Mike Daisey and our attention embellishment disorder
Last night at Georgetown University, I stood up and applauded Mike Daisey after he was done speaking about why he lied. As a journalist, you are not supposed to stand up and applaud the people you’re covering, especially people who just admitted to lying about key details about workers they had (or hadn’t) met in China. However, Daisey hit on a fundamental truth about labor journalism in last night’s talk at Georgetown. He claimed he stretched the truth about his visit to a Foxconn factory in China as part of his play The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (which later became This Americans Life’s most downloaded episode) to dramatize a story of labor abuse that had largely been ignored. As a labor reporter who has often seen stories I have written about brutal working conditions ignored, I sympathized with Daisey and his broader critique of the problems of labor journalism.
By embellishing, Daisey did what an activist — not a journalist — does. He got too emotional in his pursuit of trying to take on a big corporation, so he stretched the truth. This doesn’t make it right, but it does make it more effective. And so it forces us to ask very deep questions about the level of sensationalism required beyond the standard mistreatment of workers to get the media to finally pay attention to labor stories.
Covering strikes and lockouts, I have seen workers do the same thing: stretch the truth because they wanted to get at the company.
In 2010, some locked-out Honeywell uranium workers claimed that the scabs taking their place at the plant could cause a nuclear explosion. Turns out they were wrong: The uranium level was too low to cause any explosion. But the uranium and other chemicals in the plant were toxic enough that, if released, they could poison the nearby air and river, which on one occasion during the lockout they did. By claiming a nuclear explosion could be caused, the workers were trying to draw attention to a series of accidents caused by scab labor that the media had largely ignored. They stretched the truth because they were so desperate to get attention to a situation that they were willing to lie a little to do it.
On Monday night at Georgetown, Daisey referred to previous reports about workers committing suicide at Foxconn factories in protest of poor working conditions. “What was most incredible to me was watching the story die,” he said. Seeing the story die was what motivated him to paint such a powerful narrative with his play and in some cases lie about what he saw. “The show was built as a virus. It got out there, and then the Times picked it up, thank God.” (It’s unclear if Daisey’s work caused the New York Times investigation into Apple’s supply chain, as Daisey implies.)
“Dozens of journalists had written about abuses of workers who make electronics in China, but it took a dramatization to finally draw attention to the issue. What does that say about drawing attention to farmworkers or other workers?” said Jennifer Luff of Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, who hosted the event.
As a labor reporter it’s shocking to me that the 4,500 Americans who die on the job every year in mainly preventable accidents go largely ignored by the mainstream media. In December, I covered the story of two teenage boys who had died in an entirely preventable workplace accident in 2010. Wyatt Whitebread, 14, and Alex Pacas, 19, were jumping on grain stacks in Mount Carroll, Illinois, to break up the grains that had stuck together in the humidity. But as the stacks began to sink rapidly, the two began to drown in a 30-foot-deep stack of corn. Rescuers were unable to reach the teenagers in time, and they suffocated to death. Both of the teenagers’ lives would have been easily saved if the company had followed the law that required the teenagers to wear a safety harness to prevent them from being trapped in the corn. The company was fined a mere $268,125 for these violations. Nobody went to jail for causing the deaths of these two teenagers.
from MediaFile:
A new iPad, the same iEthics
Several days after the launch of the new iPad 3, HD, or whatever it’s called, we all know about it’s blazing 4G capabilities, including its ability to be a hotspot, carrier permitting, of course. We know about its Retina display, which makes the painful, insufferable scourge of image pixelization a thing of the past. We know about Infinity Blade. We know that to pack all this in, Apple’s designers had to let out the new iPad’s aluminum waist to accommodate some unfortunate but really quite microscopic weight gain. We know the iPad’s battery life is still amazing, and its price point is altogether unchanged. We know Apple has adopted a cunning new strategy of putting the previous-generation iPad, as it did with the iPhone 4, on a sort of permanent sale, to scoop up the low end of the high-end market. (We wonder if this was Steve Jobs’s last decree or Tim Cook’s first.) We know a lot about the iPad.
But what we don’t know: How many of Foxconn’s nearly 100,000 employees will harm themselves, intentionally or inadvertently -- or their families or loved ones -- in the manufacture of it? And will the developed world ever acknowledge the dark side of these truly transformative technologies, like the iPad, or will we continue to tell ourselves fables to explain away the havoc our addictions wreak on the developing world? Is a device really magic if to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you have to kill a disappearing dove?
