Category: quality | 質量 | 품질 | 品質

I started my career working in laboratories measuring the particular attributes of a product. The focus was consistency and ensuring that the product fell into a certain range of measurements. But this focus was around consistency and fitness for purpose. When I got to read Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quality took on a difference aspect.

According to Pirsig quality, or value, as he called it, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it. It exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically.

Pirsig drew on his knowledge of western and eastern philosophy to try and define it by understanding its metaphysics. Inspired by the Tao, Pirsig proposes that value is the fundamental force in the universe. That it stimulates everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of quality.

He broke it down into two forms: static and dynamic quality. Quality is one, but it manifests itself in different ways.

So went much of the conversations that I had with my housemate and landlord Ian during my last year in university. I started my appreciation of quality through the influence of my father who was an engineer by both trade and inclination. Pirsig’s work tapped deep into my belief system and lodged there ever since. This was why you have this section of my site. Sometimes things grab me with regards to quality.

This gives an apparently random aspect to this category, but it isn’t really random at all.

Automata Eve launch

Automata Eve launched the other week and I got to go along to their headquarters just off the Pentonville Road to find out more.

Automata Eve first impressions

At £5,000, the Automata Eve sits at a weird place in robot manufacture. It’s an expensive hobby device or a lightweight industrial product. Automata freely admitted that they sit somewhere between the £1,500 hobbyist kits and starter industrial models that are £20,000+ excluding arm tools, programmable control units and everything else required.

Automata Eve human friendly product design reminded me a bit of early Apple Macs. Their very product design sophistication made them look like ‘toys’ in the eyes of IT departments. Automata’s Eve is an equally polished appliance as robot and it might take a bit more effort to have it taken seriously in light industrial roles.

Eve even has a lopsided Picasso-esque face with two buttons on the top of the arm in a vertical manner.

Maybe it needs a different colour palette of heavy plant yellow or yellow and black diagonal stripes better telegraph its industrial credentials.

The shadow of Brexit

Brexit afflicted sectors such as food preparation seem to be some of the people who have started to explore using Automata and rivals already. The companies realise that it will hard to get further workers from the likes of Stoke on Trent or Sunderland working on sandwich production lines. Robots are part of their plans to replace labour who decide to leave the UK. Automata assemble their robots in the UK, but their supply chain partners are half way around the world in Asia.

Pain is the mother of invention

The founders story reminded me a lot of the way that machine learning projects have historically been sold into clients by creative, digital and advertising agencies.

They used to work for Zaha Hadid Architects and had used algorithmic design. This gave Hadid’s work abstract yet organic lines. So when they were looking to use a series of interlocking panels, they expected that these could be mass-made and bent by robotics.

A bit like strategy and client services teams in agencies they over-estimated the capability of technology; in their case industrial robotics.

That plan didn’t go too well. Which got them interested in why there weren’t light industrial robotics. A good number of years later and the Automata Eve was born.

Industry robotics industry structure

What really surprised me was how industrial robots essentially use the same components and innovation tends to happen in the software instead. For instance industrial robots use a compact way of strain wave gearing.

Only a few companies make the components. This means that the industry is very horizontally structured like the PC or smartphone industries relationship between processor and software manufacturers.

Robots are already accurate enough to get rid of workers who don’t care

One of the case studies used in the presentation was about an industrial electronics company who replaced a human work station that did some pretty basic soldering.

For reasons that one could assume to be a lack of work ethic. By contrast Foxconn, seems to have failed in its efforts of using robots for smartphone assembly. The reason is that they require a high degree of dexterity, rather like a watch maker. Robots still struggle with very accurate placement, but a lot of low volume manufacturing tasks don’t necessarily need the same level of accuracy.

April 10, 2019
Apple and Jaguar Land Rover in China

Apple and Jaguar Land Rover blamed the Chinese economy for their recent financial results. The truth is probably more complex. What factors are affecting affecting Apple and Jaguar Land Rover that aren’t directly related to the Chinese economy?

The reality is that Apple and Jaguar Land Rover are being buffeted by very different forces, some of which are their own making.

