Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.
It is likely the post will also in other categories too. For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.
Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.
Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.
I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.
The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.
I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.
Horace Dediu on the transformation of the car into a smartphone. Turning a car into a smartphone isn’t a technology revolution that particularly excites me. I prefer things that can kill me to be using highly reliable real time operating systems with no real time network connectivity – if they have to run software at all. Former Thai finance minister Suchart Jaovisidha who was locked inside his BMW limousine by its onboard computer is a lesson to us all.
China Mobile 5G launch video is absolutely terrifying and probably the best advert for LTE that I’ve ever seen.
Consumer use case doesn’t seem to be that high on their priority. So there’s no downloading of Netflix style TV in a flash.
So what is the killer app? It isn’t autonomous cars, or life saving tele-medicine. But dystopian omnipresent Chinese security. There’s no way I’d be buying a Huawei 5G handset after watching this. It has extra resonance with the current ‘Be Water’ protests going down in Hong Kong. More wireless related posts here.
I am guessing that China Mobile won’t be handing out copies of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Here some of the books main topics are discussed by Shoshana Zuboff, Carole Cadwalladr, Paul Hilder and Shahmir Sanni.
VCCP’s first campaign for Cathay Pacific is interesting. It has moved away from the professional business traveller to focus on the leisure travel market. This might be a bet on where the Hong Kong economy is going and a ploy to try and tap into the burgeoning Chinese luxury travel market. I suspect that a good deal of it is Cathay Pacific not being price and service competitive with the likes of Oatar Airways on premium long haul flights.
For me this was a generic ad highlighting Cathay’s overall service rather than the business class experience. which is wedged in awkwardly on the end.
Here’s One Reason the US Military Can’t Fix Its Own Equipment – The New York Times – the irony of the US military being restricted by US legislation and lack of ‘right to repair’. US military withdrawal from R&D hasn’t help things either. DARPA does pure research, but the focus on COTS (commercial off the shelf) solutions by the US military has seen a withdrawal from more practical applications. Where is the modern US military equivalent of things like the Piccatinny rail standard? More security related content here.
Facebook’s fake numbers problem — Lex in depth | Financial Times – Facebook’s own estimates suggest duplicate accounts represent approximately 11 per cent of monthly active users while fake versions make up another 5 per cent. Others claim the total is higher. Yet Facebook continues to promote its user base as an incredible 2.45bn per month — close to one-third of the global population.” – ok so some of the logic is wonky, but the underlying point is very interesting
Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection, tax powers, criminal justice – The Globe and Mail – The community Alphabet sought to build when it launched Sidewalk Labs, she said, was like a “for-profit China” that would “use digital infrastructure to modify and direct social and political behaviour.” While Sidewalk has since moved away from many of the details in its book, Prof. Zuboff contends that Alphabet tends to “say what needs be said to achieve commercial objectives, while specifically camouflaging their actual corporate strategy.” – some of the most sinister stuff I’ve heard of, that hasn’t been originated by Chinese Communist Party cadre
Chaebols and firm dynamics in the Republic of Korea | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal – Moving from low- to high-income status implies that countries escape the middle-income trap. This implies institutional reform to create innovation-based growth. The column uses firm-level data to show how the Korean government’s chaebol reforms in the late 1990s transformed the economy from an investment-based to an innovation-based model. There are lessons here for China.
Opinion | Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters – The New York Times – In everyday life, the probability of an event can range only from 0 percent to 100 percent (there’s a reason you never hear about a negative 30 percent chance of rain). But the building blocks of the world, like electrons and photons, obey different, alien rules of probability, involving numbers — the amplitudes — that can be positive, negative, or even complex (involving the square root of -1). Furthermore, if an event — say, a photon hitting a certain spot on a screen — could happen one way with positive amplitude and another way with negative amplitude, the two possibilities can cancel, so that the total amplitude is zero and the event never happens at all. This is “quantum interference,” and is behind everything else you’ve ever heard about the weirdness of the quantum world.
5G will only be as revolutionary as the devices we design for it — Quartz – “When we’ve spoken with consumers who carry the latest smartphones today, and you talk with them about 5G, what these users are saying is that the current form factor and feature sets cannot take advantage of the promise of 5G,” Sethi told Quartz. While smartphones are great for reading the web, watching videos, and checking emails, there’s not much that a considerably faster connection speed will do for them that they can’t already do.