Those of us who have been technology journalists have long been subjected to the cult of Steve Jobs’s Apple, and those of us who are fans of technology are mostly well aware of the stark elegance and extreme usability -- even the words seem inadequate -- that come with using, let alone experiencing, Apple products. But the rumblings about Apple’s manufacturing processes started years ago, and the recent New York Times series on the ignobility of Foxconn as an employer blew a hole in the side of that particular ship of willful ignorance. Few Apple consumers can claim not to understand the human sacrifice behind their glowing screens -- the death, diseases, exhaustion, mental and emotional stress, and superhuman expectations placed upon the workers who bring these magic devices to life. It’s not just in the papers -- Mike Daisey’s This American Life podcast exposé on Foxconn and Apple is a mere click away, and most mainstream media have given at least passing coverage to the working conditions reflected in the Gorilla Glass on our devices.
Update, 3/16/2012: Mike Daisey's account of working conditions at Foxconn for This American Life has been retracted by the radio show. Other reporting linked to here describing similar episodes and working conditions has not been retracted as of this update.
To be sure, Apple isn’t the first company to exploit a developing society’s cheap labor. That’s a tradition that proudly goes back hundreds of years, arguably to the first triangle trades, or perhaps to Roman times. Maybe things have come full circle for China, and this is just another version of Marco Polo and the Silk Road. But there’s something insidious about a near-perfect system where the only factor beyond design is the human one. (Especially when those humans decide to jump off buildings.)
Apple has given more than lip service to the problem, and worker suicides appear to be down. But when will American consumers care how their iPads are built? When will they be told how many human hands had to touch the elegant machine, including the last pair that wiped off all the fingerprints with powerful solvents, and how many yuans were put in those hands at the end of the workweek? With technology taking an ever greater place in our culture and our society, when do we consumers begin to demand ethical technology, the way some of us now demand ethical meat and ethical investing?
The apps that run on these devices -- not just iPhones and iPads, but Kindle Fires and Samsung Galaxy Tabs -- enable social connection and sharing as never before. Communication across time, distance and borders has become free, or just pennies a minute. But few, if any, apps enable any sort of social organizing around things more important than discounted lunches or happy hours. In fact Groupon founder Andrew Mason famously abandoned his social-change startup to focus on the far more popular idea of building a coupon site. We like -- love -- the social tooling our devices allow us, as long as they cater to our essential selfishness as consumers.
How Apple, and everyone, can solve the sweatshop problem
Every few years brings us another sweatshop offender. In the 1990s it was Disney, and then Nike and Gap. The 2000s brought us Wal-Mart. The past few weeks Apple has been in the crosshairs.
One question is of paramount importance: How can we use this current public conversation to finally drive a different outcome? What must companies do so that 15 years after Kathie Lee Gifford tearfully became the first sweatshop poster child, workers who make and grow products for global consumers are paid fairly, protected from danger and free to advocate for themselves without fear of reprisal?
The good news is that these years of effort have created robust experience from which to identify what has gone wrong. The fundamental driver of “sweatshops” is that multinationals do not place value on good working conditions in their supply chains. This does not mean that a company doesn’t care about how those workers are treated, or that the company intends to act unethically or exploitatively. To the contrary, big companies require good conditions through vendor standards and “codes of conduct.” They build corporate responsibility departments whose staff have budgets to reduce the risk of bad working conditions at supplier factories and farms. But their work is much like the arcade game Whac-A-Mole: A problem arises in one factory that they take steps to fix, while other problems fester and ultimately break through the surface elsewhere.
For this to change, companies have to resolve the ways in which their business decisions actually drive irresponsible performance among their suppliers. Companies frequently speak with two voices when they talk to suppliers. Procurement officers responsible for ordering something from a supplier expect delivery of a quality good at a cheap price on a tight time frame. Corporate responsibility professionals embody the expectations that all those other business needs will be met, but in a responsible manner. Yet that responsibility gets ignored when a company makes last-minute design changes or increases order size. The supplier will still deliver a quality product on time, but will do so by keeping his employees at work overnight or for days on end. Without the ability to negotiate a higher price at the last minute, the supplier can’t pay the workers for their overtime without taking a loss himself. Thus responsibility is sacrificed by a company’s business decisions.
Instead, companies must learn to speak to their suppliers with one voice and reinforce that voice with action. Suppliers should get positive incentives in the form of higher prices, financial bonuses, long-term contracts or other benefits for maintaining good working conditions. In-house procurement and supply chain staff should be compensated more highly if they place orders with responsible suppliers. Taking these steps would allow businesses to integrate social responsibility with other business requirements like quality, price and delivery.
