Tag Archives: Apple

Steve Jobs Story – a Bad Job

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Cricics, Critics, Everyone's a Critic, Ladies Lounge

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Posture – it’s everything, isn’t it ? The Apple Lisa and a curious onlooker

Story by First Mate

The IT industry of the past was not only managed by different companies like IBM, ICL, Prime, DEC etc., but within those companies lived tribes and families.  I was a tribal member within several tribes and more than a few companies.  It was good.  For over twenty years I enjoyed the protection and development provided by my tribal elders.

There was no such thing as job insecurity.  Everyone recognized the special talents of other team members and leaders and we put up with their foibles and sometimes straight out fuckwittery.  At the end of the day loyalty to the tribe was paramount.  Many great things were created and impossible deadlines were routinely met or bettered.  We were simply too busy to bear grudges or feel hard done by because we had encountered turds like Steve Jobs.  Life was a fascinating roller coaster ride and sometimes our tribes got wiped out by unfortunate turns of events, but there was always a galaxy of other tribes looking for talent and keen to bring us on board.

The seventies, eighties and nineties were rocketing along for anyone who could speak IT and like so many of our colleagues lucky enough to get our mittens on some cool electronica, and like so many people who actually touched Steve Job’s life in some way, the Australian computer cognoscenti too have boundless stories of derring do, outrageous behaviour and just plain madness.

There are stories of incredible sales feats (like conning the Federal government into thinking that flooding schools with PCs was a good idea and insisting that teachers somehow “incorporate them into the curriculum”) led to sales bonuses up to and including space travel.

And now – in times where the usual modus operandi is to watch your back and simultaneously duck shove your “colleague’s” career into oblivion to climb the greasy corporate ladder, the mind-numbing boredom of making no obvious mistakes has led to a dearth of interesting new folk-law.  Not tedious minutiae.  Real, death before dishonour, live-forever stories that even outsiders can appreciate.

But the authorised Steve Jobs biography is not one of those. Walter Isaacson has meticulously hunted down every snippet of Job’s not uneventful life, excused him for his tactlessness and poor personal hygiene and recorded every heartbeat, every morsel of junk food, every abuse of positional power and a mountain of toadying and skunkworks and implied that Jobs has been some new messiah.

Reading into the fine print, however, the truth appears to be a simpler notion – that Jobs was good at hunting down really clever but gullible engineers and appropriating their amazing ideas, incorporating them into a greater vision, flogging other poor bastards to make the great ideas a reality and then stepping back, taking the adoration and repeating the process.

Some of us who are old enough do appreciate the brilliant products that Apple brought to the world.  When the early iPods were released and had enough storage to hold an average western person’s record collection several times over and still fit comfortably in a geek or music aficionado’s top pocket (after the vinyl had been turned into MP3 digital files), the writing was on the wall for the record industry.  When video became portable and bandwidth became cheap, the same writing hit the wall for the print media industry.

Jobs was not alone in leading the revolution, but Apple’s recent products and service offerings have turned the digital life on its head and created many new good and equally bad paradigms.  Did you know that the numbers of pedestrians being mown down while crossing the street while they have been focussed totally on their portable communication engines has doubled in the US in the last two years ?  Same for the number of people convicted of traffic accidents that curiously involved them when they mistook texting for one of the important driving tasks.  Or do you routinely see cyclists as well as drivers too dumb to realise that plugging in an iPod takes away an important part of their survival arsenal – namely hearing a car approaching in their blind spots ?

Anyone who has travelled by train in the last year or so cannot but be surprised by the number of their fellow passengers with white in-ear headphones connected to their iPods, iPads and iPhones – or the pale Android imitations thereof.  This is a new host of individuals, acting like a flock of sheep.  Possessed by the world flooding in through their Interweb tubes, oblivious to the life going on just outside their personal spaces, indifferent and incapable of telling the difference between reality as it is personally experienced and some selective synthesis of a new reality conceived by someone else.

