Ged Carroll

Search results for: “gen x”

  • General Magic

    General Magic has a reputation of being the technology equivalent of the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, but it ended up going nowhere. I never got to see the device in person, it was only available in Japan and the US. It’s as famous much for its alumni, as it is for its commercial failure.

    Apple "Paradigm" project/General Magic/Sony "Magic Link" PDA

    This is captured in a documentary of the same name. For students of Silicon Valley history and Apple fan boys – the team at General Magic sounds like a who’s who of the great and the good in software development and engineering.

    General Magic started within Apple with a brief that sounds eerily like what I would have expected for the iPhone decades later.

    “A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object . . . It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used… Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.”

    Sullivan M. (July 26, 2018) “General Magic” captures the legendary Apple offshoot that foresaw the mobile revolution. (United States) Fast Company magazine

    The opening sequence tells you what the documentary is going to lay out. Over carefully curate images of Silicon Valley campuses, Segway riders and the cute bug like Google autonomous vehicle a voice talks about success and failure. That failure is part of the process of development. That General Magic has a legendary status due to its status as precursor to our always-on modern world and while the company failed, the ideas didn’t.

    Autonomous cars aren't nearly as clever as you think, says Toyota exec - Computerworld

    The genesis of the spirit of General Magic goes back to the development and launch of the Macintosh with its vision of making computers accessible. The team looked around the next thing that would have a similar vision and impact of a product. The Mac had got some of these developers on the front cover of Rolling Stone – they were literally rockstars.

    You get a tale of dedication and excitement that revolved around a pied piper type project lead Marc Porat, who managed to come to the table with a pretty complete vision and concept of where General Magic (and the world) would be heading. The archive of footage of the offices with its cool early to mid 1990s Apple Office products still amazes now. The look of the people in the archive footage, make my Yahoo! colleagues a decade later seem corporate and uptight by comparison.

    Veteran journalist Kara Swisher said that she started following the company because it was ‘the start of mobile computing, this is where it leads’.

    What sets the documentary apart is that it tapped into footage shot by film maker David Hoffman who was hired to capture the product development process. The protagonists then provide a voice over of their younger selves. Their idealism reaches back to the spirit of the 1960s. You can see how touch screen screens and the skeuomorphic metaphors were created and even animate emoticons.

    I’ve never known a development process with so much documentary footage. Having been in this process on the inside, the General Magic documentary portrays a process and dynamics that haven’t changed that much.

    The ecosystem that the startup assembled including AT&T, Apple, Motorola and Sony made sense given the ecosystem and power that Microsoft had behind it. It’s hard to explain how dominant and aggressive Microsoft was in the technology space. Newton came out as a complete betrayal and John Sculley, who is interviewed in the documentary comes across worse than he would have liked.

    The documentary also has access to the 1994 promotional film where General Magic publicly discussed the concept of ‘The Cloud’ i.e. the modern web infrastructure – but the documentary doesn’t dwell on this provable claim.

    Goldman Sachs was a key enabler, the idea of the concept IPO set the precedent for Netscape, Uber, WeWork and the 2020s SPAC fever.

    In a time when there is barely one thing changing the technology environment, General Magic were pursuing their walled garden of their private cloud and missed the web for a while. Part of this is down to their relationship with AT&T.

    The documentary covers how project management dogged the project. Part of the problem was perfectionism was winning over the art of the possible and not focusing on the critical items that needed to be done. The panic of having to ship.

    It’s about getting the balance between ‘move fast and break things’ versus crafting a jewel of a product.

    But shipping wasn’t enough, the execution of shopper marketing and sales training was a disaster. The defeat was hard given the grand vision. But the ultimate lesson is that YOU are not representative of the mainstream market.

    The documentary post-mortem featuring thinkers like Kara Swisher and Paul Saffo points out the lack of supporting infrastructure, that would take years to catch up to where General Magic’s Magic Link had gone. Paul Saffo uses a surfing analogy that I had previously read in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires about catching the right wave at the right time.