Workers must be part of this conversation as well. Line workers and harvesters are the best source of information about working conditions, no matter the industry. Only a worker can tell corporations with accuracy whether or not she is being paid according to her contract, whether she considers her work hours to be excessive, whether she is provided with drinking water and toilets during her long days, and whether she has been harassed or fired for “associating freely” by joining a union. By working with trade unions and NGOs, companies will learn what the reality is at their suppliers, providing an early warning when things go awry and a constituency that can help improve conditions.
To hold themselves accountable, companies need to communicate publicly what has changed as a result of their social responsibility efforts. Our recent survey of corporate responsibility reports captures a mind-numbing array of activities, but no analysis of what has been achieved. To its credit, Apple has demonstrated that communicating achievement is possible. The company remains the only multinational to quantify the impact of its supply chain social responsibility in dollar value for workers — disclosing that $6.7 million was returned to migrant workers who had been overcharged by unscrupulous labor contractors. This kind of disclosure leaves no doubt about its impact and stands in contrast to the usual corporate responsibility communication.
Apple is much important in those groups of companies that form tech-related electronics products that without involvement of Apple negative growth would be seen, as Citibank revealed….
Get all detail here,
http://www.geekscover.com/2012/05/mainta in-supply-chain-apple/
The Book of Jobs
Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits. Later, friends would theorize that he had been exercising what would prove a limitless capacity for sustained and gratuitous lying that came to be nicknamed the “reality distortion field.”
Jobs originally learned the “reality distortion field” from Bob Friedland, an enterprising hippie he met by chance one day when he returned early to his dorm room and found Friedland having sex with Jobs’ girlfriend. Bob was four years older than Steve, and had taken two years off to serve a prison sentence for LSD trafficking. Like Steve, Bob would eventually become a billionaire, just in the mining business. His followers would often invoke his old drug dealer nickname “Toxic Bob.”
Steve Jobs needed no nickname. As the title of his definitive biography reminds, Steve Jobs speaks for itself. His name was his essence, what set him apart even among greats like Einstein and Kissinger, iconic figures with whom he shared a biographer, Walter Isaacson (though not the cheesy, descriptive subheads Isaacson used in his books about the other two subjects).
Steve Jobs, the book, is very much a product of its time, which is to say, a product of its subject’s fastidious narcissism and the broader culture’s limitless capacity for nurturing it. With any luck future generations will saddle Steve Jobs, the brand, with the blemish of all the jobs (small “j”) a once-great nation relinquished because of brand-name billionaires like Jobs. But we are not there yet.
Arriving in stores all of a fortnight after his death, the book was instantly deemed by the New York Times as “clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio.”
In truth Steve Jobs is the antithesis of concise, but words have a way of inverting meanings in the reality distortion field. Surely Isaacson might have dropped one of 92 references (according to Kindle) to Bob Dylan.
Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) “How many of you have taken LSD?” Jobs taunts an audience of Stanford business school students. “Are you a virgin? How many times have you taken LSD?” he demands of an Apple interviewee. Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid.” Tripping was “one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life.” People who had never dropped acid “would never fully understand him.” The generations that followed his own were more “materialistic” and less “idealistic” for not having tripped; also, they all looked like “virgins.” In the binary world within Steve’s reality, having consumed LSD was the key determinant of whether a colleague or employee was deemed “enlightened” or “an asshole.”
Getting a bit tired of this whining about foxconn. The chinese spent 4 billion on art last year alone.
“The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.”
Who is responsible for taking care of their people? Us or china. Why are we responsible for keeping people under an unelected government happy, they should be unhappy with their rulers.
45 million americans are on food stamps and the yuppies in america work over their guilt by crying over foreign workers, its an interesting pathology on display here.
from Katharine Herrup:
Are corporations really occupying #OccupyWallStreet?
There are two stories about the corporate hijacking of #OccupyWallStreet on Reuters.com. One piece talks about how U.S. ice cream maker Ben & Jerry is making a laughing stock of the protestors by issuing a statement in support of the protest:
The directors of the board of ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s released a statement saying they were supporting the protest.
But this corporate alignment doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. Instead of drumming up support for the protestors it has made them something of a laughing stock. Papers, blogs and TV reports are running competitions for the best flavour ice-cream Ben & Jerry’s could create to honour the protests (ocu-pie is gaining some traction). But all of this is distracting from promoting the protestors’ aims and message.
