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.

  • To kill the truth by Sam Bourne

    To kill the truth is very much a book of our time. It explores the power of historical records, the alt-right and technology. The plot opens with a very current battle between ‘woke’ academia meets the polo-shirted, tiki torch-bearing far right. A former academic has gone to court in order to dispute our understanding of the slave trade and create a revisionist history.

    Historical records and accounts were picked apart to cast sufficient doubt on them. By using this legal standard record-by-record the mass of evidence is ignored. The truth becomes lies, rather like social political discussions over Brexit and Trump’s election.

    Untitled

    Then key establishments of historical record start to burn down around the world. Online repositories from websites to Google are brought to their knees by hackers. Into this mess steps a smart wonkish protagonist Maggie Costello. Maggie is tired of the political machine and gets pulled back in. Soon she suffers from online identity theft.

    Taking one side Costello’s gender for a moment. Costello feels familiar. This is partly because she is so similar to Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Smart bookish heros who could see what the establishment couldn’t.

    The second parallel to Clancy’s work is that characters are secondary to the big ideas and technical wonders. And here lies the book’s achilles heel. Costello has obviously beeen developed as a smart vulnerable ‘woke’ hero. But she feels like a cardboard cut-out rather than a believable character. The androgynous nom-de-plume Sam Bourne hides the identity of Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland. His wonkish credentials created a great high concept, but he hasn’t managed to create a character that we can root for.

    Enjoy the exploration of big contemporary issues, just keep our expectations low on the character development.

  • Airlines + more things

    Fliers Find an Old Friend on More Planes: Empty Seats – WSJ – Airlines’ average passenger loads first crossed 80% capacity in 2007, after climbing from 55% in 1978. Ryanair and other discount airlines must skew these numbers, which means that other airlines must run almost empty flights on some routes.

    Friends Don’t Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires | Forbes – not surprised by the executions, as Balzac said, behind every great business lies a crime. And you can’t do anything in China without the necessary permits which means getting dirty. What I was more surprised by was the number of billionaires who have been murdered

    Automation in the transition region | Vox – really interesting read

    VW’s chairman says even small electric cars aren’t going to be cheap | Quartz – which makes a lot of sense as you haven’t seen Silicon Valley semiconductor type transformation in price and performance for the components. More automotive related content here.

    “Brand purpose” is a lie – a lot of truth right there

    North Korean Hackers Gain Access to Chilean ATMs Through Skype – impressive social engineering skills by the hackers

    BJ Fogg’s persuasive technology design has been abused by the likes of Google. The Stanford Lab is name checked in the article. What is interesting is that Tristan Harris doesn’t talk about the ethical aspects of the persuasive technology course curriculum – which graduates tend to ignore.

    Under house arrest in Vancouver, Huawei CFO lives in luxury and spends her days out shopping – Financial Post – “I’ve been working hard for 25 years,” she said through her lawyer during her bail hearings last month. “If released, my only simple goal would be to spend time with my husband and daughter. I haven’t read a novel in years.”

    China threatens reprisals if Canada bans Huawei from 5G contracts | RCR Wireless – no choice about it, Canada needs to ban Huawei now that the Chinese have drawn that line in the sand

  • Apple and Jaguar Land Rover in China

    Apple and Jaguar Land Rover blamed the Chinese economy for their recent financial results. The truth is probably more complex. What factors are affecting affecting Apple and Jaguar Land Rover that aren’t directly related to the Chinese economy?

    The reality is that Apple and Jaguar Land Rover are being buffeted by very different forces, some of which are their own making.

    Apple

    China is a unique mobile environment and in some ways it mirrors the hopes (and fears) for the internet in the late 1990s. Oracle and Sun Microsystems spent a lot of time during the dot com boom developing technologies that would allow applications to run on the web. Enterprise software sudden had a user experience that could be accessed via a web browser. Java allowed applications to be downloaded and run as needed. Netscape had a vision of the internet replicating the operating system as a layer that would run applications. Microsoft also realised this which was why they developed Internet Explorer, integrated it into Windows and killed off Netscape. The Judge Jackson trial happened and that was the start of the modern tech sector allowing Google and Apple to rise.

