Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • iCloud thoughts

    On June 6, Apple announced a number of products at a keynote speech to kick off its worldwide developer conference. Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 were widely anticipated; but the one that got the most attention was a service called iCloud.

    This service has received a fair bit of coverage and its worthwhile reflecting upon, some of this reflection has to do with all the things that we don’t currently know. I am not  going to focus on the iTunes Connect product that gives you a selection of your music across devices as other people have done that much better than I could.

    First of all a bit of a history lesson

    Apple has actually selling online services since about 1985, so Apple’s history with online services is almost as old as The WELL. AppleLink was an online service set up originally to connect Apple employees and dealers, it had a client software application for both Mac and the later models of the Apple II. It provided assess to remote server folders (kind of like FTP, iDisk, Box.net or Dropbox), bulletin boards for discussion and system-wide email (though interoperability with other email systems came in later).

    This system was a way that Apple distributed systems updates and drivers to dealers (you have to remember that at that time operating systems and the associated software that went along with them took up much less memory than they do today). This was all hosted on time-shared mainframes and connected by a global data network by GE Information Services. GE charged too much for the service and didn’t reflect the technological changes coming down the pipe that made these services cheaper to operate. So Apple eventually worked with Quantum Computer Services (now known as Aol) to develop a version of AppleLink suitable for consumers.

    The first email from space was sent on an Apple Portable via an AppleLink account from the Atlantis space shuttle to the Johnson Space Center in 1991. Back in 1988, AppleLink was also the host for a multi-channel story that played out with weekly episodes and included user identities woven into its plot. The storytelling used chat rooms and email was well as a more traditional narrative format echoing Matt Beaumont’s novel e by about 12 years.

    After a while, Apple, had a falling out with GE Information Services and consolidated their own service renamed eWorld and had it run by AOL.
    eWorld main screen
    Eventually eWorld was closed down as Apple realised that it couldn’t compete with AOL and they had bigger things to worry about as Apple was on the downward trajectory that would result in the return of Steve Jobs. By 1997 both AppleLink and eWorld had been closed down. The content eventually ended up on the Apple website under sub-domains like developer.apple.com and support.apple.com.

    In 2000, Apple came back with iTools which included the .mac email accounts, simple web publishing and iDisk. The email account allowed you to have IMAP4 which was rare at the time and iDisk was based on WebDAV standard to syncing. There were other services including web publishing and iCards: an electronic greeting cards service (prior to Facebook were a low impact way to exchange greetings, with a HTML card sent via email. One of the most prominent providers bluemountain.com was bought in a deal apparently worth 780 million dollars by then internet giant Excite@Home).  By 2002, Apple started charging for these services and briefly threw in a subscription to Virex.

    The service got a rebrand as MobileMe to take account of Apple’s expanded computing portfolio to take in the iOS-powered series of devices. Newcomers got a .me.com email address rather than the .mac.com email address. I myself have been signed up to these services through their evolutions for the past ten years or so, so still have a .mac.com ID.

    iCloud is a development repackaging of these offerings; an evolution rather than an innovation, it also means that Apple’s claim in the sub header of its press release that the service: Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date – are economical with the truth. There is also a question in my mind, for reasons I’ll outline below, about whether this next evolution is positive for end users.

    Device philosophy

    One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Steve Jobs introduce iCloud, he described the Mac as ‘just another device’. On one level it makes sense; as the Mac is one of three sets of computing devices that Apple now sells: the Mac, the iPad and the iPod Touch / iPhone.

    • The second thing that marks it out, is a trust that as Sun Microsystems used to say ‘the network is the computer’.
    • Finally there is the question of primacy. Which device is the ultimate arbiter of the correct data?

    The flawed ‘net

    iCloud is based on the assumption that good quality data connectivity is ubiquitous, this is complete fiction for many people. I live in central London, apparently a world city, a hive of connectivity. Wi-fi that I can access safely is only available in certain coffee shops, and the mobile networks are full of holes like Swiss cheese. I am with Vodafone that seems to be better than most, but the only way to have a near-continuous reception is to roam on a foreign SIM; which is outrageously expensive. This situation isn’t . In the UK, the broadband infrastructure simply isn’t available to support existing streaming video services. I live in Central London within the proverbial stones throw from Silicon Roundabout and get barely 3MBs download and 400KBs upload from my ADSL connection. I live 500 metres from my local exchange.

