Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Wonderlust Apple event

    The Apple Wonderlust event happened on September 12, 2023. The events timing fitted in with the two Apple events a year that we have grown to expect:

    • Worldwide Developers Conference – in June.
    • Autumn event in September / October.

    Unlike when I started buying Apple products these events are no longer hosted at external conference centres but at Apple’s own conference centre as part of its campus. For the past decade and a half Apple hasn’t participated at wider trade shows, in the same way that the likes of Samsung or Microsoft would at CES.

    Wonderlust iPhone 15 pro
    Apple Inc.

    Apple events from the late 1990s onwards built their reputation for being great live performances by Steve Jobs and the management team. COVID-19 seems to have allowed Apple to move to a pre-recorded keynote that the media and general public watch together either in person or streamed online, followed by the media being allowed to get hands on with the products.

    This allows for a polished event presentation, all-be-it one that might be out of touch with its audience. More on that later.

    Is wonderlust even a word?

    A quick look at dictionaries offline and online kept bringing up results for wonderlust – the hankering to travel. That was until I hit Urban Dictionary that categorised wonderlust this way:

    the desire to be in a constant state of wonder
    Joe had a serious case of wonderlust: he was bored of anything ordinary.

    There were other definitions, but I think that they were outside the scope of where Apple wanted to go.

    TL;DR

    If you’ve bought an Apple product in the past three years there weren’t any ‘must buy’ products showcased in the Wonderlust event. Your iPhone and Apple Watch will still be good enough and benefit from this years upgraded OS. If you have a device over three years old then upgrading to the new products is worth considering.

    Apple still hasn’t jumped on the folding screen bandwagon that Samsung has. Given that we don’t see question-and-answer sessions that Steve Jobs sometimes indulged us with we don’t know the definitive ‘why’ yet.

    The meh moments

    There was more to criticise in this Apple events than other recent ones.

    USB-C as a benefit

    The reality is that in order for Apple to sell in the European Union it has had to move the iPhone and AirPods to a USB-C connection, away from the the Lightning connector. Apple tried to play this off as an improvement that they’d made to their phones, but the reality is that it was a change forced upon Apple.

    Cringeworthy ESG update

    Part of the pre-recorded content was a skit where Mother Nature turns up at Apple HQ for a meeting with the team about improvements in their environmental record. The problem was that the film was out of touch with the audience and has been roundly criticised.

    For five minutes, we had the same thing over and over. It might be about materials one moment and packaging the next, but it was a single gag stretched out too far.

    It was stretched so thin that you could see the thinking behind it. Every single element was good by itself, and no one would cut anything. 

    But the result is that every single element was undermined by the repetition. And instead of Apple showing it was better than just sell-sell-sell videos, the result was that the sketch felt like padding in an event that’s like drinking tech data from a fire hose.

    AppleInsider – Apple’s ‘Mother Nature’ sketch was a complete dud, and didn’t belong in the iPhone 15 event

    I do think it went on too long — the whole segment (sketch plus details) in fact was just 10 minutes long, not 20. But seemingly everyone, including me, felt like it lasted 20 minutes, which is never a good sign.

    Daring Fireball (John Gruber) – Thoughts and Observations on This Week’s ‘Wonderlust’ Apple Event

    There were some good points highlighted:

    • Recycled materials usage. There were also claims made about leather usage, but these only applied to Hermés straps sold within Apple’s own retail channels.
    • Taking plastic out of packaging. Apple has been minimising packaging by taking items out of the box (iPhone earphones, iPhone charger being two high profile examples). But now it’s taking plastic out of packaging as well. Its able to do this due to control of all aspects of its manufacturing process and packaging re-engineering. This is also pleasing to Apple shareholders. Given that Apple’s packaging is bought at scale, decreased materials usage and size means less risk of damage and reduced cost of manufacture & transport – any increased cost in design and packaging development will be amortised across millions of units. You see a similar benefit in Apple’s product materials as well such as aluminium laptop chassis.
    • Carbon offset for energy used not only in the manufacture of Apple Watch, but also throughout their expected life.
    • A move towards more ocean freight to reduce logistics carbon footprint, compared to air travel. This will have had a direct impact on the flexibility and responsiveness of Apple’s global supply chain, particularly custom specified products like non-standard MacBook Pro configurations.