IPA | IPA reacts to Twitter’s political ad ban – If online platforms won’t commit to a publicly available, platform-neutral, machine-readable register of all political ads and ad data online, then they should consider following Twitter’s lead in banning political advertising – and even then what would the first solution solve, given the failure of legislative regulation – what’s the point of a register when you have both major parties more crooked than a yakuza convention, but without the style?
IPA | Legal Update 31 October 2019 – Google announced that they are making changes to YouTube to address the substance of the FTC’s concerns and will apply these changes globally. The changes, which will be rolled out from January, include:• moving families over to YouTube Kids through notifications and educating parents about its benefits;• identifying Made for Kids content on YouTube via a combination of input from creators and machine learning; and • no longer serving personalised ads on Made for Kids, for all users regardless of age, and serving only contextual ads on this content
‘Caveat Emptor:’ State Dept. Mocks Russian, PRC Weapon Sales In ‘Buy American’ Pitch « Breaking Defense – four Chinese-made Harbin Z-9 helicopters purchased by Cameroon in 2015, one of which crashed soon after purchase. Similarly, Kenya bought a handful of Chinese-made Norinco VN4 armored personnel carriers, “vehicles that China’s own sales representative declined to sit inside during a test firing,” he claimed. “Since going ahead with the purchase regardless, sadly dozens of Kenyan personnel have been reportedly killed in those vehicles,” Cooper said, adding “caveat emptor!” He also slammed Chinese CH-4 armed drones, which various countries in the Middle East have found “to be inoperable within months, and are now turning around to get rid of them… We have seen countries around the world leap at the chance to obtain high-tech, low-cost defensive capabilities only to see their significant investments crumble and rust in their hands” – buy China and pay twice, interesting to see this in the defence sector. Is the export quality worse than the products for the PLA? Or is China falling down on maintenance and services packages (customer service)? I think the Russian argument is harder to make given their decades of experience building simple, but effective defence products
Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland – Diane Negra, Anthony P McIntyre, – how a post-Celtic Tiger Irish government aligned with elite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the Celtic Tiger period and lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness and defined by ‘Shock Doctrine’ regulatory policies that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of this landscape include ongoing governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the normalization of under-employment and a burgeoning housing crisis. We show here how the popular images and narratives of the period index a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity
Glossy 101: How fashion brands are rethinking influencer marketing – Glossy – when brands work with micro-influencers, they’re paying less to work with people who tend to have a more engaged audience. A report from The Wall Street Journal estimated the micro tier charges between $400 and $2,000 per post, while higher tiers will charge anywhere between $10,000 and $150,000. It should be a win-win. However, by adding more people to the mix, brands are setting themselves up for a lot more work
Sprout Social its at IPO | Pitchbook – it will be interesting to see how they get on given the negative investor sentiment around the likes of Hootsuite
BT unveils biggest brand campaign in 20 years – created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad begins with a schoolgirl reciting Charles Dickens’ classic opening from A Tale of Two Cities as she walks through the dreary British streets. Set to Blinded by Your Grace, Pt 2 by Stormzy, it goes on to showcase Britain’s technological advances over the past few decades, from CCTV and Tube advancements to the emergence of broadband – is it just me or this or is this exceptionally dark. CCTV!
Measuring the effectiveness of creativity in marketing | Marketing Week – the ad industry will be forced to refocus on creativity. Yet marketers (and their counterparts in finance) have become used to the measurability of performance marketing. If the industry can’t prove the effectiveness of creativity, brands will continue to up spend on short-term sales activations rather than brand building. The majority of markets are trying to add some science to the art. An exclusive survey of more than 400 brand marketers conducted by Marketing Week finds 61.8% measure the effectiveness of their creative (compared to 76.5% who measure the effectiveness of media)
Don’t Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business | MIT Sloan Review – those lucky employees who haven’t been automated into professional obsolescence instead find themselves enduring what economic historian Jerry Z. Muller calls the “tyranny of metrics.” Numbers rule their workplace lives, and there’s no escape. “The problem is not measurement,” Muller declares, “but excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement — not metrics, but metric fixation.” “Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” warns Harvard Business Review’s September-October 2019 cover story: “Strategy is abstract by definition, but metrics give strategy form, allowing our minds to grasp it more readily. … The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value.”
