Over the weekend NYT published an engrossing article, laying out in fascinating, sometimes depressing and heartbreaking detail China’s role as the manufacturing superpower at the cost of middle class jobs in the U.S. by way of dissecting Apple as the primary case study. Those details have profound and far reaching implications for the future of global economy and America’s tech innovation in particular. While it’s common knowledge that everything is made in China, what some may not realize is that it’s not due to cheap labor rather China’s ability to “scale” at a breakneck speed and breathtaking manner that no other country in the world can match. And when it comes to manufacturing high volume consumer electronics, that’s where it counts:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” […]
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
This is a must read. If nothing else, to get the details behind first iPhone’s benchmark-setting all glass, scratch resistant screen. Speaking of which, that last bit you’ll get you.
Okay, this is really fucking cool. It’s what the Internet is all about. Nice work Facebook and Bing.
There’s an old joke. Heavy rains start and a neighbour pulls up in his truck. “Hey Bob, I’m leaving for high ground. Want a lift?” Bob says, “No, I’m putting my faith in God.” Well, waters rise and pretty soon the bottom floor of his house is under water. Bob looks out the second story window as a boat comes by and offers him a lift. “No, I’m putting my faith in God.” The rain intensifies and floodwaters rise and Bob’s forced onto the roof. A helicopter comes, lowers a line, and Bob yells “No, I’m putting my faith in God.”
Well, Bob drowns. He goes to Heaven and finally gets to meet God. “God, what was that about? I prayed and put my faith in you, and I drowned!”
God says, “I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?”
As SOPA looks shakier, the President handed a challenge to the technical community:
“Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue Web sites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders,” reads Saturday’s statement. “We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.”
All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi—hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?
Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.
WSJ has an interesting, albeit somewhat hilarious “behind the scene” look at famous bands and their lucrative yet publicity avert corporate gig racket :
The standard contract stipulates the rocker spend 20 minutes greeting people, with a limit of 50 hands shaken, says SAP’s Mr. Giampaglia. To get it over with, producers sometimes line guests up in groups of two before the performer enters the room. […]
Some stars make demands of their own: Before Metallica would agree to its first-ever corporate gig, for Salesforce.com last year, the band stipulated that several hundred members of its fan club be allowed to attend free.
While the die-hards and the conference attendees mixed peacefully, Metallica fans on the heavy-metal band’s website complained later about the corporate crowd.
“Everyone is just pretty much standing there motionless with their cameras out,” wrote one.
Finding an act for the typical 40-year-old tech-industry attendee isn’t always easy. […]
Indeed, stepping outside the mold sometimes misses the demographic mark. In 2010, Oracle hired hip-hop’s Black Eyed Peas; one older Oracle salesman, asked the following year, recalled their name as “something with food.”
Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on.
It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him.
“I’m not a nerd,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D- Calif.). “I aspire to be a nerd.”
“I’m a nerd,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”
This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.
“Google knows it. Viacom knows it. The Chamber of Commerce knows it. Internet democracy groups know it. BoingBoing knows it. But, the Internet hasn’t been told yet — we’re going to get blown away by the end of the year. The worst bill in Internet history is about to become law.”
Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
Late last night, word began to spread around the tech community that one of Diaspora‘s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had passed away. With much sadness, we’ve now confirmed this terrible news with the Diaspora team.
Incredibly sad news.
David Pogue of the New York Times, on Windows Phone 7.5
“Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered. Never in a million years would you guess that it came from the same company that cooked up the bloated spaghetti that is Windows and Office”
…and some 700 or so words later:
This is amazing, amazing stuff — why aren’t people cheering in the streets?”
Mind you, this is David Pogue - the great Mac fanboi who among other things, likes to routinely pen songs praising Apple and bashing Microsoft (putting his musical degree from Yale to good use.)
dnnyca asked: The hardware will be important but lately I have become increasingly impressed with Samsung's stable, which the 5,000 tablet's that Microsoft gave away for dev use were manufactured by. Also the Acer tablet he had looked great as well, so the hardware dept seems taken care of (just so long as they don't go with Dell..). At this point the only thing I worry about is marketing, I remember a while ago you posted about "windows 8 charging an iPad and saying who's your daddy" they should run that ad.
Marketing. That’s one nut Microsoft just can’t seem to figure out how to crack. After the first few promising WP7 ads (‘Really?’ and ‘Season of the Witch’) I was beginning to think they might finally turn that ship around - but they failed to follow up on it. Their lack of marketing chops has always been disappointing but it’s especially frustrating when they they fail to push something as compelling as Windows Phone.