    Apple still has a lot of problems however and here are three of the biggest:

    • With the exception of the Apple Pro, Mac models can no longer be upgraded, which reduces reparability and product life.
    • AirPods can’t be repaired, only thrown away. This is a problem for the wireless earbud category in general, but Apple are a leading player in the market and can set the the tone in the market through innovation.
    • The very nature of Apple’s business could be considered to drive excessive consumption. In sharp contrast, one of the traditional reasons why one owned a Mac was that you got a computer that was useful for longer. I am currently using a couple of Apple Thunderbolt displays that are between 8 and 12 years old. Prior to the iPhone I was using Macs that may have been eight years old by the time that i parted company with them.

    Incremental product improvements

    The announcements would have felt like tweaks for consumers. Apple Watches got more powerful processors for the first time. The iPhone Pro titanium frame would marginally reduce the weight of the handset. Apple has previously used titanium in laptops between 2001 and 2003, so the material isn’t completely new to the brand. The camera can create video and photography with depth for the Apple Vision Pro. Camera performance with darker skin tones has been improved to match Google Pixel driven innovation. But battery life is ‘about the same’ as previous generations.

    Many of the software improvements including live stickers are likely to be be in the iOS upgrade available to previous generations of phones.

    Ok, so what if anything was interesting about the event?

    There were three things that while they wouldn’t make me want to go out and buy a new device are still important developments, based on the direction that they are taking Apple products.

    Service integration

    Apple iPhone is moving beyond emergency satellite text services to breakdown care via satellite as well. It’s interesting that Apple is continuing to go beyond cellular. It is starting to look like the kind of differentiation Vertu used to enjoy with its single button concierge service. It supports the viewpoint that Apple is a luxury adjacent, if not luxury brand.

    Mechanical engineering on the iPhone camera

    Apple has managed to cram in a lens with an equivalent focal length of 77mm into the iPhone 15 Pro through a novel prismatic lens design. The device also uses a similar mechanism design to that used on Pentax DSLRs to compensate for device shake. The titanium frame probably provides additional rigidity for this system to work to its full potential. However the weight loss of the device might drive increased shake so there is a careful calibration in choices that the engineering team made.

    On-device machine learning

    The Apple Watch had redesigned silicon to move machine learning from the cloud or iPhone device on to the Watch itself. This improves response time, but also points to a move of taking large language model systems and neural networks out of the cloud and on to the device. Given that the watch also features ultra wideband wireless connectivity, it’s an especially interesting choice decoupling the watch from the iPhone.

    More Apple-related content here.

  • The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

    The Code

    The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.

    Margaret O’Mara

    In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.

    Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.

    On to The Code itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.

    Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.

    HP's first product, sitting outside of Bill and Dave's office (in HP's headquarters)
    H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble

    The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.

    O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.

    The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.

    O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.

    O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.

    The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Gatekeeping + more things

    Gatekeeping

    I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.

    Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?

    gatekeeper

    What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.

    Beauty

    Why Groupe L’Occitane may delist from the Hong Kong stock exchange | Vogue Business

    Consumer behaviour

    My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith – captures a sense of now rather than a generation

    Economics

    Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment

    New analysis reveals how Porsche-VW ‘short squeeze’ distorted the stock market | The University of Kansas 

    Energy

    US airlines ally with farmers to seek subsidies for corn as jet fuel | Financial Times 

    FMCG

    Reckitt Benckiser: too many sterile quarters leave share price flat | Financial Times 

    McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.

    Gadgets

    US Feature Phone Market Stages Comeback as Gen Z, Millennials Advocate Digital Detox | Counterpoint Research – the reasons are more diffuse than this article is letting on. People like my parents are being forced to get new feature phones by network upgrades. Some people can’t use a smartphone and then there is the digital detox brigade which spans generations, people who need tough phones AND people still needing second phones

    Germany

    TSMC’s New Fab in Germany – by Jon Y – focus around automotive just has Germany has been caught on the wrong side of the move to electric cars

    Chinese responses to Germany’s China strategy: Attack abroad, assuage at home | Merics

    Health

    Unravelling the Link Between Socioeconomic Status and Obesity | INSEAD Knowledge

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades

    The Great Dilution: Hong Kong’s Changing Population Mix | Asian Sentinel

    Hong Kong delays Jimmy Lai trial as police question woman linked to exiled lawmaker | Radio Free Asia

    Innovation

    FDA Largely to Blame for Physicians’ Misperceptions on Nicotine | RealClearPolicy

    Materials

    DARPA looks to monetise the Moon | EE Times 

    Media

    Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable – The Hollywood Reporter

    Online

    What is dark social and why does it matter for your brand? – New Digital Age 

    ICANN warns UN may sideline techies from internet governace • The Register – move towards China’s vision of cyber-sovereignty

    Retailing

    Small retailers and fans step in as Nike refuses to make replica Mary Earps shirt | England women’s football team | The Guardian 

    Security

    US nuclear submarine weak spot in bubble trail: Chinese scientists | South China Morning Post

    New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China | WIRED and Dark Reading’s take: Chinese APT Targets Hong Kong in Supply Chain Attack 

    Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t

    Singapore

    Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?