Apple

China is a unique mobile environment and in some ways it mirrors the hopes (and fears) for the internet in the late 1990s. Oracle and Sun Microsystems spent a lot of time during the dot com boom developing technologies that would allow applications to run on the web. Enterprise software sudden had a user experience that could be accessed via a web browser. Java allowed applications to be downloaded and run as needed. Netscape had a vision of the internet replicating the operating system as a layer that would run applications. Microsoft also realised this which was why they developed Internet Explorer, integrated it into Windows and killed off Netscape. The Judge Jackson trial happened and that was the start of the modern tech sector allowing Google and Apple to rise.

Move forwards two decades and most computing is now done on mobile devices. In China, WeChat have managed to achieve what Netscape envisioned. Their app as a gateway to as many services as a consumer would need including a plethora of mini applications. It doesn’t suffer the problems that native web apps have had in terms of sluggish user experiences. In addition, WeChat has invested in a range of high-performing start-ups to built a keiretsu of businesses from cab services, e-commerce, property companies and even robotics. In the meanwhile Tencent who own WeChat have a range of consumer and business services as well.

What this means for Apple is that many of its advantages in other markets are negated in China. The OS or even performance of a smartphone doesn’t matter that much, so long as it can run WeChat and a couple of other apps. The look and feel of the app is pretty much the same regardless of the phone OS. Continuity: where the iPhone and a Mac hand-off seamlessly to each other doesn’t matter that much if many consumers use their smartphone for all their personal computing needs.

This has been the case for a few years now in China – but Apple haven’t found a way around it.

As for phone industrial design – Apple lifted the game in manufacturing capability by introducing new machines and new ideas. To make the iPhone 5, Apple helped its suppliers buy thousands of CNC machines. This grew the manufacturers capability to supply and the amount of pre-owned machines that eventually came on the marketplace. It meant that other manufacturers have managed to make much better phone designs much faster.

That meant Chinese consumers can buy phones that are indistinguishable from an iPhone if you ignore the logo and function the same because of China’s app eco-system. Again this has been the same for a few years and has accelerated due to the nature of the dominant smartphone form factor. The second iteration of the iPhone X form factor is what really changed things. The phones were different to what has come before, but they weren’t demonstrably better. They were also more expensive.

In the mean time Huawei and others have continued to make progress, particularly in product design and camera technology – the two areas where Apple led year-on-year. Huawei devices can be expensive for what they are, but they gave domestic manufacturers ‘brand permission’ in the eyes of many Chinese consumers to be as good as the foreigners.

This wasn’t helped by Samsung’s missteps in the Chinese market that started with the global recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 battery recall. Samsung hasn’t managed to make that gap back up and seems to make marketing missteps regularly such as its recent tie-in with the ‘fake’ Supreme brand holder China. If you’re a Chinese consumer the additional value or status that you used to see in foreign handset brands is now diminished. This seems to be a wider theme as domestic brands are also making similar gains in market share compared to foreign FMCG brands. Although there are also exceptions like baby formula.

Domestic brands have done a good job marketing themselves. BBK in particular are very interesting. Whilst Huawei makes lots of noise and bluster at how big they are, BBK creeps up. It has a number of brands in China and abroad OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and RealMe going after particular segments. The brands are focused but run separately like companies in their own right. Apple’s marketing riffs on its global marketing (though it did a great Chinese New Year themed ad last year). This reinforces the perceived common view that foreign businesses are full of hubris and don’t sufficiently localise for China. Apple’s recent pricing strategy in a market where this is so little to show in value provided looks like the epitome of hubris.

Finally, there has been a massive amount of consolidation of brands in the China smartphone market over the past four years. That provides for scale in terms of logistics, supply chain, design, component sourcing and marketing.

Jaguar Land Rover

If we move to the automotive sector and look at Jaguar Land Rover – their problems in China look self inflicted. China’s car market has declined for the first time in 20 years. But it seems to have mostly affected brands like Hyundai rather than prestige brands like Mercedes Benz or BMW. The reasons why aren’t immediately apparent. Yes diesel cars are less popular, but BMW, Audi and Mercedes make diesel cars.

Jaguar Land Rover aren’t the only foreign brand suffering: Toyota has had problems in China since the last round of strong anti-Japanese sentiment exploded in 2012.