    John Sculley over at Apple made similar mistakes to the General Magic team which resulted in him being fired from Apple. Sculley makes the very human admission that being fired from Apple took him about 15 years to recover from personally.

    IBM Simon

    The documentary gives a lot of the credit (maybe too much of it) to General Magic as the progenitor of what we now think of as smartphones. The reality as with other inventions is that innovation has its time and several possible ‘inventors’; or what author Kevin Kelly would call ‘the technium’. This is the idea that technological progression is inevitable and that it stands on the layers of what has gone before, like fossils found inside rocks several foot deep. For instance, IBM created a device called Simon which was ‘smartphone’ which sold about 50,000 units to BellSouth customers in the six months it was on the market. Motorola – who were a General Magic partner also launched a smartphone version of the Apple Newton called the Motorola Marco in January 1995 and there are more devices around the same time.

    Reality is messy and certainly not like the clean direct line that the General Magic documentary portrays, even the Newton was only part of the story.

    The Wonder Years

    I was thinking about what I liked so much about the General Magic documentary. I immediately thought about it reminding me of my falling in love with the nascent internet and technology, which then bought me to the start of my agency career working with Palm (the company that eventually helped kill off General Magic’s product ambitions) and the Franklin REX which came out of sychronisation pioneers Starfish Software.

    But it was deeper than that. The Silicon Valley portrayed in the General Magic documentary wasn’t the dystopian hellscape of platform firms, generation rent, toxic tech bro culture and ‘churn and burn’ HR culture. Instead the General Magic documentary story represented a halcyon past of Silicon Valley portrayed in books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley and Insanely Great. Where talented people motivated by a fantastic vision thing, with a user centred mission worked miracles. The darkness of fatigue and god knows what else is largely hidden by a Wonder Years TV show feel good nostalgia. Maybe it gives us hope again in the tech sector, despite Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Elon Musk? Maybe that hope might inspire something great again?

    Marc Porat’s personal tragedy and Tony Fadell’s business failure brings a hint of the real world through the door. The documentary uses Fadell’s link with the iPod and iPhone as a point of redemption, resilience, perseverance and vindication for General Magic.

    There’s also a cautionary tale full of lessons learned for new entrepreneurs, who often get the vision thing but forget about the details. More on General Magic here.

    More reviews here.

  • Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher

    Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher promises to be ‘the uncensored history of Silicon Valley’ based on stories that founders and programmers told to each other. All of which begs the question how much is myth making and how much is true?

    Valley of Genius
    Valley of Genius front cover

    Getting to the truth

    Having worked for Silicon Valley clients and in-house at Yahoo!; I recognise that the truth doesn’t get out there and the myth making is largely self-serving. There is also a big question about how far the collective memory actually goes back.

    Yahoo! star

    Secondly, the story of Silicon Valley has already been told a number of times, how will Valley of Genius compare to Dealers of Lightning, The Valley of Heart’s Delight, Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Accidental Empires in terms of telling the story of Silicon Valley?

    Finally, there is the challenge of how big tech companies have got so good at controlling their story in the wider world. Whether it was keeping close tabs on journalists like Fred Vogelstein found out while working at Wired magazine, through Frank X Shaw’s reputation for robust rebuttal, funded their own media outlets like Pando Daily and eventually disintermediated the media altogether.

    Adam Fisher

    Adam Fisher grew up in the Bay Area and became a journalist and later editor at Wired. He left there and freelanced for a number of publications, branching out from technology writing to other areas like travel and tourism.

    Style

    The most noticeable thing about Valley of Genius when you get into it is that there is no prose. It is all dialogue. Fisher has cut together segments of interviews to tell a story. Sometimes it feels like people around a table, other times it feels more disjointed.

    The book is described as an oral history and Fisher in his interviews describes the process as being like putting together documentary interviews.