But enough of Job’s legacy.  On to the book itself.

Boring, tedious name-dropping crap.  Rich in its cast of characters, but with no more character development than the telephone book.  The hardcover book hit the stands at $50 a copy – an outrageous rip-off.

The Newton left pencil and paper shivering in their socks. Not.

So I read what I had hoped were familiar parts of the downloaded e-book -costing about half the hard back, looking for some of Job’s less successful contributions – namely the Lisa (named for his one-time shunned daughter) that was incredibly expensive for its time and lacked one important ingredient – actual software that did useful things, and the progenitor of the iPad – the Newton hand-held personal assistant – with the single failing that it didn’t actually work very often, or, looked at another way – it made simple paper-based tasks even more tedious.

This is referred to in marketing circles as “not a very compelling offer”.  These two Apple products died the horrible death they richly deserved.

There are a few pages about the Lisa.  I don’t know whether the Newton gets a mention.  It probably does, but the narrative on the Lisa was so boring, it made me glad that I had only wasted $25 and not the full whack for the hard copy.

In a nutshell, enjoy your Apple products, but don’t waste your time or money on the book.  It’s a major stinker – whether you are part of the IT industry or not.

Not Going There, Done That.

20 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Emmjay

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Champs de Retail

Travel Yes and No – A Reply for Gez and Helvi.

Three weeks in Paris with FM.  I had this planned for some time but it took an eternity to work up the courage and find the cash to make the commitment.

Although she has travelled the world many times before Tim the Cabin Boy was born, this is her first trip to the city of light and my fourth – in 30 years.  Two years ago I came here with Emmlet II and her old school pal – for five days only – but it was the trip before that in 2004 with the whole tribe – for 10 days over Easter that put Paris in my “must go every now and then” list.

In every visit I always had that “I wish I had seen ……..” feeling when I came home.  There is simply too much to experience in perhaps even a year or two.  And in every case I learnt things that I should avoid or find some way around.

The first thing was that it is so far away that the trip can be exhausting – so we spent a bit more cash and flew premium economy (where your nose just misses the passenger in front’s head instead of touching it).  The second distance buster was breaking the trip at Singapore for a couple of days.  Both of these proved to be good ideas but stole time and cash.  Always the trade-off.

Luck out #1 was an upgrade to business class – free champagne and a “reclining bed”, no crowd and delightful QANTAS cabin service for the ten hours to Singapore.

Less wonderful event #1 back to premium economy for the Singapore to Paris leg – departing at 23:30 and flying all night – which means three or four movies and no cabin service and no reclining bed when you could really benefit from it.

Getting from Charles de Gaulle into Paris can be a nightmare for the language challenged.  Solution: I booked a great hotel in an ideal location (for just two nights to get over the trip and because the cost was frightening) and a car to pick us up – avoiding jetlag on the peak hour metro plus navigation on and off the thing with bags. This proved to be very good thinking and the hotel people were great.

After that we moved to an apartment I found on the internet through the massive TripAdvisor site – which had used in the last two visits – TripAdvisor that is, not the same apartment.  First it was only five minutes walk away from the hotel – easy.  Second it was very economical and proved to be huge and modern by Paris standards (like 55 square metres huge) – close to three metro stations (ideal), shops, the twice a week giant open air markets at Boulevard Richard Lenoir near Bastille.  Food there is cheap and excellent – even in this early Spring (cold, by our standards and unreliable weather like Sydney in October).

Echoing your sentiments, visiting monuments, galleries, churches and museums has been an interesting event for us.  FM loves art, but is easily put off by giant queues – and so I confess, am I.  So whereas I kind of expected to line up at Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre, we have decided to give them a miss.  Just too hard and big wasters of time.  Everyone goes to the Eiffel Tower.  But not us, this trip.  The Parisian engineers had carefully ensured that on the Easter public holidays, one of the lifts was broken down and the massive queues (in biting cold wind and light rain) were advised that the wait was over two hours.  To get a birds eye view of three or four landmarks and what is a beautiful but rather homogenous Paris central skyline.