More information

Why Does WeChat Block Competitors, While Facebook Doesn’t? | Walk The Chat

Apple’s China Problem | Stratechery

Samsung recalls Galaxy Note 7 worldwide due to exploding battery fears | The Verge

Samsung angers hypebeasts by partnering with fake Supreme brand in China | The Verge

Fake News: Samsung China’s Deal With Supreme “Knock-off” Spurs Drama | Jing Daily

Chinese car sales fall for first time in more than 20 years | World news | The Guardian

January 21, 2019
K pop bandwagon & things that made last week

Puma have got on the K pop bandwagon to sell sneakers to Indonesians. Historically Korean brands have been most adept at getting on the K pop bandwagon. It is as common as chips in Korea. They have started to extend these K pop bandwagon campaigns abroad. Foreign brands have started to get in on the act. For instance, Girls Generation partnered with Casio’s Baby G range of watches. More Indonesia related content here

A vintage advert from Apple that was all about storytelling through its customers. What’s On Your PowerBook. What’s interesting is the storytelling and the ‘lone computer user’ narrative of the Apple PowerBook. It leaned into the otherness of Apple products in the Windows world and equated that otherness to being fashion forward. During the dark days Apple was a hold out in the creative industries from graphic design to fashion and novelists.

Nike have launched a more polished looking self lacing trainer fulfilling the promise of the future from the film Back To The Future 2. They also did a good video that discusses the design of the Nike BB Adapt sneaker. The interview gives you a good insight into the Nike innovation and design process.

Pretty much everyone has shared their opinion on Gillette’s virtue signalling dog whistle advert on toxic masculinity – so I feel no reason why I should anything to the discussion. Instead, check out this Bosch ad that I got through my friend Ian. Where do you start with it? Its not nerd core as its trying to hard. I could think of a few reasons why the main protagonist lives alone with this smart home and smart car. I am sure that there would be a lot of raised eyebrows in Germany over it. Its very far away from where I would have thought that the Bosch brand would be.

January 18, 2019
Mac software recommendations
Why a list of Mac software recommendations and why me? I have been using Macs since my early cough, cough – ok let’s just say a long time. I bought my first Macs secondhand. The first one was a sit-up-and beg style Macintosh SE. This is in what nerds now call the Mac Classic style machine. This allowed me to proof club flyers on a computer rather than getting bromides made. The machine paid for itself in less than five months.

I moved on to a PowerBook 165 running ClarisWorks and early Internet software.

I managed to connect it to the net through my university and surf in 16 shades of grey. Some of the software I recommend has been maintained almost as long as I have been a Mac user which says something about the power of developer’s core ideas.

At the time there wasn’t the Mac user community that there is now. But what users there were made up for their lack of numbers with fierce passion.

When you bought a Mac you could tap into a real world community. My University user group met once a month and swapped software and tips.

It was this rather than the iMac which made sure Apple had a user base by the time Steve Jobs returned. Mac related magazines filled in the knowledge gap and carefully curated demo software. It was through this experience that I learned about some of the apps here. I have stayed loyal to them over the decades and upgraded them as required.

Nowadays there is a larger, but less passionate community. We tend to share web services rather than apps. We also tend to gather around the biggest rather than the best. I am a great believer in supporting independent development where the applications work better for me. This the lens that I view software through in making the recommendations below. Some of the recommendations come from people I trust like Mat Morrison. Where I have shared a piece of software I don’t use I’ve made this clear below.

Despite the disappointing* product designs of the last two MacBook Pro revisions, I’ve been surprised as a few more friends move to the platform. They’ve sought advice myself and other friends. So I thought I’d consolidate the knowledge and put it out there.