    Fisher went out and interviewed many of the great and the good of Silicon Valley to get this material, however given some of the soundbites were things I had heard before such as Steve Jobs talking about a computer as a ‘bicycle of the mind’; I was not sure if these people like to self reference or if Fisher has interspersed his interviews with archival material. Right at the end of the book, Fisher comes a list of people by chapter and where he had to source secondhand quotes from.

    I’ve read a number of books on Silicon Valley over the years, so had a frame of reference and I had context, so I found Valley of Genius enjoyable to read. But for someone who is coming to the subject with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley, there is benefits to having a guide. Reading the quotes without understanding the context, or having been to Silicon Valley still leaves you outside.

    I honestly don’t know if Fisher would have been a good guide, so him removing his voice from the book maybe less of a loss than we might think. But a new reader to the subject matter would benefit from a guide like Michael S. Malone or the insider snark of Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens). Fisher’s book Valley of Genius is a book for insiders and future academics who might be looking at the history of Silicon Valley in the future. According to Fisher, he managed to secure the last interview that Bob Taylor ever gave. Bob Taylor played key roles in moving Silicon Valley forward while in managerial positions at NASA, ARPA and XEROX PARC. In those interview quotes are more granular aspects of things, like Nolan Bushnell having a champagne party on the grass outside the offices of a recently bankrupt competitor, or that the video card to power the monitor used in Doug Engelbart measured about 3 foot by 4 foot in size.

    It’s also a very one dimensional view of Silicon Valley. It largely misses out hardware and hard innovation; which is problematic for a technology hub that is competing against China and India for that matter. There is no 3Com, Cisco or Juniper Networks. The hardware story is very much lacking, there is no Intel, AMD or Nvidia, Sun Microsystems or SGI. It is largely a consumer technology vision that writes out businesses like Oracle and Salesforce together with the characters that lead them.

    Plot line

    Valley of Genius ignores a good deal of early Silicon Valley, such as the the pre-war nature of Stanford, Varian, Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s garage start-up, Shockley Labs, the treacherous eight, defence contracting and the missile age.

    Mother of all demos

    Instead Valley of Genius history starts at 1968, when Dough Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute provides the Mother of all Demos to a mix of academics, government people from the likes of the department of defense and technologists.

    Engelbart talks about his developments in 1986

    He the talked about his career on the Google campus in 2007.

    Atari

    The story moves on to Atari and Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell was responsible for popularising computer games and arcade consoles. Bushnell was a bridge between the counter culture and Silicon Valley hustle. A few chapters later Valley of Genius also covers the acquisition and eventual (first) failure of Atari.

    Here’s Bushnell being interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Atari by IGN.

    Bushnell did a Google Talk a number of years ago as well.

    Xerox PARC

    PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a west coast R&D facility put together by Xerox to understand what the future of work would look like. They had already realised that it would be computerised. From PARC came modern computers, local area networks, file servers, laser printers and productivity software.

    Apple

    In separate chapters Valley of Genius covers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s commercialisation of phone hacking tools, and the evolution of the Apple computer line up from the Apple II to the Macintosh.

    Retailer High Technology did the first adverts featuring the Apple II computer

    Which was a far more budget affair than Apple’s own launch of the Machintosh.

    The book goes on to cover the return of CEO Steve Jobs and the rejuvenation of Apple as a business including the iPod, iPhone and iPad through to the death of Jobs.

    The hacker ethic, or hacker culture

    The hacker ethic or culture, a digital equivalent of the person who tinkers away with things in a shed or garage has their own section. The section is atemporal in nature, which I can understand to a certain extent. Steve Wozniak came out of hacker culture, as have many software developers over time.

    Fisher focuses on what hacker culture is, rather than what it means (both good and bad). I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution as a companion to this chapter in Valley of Genius. The copy I read years ago was published by Penguin, but O’Reilly have re-published it as the book this is part of myth-making and cultural norming in software development teams.

