Category Archives: Observer

In the Apple economy, only Apple gets really rich

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This morning’s Observer column.

Microsoft is a huge and important company. But guess what? It’s in danger of being dwarfed by an outfit that it once regarded as a joke. In terms of market capitalisation, Apple passed Microsoft ages ago. When I last checked, Apple was valued at $364bn, compared with Microsoft’s $230.5bn. And at the moment, there is only one other corporation in the world – Exxon Mobil – that is bigger than Apple.

Last week, Apple unveiled results that suggest even Exxon may not be safe from the relentless growth of Steve Jobs’s empire. Apple made a net profit of $7.31bn on revenues of $28.57bn for the quarter ending in June. That's the best three months it’s ever had, with revenues up 82% and profits up 125%. The company also revealed that it’s sitting on a $76bn cash mountain. Just to put that in context, Apple could currently buy both Tesco and BT and still have some loose change. The news sparked an 8% rise in the share price, with the stock breaking the $400 barrier for the first time.

So is Apple the new Microsoft? Answer: no – and the quarterly results explain why…

LATER: Even stranger is the revelation that Apple has more cash in hand than the US Federal government.

Thanks, Marshall, I think we’ve finally got the message…

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This morning’s Observer column.

“A prophet is not without honour”, says the Bible, “save in his own country.” This was manifestly not true in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cultural critic, who was born 100 years ago last Thursday, and was famous not only in his own country, but also abroad. In fact, he’s the only public intellectual I can think of who played himself in a Woody Allen movie.

Film buffs will recall the wonderful sequence in Annie Hall, where Woody and Diane Keaton are queuing for a movie when a guy behind them starts opining pompously about McLuhan’s description of television as a “high intensity or hot medium”. Allen expresses to camera a desire to have a large sock full of horse manure close to hand, whereupon the guy asserts his right to express his opinion on the grounds that he teaches a course at Columbia on “TV, media and culture”, a fact that – he asserts – gives his views on McLuhan a great deal of validity.

“That’s funny,” replies Woody, “because I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here.” He goes over to a flipchart and pulls out the great man himself from behind it. “I heard what you were saying, “says McLuhan to the Columbia man. “You know nothing of my work… how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” The scene closes with Woody saying to camera: “Boy, if life were only like this.”

As it happens, there have been many times in the past few years when it would have been useful to have had McLuhan to hand because, in a strange way, his insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s when he sprang into prominence…

See also this post.

The smartphone challenge

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This morning’s Observer column.

My favourite line in the film A Fish Called Wanda comes when Otto (Kevin Kline), a psychopathically idiotic ex-CIA operative, objects to being called “stupid” by Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis). To which Wanda replies: “To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs.”

Until relatively recently, “dresses” could have been replaced by “mobile phones” in the script, and the line would still have raised a laugh. But that’s changing fast. Quite how fast was revealed last week in an extraordinary report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. … The Pew report found that 35% of American adults now own a ‘smartphone’, that is to say a mobile phone with a significantly more powerful processor and much better internet connectivity than an old-style handset which could do voice and text and not much else…

Is Google+ a minus?

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This morning’s Observer column.

To read some of the excited commentary on these innovations you’d think that teleportation had actually arrived. Watching people salivate over Circles and, er, Hangouts helps to explain how the ancient Egyptians came to worship an insect. It also reminds one of the astonishing power that large corporations possess to create a reality-distortion field around them which, among other things, disables the capacity to believe that these organisations might sometimes do very silly things indeed. There was a time, for example, when Microsoft’s every move was greeted with the hushed reverence with which devout Catholics greet papal utterances. Grown men swoon whenever Steve Jobs appears in public. And it’s not that long ago since Google launched its incomprehensible “Wave” service (now defunct) and an idiotic venture called “Buzz” – things that excited geeks but left the rest of the world unmoved.

So the question du jour is whether Google+ is an electric wok or not…

.XXX marks the spot where the dot con boom begins

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This morning’s Observer column about ICANN’s decision to allow new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).

Given the pressure on namespace within the existing gTLDs, it was inevitable that Icann would come under pressure to expand their number. The first foray came from those who wanted to establish “.xxx” as cyberspace’s red-light district. After numerous spluttering rows, this was finally approved a few months ago. You may be reassured to know that applicants for a .xxx domain must first complete an application process that will be overseen by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (Iffor), a body set up to “promote the development of responsible business practices and conduct within the online adult-entertainment community”. So that’s all right, then.

But the .xxx stuff was really just the overture to the main business, which is accommodating the needs of corporations. Icann has now announced that it will allow them to apply for new gTLDs, such as “.fashion” or “.drinks”, for example. Or perhaps even “.coke” (though cocaine dealers might have something to say about that)…

In a thoughtful comment on the piece, Anthony Van Couvering argues that I’ve allowed my conspiracy theorising to get the better of my judgement.