The process caused me to reflect on the software that I use and value. I like:
- Products that work both online and offline, so Hemingway’s native app made it in rather than the Grammarly Chrome plug-in. Internet isn’t as ubiquitous as one would have you believe, God knows I love technology, but I am not blind to its faulty implementation
- Products that seem to be mature and have gone through a couple of development cycles
- Software has to fit me, rather than the other way around. I’ve built up behaviours over my time using computers and networks that seem to work for me. But we have different learning styles and habits, which was part of the reason why I’ve suggested choices that I don’t use but others like. Chances are one of them will work for you, but not all of them will
- I prefer not to depend on web giants like Google, Facebook et al when it comes to software. Their ‘always in beta’ philosophy can make for inconsistent product experiences – look at how the Skype consumer platform UI and functionality has changed for the worse over time. ‘Always-in-beta’ also results in abrupt ‘sunsets’ – that’s tech speak for killed off. This happens for a few reasons. The bigger they get, the bigger a service has to be in order for it to be worthwhile supporting. Their product strategy is about you as a product rather than you as a user. This is true if its an application or an API. Their entry into a market can see them decimating small competition; once that has been completed if there isn’t megabucks they’ll leave just as fast. The RSS news service Google Reader is an exemplar for this process. I love new shiny things as much as the next nerd, but I also don’t want to invest too much into them if they can disappear just as quick
Communications

Communications used to be a simple process for me, as I used to run Adium.

At one time Adium supported ICQ, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. Adium still exists but many of the main instant messenger platforms don’t. These days things are a little more complicated for me.

I run Apple’s Messages.app which allows me to use my iPhone’s SMS service and contact other Apple product users. It’s encrypted which is nice. It’s so simple, even my parents have managed to master it.

I use Slack to keep in touch with a number of professional groups.
My friends in China and Hong Kong use a mix of WhatsApp desktop app and WeChat’s desktop app.

I don’t use it so much any more but LINE and Kakao Talk make a couple of good desktop apps too. The Economist and Wall Street Journal do good content on their LINE channels. Bloomberg and the UK agency Battenhall publish some good content on WhatsApp that are worth subscribing to.

I use the consumer version of Skype to dial into conference call bridge numbers. I have used Skype for Business whist working at Unilever and Publicis – it wasn’t a positive experience.

I know some friends that find Franz handy, it seems to support an eclectic collection of services; but not all the ones I need covered.

Evernote alternatives

Evernote wasn’t the innovator that many people think it is. DevonThink and Yojimbo have been longer in usage amongst a small but dedicated Mac user base.

DevonThink – positions itself as document management. It also syncs across devices. It is an expansive and thorough piece of software, I’ve tried it. It’s great, but just wasn’t for me. Devon Technologies also have some interesting products that do web and system search. They have been handy for friends in recruitment headhunting research.

Yojimbo – In my personal experience I found Yojimbo easier to use than DevonThink. Both are great tools, but its a question of what makes the most sense for you. I think you should try both and see which one works best for you.

Graphics

OmniGraffle – great for diagrams and flow charts. OMNI are long time Mac developers and always seem to get the most out of the machine.

News

I have been vocal in my love of Newsblur RSS reader on other occasions, so won’t go into how fantastic it is here. I use a native Mac app called ReadKit to interface with Newsblur, Pinboard and Buffer on my Mac. This was really handy when I was in China, as the internet operates differently there.

ReadKit also has good integration with Buffer and Pinboard.in; services I use for social posting and bookmarking respectively. ReadKit isn’t perfect; in particular its persistent windows for posting to Buffer and Pinboard.in can annoy; but it works for me.

Office software

I use the default macOS applications Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts. app. They work flawlessly with iCloud to sync across iPhone, iPad and Macs. I have Google hosted, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP based accounts running on Mail.app side by side with no problems (so far).

I use the home edition of Microsoft Office (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Going for the home edition is a fixed cost rather than an Office 365 subscription. I use Hemingway to handle the creative process of writing and provide some editorial input. If I am writing a presentation for myself then I will use Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

I use OmniPlan as an equivalent to Microsoft Project.

Music

I still listen to ripped music on iTunes. Streaming services like Spotify often have a limited library of back catalogue music. Carefully curated playlists can see tracks disappear in an arbitrary manner when rights owners pull them from the streaming service. I listen to old DJ mixes, digitally bought music from BeatPort, iTunes and Bleep. I also rip CDs as often these are cheaper than their MP3 counterparts or haven’t made it into online music stores. iTunes also handles my podcasts and audio books. I have an iPod Classic that’s tricked-out with a 256GB SSD. I don’t run my phone’s battery down listening to music. I have been keeping track of my listening using last.fm’s app.

Productivity

BBEdit is a 25-year old piece of software for the Mac. It is a text editor but always comes in more handy than that descriptor implies. It’s one of them applications that I discovered on a Mac Format or MacWorld demo disk and then kept on using.