    Data integrity

    One area I am not convinced that Apple will get right with the iCloud is keeping the integrity of address and calendar data intact. If one device doesn’t have primacy there is no control mechanism. It is easy to accidentally alter a record on an iPhone and that could then ripple through the iCloud to all associated devices based on it being the most recent edit. There is no information on how it will handle duplicate entries and failed syncs. Lots of unanswered yet critical questions.

    Household enterprise systems

    My set-up on MobileMe is relatively simple, I have one iTunes account, one address book, one calendar, one set of bookmarks and system preferences. These are synced across two devices (the MacBook Pro that I am writing this post on, and my iPhone). But increasingly, Apple’s eco-system is found at the centre of family’s IT systems. The analogy of the household CEO is often used to describe the housewife as homemaker.

    The family’s IT system needs to look more like the kind of enterprise technology that a CEO would expect. With massive data storage and policy-based systems designed to keep the right data with the right owners. I haven’t seen any evidence that iCloud would do this which is likely to result in lots of poisoned address books and music collections.

    It just works?

    One of Apple’s key selling points since Steve Jobs returned to Apple was that the company’s products just work. This is why the synergy between hardware and software is so important. When you took one of the original iMacs out of the box, you plugged in the keyboard, the modem cable into the telephone socket, the power socket and turned it one; you were ready to start computing.
    Museum of Information
    It promised elegant simple technological choices to early adopters and the late majority alike and is why products like the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone have become commonplace in many developed marketplaces disrupting incumbent players like Creative and Nokia. The complexity and challenges that the iCloud system needs to overcome could undue this unique selling proposition and tear Apple’s market-making leadership position apart.

    Open standards to Apple standards

    One of the things that has helped Apple to do well has been its adherence to open standards: the iMac benefited from being a USB pioneer. Mac laptops became popular with photographers because of FireWire. The Safari web browser and WebKit build upon W3C standards compliance and it is hard to remember now, but the first iPhone used HTML5 web applications for external developers – something that many people lost sight of.

    Apple’s online services were similar. The email service was based on IMAP4 allowing for easy synchronisation and iDisk works on WebDAV. However in the Apple press release announcing iCloud there is no information on what it supports any standards, but it does talk about iCloud storage APIs. And Apple did promise to make thse APIs available to developers. I am concerned that my social graph may be locked into a storage equivalent of the Hotel California; which is especially dangerous when you think at the amount of iterations and service closures that Apple has exhibited in the online space.

    More online related content can be found here.

    More reading

    Apple Introduces iCloud – Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

    What the iCloud will cause to happen next | FT.com

    Apple details iCloud’s digital storage and syncing, free 5GB of storage

    Fourth time’s a charm? Why Apple has trouble with cloud computing

    Cloud Poll: Does iCloud Actually Have Anything to Do with Cloud Computing? | ReadWriteWeb

  • The wisdom of mobs

    Old media historically took a pride in its ability to spur the public into action, a classic example would be The Sun’s headline from April 11, 1992 which trumpeted ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. In this case claiming that The Sun’s readers had turned the tide of an election. There is also a darker side to this: the wisdom of mobs. 

    I have been interested in how mob behaviour or the shifting of public opinion has been changed by social media and affected consumer behaviour with ‘the wisdom of mobs’.  The recent super injunction debate has again brought it to the fore, as has Anonymous and Wikileaks.

    This has all had another subtle effect, as evidenced by this quote from Jamie East, founder of HolyMoly:

    “There are fewer gobshites who aren’t media-trained and surrounded by PRs, so it’s more difficult to find things to write about. And the ‘pap’ agencies aren’t getting the pictures they used to.”

    East is describing in his own colourful way an awareness and responsibility about their own reputation, or as Singaporean blogger Pat Law put it:

    As long as the information is online, even if you’ve placed it on private mode, your privacy is automatically placed on a pedestal for potential abuse. So never publish anything you don’t want people to know online.