    The WeLL

    The WeLL was the proto-online community that is still going and features first generation digerati such as journalist Wendy Grossman, the founders of Wired magazine and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

    Stewart Brand talked about the founding of The WeLL during a Google hosted talk

    The WeLL never scaled in the same way that we think about social networks now but it has quality discussions and is much kinder than Twitter or Reddit.

    VPL

    VPL was a failed start-up in the mid-1990s that set much of the expectations and tempo on VR to this day. You will most likely know it from the VR suit featured in The Lawnmower Man movie. I covered it in more depth in my metaverse discussion paper.

    General Magic

    Take a series of burnt out Apple employees and have them invent a predecessor of the net appliance or smartphone. That was General Magic and it was a glorious failure. Sarah Kerruish’s documentary on General Magic tells the story much better.

    Wired magazine

    Wired magazine gets its own chapter. it represented a way of melding culture and technology. I had read Wired before I had used the web, but it gave me a good idea of what to expect. But I don’t know if it is more important than ZDnet or other technology publishing houses. Valley of Genius goes on to celebrate Wired’s online endeavours including HotWired, Suck – a sarcastic version of Wired and Webmonkey – which taught a lot of people web development skills and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves in Valley of Genius. Mondo 2000, a rival to Wired in terms of setting the cultural zeitgeist for technologists also gets a chapter.

    Pixar

    Pixar as a Silicon Valley story is an accident due to two things

    • George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic being based in North California rather than in Los Angeles
    • Steve Jobs looking for a project post-Apple

    But it didn’t necessarily move Silicon Valley forward.

    Netscape

    The jump to Netscape as the first commercial browser makes sense. AOL, AT&T True Experience, CompuServe and Prodigy services were all driven by businesses outside the traditional Silicon Valley space.

    Bob Cringely, from what I guess was PBS’ Triumph of The Nerds

    At the time Netscape seemed as much about the crazy public valuation of the business which was emblematic of the dot com boom, as it was about the software that would kick off the open web. These kind of valuations re-emerged with businesses like Uber and WeWork.

    eBay

    eBay was the standout e-commerce play for Silicon Valley. Amazon was a Seattle company and so was an outsider in a similar way that Microsoft always had been. eBay was also founded by an ex-General Magic employee and so was part of Silicon Valley’s version of ‘Rock family trees‘. We see this even now with the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    Google

    Google changed the web experience that Silicon Valley had pioneered via Yahoo! and Excite. Brin and Page became a key point of focus in Valley of Genius. However, this ignores the complexity both around search and the development of foundational web technologies that other companies produced. If you are interested about the nature and history of Google, Steven Levy’s In The Plex is probably a better option to read.

    Google’s move to pay per click advertising gets its own chapter that greatly reduces the complexity of the real story.

    Napster

    Napster was the poster child of market value destruction and disruption that predated Uber and its ilk.

    Dot bomb

    The dot com boom can be charted from the last quarter of 1995 and reached its nadir in the last quarter of 2002.

    Eric Steiner tells his tale as the CEO of Inktomi through the dot com boom and bust

    Valley of Genius covers it in terms of its sociological impact on the Bay Area, as much as its economic impact. The reality is more complex, even the dot.com label attached to it is a misnomer. It encompassed telecoms, networking hardware, datacenters and more in terms of its impact rather than just e-businesses.

    Facebook

    While Facebook was an east coast invention, the movement of the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg west saw a cultural change in Silicon Valley that took it down a much darker patch. By comparison Twitter in its start-up phase looked more like Atari in terms of its counterculture influence.

    Future gazing

    At the end of the book there is a section on future gazing, which became what made Silicon Valley great. The business model was prioritised over innovation. Veteran journalist John Markoff even talked about how Salesforce had moved to a ‘vertical campus’ model with Salesforce tower. Which is how every other business in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Wall Street work anyway.

