fact, the only thing people seem to be able to do afterwards is learn what a particular technology is capable of. For example, managers here know about SOA, about .Net, about ESBs, about Clouds. They know what they are and how they can help business. However, they don’t know how those stuff works. You, however, seems to know deeply at least about PHP, a good deal about REGEXes, etc. These skills, if not used, are forgotten, so I’m guessing you have a tight connection with technology. I’m sure you don’t look at source codes or solve complex math problems for your analysts, but I think you get in touch with them and probably study deep technology during breaks.

I assumed a lot of stuff up there but, if I’m right about most of it, my question is, how do you do it? How do you balance being a good Technologist with being a manager? Is there some kind of synergy between them? Does your bosses took your tech skills into knowledge as you progressed through your career? Or maybe I’m completly wrong and you don’t manage people, being just the big fish when it comes to technology (highly improbable, but still…)…?

I’m know that, from what I’ve written there’s a good chance that you take me for a fool. These questions have been storming my mind for some months now, and I’ve always wanted to ask someone with more time in the market than myself…

Thanks a lot for reading,

X

The qualities this special player needs are to score as many runs as a specialist middle-order batsman and also to bowl as effectively as the other four members of the bowling unit. Anything short of this and you have not an all-rounder but an nearly-rounder. A squarer peg for the all-rounder hole.

Who are the players who have filled this role best in test match history? Names like Garry Sobers, Imran Khan, Ian Botham and Keith Miller spring to mind. But how to determine their effectiveness in filling that pivotal role?

Cricinfo’s statistics can give us the raw data. I now have a spreadsheet with all 2574 test match players and their raw figures. How can I use this data to identify the best all-rounders?

Out of 2574 players, 82 never batted long enough to get dismissed and 1053 never took a wicket. This includes 26 players who did neither in their test match career. No wickets and no completed innings: no hopers? Well Stuart Law is one of them so you decide.  Nevertheless, I think we can rule them out as all-rounders straight away. That leaves us with 1466 players who have taken a test match wicket and have a test batting average. Who were the best?

Let’s look at batting averages and bowling averages. You’d expect a test match lower-middle-order batsman to be averaging over 30. You’d also expect them to be taking wickets at less than 35 runs apiece. This gives us 120 all-rounders by this very broad and somewhat arbitrary definition. However the list includes players like Mark Boucher who played as a wicketkeeper-batsman but once took a wicket as an eighth-change bowler against the West Indies as a dull test match petered out into a draw.

So we need some qualifying numbers of runs and wickets to weed out these statistical anomalies. Again I will introduce an arbitrary cut-off of 500 runs and 50 wickets. This leaves us with 29 players who might be selected on the basis of either their batting or bowling alone.

We need a way of ranking these players as all-rounders. We can assess their contribution with the bat and ball by seeing by how much they exceed the qualifying criteria. In other words, how much higher is their batting average than 30. How much lower is their bowling average than 35? But there’s another factor – catching. Catches, as we all know, win matches. As your all-rounder you want a proper batsman, a proper bowler and a fielder who can pluck swallows from the sky.

By the magic of arbitrariness I have assigned an x-factor to each all-rounder. It’s simply a multiplier of their batting average in excess of 30, their bowling average below 35 and their number of catches per 100 matches. And the result:

Fascinating.

Garry Sobers is top, as you might expect. But the evil Jacques Kallis joins him in a top two who are miles ahead of the pack. More than 1000 x-factor points separate them from their nearest rival.

But this list looks good. It’s got all the usual suspects. Andrew Flintoff sneaks in although history will probably be less kind to him than our memories suggest. History’s judgement on Flintoff: a bit better than Daniel Vettori (but not as good a captain).

Notable absences: Richard Hadlee and Trevor Bailey averaged under 30 with the bat. Steve Waugh and Lance Klusener over 35 with the ball. Ravi Shastri averaged over 40 with the ball.

Graeme Swann will join the list when he has another 37 test runs (batting average 35.61, bowling average 29.65). Stuart Broad needs to get his batting average of 28.71 up a bit.

