哈囉 – here you’ll find posts related to Hong Kong. That includes the territory, the culture, business, creativity and history. I lived and travelled to Hong Kong a number of times, so sometimes the content can be quite random.
In addition, I have long loved Cantonese culture and cuisine, so these might make more appearances on this category. I am saddened by the decline in the film and music production sectors.
I tend to avoid discussing local politics, and the external influence of China’s interference in said politics beyond how it relates to business and consumer behaviour in its broadest context.
Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Apple Daily launched a new ad format that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Hong Kong.
If there are subjects that you think would fit with this category of the blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier to work in dark mode on my computer, which provides an interesting contradiction to idea
The white working class is a political fiction | The Outline – It turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”
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.
‘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
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?
Why strategy should embrace execution | WARC – The Nike ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ campaign was a really long process – about a year. In the beginning we had a vision to get really local. Then about halfway through the process, the terrorist attacks happened in London. And a picture emerged of a man fleeing the scene with a beer in his hand. Everyone inside London said that’s what it means to be a Londoner: no matter what happens, they hold onto their beer. And off the back of that, I wrote the line ‘nothing beats a Londoner,’ which wasn’t supposed to end up as the final line but it did. It just gave the creative more depth and a place to springboard from. It changed the energy of the work.
The more voters hear no-deal warnings, the more they support it | The Times – Much of this is simply because voters have heard it all before. Trust in politicians and the media, also seen as responsible, is at record lows. The legacy of the 2016 referendum campaign runs deep. Promises from both sides, from the infamous £350 million a week to forecasts of a recession, still endure as easy-to-reach examples as to why you should not trust anything a politician says. For up to about a year after the referendum, a handful of voters would repeat a number long forgotten in Westminster — that the Remain campaign had said leaving would make households £4,300 a year worse off. This was the archetype of nonsense, largely because of its precision. How could anyone know in such detail, to the nearest hundred, with such certainty, what the effect would be? It can only be a lie. But the aversion to anti-no-deal messages is about more than distrust. Where there is support for no deal in the country, it is fused to a deep sense of patriotism. A feeling that we are British, we have endured so much and thrived, of course we will be okay if we leave without a deal
Off-White, Vetements and The Paradigm of Luxury – “Disruption is evolution. Defining the word ‘luxury’ might be a start for defining disruption and evolution as the word and the concept of luxury has different meanings following the demographics of peoples and cultures according to age, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, income, and education”
