Category Archives: Observer

We are all Ancient Egyptians now

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This morning’s Observer column.

I’ve just discovered that the ancient Egyptians worshipped a beetle – a scarab. Quaint, isn’t it? I mean to say, we’ve come on such a lot since those primitive times.

But what’s this? A note from my Guardian colleague, Charlie Brooker, about something he calls the Jabscreen. “Several times over the last year,” he writes, “I’ve attended meetings that started with everyone present gently placing their Jabscreen face-down on the table, as though commencing a futuristic game of poker. It wasn’t rehearsed, wasn’t planned, it just happened; a spontaneous modern ceremony.” Charlie was struck by “the sight of a roomful of media types perched reverentially around their shiny twit machines… each time it happened, a vague discomfort would hang in the air until, in a desperate bid to break the tension, someone would mumble a sardonic comment about the sinister ubiquity of the Jabscreen, likening it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Look before you leak

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This morning’s Observer column.

In the annals of the net, one of the sacred texts is John Gilmore’s aphorism that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. Mr Gilmore is a celebrated engineer, entrepreneur and libertarian activist, who is regarded by the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and men in suits everywhere as a pain in the ass. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes. These include: creating the ‘alt’ (for alternative) hierarchy in the Usenet discussion fora; open-source software; drugs law reform; philanthropy; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which last week won a notable concession from the Library of Congress to legalise the “jailbreaking” of one’s iPhone – ie liberating it from Apple’s technical shackles).

The aphorism came up a lot last week following publication by the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel of extensive reports based on the stash of classified US military reports published on the WikiLeaks website. And of course in one sense this latest publishing coup does appear to confirm Gilmore’s original insight. But at the same time it grossly underestimates the amount of determination and technical ingenuity needed to make sure that the aphorism continues to hold good…

Growing pains

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This morning’s Observer column.

Over the past two months, Apple’s market capitalisation (ie its value as measured by the stock market) averaged out at $229.8bn.

The corresponding figure for Microsoft was $215.9bn. And yes, you read those numbers correctly: Apple is now worth significantly more than Microsoft, and the difference isn’t just a flash in the Wall Street pan.

This has implications for all of us who follow these things. The mainstream media, for example, need to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which they have viewed Apple ever since Steve Jobs returned to the helm in 1997. Apple is no longer the Lucky Little Company That Could but a looming, secretive, manipulative corporate giant.

Recent developments suggest that Apple itself also needs to adjust to its new status as just another company…

Apropos the Microsoft comparison, Randall Stross has a useful piece in today’s NYT. Microsoft continues to be a formidable company, but from the viewpoint of investors it’s become more like GE or Big Oil (excepting BP, perhaps) — a good ‘banker’ stock for a part of one’s pension portfolio.

Will we lose our App-etites?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google has launched a new online tool that may eventually make you wish you’d never been born. It’s called App Inventor, and it’s a kind of DIY kit that will allegedly enable non-techies to build applications for Android smartphones. “To use App Inventor,” says Google, “you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behaviour.”

There’s a nice video that illustrates this point. It opens with an attractive young woman and her cat, who’s walking all over her computer keyboard. So she takes puss on to her lap and sets to work…

The start-up fallacy

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This morning’s Observer column.

In an essay entitled "How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late", Grove pointed out that whereas Apple has 25,000 employees in the US, Foxconn has 250,000 in southern China alone. "The company," he points out, "has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62bn, larger than Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Dell Inc or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel and Sony Corp."

Grove cited these figures to attack what he regards as a pernicious mindset that now afflicts government policymakers in most western countries – "Our own misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create US jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called 'Start-Ups, Not Bailouts'. His argument: let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back start-ups."

Grove thinks this is baloney and he's right. Start-ups are wonderful but – at least in technology – they generally don't create jobs on the scale that western economies need. What really matters is what comes after that eureka moment in the garage, as the new idea goes from prototype to mass production…

The Great Paywall of Wapping

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I also wrote a Comment piece for this morning’s Observer about the now-operational Murdoch paywall. Excerpt:

When the web took off, most newspapers were bewildered by it. Fearful of falling behind, they began to put their content online – for free. Insofar as there was a business model behind this, it was the belief that: "If we build it they will come." And if the readers came there would surely be a way of "monetising" all those resulting eyeballs.

For the most part, however, the monetisation lagged way behind the costs of online publication and newspapers began to think that, while the web might indeed turn out to be the future, most of them would be insolvent long before the online bonanza materialised.

One unintended consequence of this triumph of hope over experience was that several generations of internet users came to believe that online content comes free. As every economist knows, in a competitive market, the price tends to converge on the marginal cost of production, which, in the case of online news, appeared to be zero.

But it only appeared to be zero because newspapers weren't charging a price that corresponded to the costs of production. In fact, they weren't charging anything at all. As a result, we have no idea whether people would be prepared to pay for online content published on the web and, if so, what a realistic price might be. The great thing about Murdoch's experiment is that it may provide some answers to these questions…

Will the iPhone and iPad kill off the Mac?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Companies go where the commercial opportunities are. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Apple's recent history is that the spectacular growth opportunities are in mobile devices, not deskbound computers or even laptops. The iPad is selling at a rate of a million a month. More than 1.4 million of the new iPhones were sold in the first four days. And the pace seems to be increasing. It took the first iPhone 74 days to reach its first million. The iPad got there in 28. Only things like the Nintendo Wii (13 days) shift faster. Then there's the small matter of the 40% contribution the iPhone now makes to Apple's bottom line. In those circumstances, if you were Steve Jobs, what would you focus on?

I’ve just had an email from a reader who, many years ago, switched to the Mac on my advice. He writes:

I’ve just read your piece in the Observer New Review. I suppose I have to prepare for the end of civilisation as I know it!

Open data and the live tube map

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This morning’s Observer column.

For me, the most arresting image of the week was not the photograph of General Stanley McChrystal, looking drawn and ascetic in combat fatigues, en route to his dismissal by his commander-in-chief, but a map of central London showing the underground system. On each line can be seen little yellow blobs. Blink and you discover that each blob has moved a fraction. You can see it for yourself at traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/.

The yellow blobs are, of course, tube trains. The fact that they're moving across the map indicates that this is, as near as dammit, real-time information about their positions on the network. And it's public data: you can sit at your computer in San Francisco or Accra and know how the trains on the Central line are doing just now.

How you react to this provides a litmus test for determining where you are on the technology spectrum…

The wisdom of ages

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Today’s Observer has my “Everything you need to know…” piece which encapsulates some of the stuff in the book I’ve been working on. I particularly like one of the comments:

This article reads as if it is written by an 80 year old for other 80 year olds. Something to talk about at bingo.

LATER: Generous comment from Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing:

John Naughton’s feature in today’s Observer, “The internet: Everything you ever need to know,” is a fantastic read and a marvel of economy, managing to pack nine very big ideas into 15 minutes’ reading. This is the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss’s door.

Ulysses app causes Apple to blush

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last Wednesday, 16 June, was Bloomsday, a day revered by admirers of James Joyce the world over. It's celebrated because 16 June 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. Readers follow the perambulations around Dublin of the book's endearing hero, a freelance advertisement-seller named Leopold Bloom, who is tactfully keeping out of the way while his wife is being unfaithful to him in the marital home at No 7 Eccles Street.

Bloomsday celebrations take many forms but usually involve readings from the novel, and often the consumption of food and drink (gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy, for example, in honour of Bloom’s lunchtime fare). This year there was an added frisson to the festivities, for it transpired that Apple, a company not hitherto noted for its interest in modernist literature, had been paying close attention to the content of Joyce’s great work…