    Move forwards two decades and most computing is now done on mobile devices. In China, WeChat have managed to achieve what Netscape envisioned. Their app as a gateway to as many services as a consumer would need including a plethora of mini applications. It doesn’t suffer the problems that native web apps have had in terms of sluggish user experiences. In addition, WeChat has invested in a range of high-performing start-ups to built a keiretsu of businesses from cab services, e-commerce, property companies and even robotics. In the meanwhile Tencent who own WeChat have a range of consumer and business services as well.

    What this means for Apple is that many of its advantages in other markets are negated in China. The OS or even performance of a smartphone doesn’t matter that much, so long as it can run WeChat and a couple of other apps. The look and feel of the app is pretty much the same regardless of the phone OS. Continuity: where the iPhone and a Mac hand-off seamlessly to each other doesn’t matter that much if many consumers use their smartphone for all their personal computing needs.

    This has been the case for a few years now in China – but Apple haven’t found a way around it.

    As for phone industrial design – Apple lifted the game in manufacturing capability by introducing new machines and new ideas. To make the iPhone 5, Apple helped its suppliers buy thousands of CNC machines. This grew the manufacturers capability to supply and the amount of pre-owned machines that eventually came on the marketplace. It meant that other manufacturers have managed to make much better phone designs much faster.

    That meant Chinese consumers can buy phones that are indistinguishable from an iPhone if you ignore the logo and function the same because of China’s app eco-system. Again this has been the same for a few years and has accelerated due to the nature of the dominant smartphone form factor. The second iteration of the iPhone X form factor is what really changed things. The phones were different to what has come before, but they weren’t demonstrably better. They were also more expensive.

    In the mean time Huawei and others have continued to make progress, particularly in product design and camera technology – the two areas where Apple led year-on-year. Huawei devices can be expensive for what they are, but they gave domestic manufacturers ‘brand permission’ in the eyes of many Chinese consumers to be as good as the foreigners.

    This wasn’t helped by Samsung’s missteps in the Chinese market that started with the global recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 battery recall. Samsung hasn’t managed to make that gap back up and seems to make marketing missteps regularly such as its recent tie-in with the ‘fake’ Supreme brand holder China. If you’re a Chinese consumer the additional value or status that you used to see in foreign handset brands is now diminished. This seems to be a wider theme as domestic brands are also making similar gains in market share compared to foreign FMCG brands. Although there are also exceptions like baby formula.

    Domestic brands have done a good job marketing themselves. BBK in particular are very interesting. Whilst Huawei makes lots of noise and bluster at how big they are, BBK creeps up. It has a number of brands in China and abroad OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and RealMe going after particular segments. The brands are focused but run separately like companies in their own right. Apple’s marketing riffs on its global marketing (though it did a great Chinese New Year themed ad last year). This reinforces the perceived common view that foreign businesses are full of hubris and don’t sufficiently localise for China. Apple’s recent pricing strategy in a market where this is so little to show in value provided looks like the epitome of hubris.

    180120 - China smartphone market

    Finally, there has been a massive amount of consolidation of brands in the China smartphone market over the past four years. That provides for scale in terms of logistics, supply chain, design, component sourcing and marketing.

    Jaguar Land Rover

    If we move to the automotive sector and look at Jaguar Land Rover – their problems in China look self inflicted. China’s car market has declined for the first time in 20 years. But it seems to have mostly affected brands like Hyundai rather than prestige brands like Mercedes Benz or BMW. The reasons why aren’t immediately apparent. Yes diesel cars are less popular, but BMW, Audi and Mercedes make diesel cars.