I haven’t used it, but Duet looks like a handy way of bringing a secondary screen around with you, if you are working out of client offices.

OmniFocus – list writing made better, but also handy for getting thoughts down on a presentation etc

Parcel – comes in handy for keeping an eye on your package deliveries.

PopChar X – I have been using PopChar since I was in college. I got it on a demo disc from MacFormat and immediately saw its benefit. Twenty years later I am still using the application.

Screen grabs

Papparazi is my go to screen grab tool, Skitch comes highly recommended from people I trust.

Utilities

Apple has got an annoying habit of taking ideas from great utilities and including them in future versions of macOS. This is great for users, but bad for Apple’s long-suffering developer community. It was independent developers who kept the faith during the dark times of the mid-1990s.

coconutBattery – recommended by a friend who uses it for ensuring that apps aren’t drawing excessive power when you’re on a battery. Here’s looking at you Google Chrome!

GraphicConvertor – yet another app that is over 20 years old and still supported. It manages to handle the most arcane graphics formats and allows you editing functions.

Fetch and CyberDuck – Fetch and Transmit have been the go to Mac apps for FTP clients for a long time. Familiarity for me means that Fetch edges out Transmit. Both are great pieces of software that I am happy to recommend. It is also worthwhile considering CyberDuck which is open source. CyberDuck has also done work on supporting Amazon and Google storage which some of my friends find invaluable.

Little Snitch – in the world of Mac users Little Snitch used to be famous for stopping Adobe software from phoning home. This was back before Creative Cloud when buying software was a major investment for agencies. So there was an interest in cracked user codes and careful monitoring of your network connection. Little Snitch is very useful these days as a really good firewall application.

Stuffit Deluxe – yes you can do a lot in terminal but you’d be hard pushed to find a compression app that handles as many formats as Stuffit. I even opened up some 20 year old .sea archives from my time in college.

TechTool – machine health monitoring that has been around since the dark days of the Mac. A great application to keep your Mac running the way you want it to.

Terminal.app (default app) – macOS is built on a proper operating system NetBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. Terminal allows you to access the power of the operating system. But with great power comes great responsibility, I strongly recommend some additions for your bookshelf. O’Reilly Publishing has some great books that provide advice on how to use the terminal notably Learning Unix for OSX. David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for macOS are worthwhile as references as well.
January 9, 2019
Good strategy inspired by Matt Holt
A couple of tweets on good strategy by Matt Holt inspired this post. Strategy and planning are considered to be disrupted by changes in the advertising industry. It often boils down to ‘ who needs strategy when you have big data / machine learning’.

Big data; isn’t good strategy. Instead it tells you retrospectively where you should have zigged rather than zagged. It doesn’t plot an overall direction. It is usually pretty reductive only focusing on sales now. It doesn’t think about future sales through building a brand and its good standing.

In marketing automation, it is focused on ‘harvesting’ from the end of the marketing funnel.
- It is sacrifice. It’s about making choices and saying no
- It is specific. There is a specific well-defined problem to be solved.
- It is simple to explain (even if the subject matter is complex). If you’re setting a direction, the roadmap has to be clear for all stakeholders.
- it has elegance. Which is a good measure of its simplicity.
- It steers tactics. It provides a directional lens to the data and helps in deciding KPIs (key performance indicators) and HVAs (high value actions).
- Good strategy is stubborn in the face of the shiny and new. Strategy is not a fad is a long term roadmap. The shiny and new can be a facilitator at best. At worst its a distraction.
- It is saying no to excess. Keep the strategy focused on the objectives that it addresses
- It has its own intrinsic quality. For more on this I recommend reading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to understand more about the nature (or metaphysics) of quality
- Good strategy seems self evident in retrospect. It’s not just a way to solve the problem, but has been sweated out to optimise it to the point that it seems self evident in retrospect.
- It is emergent, but not realtime. A strategy needs to be able to flex as conditions change. Its the direction, not an exhaustive road map.
- It is not ‘big data’. Big data can be a source of insights that will help develop a strategy, but it’s not a strategy in of itself. For example the inspiration for Compare the Market’s meerkat campaign was misspellings in search data for the word market
More ideas related posts here.
September 9, 2018