You might recall that I expressed disappointment with the Picasso exhibition visiting Sydney recently.  Our apartment manager lunched with us on the first day and asked me what I thought of the Picassos – still on travelling exhibition while their Paris digs are under renovation.  I was honest.  She beamed and almost shook my hand.  She said that the story behind the collection is that the heirs to the Picasso legacy were facing a huge tax bill when he died – which, under French law they could “pay” in kind.  So they took all of the crap that was still in the paintings shed and gave it to the people de la Republic.  She thought they got the unsaleable rubbish – which I feel reflected a certain slight anti-Spanish sentiment as much as it did a major disapproving artistic judgment.

But to be fair to Paris, the exhibition in the Musee Marmotan (many smaller Monets and other impressionist and post-impressionist artists ) was on a human scale and excellent to visit.  Musee Carnavalet (Museum of the History of Paris) was also a good experience – FM said she thought it might be better going two or three times.

But perhaps the most significant difference was in our views about what is important and therefore should be the focus of spending our time.  FM is a fashionista – hard core and many of her favourite designers are here and in London.  So shopping – the real exchange of serious wads of cash and the indolent wandering – flaneur-style around the cities are her priority.  My kind of Y chromosome carrier detests shopping in all its forms – so we have trod a careful compromise of DIY.  More Shakespeare and Co for me than any number of designers.  And more time to take it easy, read, drink wine and coffee and eat (oh, my fat and growing torso) for me.

Getting back to your reluctance to travel as sightseers, I think the internet and international security and all the hassles of travel are speaking loudly in support of your view.  If you want – for some reason – to see monuments, they are only as far away as google.

But shopping is apparently not like that.  I cannot imagine anyone being a monument-viewing-aholic.  Stuff from precisely the same designers in Paris is different in exclusive shops all over the world – and surprisingly little choice is available in Australia – relative to what you can see wandering (with intent) in Paris.  So for FM, the London and Paris designer-specific shops have been a real eye-opener.  And so too were the shops in Singapore.  You really (apparently) do have to be there to feel the width.

A tiny snip of the Orchard Rd Retail Megatropolis

Australians have for years spoken of Singapore as a Mecca of shopping.  It was incredible in terms of the scale of the retail universe there.  But perplexing too.  There was shop after shop after shop all selling the same “exclusive” brands.  Exclusive by cost, not by availability, believe me.  I’m surprised that a Zegna suit failed to attach itself to me just through repeated exposure.  for reasons of personal financial safety, I’m OK about not returning to the Asian capital of retail.

As a person somewhat interested in information technology, I paid a special visit to the “Can’t Remember Jalan Centre”.  A tired and dilapidated, if not downright grubby octagonal building of six stories each with a double ring of mainly small one man stores, many temporarily closed or just plain dead, met my countenance.  Hundreds of little businesses all selling much of a muchness with a little specialisation in communications, security or whatever, here and there.  Things have clearly moved on from the cowboy PC with everything days.  The Apple stores are nowhere to be seen in this retail backwater.  They are amongst the high fashion stores.  And they are packed to the raffles with products and customers clamouring for today’s and tomorrow’s IT.

This is in itself surprising, because anyone with a quid can buy any Apple product from the comfort of their own house without ever having to step outside.  But Apple have made their technology and their retail palaces cool places to be and to be seen.

So maybe that’s where the 21st century monuments will be found.  Not in the expensive real estate of major cities far away, but on the desk in the spare bedroom – now called “the home office”.  And since the internet can usually provide us with a picture of just about anything, I think it will be OK to pull down the Eiffel tower and build a few more Apple and Big Mac stores – and save us the cost and hassle of the trip and the bother of the retail zone.  It’ll be locals only – but then, we are all locals anyway, are we not ?

Alternatively, perhaps we can take a leaf from Lehan’s book and send a hologram of ourselves to visit a hologram of the Eiffel tower – just so we can, with some confidence, say “yeah, haven’t been there, done that.”