1. Herb Simon

2. Complex adaptive systems (esp. Nearly Decomposable systems)

3. Netflix mission statement

There’s clearly some academic work supporting the “we hold these truths to be self-evident” tone of the Netflix mission statement slides. Do some reading. Do some writing. This stuff matters.

NB Remember to credit Sean for the Prezi.

If I was writing a sports book and there was a existing sports author[2] with the same name as me I would urgently consider changing my pen name.

If I was was writing a book about cricket and I had the same name as a famous cricketer[3], I might consider the game was up and I had better start thinking of pseudonyms right away.

Because what chance is there of finding the new Peter May on Google?

[1] Peter May

[2] Peter May

[3] PBH May

Ticket prices from Virgin Trains website for Leamington Spa - London Marylebone

Ticket prices range from £37.90 to £103.50. The shortest jurney time is 1 hour 53 minutes. All the journeys offered to me involve a change of trains at Banbury.

Now I know this route. I did this exact journey twice a day for 10 years. It doesn’t take two hours and you don’t need to change trains. Have a look at what the Chiltern Railways website offered me for the exact same journey on the exact same day:

Ticket prices for direct trains with Chiltern Railways

I can get a ticket for £5 or £10. The journey is direct and it takes just over 90 mins.

Why is Virgin Trains trying to get me to buy a more expensive ticket for a slower train? Could it be because the Leamington Spa – Banbury leg of their suggested route is on a Virgin Cross-Country service?

Surely not.

I’m surprised this is legal. If in fact it is.

1. Anybody who’s seen him bowl can see that he’s a marvellously natural bowler. He has a gift for controlling his length and enough of an innate variation in pace to deceive world-class batsmen. He doesn’t turn it much, but half a bat’s width is all you need.
2. He has taken 126 wickets in 39 Test Matches. That’s  very good. He’s a very good bowler. Ashley Giles, until then England’s main spinner, retired at the young age of 33 within 9 months of Panesar’s debut. The writing was clearly on the wall.
3. In 2008 England appointed Mushtaq Ahmed as spin bowling coach, to “mentor our leading spin bowlers“.
4. Since then, Panesar’s career has gone into a steep decline. He lost his England place to Graeme Swann and at the end of the 2009 season Northamptonshire admitted he was a luxury they could no longer afford having taken only 18 first class wickets in the season.

So what’s gone wrong with this gifted cricketer? I’m afraid the clue may be No.3 above.

Panesar’s limiting factor is his lack of guile. His naivety reveals itself in his self-conscious and clumsy fielding and batting. Only with a ball in his hand does he become a creature of grace and beauty. He doesn’t have the imagination to plot the downfall of a batsman like a chess game, he lets the batsman do this himself. And most batsmen will ultimately think themselves out if they can’t score runs and they don’t know why. So his limiting factor is also one of his unique strengths.

Panesar’s lack of ego is a contributing element to this. If he gets hit for a boundary it is not revenge that is uppermost in his mind but a desire to correct the minor fault that caused the lapse. To his credit, his response is not to bowl a flat defensive ball nor a cunning trick delivery but to bowl the same ball again with his natural minor variations. This is what gets good batsmen out.

What he needs is help in understanding this. Help to retain the natural gifts over time and help to see why they are his main weapons.

What do we give him? Mushtaq Ahmed. The other sort of spinner.

Mushy is cunning. He has a wide variety of deliveries, each more perfidious than the last. He is clever and aggressive. He is so not what Monty needs. And now he will have his advice not just with England but with Sussex, Panesar’s new county and Mushtaq’s old one. Here’s the Sussex manager Mark Robinson:

We have got Mushtaq working with us a little bit, who is anything but a technical coach, to preach the love of the game and use of the imagination

And Monty loves him:

I spoke to Mushy who still thinks of Sussex as his county and he was keen to have me at Hove. He said that there was a real family feel to the club and Mike Yardy, who I have toured with, was also very persuasive.

There’s your answer. Monty needs technical help in retaining and exploiting his natural gifts. The last thing he needs is somebody to give him an imagination. Mushy’s input will be entirely towards this destructive goal and not at all with the technical thing.

I see no way back for Monty at this point.