Daily Archives: July 4, 2010

The choice: kindness or cleverness?

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Jeff Bezos’s Princeton Commencement Address is the best thing I’ve read today. Sample:

On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices…

In my gloomier moments I sometimes feel that a lifetime spent in universities has left me with the feeling that there’s a high correlation between cleverness and moral cowardice. At any rate, I’ve known some very high-IQ cowards, and rather more modestly-endowed heroes. Who was it who said that anyone with sufficient intelligence can think of a dozen reasons for not doing the right thing?

And I was fortunate to know one extremely intelligent man who was also a genuine hero.

The joy of photography

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Lovely Observer column by David Mitchell.

At the high points of my childhood – holidays, birthdays, picnics, Christmas – my father took photographs. This took the shine off many of the high points. Watching my dad take a photo is exquisitely frustrating. Until about 1995, he still had the camera he'd been given for his 21st birthday. This was quite an expensive item in its day. Clearly capable of "proper"' photography, it should've made light work of capturing my mum, my brother and me in front of a castle or behind a knickerbocker glory.

But the ice cream would usually have melted by the time the snap was taken because the camera had dozens of dials and buttons to adjust. My father was uncomfortable doing this unobserved and would make everyone pose with the appropriate grins before he started to grapple with the settings. Just when you thought he was ready, and he'd put the camera to his eye – just when you really believed you were about to get your life back and actually enjoy the leisure experience he was attempting to immortalise – he'd remember there was one more knob to fiddle with and start studying the machine again while asking: "How far am I?" to which my mother would, in an exhausted monotone, invariably reply: "Ten feet."

These photos are a bizarre historical document. These were a people, future archaeologists will think, who spent their whole lives in weary celebration. Their dwellings were permanently festooned with greenery and tinsel, their children expected to spend hours digging aimlessly by the sea, using flimsy tools in a state of near nakedness. And their diet consisted almost entirely of ice cream, turkey and plum pudding…

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!