A p p L E D

11 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 37 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Our Lady

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Where does education come from? The shop. The shop where the applications come from, the tablet comes from. But not where the school comes from, nor the teachers. We might say that the technological corporations will become the institution, and the teachers and schools will become the software and hardware for distributing them.

Technology’s best trick is always to change the way we understand things to be. An invisible cloak? This does not mean that it is invisible, it just means that we can’t see it. The same trick with education, which is getting pushed and pummelled over a degree or too until it means “access”. Is it such a big difference, that while access used to be the ability to get into a school, it now means the ability to have an internet connection and a device for looking? Is it possible for me too to change my thinking about this, to consider that schools have for too long had control of education, that freeing it up might just give us something new?

But I find education about technology to be a little shallow, more of a review than a critique, more instruction than reflection, and I wonder if education through technology will be more of the same. Not surprising then, that RMIT is leading the way in Teacher re-education by introducing its new Behaviour Capability Framework; guidelines for the way one should present oneself as an RMIT employee. But can we really blame short-attention-spanned HR/PR practices for this? Surely we could have foreseen the moment that technology took on education and won?

We are all heading for the clouds. Up in the clouds is everything we do, deliberately and absentmindedly, and that everything is becoming us. We don’t need to know everything any more. We just need to know how to find it. We can review it, we can critique it and it’s not even possible any more to edit it. Soon it will be difficult to critique it too, as criticism turns itself ever-so-slightly and becomes a negative behaviour, and we will stop that, forgetting we ever had the power to do so. Technology’s second best trick, after all, is to quickly replicate itself, removing a feature here or there, that we quickly forget we ever had.

Education is heading toward becoming a search engine. Not, though, until search engines are superseded by the next big data retrieval system. Leaving us always a little behind in our capabilities. We need to know how to find things. Technology needs to know what we can find. So sadly, though we might dream of education breaking from its archaic bonds and becoming a revolutionary force, it’s unlikely to happen.

I don’t dream of that. Education breaking from its archaic bonds. I like technology. I like it because it babysits me when I am bored and at the boundaries of my physical environment. I like to read, and write, and think. Technology gives me crayons and scraps of paper, and when I am bored, something pink or flashing. It helps me to remember that I am a Lifelong Learner, and it tells me where and how to get my education. This education is very nice to me, it encourages me to start and doesn’t get strict with me when I stop. Oh, that’s okay. Pick it up when you feel like it. It lets me pick and choose and move on if I’m bored, and best of all it lets me feel like I am really smart. Not like education used to be. I found it difficult! Even, at times, a struggle!

But we have a good relationship now, technology and me, and I can be who I am. Who I am is a little limited, of course. I am a dilettante, a dabbler, a jack-of-all-trades. I now have a motivational quotation for everything. A bit like a specialist in HR/PR, I now have at my fingertips the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers. And what did Einstein say about that? Something inspirational, I’ll just go look it up.

I don’t have to rely on myself any more. I think that has made me a better person. Other people seem to have done and said things that where much smarter than I would. So it makes sense to draw upon their experience, instead of having to do whatever I am doing again. And again, till I get it right. And again, till I bloody understand it.

I like those tablets. I am hoping that they will soon make one that I can swallow. Pictures of cheap shoes will appear in my eyeballs, and my fingers will twitch to touch something, shooting sensory memory-like data back into my nerve endings which I will recognize only as inherent knowledge – my own wisdom, my own intuitions. Isn’t that where we’re going with tablets? Or have I got the technology industry confused with the medical industry? I’ll just check. Oh. It’s Moses. Not Pfizer. Anyway I like them, though I wish they would make them as small as my Smart Phone, so I can hang them both around my neck.

