Richard Speed

Richard Speed covers technology for The Register with a focus on how big platforms, enterprise software and long‑running engineering projects collide with real users and working IT teams. His pieces mix close reading of vendor moves with a dry, sceptical tone, highlighting where glossy product narratives hide friction, risk or inconvenience.

Big tech nudges and the user impact of product decisions

Speed pays close attention to seemingly small product changes that carry major consequences for users and administrators.

In his coverage of Google asking users for their phone numbers, he dissects how consent prompts are phrased, what data is being sought, and how that alters the balance between user convenience, security and data collection. He treats interface tweaks, new defaults and opt‑out mechanisms as newsworthy in their own right because of the pressure they place on people who just want services to keep working.

Across his Google and cloud platform stories he picks out the gap between the official justification for a change and the experience on the ground. He explains what a new requirement or workflow means for sign‑in journeys, account recovery, and support desks, rather than stopping at the marketing line. That focus on real‑world impact, rather than feature lists, sets his platform coverage apart from more generic product‑announcement reporting.

Enterprise software, operating systems and the plumbing of IT

Speed spends much of his time on the unglamorous layers of technology that keep organisations running: operating system releases, enterprise software updates, and the legacy systems beneath them. His Windows and infrastructure pieces track cumulative updates, patch quality, regressions and rollback paths, spelling out what each change means for fleets of machines rather than a single workstation. He follows long‑running sagas such as problematic updates or stalled migrations, treating them as story arcs rather than isolated incidents.

Legacy technology is a recurring thread. He writes about older platforms and languages that stubbornly remain in production, and the engineering compromises involved in keeping them alive while vendors push customers toward new stacks. When he covers vendor roadmaps or end‑of‑support dates, he frames them in terms of operational risk, compliance pressure and the cost of moving workloads, reflecting the concerns of administrators who have to deal with consequences long after a press release has faded.

Spaceflight, engineering projects and technical detail

Alongside enterprise coverage, Speed writes extensively about spaceflight and complex engineering programmes. His space stories follow launch schedules, mission milestones, hardware failures and incremental successes across agencies and commercial operators. He is interested in the engineering constraints and programme management realities that sit behind the headlines of a successful launch or a missed window.

These articles typically step through the technical configuration of spacecraft or launch systems, explain why specific design decisions matter, and set individual events in the context of multi‑year mission timelines. He treats slips, redesigns and partial successes as important as spectacular wins, giving readers a sense of how iterative and fragile large‑scale engineering really is.

Tone, structure and approach to stories

Speed writes in the signature Register mix of straight reporting and wry commentary. His headlines and copy carry humour and wordplay, but the body of each piece is grounded in documentation, vendor statements and technical specifics. He is quick to juxtapose marketing claims with error messages, support notes or change logs, and he lets that contrast do much of the critical work.

His output ranges from quick news hits on fresh announcements or incidents to more reflective pieces that revisit ongoing problems with updates, migrations or space missions.

Recurring interests include how software changes ripple through large organisations, how users experience “nudges” from platforms that want more data or tighter control, and how complex technical projects evolve over years rather than news cycles. Across subjects, his work is defined by a focus on consequences, a feel for long‑running technical sagas, and a consistent scepticism toward vendor spin.