By the way, here is the link to Ben & Jerry's official statement. I agree with Kathleen that having corporate support would doom the protest if the corporation were, say, Bank of America, for instance, but Ben & Jerry's is no Bank of America.
All that Ben & Jerry's board is saying is this: "We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement." Besides, Ben & Jerry's is not donating money to help fund the protests (at least not yet). So how exactly does a company that's lobbied for a Constitutional amendment that would limit corporate spending in elections hijack a protest that would fight for that mission as well?
Yes, Ben & Jerry's sold out to Unilever, a Dutch-British corporation with headquarters in Rotterdam, Netherlands. But Ben & Jerry's was founded with a distinct social mission, which they've held on to despite the buy-out. And, despite being part of a global conglomerate now, Ben & Jerry's is a company that's long been associated with tie-die loving, beard rebelling, free loving Vermont hippies. The difference in their support is that the company isn't out to rape people of their money.
Meanwhile, this piece claims the protests are shallow because how can the protestors be against corporations when so many of them love and use products by Apple, a huge U.S. corporation?
While the new movement is undoubtedly counter-cultural, corporate leaders and politicians have learned how to co-opt such incoherent anti-establishment sentiments. Apple, for example, has done brilliantly by combining high tech, high prices and a veneer of counter-culture. Occupy participants use more than their share of Apple products.
Indeed, the grief over the death of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, gives a more accurate cultural reading than Occupy. The college dropout who wandered to Asia looking for enlightenment became a hero for many of the 99 percent. They may feel oppressed by the state of the economy, but they sense they have more to lose than to gain from any substantial change in the system that has provided iPhones and iPads. So what does OWS signify? The shallowness of our discontent.
Well said, netizen_james! In the fairy-tale world of sound-bites, corporate “expectations”, and the media that supports them, there is no room for nuance, subtlety, or the notion of the “greater good.”
As a result they miss the point, the forest, and the trees.
Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit
By Clayton Christensen and James Allworth The opinions expressed are their own.
Steve Jobs retires as the CEO of Apple with a reputation that will place him amongst the pantheon of history’s great global business leaders. Many people have written about what makes Jobs and Apple special, but I think they’re missing what truly set him apart. Jobs has succeeded by eschewing the one thing that most people view as the raison d’être for companies — profit.
When I left the industry to come to academia 22 years ago, it was driven by a set of questions that had troubled me for some time. Why was it that the best run companies in the world — companies that have had incredibly smart leaders, following carefully detailed plans and with tremendous execution ability — reliably seem to come unstuck? The answer to this question is what has become known as the theory of disruption.
In a cruel twist of irony, the pursuit of profit — something that Wall Street pushes so hard — is what leaves companies open to being displaced. As they grow, their ability to find opportunities that are big enough to sustain their growth is reduced. They become myopic; they listen only to their best customers. They focus disproportionately on their most profitable products, and strive to improve these the fastest.
The American auto manufacturers have suffered at the hand of disruption in the past few decades; they focused on their most profitable vehicles, and abandoned less profitable markets when low-cost entrants emerged. The Japanese came along with their smaller, cheaper vehicles; the Big 3 retreated upmarket all the way to SUVs and trucks. It was not long before Toyota was winning the sales race. Now, the Japanese are going through the same process, fending off the Koreans.
In short, disruption describes how the incumbents move upmarket, and leave the bottom of the market completely open for scrappy upstarts to enter. It explains the rise and fall of many great companies.
But there has always been one company that doesn’t follow that pattern. At some point in my class every year, a student raises his or her hand and asks: “What about Apple? Aren’t they a high-end, upmarket player? Why haven’t they been disrupted?”
I agree this is so hard to do. Apple grew into this in the big, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but in many small ways dumping the Mini-iPod for solid state Nano-iPod, dumping the floppy drive in iMacs, dumping ADB for USB, dumping SCSI for Firewire, dumping ethernet for WiFi [remember Apple first Airport was 5X cheaper than competitors], dumping CD/DVD drive for MacBook Air, not jumping on Blueray, etc.
In other words, in a host of small ways Apple made the choice to disrupt itself – this helped build the culture. When you look at Apple’s competitors, they never never make that leap. Whether in a big or small way and then later try mimic Apple or in the case own SAMSUNG be a quick follower, but even there they can’t make the break, stylus on a fat cell phone?
Where I run into a problem is understanding the job to be done that Apple consciously or unconsciously does. Is it “build the stuff we want” the way to think about jobs to be done in a practical sense?