Not only they don’t get how to market their products to end users (which says something about their creative department and choice of ad agencies) what’s more - they completely failed to recognize that it’s really the wireless carriers who need to play hardball with first. They control what kind of products gets pushed to millions customers. And these bastards want nothing to do with another mobile OS that they can’t fully control and rig to screw their customers with (which explains why they love Andriod to much: it’s their bitch.) And since MS has none of Apple’s mojo and Windows Phone offers none of Android ‘customization’ (read: bastardization) capability - the Wireless carriers in the U.S being the greedy, anti-consumer centric organizations that they’re - are reluctant to push Windows Phone based devices to their customers. And that’s where the real problem lies for Microsoft. Until MS address that - whether by strong arming the carries (the way Apple did to AT&T before releasing the iPhone back in ‘07) or sweetening the deal in some way or simply raising the awareness and demand for their product among consumers to a level that the stores can no longer ignore - sales of WP will continue to suffer. It’s a shame but that’s the reality.
However, I’m less concern about MS’s ability to push Windows 8 - that beast will take care of itself if nothing else for two simple reasons: 1. It’s Windows, with install base in the billions. 2. Hardware vendors are desperately seeking an attractive alternative to iPad, where Android has failed to come through the way it did in the mobile space. But the clock is ticking. They need to get this baby out into production as soon as possible, before another round of Android devices get their shots (Amazon Kindle Fire so far is the only one that’ll be successful, but that could others down the line.)
Bonus: imagine a W8 device next to the iPad on the store shelves at a local Best Buy or Fry’s. They both have similar hardware profile, thinness and size - one of them is pulsing with brightly colored active tiles that are constantly updating and the other is a stale row of static icons looking all too old and familiar. Which one will seem more inviting to a first timer?
dnnyca asked: Just saw a live demo of Windows 8 beta today on an Acer today by a friend. He tried running chrome, firefox, paint, doom, and many more programs and the system refused to crash. It has picture lockscreen which you can designate three "patterns" be it touch spot, lines or anything really. The thing just works. It'll put the iPad to bed.
This is excellent news. I’m beyond excited about Windows 8, despite some potential reservations (portrait mode use cases, burden of legacy app support, battery life etc.) Curious to see how it all plays out. I’d been meaning to install the dev preview on one of the machines - but haven’t gotten around to it. Plus, in order to really get a feel for it - you need one equipped with touch screen (which ALL display will be regardless - 2/3 years from now.) I just hope the OEM partners put out some decent hardware that live up to the full potential of Windows 8 or at least up to snuff with iPad in terms of battery life.
Two thoughts:
1) This is the Twitter equivalent of “Drop the ‘the’”
2) He’s right — but…
Twitter basically created (and now is trying to take over) an entire sub-industry (link shortening) because they didn’t plan well for this. Of course, early on, Twitter was largely based around SMS, and there is no metadata payload for SMS, so those links had to be included in the 140 characters themselves (and yes, SMS is 160 characters, but Twitter set aside 20 for usernames). Yet another reason why SMS needs to die.
Spot on.
How the Kindle Moved From BlackBerry to iPad
“Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people,” the former Amazon designer explained. “That’s why the first Kindle was so boxy, had the funky square keyboard and that strange scroll wheel on the side; it was all inspired by Jeff’s BlackBerry.”
Amazon Silk
Amazon introduced a new browser for the Kindle Fire called ‘Silk’. Looks pretty interesting. The idea behind a cloud accelerated pre-processed/cached web browser isn’t exactly new, but they seemed to have taken it to some new heights.
The video is great in it’s own right: from the distinct flavor of hand drawn motion graphics to the lighting, tone and pacing - without ever invoking any resemblance to a typical Apple or Google (Chrome) videos - certainly commendable in my book.
Google made a blog post earlier today that gives the phrase ‘sour grapes’ new meaning. In it - it makes an unseemly, laughable, even worse - a hypocritical attempt to re-frame an issue that’s clearly going to cost them in the near future.
The post, made by chief legal officer David Drummond, sounds like that whiny little kid in the class who gets caught stealing and then cries foul when confronted. I was going to do a point by point rebuttal but someone already did a great job calling them out.
Google is a great company that does a lot of important, cool stuff but I wish they’d just grow the f-ck up.