    This is one side to a multi-stranded solution to the wisdom of mobs problem:

    • Behavioural – individuals need to take responsibility for their actions and what they say, reputation isn’t managed: reputation is, as reputation does
    • Social – we have yet to develop an appropriate civic society online. Towns on the American frontier appointed sheriffs and town councils to try and bring a modicum of justice and decorum during the pioneering days. These appointments were symptoms of a wider awaking towards thinking less about the individual and more about the kind of society that they were creating on the frontier. We need a similar awakening for online. Secondly a better civic society, should be able to organise lobbying that is as effective as that currently done by vested interests on behalf of disrupted interests like the ABPI and Warner Music; otherwise these groups will continue to enjoy undue succor – what politicians fail to see is that these groups are the British Leyland or the Northern Rock of the digital age
    • Legislative – this is the one that I am most concerned about for a number of reasons. Politicians of all sides are not good at giving up surplus powers and striking down legislation, instead keeping it to one side for a rainy day. The Labour administration of Tony Blair kept the Criminal Justice and Public Order act of 1994 including its controversial part V dealing with criminalising rave culture. The current conservative government has kept the Digital Economy Act in place, despite the fact that it adversely affects their ability to spur digital innovation and inclusion. The threat of legislation allows politicians to adjust behaviour in industries, for instance: self-censorship by UK ISPs by Ed Vaizey. It is virtually impossible to find a legislative body with the suitably sustained light touch required
    • Governance – effective and transparent governance mechanisms for governance in commercial issues would mean that there would be less of a public interest in gossip. Allegations surrounding Fred Goodwin would have been more appropriately investigated as part of his management of the Royal Bank of Scotland
    • Professionalism – the media has a responsibility to lift its own content out of the gutter of sensationalism. They need to man up and take responsibility for the wisdom of mobs, but they won’t. There simply isn’t a desire to do decent investigative journalism or thought-provoking analysis. It is probably not considered commercially viable to do it (though the audience of documentaries at the cinema seems to suggest otherwise), there aren’t the journalists with the right set of skills and mindset: where are the next Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein or Seymour Hersh?

    More ethics related content can be found here.

  • IBM fellows + more news

    IBM fellows

    New IBM Fellows push computing frontiers – IBM fellows are the company’s most prolific innovators. This batch of IBM fellows is interesting because it is a good indication of technology areas which will be hot: question-and-answer systems, a holistic approach to hardware and software design (like Apple), mathematical modelling for environmental risk management, stream computing, network optimised computer operating systems, cloud services, virtualised data centres and semiconductor design verification tools / processes (presumably to deal with increasing complexity and parallel processing at the silicon level)

    Business

    Helen Wang On China’s Opportunities. She’s Not Dreaming. : China Law Blog – luxury, healthcare, education and green tech are foreign companies opportunities. Basically most of the west is screwed

    Design

    Warm Respect for a Scottish Ruin – NYTimes.com – I love the way you have a house within a house on this design, could think of a few places in Ireland where this would work a treat

    Economics

    Revenge of the Invisible Hand – By Bruce Everett | Foreign Policy – this of course also means that much of the FTSE-related portfolios depending on Shell and BP for its value is screwed

    Big Oil In Turnaround – By Edward C. Chow | Foreign Policy – good write-up on the current state of what were the 7 Sisters of the oil industry. I’d be more worried about energy security than the environment now

    What exactly is made in China? | FT.com – rising wages encouraging clothing to move elsewhere in Southeast Asia

    Luxury

    Chanel’s cruise control | Material World | Vanessa Friedman blogs on the fashion and luxury industry for the Financial Times – FT.com

    Media

    U.S. Bill To Criminalize Illicit Movie / Music Streaming | TorrentFreak

    Leaked “ACTA” Lobby Letter Reveals Hollywood Pressure On EU | TorrentFreak – what is of interest is that they want to bypass the judiciary and push this into law

    Online

    Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com – interesting that law enforcement hasn’t been looking at this

    Security

    Why you can’t really anonymize your data – O’Reilly Radar – the ethics of big data need to be thought out and you have to ask questions about the ethics of how healthcare research is executed in the future

    Software

    Android vaults to smartphone lead as Nokia faces ‘ugly’ future | guardian.co.uk

    Did Microsoft pay for the wrong Skype? | asymco – interesting analysis

    Technology

    Zennstrom: private investors take the profits | FT.com – interesting ethical questions brought up

  • The Dentsu Way by Sugiyama

    The Dentsu Way highlights a very integrated approach to marketing communications. When I first started off in public relations Japan was described as a ‘backward’ market. This was supposed to be because PR wasn’t highly valued and Japanese advertising agencies like Dentsu would run an end-game around PR agencies. There wasn’t a specialism in the industry to the same extent as the US or EU. Of course, the reality was rather more complex. In the same way that the division of media and creative adversely affected the advertising industry, so has the division of earned and paid media. One agency, one integrated strategy has a better chance of delivering results.