Apple over Microsoft by a TKO
– Robert X. Cringely has been writing about technology since 1987 and blogging since 1997. His work has appeared, well, everywhere, but can mainly be read at http://www.cringely.com. The views expressed are his own. –
Winning by a technical knock-out (TKO) over Microsoft, Apple this week became, according to Standard & Poors, the second most valuable NASDAQ firm by market cap after Exxon-Mobil (click here for more on S&P’s ranking). What a difference 13 years makes! Apple is on a roll and while Microsoft is far from down and out it is clear that the competitive momentum lies these days with Cupertino more than Redmond.
When Steve Jobs assumed the CEO position at Apple on July 9, 1997 Apple shares cost $3.42 and the company had a market cap of around $3 billion. This week Apple shares hit $266 with a market cap of $241 billion — 80 times larger than it was 13 years ago. Microsoft shares, in contrast, went from $17.67 to $31 in the same time frame — not even a doubling despite more than $80 billion in share buy-backs by the company.
So what’s going on here, really? Having known both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for more than 30 years, it comes down to market transitions and the fact that, as Gates explained to me many years ago, “the way to make money in this business is by setting de facto standards.” And while Windows and Microsoft Office remain the biggest de facto standards of all, Microsoft hasn’t created any new such standards in over a decade while Apple has the iPod, iPhone, a resurgent line of Macintosh computers, a huge retail operation, and dominant market share in music sales.
What’s really significant here is that the computer industry is undergoing a transition to web services and mobile hardware, neither of which are dominated by Microsoft. Yet in each Apple holds a leadership role. So while Microsoft can continue to live off Windows and Office fat for years to come, absent some very dynamic product initiatives, the long term trend for Redmond is far from good.
The trend line is definitely up for Apple and mildly down for Microsoft. It took 13 years to do it, but Apple is well positioned now to take Microsoft’s crown. I mean it. Look at the downward price erosion of Microsoft Office caused by a combination of Open Office and iWork, which is down to $30 on the iPad. How long will it be until Apple is giving iWork away to sell hardware — an option Microsoft doesn’t have? Not long. By then a bit more of Redmond’s goose will have been cooked. Digital market leadership is now Apple’s — not Microsoft’s — to lose.
But that doesn’t mean that Apple’s success is guaranteed any more than is Microsoft’s failure. If Apple is going to maintain its momentum it will have to take on bigger and bigger competitors, which Steve Jobs seems eager to do. Not just Microsoft, in this case we’re talking about the publishing, broadcasting, and movie industries, as Apple moves to dominate those media the way it already does music. Microsoft is nowhere to be seen in any of these venues.
Apple is not winning by a TKO (Technical Knock Out) over Microsoft, I would say that it is winning by a PKO (Product Knock Out) and a MCKO (Market Cap Knock Out). I don’t find Apple being a better technology oompany than Microsoft, more like a better product company than Microsoft. I don’t know how the writer can imagine people will stop using Microsoft Office or Windows and iwork will take market share. Even if we dont like Windows, a whole lot of us cannot give up MS Office.
Except for multi-touch, apple has not delivered any revolutionary technology. The touch screen mobile phone existed in 1994 (IBM Simon), the first smart phones (widely adopted) were Blackberry. And anything that you can find on an iphone (technology wise) exists in other smart phones out there (Nexus One, Droid).
I feel whereas Microsoft spends a lot of energy on research and developing/exploring new technology, Apple spends that same amount of time dreaming up something they can sell in the market. As a technology worker, I find Apple’s approach limiting and don’t feel like its a technology company other than the fact that they sell technology products.
For real results on climate, look beyond Copenhagen
– Aron Cramer is the president and CEO of BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability. He is also coauthor of the forthcoming book Sustainable Excellence (Rodale 2010). The views expressed are his own. –
(Updated on December 17th to correct figure in McKinsey study in paragraph 7.)
As world leaders seem uncertain about whether a binding treaty is even possible at Copenhagen, it’s important to remember what was already clear: Twelve days in Copenhagen were never going to solve climate change anyway.
No doubt, these negotiations, now extending into 2010, are crucial. The sooner we can seal a global deal to reduce emissions, the sooner we can avoid catastrophic climate change. But as important as the treaty negotiations in Copenhagen’s Bella Centre are, even a successful outcome will be for naught if boardroom decisions and factory processes aren’t reoriented toward a low-carbon future.