    There was a singular lack of reflection on challenges ahead or areas of introspection by the people telling these stories. If anything, that was what concerned me the most about the book. Innovation is at a technological, scientific and socio-cultural cross-roads and the inhabitants of the Valley of Genius apparently doesn’t have a clue. More on the book here. You can find more of my book reviews here.

    Extra content – Valley of Genius promotional tour interviews

    Panel hosted by Adam Fisher to promote the Valley of Genius book

    Leo LePort interviews Fisher on Valley of Genius at the time of its launch.

  • Gentler place to work + more stuff

    Gentler place to work

    Saying out loud the quiet bit about work-life balance; tectonic plates of streaming move again – I’ve found myself thinking about one panel in particular – the participants in the session on advice for aspiring leaders went beyond the usual platitudes, and shared a couple of uncomfortable truths about an industry which is trying to rebrand itself as a gentler place to work. – I think that we’ll see more of this move away from a gentler place to work as companies look to cut staff. I entered the workforce in the middle of recession before I went to college, this was the time of micro serfs and mcjobs. The idea of a gentler place to work seemed to be a transient one to me – one that would come and go with economic growth. Zero hour contracts really grew during and after the 2008 financial crisis, which is as far away from a gentler place to work as you can get.

    China

    Take down Pelosi’s plane’: Chinese react online to Taiwan visit | Financial Times 

    Displaced Syrians voice anger as bombed-out town doubles as film set | Financial Times – film being produced by Jackie Chan as demand in China for conflict porn grows alongside nationalistic fervour

    Consumer behaviour

    Children between the ages of 10-12 are spending the most on video games, survey reveals / Digital Information World 

    ‘I am borrowing to live’: pawnbrokers enjoy golden era as UK hits hard times | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian 

    Economics

    How rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait could threaten global trade | Financial Times 

    Ideas

    Primary care physicians need 26.7 hours in the day – Futurity 

    Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. – It is more than search, there is also motivation and consumer behaviour change in the old web versus the new one – The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo 

    Innovation

    How the American semiconductor industry claimed back technological and market leadership from the Japanese

    Microrobots in swarms for medical embolization — Nano Magazine

    Turning fish waste into quality carbon-based nanomaterial — Nano Magazine

    Ireland

    Lidl Ireland removes mandatory retirement age of 65 | RTE 

    Legal

    EU starts competition investigation into Google Play store terms – report – Telecompaper 

    Luxury

    Telfar gets Beyoncé boost, but so does Hermès despite Birkin snub | Vogue Business – rappers don’t drive luxury sales, middle class Asians do

    Media

    Visa and Mastercard cut ties with ad arm of Pornhub owner MindGeek | Financial Times 

    Retailing

    Ocado, the online supermarket – is this a legitimate content partnership with Disney? Something feels a bit off about the Ocado | Disney inspired meals. The ‘inspired by Disney’ tagline and the Lion King themed ‘green grub pasta’ feels weird.

    Ocado, the online supermarket

    Security

    Missfresh hit by lawsuits from investors and employees | Financial Times 

    Starlink’s Space Speed-Up: A Battle for Internet Leadership – EETimes 

    Government concerns over China-owned CCTV company embedded in UK – Channel 4 News – There are more than a million of Hikvision’s cameras installed across the UK – monitoring every aspect of our lives. But Channel 4 News has learned that there are growing concerns within the government about the Chinese state-owned tech company.

    Next Generation Post-Quantum Encryption May Not Be As Secure As Many Tech Experts Had Hoped / Digital Information World 

    China’s war games spur Taiwanese business to rally to island’s defence | Financial Times 

    Web of no web

    Air Force Pilots to Fight AI-Based Enemies Using AR Helmets 

    Apple’s Next-Gen CarPlay Is Scaring the Car Industry. Here’s Why. – Robb Report UK 

    Some interesting business takes on the commercial decline of ‘metaverse‘ platforms:

  • Frances Haugen

    Why Frances Haugen?

