In Business, Culture on
13 January 2012 with no comments
From
Tim Cook’s internal email addressing Apple’s
2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report:
Our team has built an ambitious training program to educate workers about Apple’s code of conduct, workers’ rights, and occupational health and safety. More than one million people know about these rights because they went to work for an Apple supplier.
In 1791, when the United States ratified the Bill of Rights, the population of “free white males of 16 years and upward” was 807,094. (The total population was more than 3 million more.)
I don’t mean to draw any conclusions about the ascendancy of corporation as a governance institution, but do find it noteworthy that the scale of a single company’s global manufacturing network is comparable to the birth of its nation.
In politics on
2 December 2011 tagged occupy, society, teaparty with no comments
Schaeffer warned that America’s descent into tyranny would not look like Hitler’s or Stalin’s; it would probably be guided stealthily, by “a manipulative, authoritarian élite.”
These words were written by Ryan Lizza in his August New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann. He was making the case, accurately, that Francis Schaeffer was a paranoid conspiracist.
But a month later, Zuccotti Park was filled with Americans who seem very unlikely to subscribe to Schaeffer’s ideology, but are likely to agree with that warning. Occupier or Tea Partier, at least Americans seem to agree about our shared manipulative, authoritarian élite. Eventually we may figure out that the Koch brothers and Fanjul brothers both represent social problems.
In Culture on
20 October 2011 tagged politics, urban with no comments
Today I’ve learned that NYC tried to implement
congestion pricing but was foiled by their state government, and that Washington state is considering
“allowing” cities to set speed limits on the roads that those cities build, maintain, and patrol.
America’s cities are responsible for over 80% of the population and 90% of the nation’s GDP. Yet this is the United States, not the United Cities, and our atomic units of governance are large land areas that generally have capitols in sparsely-populated areas. They tend to overrepresent rural interests and prioritize highways and social conservative issues with a dismissive attitude toward the collectivist preferences of dense population centers. Rhetoric from the right often extolls the virtues of local decision making, but generally mean to empower states.
Remaining competitive in an increasingly urban world is going to require more attention to the needs of cities. Our mayors need to fight for city rights.
In Business on
3 October 2011 tagged apple, mobile with no comments
Five years ago, the Motorola Razr was the top-selling phone. Imagine trying to sell 6 million of them today.
Jonathan Chaplin, quoted in the WSJ
This feels like a fair comparison. At its height in 2006, the RAZR held a 22% market share. The iPhone has recently been estimated at 27% among smartphones.
Yet consider how the RAZR’s popularity fell off. It was dominating the high end of a category (now called “feature phones”) that had its top end chopped off by the iPhone and the other pocket-tablet phones it spawned. It was designed as a skunkworks project within Motorola, and after launch the only innovation the Motorola product machine brought to it was new colors and sacrificing profit to address the mass market. Apple, in contrast, no longer needs irreproducible skunkworks to develop disruptive products. While Motorola had to lower their margins to drive RAZR sales, Apple is profiting handsomely from the iPhone and will remain motivated to develop it.
What’s most troublesome about this sort of analogy, though, is the framing. Among mobile telecommunications industry analysts, Jonathan Chaplin is rather astute, but is still a member of an old guard that has learned to analyze an industry that has undergone dramatic change. They are working with an obsolete model where consumers visit carrier-sponsored storefronts, find a phone that matches their coat, and then settle on a service contract under the guidance of sales staff.
Today’s market is quite different. Many consumers are choosing a device based on its own features and perceive the carrier as a service provider. Each carrier is struggling to preserve its status as a direct marketer of handsets, and they have all failed to establish themselves as a credible provider of services beyond wireless data and, for now, voice communications.
Device choice is leading consumer choice and arguably the most compelling feature is application platform. Which is why I don’t advise much attention to analysts that are veterans of the telecom industry, who have only managed to add “OS” to their box of phone features. Listen, rather, to those who see platforms and understand, for example, that the Amazon app store is a platform that has some cross-benefit with Google’s but should not be simply confounded as “Android”.
Except even these voices are lazy and want to believe this market will be a repeat of the Mac vs. Wintel history, or the iPod vs. everyone else history. Better to just remain suspicious of historical analogies.
In Technology on
12 September 2011 with no comments
There has recently been much attention to the problem of software patents. I think Marco Arment probably best summed the prevailing wisdom:
The USPTO has repeatedly shown that they do not possess the ability to issue software patents responsibly. This isn’t the agency’s fault — it’s impossible in practice.
and the
current reform is likely to only exacerbate the issue by rewarding first-filing over invention.
I used to agree with a talk Paul Graham gave at Google in 2006; the system had created a tense stalemate that didn’t punish entrepreneurs too much, but patent trolls were upsetting the balance. Today, I fear, we’re seeing the result of that, with large and reputable players sniping at each other in Bush-style preëmptive strikes.
So the internet is abuzz with calls to end (or restrain) software patents. But what’s “software”? It seems algorithms are behind most things patented, even predating the concept of software. Is Intel’s new chip-level random number generator just software expressed in circuitry? The line between software and hardware is not one we can simply entrust the USPTO with, and letting the courts decide only re-frames the problem we already have.
It may be too late to return to the cold war of the past, but maybe we should try, and disable patent trolling as an industry. Award patents only to humans (not corporate “persons”) and do not allow transfer except via inheritance.