To steer the world in that direction, business must change how it operates, with a shift of historic proportions. Otherwise—like the Kyoto Protocol of 1997—a new international climate agreement won’t achieve its goals.
Making this change requires business to focus on innovation, efficiency, mobilization, and collaboration—and that work must start now.
At every turning in point in history, from the advent of the railroad to the internet revolution, innovation has redefined our economy. Solving climate requires exactly the same thing. Everything about a climate-friendly economy—from the basic products we use to the places we shop to how we commute—will look different.
from Commentaries:
Apple-Google learn Corporate Governance 1.0
LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The resignation of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple's board should come as no surprise to anyone with an inkling of what corporate governance means.
But then Silicon Valley's idea of corporate boards has long consisted of cozy, interlocking directorships which would be considered collusion in most other industries.
Google's CEO is not leaving Apple's board voluntarily. He is only stepping down in response to the increased government scrutiny of obvious potential conflicts of interest between the two companies.
Yet regulators shouldn't be content with Schmidt's departure. The truth is that Apple and Google have been heading into the same markets for years. A veritable chain of overlapping business ties remain in place even if the most obvious formal link is now broken.
The chairman of Apple's board, former Genentech CEO Art Levinson, remains on Google's board. Another Google board member, Ann Mather, is the former chief financial officer of Steve Jobs' former animation company, Pixar Studios.
Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel Corp, Apple's main chip supplier, also sits on Google's board. Al Gore remains on Apple's board, but in his new turn as venture capitalist he has many business ties to Google and its founders. Gore is a partner of Google board member John Doerr at legendary Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins.
For months, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been examining Schmidt's participation on the boards of the tech world's two most dynamic companies. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission said it was looking into Apple's decision to reject a Google phone application to run on the iPhone.
This reader generally finds Eric Auchard easier to follow than in the present article, which ought to be interesting, but in my opinion leaves much room for confusion.
Is the point here that Apple and Google are not competing sufficiently against one another, or that they’re competing too much and if so, how could this possibly be the case? Frankly, I’d like to see them compete more rather than less, but it’s really hard to tell from what has been written here whether they do and what makes them any worse than [insert long list of major U.S., corporations here].
In passing, would it not be appropriate also to actively question the debilitating role in post-IPO terms that VC can and too often does exert upon emerging industries, by dictating terms of policy and players involved? There’s more than a smattering of governance ethics needing dealt out and enforced in the entire business sphere of so-called Venture Capital, and has been for over a decade. Which brings us to the present.
Corporate governance – or lack thereof – would be a fundamental topic of immense importance if properly argued across the board in American [for lack of a better word] industry.
I for one would like to see corporate cartel considerations scrutinized more closely in general, rendered transparent, (within reason) enforceable and, particularly in this case, put in better perspective before concluding the debate.
How Apple can take bite of business market
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Apple Inc is taking steps to make its computers run on corporate networks, but these moves fall far short of ensuring Mac users win equal standing in business.
Full corporate access for Apple computers inside businesses remains years away. If and when it comes, acceptance is more than likely to be the result of broad trends reshaping the office computer market, rather than Apple’s own product genius.
This week, the reigning consumer king of computers, music players and smartphones showed off a new operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, with a handful of tantalizing features built for business.
The new software, due out later this year, will connect Macs to Outlook e-mail systems running Microsoft Exchange — the way that most office workers manage their e-mail, calendars and contacts.
In doing so, Apple is addressing a key issue in the classic Mac vs PC debate over whether its machines are practical for office tasks.
Of course, multimedia-rich Macs already predominate among graphic artists and many Web software designers. And Apple computers are popular with small and medium-sized businesses with skeletal technical staffs.
We have a Mac at home and like it. My wife is having to fill in an online accounting form to the state government because of her business. The state government is requiring the procedure use Access which only works with PCs, not Macs. It is things like this that will make it extremely hard for Apple to make inroads to the business world.
Mike Daisey’s monologue relied extensively on the work done by China correspondents. For example, the story of the workers injured by n-hexane in Suzhou was extensively reported by resident correspondents in Beijing and Shanghai. Daisey never credits them, but rather claims to have met people damaged by the chemical on his own in Suzhou.
Is that the “boring reporting” that Mike Elk looks down upon in this editorial?
It speaks very poorly of Reuters that it would publish an editorial in which a writer blames a case of journalistic misconduct on the reporters who actually did the hard work and reporting that Daisey didn’t. Shame on Mike Elk, and shame on Reuters. This lowers both of your reputations. Despicable.