Hey – it could’ve been Regina Ip! | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – it seems Hong Kong officials use Reuters as their preferred conduit for leaks (or ‘scoops’ as media folk call them), while their Mainland counterparts prefer the Financial Times. The latter today reveals (paywall, etc, possibly) that Beijing will eject Chief Executive Carrie Lam, maybe in March, after things have ‘stabilized’ ha ha
Six Chinese men jailed for a hit job that was subcontracted five times – Inkstone – Pi Yijun, a criminal justice professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said the case reflected strong distaste towards litigation in Chinese culture. “People are not willing to go through the legal channel,” Pi told Inkstone. “Whenever they encounter disputes, they try to solve it privately, mediating through personal connections or taking the law into their own hands.” – Caveat Emptor
Andy Kessler: WSJ: Tech Treadmill Wears Firms Out – Max Hopper’s “Rattling SABRE—New Ways to Compete on Information,” and finally in 2013 we got Rita Gunther McGrath’s “The End of Competitive Advantage.” Each of these takes describes a different stage in the life cycle of corporate tech. Hopper was, as Harvard professor James Cash noted, “the first person who really defined the marketing leverage that could come from using technology.” In the late 1950s Hopper helped build Sabre, an automated flight-reservation system, and in 1981 he helped design the first major frequent-flier program to give American Airlines a competitive “AAdvantage.” Yet by 1990 he worried that the game was over, suggesting that technology was “table stakes for competition.” Hopper noted that “SABRE’s real importance to American Airlines was that it prevented an erosion of market share.” That insight comes to mind watching the Streaming War of 2019. Netflix and Amazon have a huge lead in streaming video. But eventually everyone uses the same technology. Tim Cook wants in, so Apple TV+ launches Nov. 1 with (probably overpaid) Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Robert Iger wants in, and Disney paid (probably too much) for control of BAMTech, the streaming-video technology developed by Major League Baseball, which it is deploying for streaming services Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu + Live TV. AT&T wants in and paid (again likely too much) for Time Warner to create HBO Max. NBCUniversal wants in too. See the trend? Google ought to rename its streaming service YouTube TV Max+
Are Publicis’ problems reflective of a wider market malaise? | Advertising | Campaign Asia – By placing Publicis on top of Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and Bartle Bogle Hegarty, they have destroyed those storied brands. By putting Publicis Sapient on top of LBi, Digitas, Rosetta and Razorfish, they have killed their digital brands too. As a result, now they are saying they have to transform the transformers – I agree that brands have been affected, but I’d also argue that the flight away from craft to disruption has also been probelmatic
Louis Vuitton Has a Factory in Texas Now, Marking its Third in the U.S. — The Fashion Law – LVMH – which is trudging ahead and abroad and “increasingly letting industrial logic and geopolitics govern supply-chain decisions,” per Dalton, while competitors, “such as Gucci, Hermès and Chanel have kept most [of their] production in Italy and France” – this is just business. And considering that LVMH’s Fashion & Leather Goods division, alone, brought in $15.8 billion in sales in the first 9 months of the year– with the group as a whole reporting revenues of $42.14 billion for the same period
Daring Fireball: Apple Removes HKmap.live From App Store – I still haven’t seen which local laws it violates, other than the unwritten law of pissing off Beijing. This is a bad look for Apple, if you think capitulation is a bad look.
The Nike of China Wants to Go Global and Has Xi in Its Corner – Bloomberg – Anta seems better positioned to challenge the Western sporting apparel giants because it’s building a family of brands with reach far beyond China. He says the company has been bolstered by its recent $5.2 billion acquisition of Finland’s Amer Sports Oyj, parent of ski brands Armada, Atomic, and Salomon, as well as high-end outdoor gear company Arc’teryx and equipment company Wilson. “Anta is heading towards the Winter Olympics in much better shape than Li-Ning was in 2008,” Martin says. “With the winter and outdoor sports brands, it’s very relevant. Anta’s already in a better position to leverage the sponsorship.” – (paywall) – interesting article. What isn’t discussed is that Salomon and Arcteryx are key providers to western militaries including special forces units. Arcteryx’s LEAF outfits have a lot of material and design innovations that have aided operators. This is a very real security risk that hasn’t been addressed at all. Buying Salomon and Arcteryx provides Anta with a bumper issue of technology and innovative design
Terminus 2049 | NBA events and national madness – sane Chinese thoughts on the NBA debacle, fascinating read which provides insight into the conundrum of correlation between Chinese national fragility / sensitivity and Chinese power
On-Board ‘Mystery Boxes’ Threaten Global Shipping Vessels | Threatpost – Commercial shipping environments are rife with vulnerabilities, according to researchers – up to and including unpatched “mystery boxes” that no one knows anything about. “In every single [nautical pen] test to date we have unearthed a system or device, that of the few crew that were aware, no one could tell us what it is was for,” said Andrew Tierney, researcher with Pen Test Partners – given the importance of logistics in the global economy this should be frightening. That sounds like a bumper issue of security faults…