    Frances Haugen went from an unknown to prominence in the space of a week. Ms Haugen is the whistle blower who collaborated with the Wall Street Journal on a series of stories about Facebook.[1] Her identity became public when she appeared on US programme 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes included allegations of promoting human trafficking and domestic servitude.[2]

    One interesting aspect of what Frances Haugen said on the show was that Facebook tackles as little as 3 – 5 percent of online hate and misinformation content, despite being the best in the world at it.

    Frances Haugen then appeared before a US senate committee[3] and testified about the effects of Facebook. Finally she complained to the SEC claiming that Facebook has misled shareholders with regards the social network’s appeal with young people.

    When is data science a house of cards? Replicating data science conclusions. June Andrews (Pinterest), Frances Haugen (Pinterest)

    Are social networks bad for people?

    Facebook’s research indicated that 40 young women who had self esteem / mental health issues were negatively impacted by use of Instagram. There is a good deal of evidence within the Facebook document trove and elsewhere that social media can have a negative impact on mental health.

    There is also research that establishes a link between social media and both conspiracy theories and political polarisation[4] in Frances Haugen’s horde of Facebook’s internal documents. None of this is surprising and has been confirmed by third party sources over the years. So yes social networks can be bad for people.

    This also isn’t the first time that social networks like Facebook have been linked to political polarisation.

    But….

    But so have other mass media. For instance:

    The early years of state television in Italy, which began transmission in 1954, have usually been viewed as crucial to the spread of mass culture through Italian society. In addition, these developments have essentially been seen in negative terms by historians and sociologists.

    Television and the City: the Impact of Television in Milan, 1954–1960[5]

    Back in 1997, research had looked at the negative effects of fashion magazines on female self image in college age students. Fashion magazines were seen to have a negative effect.[6]

    Back in 1990, there was already academic coverage of how talk radio was driving political polarisation with a genre of service called confrontalk. Factors driving this included satellite networks driving national syndication in the US and free phone numbers that the audience could dial into.[7] By the mid-1990s nationally syndicated US talk show host Rush Limbaugh was named as a driver of political polarisation.[8]

    Political polarisation in the US has been discussed since at least the 1950s. By comparison bipartisanship is actually the odd event spanning from the 1950s through to the early 1990s; so polarisation is more likely to be closer to the norm in US politics.

    While Facebook was used in Myanmar to organise and galvanise action against the Rohinga minority. It was hasn’t been the only media used this way. The Indonesian mass killings of 1965 – 1966 were galvanised with the use of propaganda pamphlets as well as organising and training local militias.

    In a similar way to how Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used broadcast media,[9] support amongst Hutu people for the Rwandan genocide was galvanised by two national radio stations. The state owned Radio Rwanda and commercial station Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (RTLM).[10]

    I think there is a bigger question to be asked about is Facebook and other social media platforms somehow worse than other media? And if so, why is that? What can be done to resolve it?

    Has Facebook misled shareholders with regards the social network’s appeal with young people as Frances Haugen alleged?

    I don’t know if Facebook had explicitly made misleading statements, but the media has certainly covered Facebook’s declining appeal to young people. By 2018,[11] there was third party research to indicate that teens were abandoning Facebook for other platforms like Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Snapchat.

    I would be surprised if investors hadn’t discovered it in their due diligence. The negative network effects for young people were entire predictable in terms of their nature, if not their timing. There are bigger questions to be asked about the business model of digital advertising, Scott Galloway put together some of the salient points in terms of its relative inefficiency.[12]

    Facebook’s response

    I had a de ja vu moment when I heard about Facebook’s rebuttal of Frances Haugen. It reminded me of Microsoft’s responses during the buffeting it received in the late 1990s and early 2000s. If you want a definition of awkward watch Bill Gates video testimony for the antitrust hearings. This is just a small bit of the footage.