In FACT I want to be able to hook them together, my tablet and my Smart Phone. If you put them together, they would give you TWICE the screen size! That would be very, very cool. Perhaps I could get them to argue with each other about what I should do next. Though probably only if they were products from each of the two rival groups. Being Smart, though they would probably resort to trickery, an attempt to discredit each other’s information, until I was well and truly confused. What would I do then? I would put them on the ground, take a stick, stand it up, and choose the device it fell toward.

Education comes from the shop. It has always come from the shop. It’s not a small thing, to remember that. Shops are nothing new. All those pithy quotes by our world leaders are Shop Talk of old. Nothing new there, HR/PR people.

You Might Call it Lucky (but I call it Genius)

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Peace

Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I want to talk about faith. I’ve thought a lot about it these last months. It was my niece who got me thinking. We were painting together, some mistake turned out unexpectedly well. “Lucky!” I exclaimed. “You might call it lucky”, she said. “I call it God’s help”. Thus clearing up for me something I had never been able to understand. How does faith WORK?

Faith is like a reprogramming, so that instead of noticing the things that are going wrong, you start to take notice of what is going right. And it has one brilliant feature. Once you start to notice how many things are going right, you start accumulating fortune. Because you don’t take any of those fortunate things off your list, you just keep adding to them. All that success makes you stand taller, smile more, be more assertive, and if you are more confident and assertive, you will be more successful. So whatever it is that you have chosen to have faith in – whether it is your own luck, or the hand of God, or the course you have started, or some kind of guru – is going to look good, very good. The better it looks, the more faith you’re going to have.

But speaking of gurus, the proclamation of all the online newspapers I’ve seen today that The Future is Tablet. These days we could be talking about another medical breakthrough, but it is of course The Hand of Jobs of which we speak. I have total faith that anyone who can get that much publicity for their product is speaking with the authority of a Higher Being anyway. But I note that Apple didn’t declare their faith in this Future until the goal was well within sight. Thankyou, all the companies that contributed, and all the consumers that bought, all the people who wanted an easier format, for making it possible for Apple to rule the Electropolis.

On Design

13 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

, ,

Dry

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Lately I have been thinking about the effect that Apple had on design. On the one hand, Apple has introduced a very strong kind of design that is immediately recognizable, not only for being Apple but also for being GOOD design. But inside of that, Apple threw away some of the important core meanings of GOOD design. They threw away durability (with products that have to be replaced too often), they threw away heritage (with products that can NOT be kept) and they threw away flexibility (with products that can not be re-used.

I have always thought that Apple design was very Japanese, and it is interesting to use Apple as an example of “Japanese Design”. It is very beautiful, it has an other-worldly quality about it, it’s sometimes as if the design is enough to justify its existence, no function needed. That brief, slick, cute and eerily perfect product? Before Apple, it was Japanese Design.

But after the earthquake of March 2011, in a time of new understanding of the frailty of our environment and our responsibility to it and ourselves to care for it, it may be time for a re-think. Part of re-thinking is about changing perception. If we consider that Apple is the world’s most successful example of “Japanese Design”, and we look at those problem areas – durability, heritage and flexibility – can we make a blue-print for a new definition of GOOD design?

A Call to Player – Occupy Apple. You. Yes, You.

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

,

Europe 04

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Recently a movement called Occupy Wall Street has sprung up, and to the delight of many has captured the attention of the media. The media is happy to find an enclave of potential disruption; it makes it easier to get the lighting sorted and have the journalists standing by. Besides, this Occupy Wall Street enjoys the patronage of many well-to-do celebrities keen to share the spotlight. A cause and a celebrity is an attractive combination for the media.

Occupy Wall Street identifies itself as the 99 percent of the world that is asking the richest 1% – to stop being so greedy. Perhaps to give up a little of its money. Particularly the Bankers of Wall Street, those who receive huge bonuses for their financial management whether it works or not. Occupy Wall Street participants take to patches of city land and camp there. My suggestion here is that Occupy Wall Street participants could do better to find a way to Occupy Apple. And I am asking you – yes you – to do it.