Huawei’s 5G Tech Isn’t Worth the Risk – Huawei may assert that it has already taken an unbeatable lead in 5G infrastructure, judging who’s truly ahead in the field means looking at multiple criteria. Such indicators can include commercial contracts, deployed performance, integration with network infrastructure, and real technological innovation. For example, Huawei has claimed that it has more 5G patents than all U.S. companies combined, but quantity does not necessarily correlate with quality—especially in China, where patents are often of dubious value. – Interesting article, it burns Huawei in a different and probably more damaging way if it gained traction
China fact of the day | Marginal Revolution – Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period. There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”
What luxury brands can learn from Golden Week 2019 | Marketing | Campaign Asia – the silver generation has gone on to become the driving force behind holiday consumption. According to data from Alibaba, this demographic is now tech-savvy and will order food delivery, book travel packages online, and purchase high-end skincare and health packages from their phones. As much as luxury brands focus on millennials and Gen-Z, they shouldn’t ignore Chinese seniors, many of whom are retirees willing to splurge on luxury goods and go on luxury holidays. According to a study by the China-Britain Business Council, Chinese seniors who are 60 or older have set aside an average of 15 percent of their annual income for travel.
ADMAP | June 2019 | Tim Doherty on how China is finding its voice – YouTube – Chinese using voice interfaces for entertainment and surf the web, 77% use of voice on smartphones. I wonder how much of this is voice messages on WeChat rather than Siri type interactions? Interesting how strong government support has bolstered voice technology
Handbag Market Dynamics Have Changed | NPD – Today’s consumer is looking for a solution, not just a bag. Consumers expect a lot from the products they are buying, from function and versatility to a brand’s engagement in the social and environmental issues that matter to them, and the luxury market is not immune to these pressures
Here’s How the UK Avoided A “Vape Lung” Epidemic – “I think the difference between the U.K. and the U.S. are due to the American propensity to turn health issues into moral crusades,” University of Louisville doctor and tobacco addiction expert Brad Rodu told Vice. “It appears that policymakers in the U.S. are either completely ignorant of the history of tobacco, or completely ignore it.”
LinkedIn Adds Tools to Help Marketers Sharpen Their Campaign Targeting – Adweek – another Matt Muir zinger: The ability to create targets using Boolean parameters is quite a nice touch (if that sentence fragment meant nothing whatsoever to you then know that I am so, so jealous of your innocence), as is the live view of the exact demographic breakdown of your target audience as you set your ads up (so, for example, you can see what percentage of the overall X,000,000 people you could potentially reach are senior managers, what percentage janitors, etc). Really rather useful, although it doesn’t stop LinkedIn from being a miserable, awful place where joy goes to die
Facebook’s Workplace hits 3M paying users, launches Portal app in a wider push for video | TechCrunch – I’ll leave you with Matt Muir’s critique: – 3million paying users is a lot for a product which, whenever I’ve seen it in use, doesn’t appear to actually fulfil any practical purpose whatsoever other than giving HR another channel through which to spout platitudes about cake-based fundraising initiatives and what’s on the canteen menu today. Still, some people obviously like it (ha! Joke! Noone ‘likes’ this stuff; at best, one tolerates it while one waits for the sweet release of death), and should you be one of said people then you will be THRILLED to hear of a few exciting updates to the service. “Workplace is announcing several steps of its own into video. It’s releasing a special app that can be used on the Portal, Facebook’s video screen; and alongside that, it’s announcing new video features: captioning at the bottom of videos; auto-translating starting with 14 languages; and a new P2P architecture that will speed up video transmission for those who might be watching videos on Workplace in places where bandwidth is constrained.” Oh, and there will be a bunch of new materials and tools available to help the aforementioned HR people to get people to actually use the service, as well as METRICS and ANALYTICS and OTHER STUFF. Lucky, lucky us.
How NBA crisis brings US-China tension into American living rooms – Inkstone – “What used to be the gap between the hard consensus on China in Washington and the ambivalence or bias toward a positive perspective on the street, that gap is closing,” said Jude Blanchette, chair in China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington
Facebook to Pay $40M in Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit | Hollywood Reporter – According to a brief in support of the settlement, Facebook would pay $40 million to resolve claims. Much of that would go to those who purchased ad time in videos, though $12 million — or 30 percent of the settlement fund — is earmarked for plaintiffs’ attorneys. The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. “The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,” stated an amended complaint.