    Yes before Bill Gates was a cross between Mr Rogers and the Oprah book club; he ran a company that dominated media and technology. Microsoft shut down innovation. If you were in an area that Microsoft might have an interest, you couldn’t get VC funding. Yahoo! always called themselves in a media company to try and stay out of Microsoft’s hit list.

    It was a habit that was hard to shake. I flew over to San Francisco on the eve of a Martin Luther King bank holiday for a pitch (i think it was for BusinessObjects, but can’t be certain) at the agency I worked for. By the time that I landed and got in the office b AT&T Park, the pitch was off. The reason was the Microsoft was our client. Every pitch we did was run past them. I was told that we couldn’t do the pitch as it was an area that Microsoft might want to be in, in the future.

    The weak sniping responses of Facebook[13] reminded me so much of Microsoft’s responses to the antitrust issues and open source software. The bigger issue for Facebook is it that it can’t easily debunk its own research that Frances Haugen leaked outside the organisation as part of her work with the Wall Street Journal, report to the SEC and in front of the senate committee.

    What does this all mean for Facebook?

    There is a sense in the media that this scandal is different for Facebook and we are likely to see some sort of change. It is highly unlikely that the business will be broken up a la Standard Oil or the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think that we’ll see Facebook having to do the kind of video that Microsoft did over its antitrust settlement in 2001.

    https://youtu.be/z5_fBqZrwA0

    America’s regulators have a history of being very light touch in nature, especially around issues that are tangental to free speech. Secondly, while there is a bipartisan agreement to take action against Facebook; there is a US partisan split on what to take action over and how that action should take place.

    Broadly speaking the Democrats believe that Facebook is an engine of hate and harm. The Republicans feel that Facebook unfairly censors their opinions in favour of the Democrats.

    Facebook may see regulation instead in markets like the European Union, Japan and Korea.

    I think the singular worst thing that came out of this for Facebook is that they are bad at technology. They have demonstrated an ability in machine learning that is far behind peer organisations in China for instance. Facebook just isn’t that innovative.

    How will Facebook change?

    It is hard to say how Facebook itself will change as an organisation. Early indications are that ‘move fast and break things’ might be moving out of the company lexicon as it looks to review the reputational risks of new products.[14]

    What’s less clear is whether this is a temporary or permanent behaviour change.

    Facebook will also find it harder to recruit western employees in technical and product roles. But that was to be expected anyway as the company matured; there have been red flags about Facebook’s culture for over a decade and there is diminishing opportunities for riches joining a mature media technology company. Alphabet is in a similar position.

    Like trendy bars or night clubs, with online properties the heat eventually moves on, it is a miracle that the likes of Alibaba, Baidu, Google and Yahoo! have lasted for so long.

    Online services have their time and then lose their heat.

    More information

    [1] Glazer, E., Hagey, K., Horwitz, J., Purnell, N., Schechner, S., Scheck, J., Seetharaman, D., J. Stamm, J.S., Wells, G. and West, J. (September 13, 2021 – October 3, 2021) The Facebook Files. United States: The Wall Street Journal

    [2] Zubrow, K., Gavrilovic, M. and Ortiz, A.(October 3, 2021) Whistleblower’s SEC complaint: Facebook knew platform was used to “promote human trafficking and domestic servitude”. United States: CBS News (60 Minutes Overtime)

    [3] Haugen, F. (October 4, 2021) Written statement of Frances Haugen. United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security

    [4] Zubrow, K. (October 4, 2021) Facebook whistleblower says company incentivizes “angry, polarizing, divisive content”. United States: CBS News (60 Minutes Overtime)

    [5] Foot, J. (November 1, 1999) Television and the City: the Impact of Television in Milan. United Kingdom: Contemporary European History volume 8, issue 3 published by Cambridge University Press

    [6] Turner, S.L., Hamilton, H., Jacobs, M., Angood, L.M. and Dwyer, D.H. (Fall 1997) The influence of fashion magazines on the body image satisfaction of college women: an exploratory analysis. United States: Adolescents; Roslyn Heights Volume 32, Issue 127