    Software

    Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.

    Style

    Where Streetwear and Tech Cross Paths: ASUS Vivobook X BAPE® – one of the more cynical collaborations that I have seen with streetwear brands

    Technology

    Deal to develop generative AI on quantum computer | EE Times – how will quantum computing affect a GPT type Bayesian model?

    Web of no web

    Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.

  • Geico advertising + more things

    Geico advertising

    What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.

    Geico

    Geico advertising – a primer

    Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.

    Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.

    The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising

    Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.

    Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
    Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).

    Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset

    As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.

    There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.

    The reasons are cultural in nature:

    • Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
    • Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
    • Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere

    Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.

    Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.

    By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).

    The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.

    This achieves a few things:

    • You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
    • You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
    • It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
    • It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand

    Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:

    • Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
    • Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
    • Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
    • Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients

    So why was Geico advertising spend cut?

    This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.

    There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:

    • There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
    • Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities

    There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.

    Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.

    Beauty

    Beauty hotspots: Why global giants are circling Australian brands | Vogue Business – well developed brands, celebrity and influencer brands have less longevity and are over-priced by comparison

    Trends Shaping the Future of the Skincare Industry | Mintel 

    Farfetch to shut down its beauty business | Vogue Business – interesting e-commerce specific issues

    Business

    A Chinese Electronics Empire – The Wire China  – on Midea

    China

    The China Convergence – by N.S. Lyons – The Upheaval

    Chinese developer’s cancelled share placement fuels property sector woes | Financial Times – this is interesting as Country Garden is one of the country’s better run developers and hasn’t done as many things that could be considered hubristic in nature. And the second shoe drops: China’s Country Garden misses bond payments as turmoil grips property sector | Financial Times

    Anger in China over plan to use cities as ‘moat’ to save Beijing from floods | China | The Guardian

    China’s embassy to Russia criticises treatment of citizens at border | Reuters 

    Weekly news roundup: China’s strides and setbacks in semiconductor self-sufficiency and other top stories – interesting that China is going for self sufficiency across all aspects of semiconductors from raw materials to processes

    Reckoning in China: Behind Xi Jinping’s Firing of Top Beijing Officials | Daily Beast

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Chinese economy falls into deflation as recovery stumbles | Financial Times 

    China’s Plan to Rule the World’s Smart Devices, FCC Urged to Act | Newsweek

    Consumer behaviour

    Invasion of Food Delivery Robots is Driving People to Vandalism and Theft | Futurism – no opportunity is bringing out the worst in some people

    Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.

    Culture

    Remnants of curry dating back 1,800 years found on stone tools in Southeast Asia is oldest outside India | South China Morning Post 

    Economics

    Risk perceptions and economic activity in the United Kingdom | Bank Underground

    VC Optimism Returning But More Pain Ahead In Their Portfolios | Hunter Walk 

    Energy

    The growth of lithium-ion battery power | The Economist – hitting a natural limit of price / energy provided

    Gadgets

    Apple seeks to bolster expertise in generative AI on mobile devices | Financial Times

    Germany

    Bertelsmann Investments to plough $700mn into Chinese start-ups | Financial Times

    Health

    ‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories

    MSLs drive 1.5x adoption in first six months | Klick Wire – launch tactic

    Hong Kong

    Bruce Lee’s legacy squares up to modern life in Hong Kong | Reuters

    ‘Long-distance’ is the new ‘soft’ | Big Lychee, Various Sectors

    Canadian Case Exposes Hong Kong Developer’s Corporate Ties to Chinese Criminal Underworld – OCCRP 

    How to

    INFER Public | The Pub Blog – Using AI to improve your forecast rationale 

    Japan

    FEATURE: Samurai and Son – The Oral History of SHOGUN ASSASSIN! – Tokyoscope has the inside track on the American version of Lone Wolf & Cub part two

    Luxury

    Bentley’s global sales drop 4pc in first half of 2023 | Luxury Daily 

    Marketing

    Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.

