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.
15 years ago on September 11, 2001 I worked agency side in Haymarket in London’s west end for Edelman. It was a normal day. Well as normal is it gets when you are in the middle of the dot com bust fallout. It was a mix of mobile businesses trying to ride the mobile internet wave and service providers for the soon to launch 3G mobile networks. Alongside this was helping dot com businesses try to find their place in the new world.
My job meant working on communications programmes for the European subsidiaries of technology companies. This was to reflect a ‘business as usual’ face to their customers. This allowed the European subsidiaries to keep their businesses largely intact so that they could be sold off to help bail out the financial hole that the US parent company had made.
The businesses had grown on generous venture capital payments, share placements and bank loans. The dot com bust suddenly meant that there was a surplus of servers, network switches, bandwidth, commercial space and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
Due to the nature of the business I worked closely with colleagues on the finance team because I spoke ‘geek’ and understood how screwed these clients happened to be.
The financial and corporate teams worked for a number of clients, notably Cantor Fitzgerald. They were to lose two thirds of their personnel by the end of the day.
It was early afternoon, when I realised that something was up. We had TVs around the agency that often weren’t on. This time they were all turned to Sky News, which was running the footage. After the troubles and bombings in Beirut, it wasn’t a complete surprise to see another landmark attack – at least at first.
Once the scale sunk in, then the realisation of how different the world was going to be after September 11 started to dawn on me. More related content here.
In a now annual ritual its 2016 Apple event held on September 7 left me a lot to reflect on.
Style
The presentation was telling a hard story to an audience that were likely to be underwhelmed. Phil Schiller rather than Tim Cook carried the most difficult parts of the keynote.
The piano finish device was an obvious attempt to provide a style angle to the new iPhone and mask the aerial sections. However it is a class action waiting to happen as it will dull over time with micro-scratches
The story that the audience was told didn’t feel right. Lets talk about the headphone jack. The double camera only appears in the Plus, so the requirement for room isn’t a credible argument on its own, other vendors have managed to waterproof handsets with headphone jacks. I suspect that Apple isn’t sure that its backing the right horse. Its the least aggressive change they’ve made in a while. The inclusion of an adaptor shows that their user aggression still isn’t as high compared to when they got rid of: SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), iPod 30 pin port (still pissed about that one), AppleTalk, floppy disks or optical disk playback and storage – I suspect that they are fearfully waiting to see what the pre-order numbers will be like and they should be. A straw poll of AdAge readers (core Apple user demographic) showed overwhelming disappointment
There is a lot of really nice features in iOS 10 – I’ve been using it for a while, why didn’t they make more of this and macOS Sierra?
Substance
Innovation in the smartphone category has flattened out. The iPhone 7 provides reasons for laggard iPhone users to upgrade, but nothing for 6 and 6S series users. There are few if any innovations for the likes of Huawei to ape in their new models
Innovation in smartwatches has plateaued. Apple is coalescing around fitness and dedicated products are much more cost effective for consumers. In China Xiaomi’s fitness band sells for about £15, for many consumers it would be enough. Fitbit is doing well – Apple’s wrist computer (alongside Samsung Gear etc) looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Apple have done nothing to address the latent demand for new laptops amongst consumers (I am still happy with my 13″ Retina MacBook Pro). There was no replacement for the Cinema display (again, I am happy with my current set-up, but where is the pro-user love)
Apple abandoned its flirtation with luxury by discontinuing the gold Watch. They are still holding out to be viewed as stylish by doubling down with Hermes and a white ceramic device – it would work on the opposite wrist to a Chanel J12
It was curious that Apple moved away from talking about security and privacy; the collaborative document working using iWork which could be seen as a potential attack vector on to the desktop. The Air Pods that sync seamlessly with a device without visible security precautions. iPhone security was addressed in the James Corden car karaoke skit at the beginning of the show rather than woven through the materials.
The speech about the app store was to try and bolster developer support, I suspect that services will shore up the Apple financial numbers over the next 12 months
The Nike branded Apple Watch was part of a broader move reposition the Apple Watch 2 as a fitness device and probably the biggest transition of the 2016 Apple event.
JTB, Panasonic, Yamato eye paperless luggage transport service for tourists | Japan Times – this looks awesome. Yamato Express is a logistics company that will do everything from parcel delivery to helping you to move house. The Yamato Express business philosophy is embodied by our symbol of a mother cat carrying her kitten. Yamato Express look to deliver the same level of care to every customer relationship – and believe in our responsibility to contribute to their customers’ wellbeing and prosperity. I have experienced their service in both Hong Kong and Japan and Yamato Express is a level above UPS, Fedex etc.