    [7] Munson, W.E. (1990)Talking about talk: The talkshow, audience participation and the postmodern. United States: New York University

    [8] Barber, B.R. (winter 1996) An American Civic Forum: Civil Society Between Market Individuals and the Political Community. United Kingdom: Social Philosophy and Policy volume 13, issue 1 by Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation

    [9] Burke, J. (October 7, 2019) Idi Amin’s mastery of media revealed in newly published photos. United Kingdom: The Guardian

    [10] Rwanda radio transcripts. Canada: Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University

    [11] Anderson, M. and Jiang, J.J. (May 31, 2018) Teens, Social Media and Technology 2018. United States: Pew Research Center

    [12] Galloway, S. (October 8, 2021) Carcinogens. United States: No Mercy / No Malice

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  • Genesis luxury car brand

    In the space of a few decades Hyundai Motors have gone from building cars based on western and Japanese car manufacturers to having its own luxury marque: Genesis, that challenges Lexus and Mercedes-Benz.

    Genesis
    Genesis advert from the FT magazine

    Genesis origins

    The Hyundai Grandeur was an executive saloon that they started making in 1986. It was basically a rebadged version of the Mitsubishi Debonair. The Debonair was a competitor to the Nissan Cedric and Toyota Crown. It was noticeable for having the same body style from 1964 to 1986. Hyundai built the a licensed version of the mark II Debonair.

    Hyundai needed a domestic luxury car to ferry officials around in for the Seoul olympics in 1988. The focus on the Olympics was because Hyundai Motors had become an official sponsor. The Seoul olympics was put on to showcase how Korea had become a developed nation over the previous four decades.

    The early Grandeur was a world away from Hyundai’s previous range topper, a rebadged version of the Ford Granada mark II.

    Successive models of the Grandeur were the top of the range vehicles in the Hyundai Motors range until the arrival of the Hyundai Equus and Genesis. When the Genesis brand range was founded the Hyundai Grandeur reduced the number of markets were it was available to  South Korea, China, the Middle East, Latin and South America (except Mexico).

    Hyundai Genesis -> Genesis G80

    The Genesis was originally designed as an interpretation of the modern rear-wheel drive sports saloon. It was evenly balanced and lighter than the BMW 5 series and Mercedes E class. It under performed in the US and Canadian market.

    So when the mark II Hyundai Genesis was due to come to market; the company set up a new brand built around the car which became the Genesis G80 launched alongside the related but bigger G90.

    Equus -> G90

    Hyundai needed a car for its politicians and captains of industry so in 1999 it built its own version of the Mitsubishi Dignity. The Dignity is a lesser known known competitor to the Toyota Century. It was a Japan market only car that was only available for 15 months.

    By comparison Hyundai’s Equus was made from 1999 to 2008 and sold in Korea, China and the Middle East. The second generation car took its cues more from Mercedes Benz. It became rear wheel drive, got air suspension and a variety of handling technologies.

    The mark III became the G90, a competitor to Mercedes S-class. A high performance limousine with four wheel drive like a fully specced Mercedes limousine.

    G70

    Hyundai extended the product line downwards with a sporting compact luxury saloon and hatchback. All wheel drive is offered as an option, indicating that Mercedes and Audi buyers are their target market.

    GV70 and GV80

    Finally they’ve rounded out the range with two SUVs. The GV70 is about the size of the Range Rover Velar and the GV80 is roughly the same size as a Range Rover Sport.

    Differentiating a luxury car brand

    It was 25 years since a luxury car brand had been successfully launched before Genesis. The comparisons with Lexus are obvious. Genesis has focused on getting a really high JD Power rating like Lexus did decades before.

    The kind of high technology Hyundai has used to differentiate in other categories is a hygiene factor in the luxury space. Instead Genesis is focusing on the ownership experience. Its differentiator is that you get a leasing type experience even if you buy a new Genesis.

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