Now, that’s telling him

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Just in time for the panto season comes this apparently-official report of the ‘trial’ of the North Korean Boy Emperor’s dastardly uncle.

It is an elementary obligation of a human being to repay trust with sense of obligation and benevolence with loyalty. However, despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.

No shilly-shallying with extended trials, juries, evidence, cross-examination and all the other tedious appurtenances of Western ‘justice’. These folks don’t hang about. The whole thing took about four hours, after which Uncle Dang was shot like the, er, dog that he was supposed to be.

Steve Jobs on what went wrong at Microsoft

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From one of the last interviews Jobs gave:

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.

Source

News Corpse

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Emily Bell has a terrific review of David Folkenflik’s book, Rupert Murdoch: The Last of the Old Media Empires, in which she makes the point that the Digger’s assiduously-fostered image as an ‘outsider’ doesn’t quite fit the facts.

Murdoch and his properties are forever booing and hissing at the public sector; he is a lusty advocate of the free market, he is frequently at odds with communications regulators, and he loathes publicly funded media. His personal Twitter feed is full of pithy aphorisms urging the dropping of regulation and the lowering of taxes.

However, Murdoch’s expedience in dealing with government is a defining feature that distinguishes him from his less successful peers. His engagement with the political process in every country he operates in is intense. Whether being readily received by Margaret Thatcher, his great political ally in breaking UK print unions in the 1970s, meeting with Russian oligarchs on his yacht, or consulting with Chinese party officials, Murdoch maintains close ties to regional power. He leans on the door of regulation so often and because of his facility with establishments, it gives way. Is that something we should blame Murdoch for? No. He is only doing what all business people would do—he is just more efficient and persistent and strategic than most.

Too close, indeed, in the UK, where subsequent governments of opposing parties demonstrated obeisance toward him, his family, and his executives in a startling inversion of the normal patterns of patronage and lobbying. Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun and News of the World editor who is now indicted on hacking charges, rode horses with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, despite repeated warnings not to, also employed former Murdoch editor Andy Coulson as his head of communications. That was before Coulson also faced charges similar to Brooks. The hacking scandal at the News of the World, once uncovered, did not reveal an organization at odds with the establishment, but one that was indistinguishable from the establishment.

Douglas Coupland on 21st-century relationships

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Excerpt from a lovely, quirky Financial Times column by Douglas Coupland:

Last year, at a conference about cities, I met this guy from Google who asked me what I knew about Fort McMurray, Alberta. I told him it’s an oil-extraction complex in the middle of the Canadian prairies and, because of this, it has the most disproportionately male demographic of any city in North America. Its population is maybe 76,000. I asked him why he was asking and he said, “Because it has the highest per capita video-streaming rate of anywhere in North America.” Nudge nudge.

I think that because of the internet, straight people are now having the same amount of sex as gay guys were always supposed to be having. There’s a weird look I can see on the face of people who are getting too much sex delivered to them via hooking up online: wait, is this as good as it gets?

So where are the Telcos? In the government’s pocket, as usual.

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So the Internet companies have finally realised that the damage done to their interests by the NSA is serious enough to flush them out into open opposition. Jeff Jarvis has an astute Guardian comment post which points out that some important companies are missing from the lost if potential refusniks.

Please note who is missing from the list – the signators are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Apple, LinkedIn. I see no telecom company there — Verizon, AT&T, Level 3, the companies allegedly in a position to hand over our communications data and enable governments to tap straight into internet traffic. Where is Amazon, another leader in the cloud whose founder, Jeff Bezos, now owns the Washington Post? Where are Cisco and other companies whose equipment is used to connect the net and by some governments to disconnect it? Where are the finance companies — eBay, Visa, American Express — that also know much about what we do?

The reason the Telcos are not in the list is that they have always been part of the national security system, so they’re unlikely to discover civil liberties anytime soon. In Britain, for example, I remember a time when anyone who worked for British Telecom — even in lowly capacities — had to sign the Official Secrets Act. Why? Because they might be instructed to tap someone’s (analog) phone. For all I know, it may still be a requirement for employment by BT.

Beyond the bubble

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Yesterday’s Observer column.

The bad news, therefore, is that we’re in a new technology bubble. If you are impolite enough to mention this in Silicon Valley at the moment, however, then people will cut you dead. That’s par for the bubble course. The folks who are caught up in one do not appreciate well-meaning attempts to rain on their parade. When the Celtic tiger was roaring in my beloved homeland, for example, a lone economist named Morgan Kelly dared to say that the tiger had no fur – and was roundly abused for his pains.

The good news is that when the current technology bubble pops there will be less collateral damage than last time. This is largely because it costs so much less to start a technology company nowadays and the funding models (and therefore the investment risks) are different…

EasyJet 4, Ryanair nil

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I don’t do much long-distance travel (sheer laziness) but I do fly short-haul quite a lot, using budget airlines — mainly Ryanair. This afternoon, I flew with EasyJet to Copenhagen to speak at the Neils Bohr conference and was reminded of how comparatively civilised EasyJet is compared with its raucous competitor.

Reflecting on the difference, four factors stand out:

  • The EasyJet website is relatively straightforward to navigate. There are none of the annoying hidden traps for the unwary with which Ryanair tries to nudge naïve customers into buying travel insurance, priority boarding, car rental or ‘special’ Ryanair cabin bags. One has the feeling that the EasyJet site is actually trying to help one book a flight as quickly as possible.
  • There’s no scramble to board and no scrum to find a seat when you get into the aircraft. Why? Simple: Easyjet assigns everybody a numbered seat on booking.
  • During the flight, it’s relatively quiet. There’s nobody constantly on the public-address system trying to flog you scratch cards, ‘duty-free’ crap, rail or bus tickets, or electronic ‘cigarettes’.
  • EasyJet planes have pockets in the back of the seats into which one can stuff books, water bottles, Kindles and other paraphernalia while you’re settling in and trying to find the seat-belt.

    • In other words, there’s nothing sophisticated or complicated about the things that make EasyJet a more enjoyable travelling experience. Why then doesn’t Ryanair adopt them? After all, they give EasyJet a competitive advantage. I have friends who, when coming to visit us in Provence in the summer, will fly to Nice rather than to Marseilles or Toulon simply because EasyJet flies to Nice — even though the resulting road trip to the house is significantly longer.

    Why the NSA has landed us all in another nice mess

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy will fondly remember Oliver’s complaint to Stanley: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” In a future remake, Hardy will be played by Barack Obama, suitably enhanced with a toothbrush moustache, while Keith Alexander, currently head of the NSA, will star as Laurel. The scene in which this particular bit of dialogue occurs is the Oval Office, which for the purposes of the scene is littered with flip charts summarising the various unintended consequences of the NSA’s recent activities, as relayed by Edward Snowden.

    One chart, supplied by the Department of Commerce, lists the collateral damage inflicted by the revelations on major US internet companies…

    Read on…

    New Yorker cartoons

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    I love the New Yorker, even when I feel reproached by the accumulating pile of as-yet-unread issues. Leafing through some this morning I came on two cartoons that made me laugh out loud.

    One shows a pantomime horse with a speech-bubble coming from the rear asking “Are we there yet?”

    The other showed a group of beggars on a street corner. One says to the others, “Remember — we’re not begging. We’re crowdfunding.”