Yamato Express logo showing a cat carry its kitten. The implication is that they take the same care
Japan’s message to the UK and EU – Japanese ministry of foreign affairs – interesting technical document that highlights how fucked the UK could be, this outlines the red lines that drive Japanese companies out of the country to another EU country instead. Unfortunately it will be too subtle for UK politicians (PDF) More Japan related posts here.
Media
Yes, the News Can Survive the Newspaper – The New York Times – One day many decades hence, when your grandchildren ask you, “Grandma, what was a newspaper?” you can direct them back to Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Because it may well go down as the day the American newspaper as we’ve known it moved out of intensive care and into the palliative wing on its way to the Great Beyond
The Twilight of Fox News – The Atlantic – interesting demographic cliff challenge, I would imagine that newspapers face a similar if less extreme challenge?
Will Amazon Kill FedEx? | Bloomberg – reminds me of Alibaba in China. The key difference is Amazon’s belief that they will always have the cheapest capital
Details Emerge On China’s 64-Core ARM Chip | NextPlatform – ARM as RISC server processor. ARM is more optimised as a client processor, whilst the power reduction focus is good, this isn’t necessarily the slam dunk that it appears on paper
Alcatel’s standalone VR headset is a tough sell | Engadget – really smart product design in terms of weight distribution. I suspect a good deal of the issue is access to compelling content and that consumers have been educated to do everything on/with their smartphone
Wireless
Total Recall | CCS Insight – Samsung’s Note 7 battery issue will be forgotten (like Dell and Sony’s laptop battery issues in the past). They will take a bit of a hit on their quarterly results, but business insurance will probably cover it
The New Yorker has been producing some fantastic surreal content
The Suicide Squad movie was disjointed to say the least, but one good thing that came out of it was a collaboration between Action Bronson and Mark Ronson
Korean cosmetic brand Innisfree tapped into the aspirations of Korean and Chinese consumers with this fantasy VR bike ride to Jeju Island. The execution was canny, from a technical perspective it deals well with the motion / balance issues that VR projects sometimes have. Jeju Island is a famous for its pleasant weather and more relaxed lifestyle. Chinese investors have recently been driving up property prices there. More Korea related content here.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquires SGI for $275 million | VentureBeat – death of a legend. SGI stands for Silicon Graphics International. SGI workstations and servers were legendary. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were rendered on SGI hardware. Much of the early web was run off SGI servers and SGI were involved in early efforts to make the internet a ‘metaverse’ with a 3D VRML browser. Their IRIX UNIX operating system was like macOS today, but well over 20 years ago.
China
Why Millennials Are Excited About the 90th Birthday of China’s Ex-President – China Real Time Report – WSJ – “It’s very simple,” says Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Beijing’s Renmin University. “People right now aren’t satisfied…When he was in office, everyone said bad things about him. Now people miss him more and more.” – which by implication is pretty damning for the Xi administration. Hu wasn’t dynamic and hamstrung by Jiang Zemin interfering in the shadows. Jiang when in power was ruthless and pragmatic
Intel Licenses ARM Technology to Boost Foundry Business – Bloomberg – this plugs a gap, whether it is a permanent approach a la what IBM did with manufacturing for Xbox etc or a stopgap until they come up with a new mobile offering who knows? The ARM | SoftBank deal looks strangely prescient and ARM looks like an even bigger monopoly – existing ARM Holdings shareholders who wanted to hold on to their shares will be sick as dogs
What’s behind P&G’s cutback on targeted Facebook ads? – To reach 5,000 targeted viewers on Facebook, the spending needed can reach the equivalent of that required to reach a million TV viewers, according to Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, which tests ads for effectiveness – more on marketing here
Google’s New OS Will Run on Your Raspberry Pi | Hackaday – interesting that Google could be moving away from Linux on everything to RTOS underpinnings – presumably to reduce the footprint and further improve stability. At the end of the day, do you want your phone to control a lift, a defibrillator or anti-lock breaks? Also benefits for IoT in terms of smaller footprint??? Though not so sure as the language says ‘not so minimalistic’
Tighter EU rules on messaging services | RTE – so much in this but overall could be good for telecoms carriers and bad for privacy as well as freewheeling Silicon Valley companies
Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN | Reuters – Cisco moving away from hardware. Interesting, implies that there is no differentiation in networking hardware anymore. Not sure software will be defensible for them as other players like Microsoft et al could get involved. Also means networking hardware to become more commoditised. On a related note Cisco et al missed a trick on not using work like that done on Bayes Theory and network management in the late 1990s to help prevent buffer bloat. Academics have continued on this theme