The big-corporation conspiracy theory is one that I typically warm to, but as someone who’s been involved with ICANN for years, I can tell you that far from big corporations pushing this, they have been dead set against it, and over the last few years have put a lot of dollars and muscle trying to defeat the expansion of the top-level domain space. The reason is twofold: first, they feel that they will have to do defensive registrations in hundreds of new namespaces; second, they already own most of the beachfront property, and if you’re in that position, the last thing you want are more beaches.

He goes on to say that:

So although it does function as a barrier to entry, the $185,000 application fee is probably not what’s going to stop someone who’s seriously interested in applying — it’s just one of many expenses.

So who will apply? The brands will apply, mostly for .brand, either to promote it or as a “just in case” defensive measure. Cities will apply, and both New York and Paris among others have made known their intent. Ethnolinguistic communities will apply: .scot (Scotland), .cymru (Wales), .bzh (Brittany), and .eus (Basque) are just some of the announced candidates. Finally, there will be entrepreneurs who think that they have some special sauce that will make their top-level domain one that will be attractive to consumers.

[…]

The new gTLD program has a complicated history, and many interests have forcefully put forward their agenda. What we finally got was a compromise that everyone can grudgingly live with, but which in the end opens up the top-level domain space that for years had been blocked by corporate interests. It is a Very Good Thing.

I hope he’s right.

Kindlespam

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This morning’s Observer column.

At first sight, it seems magical. At a stroke, all those tiresome gatekeepers – those self-important agents, editors and publishers who stood between you and recognition – are abolished. Suddenly, the world can see your hitherto unrecognised talent in all its glory. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Er, up to a point. This ebook technology has proved so successful that Amazon now claims to be selling more electronic publications than conventional printed ones. The company is clearly surfing a wave. According to one industry expert, for example, nearly 2.8 million non-traditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States in 2010, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million ebooks and 302,000 printed books in 2009.

Impressive, eh? It’s only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent…

Vive la France!

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This morning’s Observer column.

A spokeswoman for the CSA explained the thinking behind the ban. “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars,” she asked, “when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition? This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box – other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘Why not us?’ ”

Quite. You can imagine the derisive reaction to this in the Anglo-American media, old and new. The broadcasting ruling was linked with President Sarkozy’s clueless remarks at the G8 summit about “civilising” the internet, and interpreted as a sign of cultural resentment at American dominance in cyberspace. “Poor old Frenchies,” was the general tenor of the commentary, “they just don’t get it.”

Actually, the joke's on us. As it happens, the French do ‘get’ it. To appreciate that, just do a simple thought-experiment. Suppose, for a moment, that BBC News started to use “Dyson” instead of “vacuum cleaner” in its reports of dust-mite infestations, or “Bollinger” instead of “champagne” in its coverage of the drinks industry. We'd be outraged. Yet that is effectively what we are thoughtlessly doing when it comes to dealing with phenomena like social networking: taking the dominant commercial brand and pretending that it’s generic…

T.S. Eliot, the iPad and me

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This morning’s Observer column.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was first published in 1922, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. And in case you’re wondering what a technology columnist is doing making pronouncements like that, I should explain that I’m just quoting Andrew Motion, who used to be poet laureate and knows about these things. But for mere mortals, or at any rate engineers like me, the complexity of the poem has always put it out of reach. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to read it before concluding that it would have to be added to my list of futile aspirations.

Until now.

What has changed is that last week Touch Press, an innovative publishing outfit founded by Max Whitby, Theodore Gray and Stephen Wolfram, in partnership with the olde-worlde publisher Faber & Faber, launched a digital edition of the poem for the Apple iPad…

LATER: Interesting blog post by one of the App’s designers.

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…

The power of metaphors

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My Observer column for today.

At first sight it looked like an April Fools’ joke. A branch of the US intelligence service called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it would be pouring millions of dollars into a “Metaphor Programme”. “Perhaps it’s a red herring,” observed a colleague, entering into the spirit of the thing. But then we remembered that the US intelligence establishment doesn’t do jokes, on account of it comprising lots of smart folks whose sense of humour was surgically removed at birth. So I read on.

“The Metaphor Programme,” said the solicitation (ie call for research proposals) from IARPA’s Office of Incisive Analysis (I am not making this up), “will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture. In the first phase of the two-phase programme, performers [IARPA’s intriguing term for researchers] will develop automated tools and techniques for recognising, defining and categorising linguistic metaphors associated with target concepts and found in large amounts of native-language text.”

Ah! So it’s computational linguistics on steroids. But why would US spooks suddenly develop an interest in an area that has hitherto been the preserve of humanities scholars?