I do not mean that you should take your tent and sleeping bag and move into the Apple shop. Nor that you should fill up the footpaths in front of it. I am suggesting that instead you find a way to nestle inside your Apple Products until there are enough of you, and then send a polite note to the Apple bosses that says hey, we need a little help with a small problem – do you have a minute?

Those Occupying Wall Street – what are they occupying, how are they occupying? Why do we like them so much? They are not asking for anything in particular, they say. Just for the bankers to give up some of their wealth. I like them – they have the springy innocence of Apple products. And they are not causing any trouble – it is the police that are the trouble, it is the governments that are the trouble. They don’t look at the police, don’t look at the government, just carry on being fresh and uncomplicated.

I remember when Apple had some great advertisements using their Think Different slogan, using the pictures of famous people; Gandhi, Mother Theresa. Now we could put Steve Jobs in there; he was world-changing too. I think it is highly possible that he was. Certainly there are people whose lives are better because of his work. Perhaps though he was more of a “working-class” hero; mostly helping people with good lives to live better lives. We should try to Think Different too.

Really poor people don’t usually have mp3 players. Sometimes though they do get to build them. What if you were to ask Apple to add a function to your computing devices that allowed you to meet the people who built them for you. It wouldn’t be so difficult would it? And then, like the tracking that allows you to know where your food sources grew up, you could also know who had built your devices for you, what their names were and what they looked like. That would be one way in which Apple could help.

I am wondering how it would be possible to mimic the behaviour of the Occupy Wall Street action to achieve a similar result. And I am wondering where this behaviour has come from. The first step is to set up a camp in a place that is not Wall Street, but call it Occupy Wall Street. So it is a kind of a virtual occupation. What is the precedent for this?

The second step is to not look at the Government, even though one’s actions are directed at the Government. Then, the peaceful protests change into violent resistance and the government forces are blamed for the violence. That is not so new, we would probably find that this has been tried before.

How could you replicate this in an Occupation of Apple? Perhaps all the apple owners could declare that their purpose, in stocking up on apple products, was actually just to use the product because they liked it. Then, they could reveal that actually it was something else: It was to give Apple the power and the means for implementing a peaceful revolution. And then wait. Wait for the peaceful revolution. And then, in the case that it didn’t come, that Apple didn’t come through, to drop all their products in the bin and encourage another company to fly high.

We should not be giving Apple all of our ideas for what we could do to address inequality in the world. Because that’s what Apple does, that’s what it trades in; ideas. Ideas, brought to life and clothed in the best design there is. If there is an idea out there worth pursuing, Apple will find it for us. And if Apple finds that idea, we can rest assured that Apple will also find a way to make it pay for itself. And we will have a profitable solution to the world’s greatest problem. That’s not something that Wall Street can lay claim to. They didn’t make a profit out of the Global Financial Crisis, did they? Occupy Apple. Because it’s a sure thing.

Question. Question yourself and what your stake in this is. To question your involvement in Apple and to question your own values and your own place in the world and in the problem. We know that Occupying Wall Street places our governments in the firing line, between us and the big corporations. And we know that looking at causes in far off places can take away from our sense of responsibility for what happens here and now; problems connected to us. You may have figured out how to occupy Apple. If you are not sure about what your question to Apple is going to be – for you are likely only to have one chance, one question – take some time to consider it now. Once you get in there, we’ll be counting on you to ask it.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

31 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Emmjay

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, ,

Mike Daisey Returns to the Sydney Opera House.

24 September to 2 October.

Mike Daisy and Friend

Some of our regular patrons of the Pig’s Arms might remember a review I wrote a while back on the great raconteur – Mike Daisey who performed at the Sydney OH last year – his monologue on cargo cults.

Mike returns to this year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas with his new work – the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Here’s a taster from Tech Crunch……

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/the-real-story-apple-and-foxcon/

This piece is coming to you from my Macbook Pro ….. the black Apple on Mike Daisey’s machine in the pic is a nice touch, though 🙂