The Great Debate

from MediaFile:

A new iPad, the same iEthics

Paul Smalera

Mar 9, 2012 19:54 GMT

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.

The Book of Jobs

Maureen Tkacik

Feb 22, 2012 15:36 GMT

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.”

Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit

Clayton Christensen

Aug 29, 2011 17:50 BST

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?”

Apple over Microsoft by a TKO

Robert X. Cringely

Apr 23, 2010 14:59 BST

– 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.

from The Great Debate UK:

New iPhone small step towards global domination

-Tom Dunmore is editor-in-chief of Stuff magazine. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Yesterday, Apple unveiled the latest version of its wildly popular iPhone. And it was quite a show, despite the absence of Apple's usual ringmaster Steve Jobs.

The keynote speech at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco was heaving the massed ranks of the global media, hyped by rumours of mini iPhones, touschscreen Macs and Steve Jobs' early return from sick leave.

In the end, Apple's hardware announcement was more prosaic - the new iPhone 3G S looks exactly the same as the old iPhone 3G but is faster, has a better camera, and offers voice control.

But it quickly became clear to the audience that the iPhone is about much more than hardware. Developer after developer took to the stage to show off their new software, which ranged from multiplayer games to a medical application that allows doctors to remotely monitor a patient’s vital signs.

There are already 50,000 programs available from the iTunes App Store, and the 40million iPhone and iPod Touch users have each downloaded an average of 25 apps - taking the total downloads to over 1billion since the App Store launched less than a year ago.

Many app downloads are free, but plenty of developers are making a good living from selling their wares to this growing audience, and the new iPhone 3.0 software - due out on June 17 - will allow them to charge for updates and subscriptions from within their applications.

Are a CEO’s health problems a private matter?

– Dana Radcliffe is a Day Family senior lecturer of business ethics at the Johnson School at Cornell University. The views expressed are his own. —

Are a CEO’s health problems a private matter? Or does he or she have an obligation to disclose them to investors and other stakeholders?

These are questions Apple and its iconic co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs have had to face ever since he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003.  Happily, the disease proved to be treatable with surgery, which Jobs underwent in 2004.  But shareholders didn’t learn that Apple’s chief had been ill until he sent out an email to employees, announcing that he had had cancer but was now “cured.”

The issue of what, if anything, the company should disclose about its CEO’s health concerns resurfaced last summer, when Jobs spoke at Apple’s annual developers conference.  There he appeared, as the New York Times put it, “unusually thin and haggard.”  Reacting to the inevitable rumors that Jobs was ill again, the firm’s public relations department reported that he was suffering from “a common bug.”

A PRIVATE MATTER

However, according to the Times’ John Markoff, Jobs told some associates that he was experiencing “nutritional problems.”  Moreover, people close to Jobs told Markoff that in early 2008 he had a surgical procedure to treat a problem related to his weight loss.  Yet, in July, in a conference call after the release of Apple’s quarterly earnings statement, a senior officer deflected an analyst’s question about Jobs’s health, calling it “a private matter.”

Not surprisingly, investor uncertainty about whether Jobs would be able to continue as CEO was reflected in sharp fluctuations in the price of Apple’s stock.  In December, the worries intensified when the company said that Jobs would not give his much-anticipated annual keynote address at Apple’s Macworld conference.  At first, the reason offered by a spokesman was that the firm would not take part in the event after 2009.  That “explanation” only fueled the rumors.

What Apple loses without Steve

Eric Auchard

Jan 15, 2009 19:38 GMT

– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

“There’s probably no God” runs the slogan of an advertising campaign humanists are running on buses across Britain. But if the supreme being has his doubters, few question the importance of Steve Jobs to Apple Inc.

In a letter to employees on Wednesday, the Apple co-founder said he would take himself “out of the limelight” for six months after learning in the past week that his still vaguely defined “health issues” are “more complex than I originally thought.”

While Jobs paints his absence as a temporary medical leave — he retains the Apple CEO title even as he steps aside — his departure leaves a spiritual void at a company most people think of as inseparable from the man.

The miraculous career of the prophet of the personal computer revolution, the self-made billionaire known for a career of second acts, draws frequent religious parallels: one biography of him is entitled “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs”.

In the 33 years since he co-founded Apple, Jobs has attracted the fervent devotion of his followers — the Mac faithful, and more recently, iPod and iPhone fanatics. To them, Steve is a secular messiah; to his detractors, a cult-leader.