That’s the end of this bumper issue of links. Watch out for the next bumper issue that is likely to be equally diverse in nature
Apple designed in California and sold in China. Is it now Apple souled out to China? Apple is often cited as being a technology brand with a purpose and profiitable. It is unique in mobile phones, computers, tablets and set top boxes. It has a throw back model to the pre-Windows age of computing. It is vertically integrated.
They make key software for their computer. They make the hardware. And in the case of every device except the Mac, they make the key components. It does all this without owning the means of production.
Apple doesn’t own its factories. It owns some of the machines in assembly plants. But if a legal dispute broke out, it would struggle to get those machines out of a partner factory. It’s production volumes are so vast; this puts a further constraint on partner choice. Apple’s electronic components are made around the world:
Germany
Japan
Korea
Taiwan
China
USA
The device chassis, battery and assembly happens in China.
In software, Apple is reliant on two types of partners:
The open source community. iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS are all built on open source software. Apple takes them building blocks and innovates on top of them
The Apple developer community. Apple’s computers are nothing without software. On the iPhone about half the game developers are China based
The Apple difference
Their differentiator for the first thirty years or so was computing for non-technologists. Over time this has been articulated as:
Computing for the rest of us. Computers with expert product design that made them friendly in consumer eyes. This was to try and portray computing as an appliance or piece of consumer electronics. Brands as diverse as Sony and Cuisinart cited as inspiration. Critics of the Mac interpreted this focus on product design to call it a toy. They didn’t think that it represented ‘serious’ computing
https://youtu.be/C8jSzLAJn6k
Think different. Apple needed to keep a fraying customer base together. They came up with the brand anthem that highlighted the diverse range of users. This ranged from technologists and scientists to artists and creatives
https://youtu.be/cFEarBzelBs
It just works. It just works was initially used as a way to describe the intuitive Mac interface. My key attraction to the Mac was discovering thoughtful design at every aspect of the software. Even now, once you learn a keyboard short cut it works consistently in all software. In contrast, Ctrl + Q on Windows is inconsistent between some Microsoft apps
Apple extended this process from the iMac onwards, making it easier to:
Get online. The modem was in the iMac’s case. You plugged your phone line into the computer. You plugged the computer in and followed the software instructions. Apple even carefully curated high quality dial-up ISPs (internet service providers)
Set your email up
Get your address book on to your phone – something that became even easier with the iPhone
Get your music on to your phone or iPod
https://youtu.be/rnzCnPSQM7c
The pivot to privacy started back in 2003 with the launch of FileVault. It makes it easy to encrypt a hard drive partition, CD ROM or USB key. This was to help the Mac find acceptability within business. It also benefited consumers. Eight years later Apple launches the iMessage service which encrypts text, image and video messages by default. It also launched FaceTime video calling with encryption. Two years later, Apple builds Secure Enclave into the iPhone; encrypting the entire device. Over time, the technology moved from being business friendly, to consumer differentiator. It gave Apple clear separation from Google and Facebook. Privacy fitted into a Cook narrative about a company that promoted social good. This was part of the move to a post-Jobs Apple. One that thought social purpose was more than addressing the education market with high quality products. Tim Cook and Apple stood up for American civil rights and progressive ideals.
Concepts that in retrospect look rather naive when going into China.
Compromises in China
Apple has already given over control and cryptographic keys of its services in China. Apple users in China do not enjoy the kind of privacy and security protections of users elsewhere. Apple has not gone to the mats on behalf of users. Apple’s service offering has been severely restricted. Apple’s book offering had to be withdrawn. The app store is without whole categories of applications. Apple Music has a much reduced catalogue due to censorship. Check out Six times Apple gave in to China | Abacus for more information.
Compromises to China
The protests in Hong Kong shone a light on corporate kowtowing that has been going on for years. HKMap Live is similar to map / data mashups done for other protest movements. It plotted crowd sourced reports of police on a map.
The data offered is not granular in nature. It might give you a pointer if you commute is going to pop-up in the middle of tear gas and baton rounds.
This means that Tim Cook was gullible, or compromised when he made the following false statement about HKMap.live
“…we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.”
The problem is no one has come out and said in public what these instances were. Apple hasn’t provided any supporting evidence. One could guess that Apple’s calculus was that people can still use Safari to access the HKMap.live site.