    Jaguar Land Rover aren’t the only foreign brand suffering: Toyota has had problems in China since the last round of strong anti-Japanese sentiment exploded in 2012.

    More information

    Why Does WeChat Block Competitors, While Facebook Doesn’t? | Walk The Chat

    Apple’s China Problem | Stratechery

    Samsung recalls Galaxy Note 7 worldwide due to exploding battery fears | The Verge

    Samsung angers hypebeasts by partnering with fake Supreme brand in China | The Verge

    Fake News: Samsung China’s Deal With Supreme “Knock-off” Spurs Drama | Jing Daily

    Chinese car sales fall for first time in more than 20 years | World news | The Guardian

  • ICYMI | 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

    Ogilvy consulting – the digital transformation arm of ad agency Ogilvy put together their annual trends presentation, which is worth going through. Ogilvy Consulting came out of Social@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Red and OgilvyOneMore related content here.

    About Placement asset customization on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network | Facebook Ads Help Center – via James Whatley

    Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal – Lawfare
    – great piece by Bruce Schneier and dangerous ideas. Once it can be done, it won’t be just the good guys that will be demanding it

    Jury awards T-Mobile $4.8M in trade-secrets case against Huawei | The Seattle Times – this has been going for years

    Navigating luxury in China: advice from the front line | Campaign Asia – 2018 was an interesting year for brands in China. It was the year of the WeChat pop-up mini program, and also the co-branded limited edition KOL collection. Standouts included collaborations between Mr Bags (the pseudonym of fashion blogger Tao Liang) with Tod’s—a collection that sold out in seven minutes—and Longchamp, for whom Liang made RMB 5 million [US$738,000] in two hours; and top KOL Fiona Xu’s collaboration with Roger & Gallet, which saw 500 limited edition pieces sell out online in minutes.

    Transformation | PMI – Philip Morris International – interesting regulatory push Philip Morris is making around smoke-free cigarettes

    Swiss Watchmakers Brace for Slowing Chinese Demand | BoF – they are are remarkably more resilient than I was expecting

    WSJ City | Poland tries to balance reliance on Huawei with spy fallout – just wait until they get into the water, electricity and railways….

    CES 2019: A Show Report – Learning By Shipping – Sit back and think for a minute that it actually got easier to turn off your lights in New York by tapping a button on smartphone and sending the off command into outer-fricking-space and back through a datacenter in Idaho than to simply send 4 bytes worth of infrared 12 feet across the room.

  • K pop bandwagon & things that made last week

    Puma have got on the K pop bandwagon to sell sneakers to Indonesians. Historically Korean brands have been most adept at getting on the K pop bandwagon. It is as common as chips in Korea. They have started to extend these K pop bandwagon campaigns abroad. Foreign brands have started to get in on the act. For instance, Girls Generation partnered with Casio’s Baby G range of watches. More Indonesia related content here

    A vintage advert from Apple that was all about storytelling through its customers. What’s On Your PowerBook. What’s interesting is the storytelling and the ‘lone computer user’ narrative of the Apple PowerBook. It leaned into the otherness of Apple products in the Windows world and equated that otherness to being fashion forward. During the dark days Apple was a hold out in the creative industries from graphic design to fashion and novelists.

    What's On Your PowerBook?

    Nike have launched a more polished looking self lacing trainer fulfilling the promise of the future from the film Back To The Future 2. They also did a good video that discusses the design of the Nike BB Adapt sneaker. The interview gives you a good insight into the Nike innovation and design process.

    Pretty much everyone has shared their opinion on Gillette’s virtue signalling dog whistle advert on toxic masculinity – so I feel no reason why I should anything to the discussion. Instead, check out this Bosch ad that I got through my friend Ian. Where do you start with it? Its not nerd core as its trying to hard. I could think of a few reasons why the main protagonist lives alone with this smart home and smart car. I am sure that there would be a lot of raised eyebrows in Germany over it. Its very far away from where I would have thought that the Bosch brand would be.