    Thinkerbell co-founders on life after PwC – by Tim Burrowes 

    Materials

    Musk still mulling massive Tesla plant for Indonesia | Asia Times – Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of Nickel in the world and have been focused on exploiting it in a way that maximises the economic benefit to Indonesians

    Media

    Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts | Financial Times and WPP & Spotify announce first-of-its-kind global partnership | WPP 

    Influencer Marketing on Instagram: Empirical Research on Social Media Engagement with Sponsored Posts and Sponsored posts and microinfluencers deliver greater engagement on Instagram | WARC – Sponsored posts of social media influencers (SMIs) outperformed their non-sponsored posts in terms of generating more comments and “likes” than NSPs. The average number of engagements for sponsored posts was 1,559.2, beating a comparative figure of 1,157.4 for non-sponsored posts. Median engagement totals for sponsored posts came in at 747, while the median engagement for NSPs stood at 401.

    Online

    China proposes tighter limits on children’s use of tech | Financial Times

    How effective is Russian propaganda? | Financial Times 

    LinkedIn Workplace Halts Services in China Starting Today – Pandaily – I was a bit surprised as I thought Linkedn had left a few years ago

    Security

    UK defence group BAE Systems lifts profit forecast as military spending soars | Financial Times and Britain’s investors shy away from UK defence companies | Financial Times 

    The untold history of today’s Russian-speaking hackers | Financial Times 

    Former U.S. Officials Urge New Export Alliance on China – EE Times 

    Microsoft downplays damaging report on Chinese hacking its own engineers vetted – this could go bad for Microsoft: US senator victim-blames Microsoft for Chinese hack 

    Five Eyes nations list 12 most exploited vulnerabilities • The Register – Fortinet products are coming off very badly in this list

    Fortinet’s security issues have aligned with a reluctance for customers to upgrade their business with the company

    Exclusive: North Korean hackers breached top Russian missile maker | Reuters

    On publicizing Chinese hacking success – by Graham Webster – really interesting observations here

    Drug-related killings add to instability in Syria’s south | Asia Times 

    Software

    Should an AI bot making $1mn really be the next Turing test? | Financial Times – also what does it say about being human?

    Zoom wants to train its AI on content from all user calls | Quartz – combine the legal overreach with concerns about Zoom’s connections with the Chinese government and you can see how bad this is likely to get

    Style

    Yeezy drops are still boosting Adidas profits | Vogue Business 

    Technology

    AMD Q2 – Building Momentum? | Digits to Dollars 

    Radar Trends to Watch: August 2023 – O’Reilly 

    White House unveils ban on US investment in Chinese tech sectors | Financial Times 

    Web of no web

    Taiwan’s satellite supply chain empowering international market entry

  • Chip War

    It has taken me far too long to finish Chip War and write this review, so apologies in advance. Chip War was one of the FT’s best business books of 2022. In reality it’s a book about history, that happens to feature businesses.

    Chip War

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and Chip War was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    The author

    The author Chris Miller wasn’t a familiar name to me. Unlike Cringely, Markoff, Malone or Levy; Miller is an academic rather than a former journalist. Miller currently teaches international history at Tufts University. Chip War wasn’t his first book, his previous ones have focused on Soviet and Russian history. As a technology sector outsider, Miller’s Chip War has a very different tone my other favourite books from the genre.

    It also allowed Miller to view the history of semiconductors in terms of a global perspective, that I hadn’t previously seen done.

    On to Chip War itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘outstanding’ and ‘epic’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality and length of read aren’t really all that helpful. It took me six months to read as a casual book. This is partly down to a hectic work schedule and that its a long book. I suspect that some readers when they reviewed the book seem to have thought ‘long’ as difficult to read. It’s actually 351 pages ignoring acknowledgements and the footnotes at the back of the book. Being an academic Miller worked hard to source everything in Chip War.

    The book starts in the post-war period as the defence industry moves from being focused on hammering steel to developing smarter systems using semiconductors. That road takes the book past Texas Instruments and the early Silicon Valley of Bob Noyce and other members of the treacherous eight.

    The book also zooms out to cover the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to replicate Silicon Valley as well as domestic industrial espionage and the start of globalisation which begat the current industry.

    The Japanese challenge is covered in depth as is the rise of Korea including challenges that the industry faced in the early 2000s. The rise of Taiwan and its use of semiconductors as a hedge against invasion from the mainland. European tool maker ASML gets its own section, which is a case study in how to make a virtue of necessity. Finally it covers the technology conflict with China. Bring this up to date circa 2022.

    If you are student of Silicon Valley history, then Chip War is unique in the way it puts everything in context. There were some completely new parts to me such as the political role that Sony founder Akio Morita played in advocating for a robust Japanese semiconductor industry as part of reasserting Japanese importance internationally.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.