But this comes on the back of Apple removing the Taiwan emoji from all iPhones using Chinese language input. That affects:
Chinese
Hong Kongers
Macau residents
Tim Cook has gone from progressive corporate citizen to Tolkein’s Gríma (Wormtongue). So what’s Apple’s pay-off?
Apple’s prospects in China
You could argue that Apple’s best days are behind it in China. WeChat has effectively built a smartphone OS inside its application. This has meant that the iPhone’s differientators and real world performance compared to Android are moot.
Tablets are less relevant due to Chinese preference for large smartphones.
Apple TV is crowded out of the market by Tencent content deals.
The Mac is a niche product that Apple is likely to maintain
In the face of a changing political environment and rising Han nationalism; Apple is in decline. It’s a question of how fast, which means that Apple feels obliged to placate a mercurial Chinese state.
Apple’s prospects on Capitol Hill
Big technology companies under the magnifying glass by lawmakers. Apple doesn’t have the issues that Facebook has. But it did develop most of the tax avoidance measures now used by Facebook, Google and Amazon. And the one thing both Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that China is a bad actor that needs to be confronted. Apple sits nice at the intersection of these two issues. Tim Cook took a high risk gamble positioning Apple in political crosshairs – in the run up to an election. I guess like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook is hoping Elizabeth Warren doesn’t get in.
This also offers other technology companies a unique proposition. Their lobbyists could throw Apple under the regulatory bus for commercial advantage. Amazon’s lobbyists managed to blunt the threat of Apple Books to the Kindle book store. Do you think they or Facebook won’t offer Apple up as the sacrificial lamb?
Thinking about trade specifically. Apple has already moved up to a third of iPhone assembly outside China due to the US | China trade difficulties. This leaves the rest of its products under threat:
From Chinese government action in the supply chain
From US government action against the supply chain
If you’re an American politician, Apple looks like a corporate Quisling. On the right wing, it acquiesces to Chinese government pressure, yet won’t help the FBI. On the left, it avoids its tax responsibility and kowtows to an authoritarian regime that wants to displace America.
Apple’s prospects with western consumers
One can understand why Apple has thought it could get away with Chinese practices. It was something that other companies do:
Apple hasn’t had significant pushback or scrutiny of its Chinese practices. Unfortunately, Chinese government hubris, 愤青 (fenqing) and the NBA has brought Apple into sharp focus.
The HKmap.live app is just the tip of a China iceberg:
It has handed over all the cryptographic keys for iCloud services in China to the government
iCloud hosting in China has been handed over to a Chinese state-owned company
Apple has censored books and music on behalf of the Chinese government
Apple has got rid of whole categories of apps like VPNs at the request of the Chinese Communist Party
It has pulled the Taiwan flag emoji from many devices
It’s handing over data to Tencent that bundles IP addresses with URLs. Apple claims its technique protects privacy, unlikely from the Chinese government technologists. Given a wide enough data sets and enhanced interrogation, you can whittle it down
Apple has requested that content providers on its new TV service censor themselves – not to offend the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people. Guessing South Park won’t be making content for Apple TV+
This makes Apple look like a hypocrite.
The San Bernardino lawsuit looks less like a stand for privacy a la Edward Snowden. Instead Apple looks like it prioritises the interests of the Chinese government over the US.
There is a breach of trust for some Apple customers. Can you now trust Apple in other areas such as privacy?
How much of a threat would China have to make in order for Apple to hand over the keys to mail and messaging globally?
Or maybe just countries along the Belt & Road, which would include the European Union
Access to Apple’s global data would be an intelligence trove of kompromat. China wouldn’t be able to resist.
If you’re an Apple customer, you know Apple just isn’t cool. The trust in Apple’s privacy USP is blown. You can’t be sure what Apple won’t do to make China or other governments happy.
Western consumers are waking up to Apple having shattered an unwritten moral covenant, set by its progressive actions.
In trying to avoid hurting the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people, Apple has burnt the trust of everyone else. And most of those 1.4 billion Chinese people Apple avoids offending won’t buy an Apple product. Which doesn’t look that great when you’re a shareholder.
Apple and developers
Prominent developers like Maciej Cegłowski (founder of pinboard.in) have been active in supporting Hong Kong protestors. It has put Silicon Valley developers on the opposite side to Apple. Cook will realise that there will be Apple insiders who sympathise with the Hong Kong protest movement.
Taking the morality out of the equation for the moment, if you’re an Apple developer or employee; you know Apple won’t have your back. Why should you help them? Why would you help facilitate them use your open source code to build their products?