    Of course, whilst the observations were true the facts drawn from them weren’t. Dentsu is one of the world’s biggest marketing communications groups not because it is backwards. The company has raised its profile in London due to the stand out work of Dentsu London over the past 12 months or so.

    Dentsu’s cross-communication offering looks remarkably prescient in many respects: insight-based planning is used to drive all activity. It is also interesting how closely psychology is linked to public relations campaigns looking to achieve product preference through attitudinal change. Whilst Bernays talked about this in his original work in the public relations field. The reality is that its used surprisingly little.

    For example a large PR agency pitching a vertical dinosaur-shaped lawn to be displayed in the middle of the Broadgate centre. The rationale was ‘its about plants’. This was while I was working inhouse on an FMCG relaunch, and the memory will forever stay with me.

    The Dentsu Way explains their organisation and an approach in an exhaustive manner and manages to quote Bruce Lee along the way with regards their approach to campaign planning. The book is easy to read and informative with great case studies from the Japanese market. I liked the book that I included it on bookshelf page of recommendations.

  • Deposit Files + more things

    Deposit Files – could be useful. Deposit Files is a WeTransfer competitor with much more flexibility. The premium version allows you to upload files of 10GB in size. So ideal for large video projects.

    Top 15 websites in Russia (Digital Knowledge Centre – Digital Intelligence)

    Shrib: A Simple Online Scratch Pad: Business Collaboration News « – interesting idea, potentially open to abuse though

    For social search, similarity could trump friendship – O’Reilly Radar – common interests rather than commonality

    How Facebook Connect Freaks Me Out – great points on Facebook by Danny Sullivan. More on Facebook here.

    IABUK : Steps to success – for mobile marketing

    Tablets Are Already Crushing Growth In The PC Market

    Windows Phone 7 Sales Eclipsed by Android – and Symbian – interesting anecdote, however WP7 was as much about getting Microsoft back in the game at all. A more worthy comparison would be WebOS

    In the smartphone market, Apple users remain the most loyal

    Simfy, the German Spotify, tunes into 16m-strong student network – smart move by StudiVZ

    How To Turn Google Translate Into Google Beatbox – absolutely brilliant

    Microsoft Sees Revenue Opportunity in Phone Patents | AllThingsD – interesting that they are even mentioning plan B

    Public Relationships: Social Media Consultant – Is there a market for this profession? – interesting take on things by Jeremy Woolf

    FMCG goods ‘recession-resistant’, says Unilever Asia president – Brand Republic News – developed world not likely to recover ‘any time soon’

    Does your Facebook campaign break the rules? | Econsultancy – lots of marketing campaigns breaking the rules, worthwhile monitoring competitors and grassing them up

    Morgan Stanley’s Legendary Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Moving To Kleiner Perkins – interesting move. Meeker maybe about Kleiner Perkins accessing large financial institutions pockets and relationships for M&A?

    Apple Lawyers Up for Patent Showdowns With Nokia, Motorola, HTC – BusinessWeek – legal battles in mobile escalates

    I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail – more like decline in prominence but otherwise good stuff here

    Chanos vs. China – Fortune Finance – interesting opinion piece for and against the Chinese property market

    Poking, Tagging and Now Landing an M.B.A. – NYTimes.com – really surprised by the low completion rate quoted for online courses

    Why are men’s magazines being left on the shelf? – Press, Media – The Independent – interesting article. I buy magazines and media: just not men’s magazines. Esquire used to have great reportage but has gone off the boil. My current print diet is Wired US edition, Monocle (for the great reportage) and the occasional issue of an i-D, Vice, an audio engineering or DJ magazine

    CitizenMap | South China Morning Post – really interesting project to visually show news and readership feedback

    Reeder – interesting RSS client for iPhone and iPad (Mac coming soon) that syncs with Google Reader. It is also worthwhile looking at Newsblur