How to get people up in the morning

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My friend Jonathan Steinberg has written a wonderful biography of Bismarck, which I’m reading in the Kindle edition and thoroughly enjoying. This passage about Bismarck’s time as a country squire and his behaviour as a host (or even an host) made me laugh out loud:

One night after a long journey, Herr von der Marwitz and a friend showed up unannounced at Kniephof [Bismarck’s estate]. Bismarck welcomed them, set out the usual fare, and the visitors and their host sat late and drank a lot.

He apologised in advance that he would not be able to see them at breakfast because he had to be in Naugard by 7am. The guests needed to go there too and, though Bismarck strongly urged them to sleep as late as they liked, they eventually agreed that Bismarck would wake them at 6.30 in the morning. They drank on and eventually went to bed. The friend said to von Marwitz, as they climbed the stairs to the guest room, ‘I have had more drink than I am used to and I want to sleep it off tomorrow morning’. ‘You can’t do that’, Herr von Marwitz said. ‘Wait and see,’ replied the friend who pushed a huge chest of drawers against the door.

According to von Marwitz’s account,

“At 6.30 in the morning, Bismarck knocked at the door. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from the room. Bismarck turned the doorknob and pushed the door against the heavy chest. A few minutes later he called out from the courtyard. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from us. Two pistol shots crashed through the window-glass and knocked plaster onto my friend, who crept to the window and stuck a white handkerchief out on the end of a stick. In a few minutes we were downstairs. Bismarck greeted us with his usual heartiness without a word about his little victory.”

Hmmm… This might work with teenagers. I’ll need a gun licence, though.

So is Amazon finally stamping on Kindlespam?

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Some time ago I wrote about the scourge of Kindlespam — the way in which opportunists were producing hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of phoney ‘ebooks’ using the Kindle Direct Publishing system. I wondered why Amazon wasn’t stamping on the practice, and cynically assumed that it was because the company continued to make money on every one of these ‘books’ sold on the site. If so, this seemed short-sighted, as it couldn’t be in Amazon’s long-term interests to have the Kindle marketplace swamped by this kind of spam.

Now, however, it looks as though the company has woken up. Witness this email received by an ebook self-publisher and posted on a forum that specialises in Kindle publishing under the heading “All My Amazon Ebooks have Been Taken Off The Shelf!”

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding books you recently submitted via Kindle Direct Publishing.

Certain of these books are either undifferentiated or barely differentiated from an existing title in the Kindle store. We remove such duplicate (or near duplicate) versions of the same book because they diminish the experience for customers. We notify you each time a book is removed, along with the specific book(s) and reason for removal.

In addition to removing duplicate books from the Kindle store, please note that if you attempt to sell multiple copies or undifferentiated versions of the same book from your account, we may terminate your account.

If you have any questions regarding the review process, you can write to kdp-quality@amazon.com.

Best regards,

Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com

About time. Kindle Direct Publishing is a great idea for enabling user-generated content and it would be a shame to see it destroyed.

Struggling with a great contraction

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Martin Wolf has a sobering column in today’s FT. This is how it begins:

Many ask whether high-income countries are at risk of a “double dip” recession. My answer is: no, because the first one did not end. The question is, rather, how much deeper and longer this recession or “contraction” might become. The point is that, by the second quarter of 2011, none of the six largest high-income economies had surpassed output levels reached before the crisis hit, in 2008. The US and Germany are close to their starting points, with France a little way behind. The UK, Italy and Japan are languishing far behind.

Further down, he has some pretty harsh things to say about Obama and Merkel. Thus:

The depth of the contraction and the weakness of the recovery are both result and cause of the ongoing economic fragility. They are a result, because excessive private sector debt interacts with weak asset prices, particularly of housing, to depress demand. They are a cause, because the weaker is the expected growth in demand, the smaller is the desire of companies to invest and the more subdued is the impulse to lend. This, then, is an economy that fails to achieve “escape velocity” and so is in danger of falling back to earth.

Now consider, against this background of continuing fragility, how people view the political scene. In neither the US nor the eurozone, does the politician supposedly in charge – Barack Obama, the US president, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor – appear to be much more than a bystander of unfolding events, as my colleague, Philip Stephens, recently noted. Both are – and, to a degree, operate as – outsiders. Mr Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony. In fact, he faces an opposition that would prefer their country to fail than their president to succeed. Ms Merkel, similarly, seeks a non-existent middle way between the German desire for its partners to abide by its disciplines and their inability to do any such thing. The realisation that neither the US nor the eurozone can create conditions for a speedy restoration of growth – indeed the paralysing disagreements over what those conditions might be – is scary.

Yep.

Time Warner: profiting from hacktivism?

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Aw, isn’t this lovely? When members of the hacktivism group Anonymous appear in public to protest against censorship and corruption, they wear plastic masks of Guy Fawkes, the celebrated 17th-century terrorist. But guess what?

Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

Groucho Marx, where are you when we need you?

Steve Jobs and Napoleon: an exchange

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My Observer piece about Steve Job’s place in history prompted some interesting responses, in particular an email from my friend, Gerard de Vries, who is an eminent philosopher of science. “With all the articles about the genius of Apple’s Jobs around”, he wrote

Tolstoy’s War and Peace came to my mind. This is how historians used to write about Napoleon: as the genius, the inspirer, the man who saw everything coming far ahead and who designed sophisticated strategies to win his battles.

That image was destroyed by Tolstoy.

Was Napoleon in command? Well, he may have given commands but – as Tolstoy’s novel stresses – a courier had to deliver them and maybe the courier got lost in the fog, or got shot halfway and even if he arrived at the right spot and succeeded to find the officers of the regiment, the command to attack may have been completely irrelevant because just a half hour before the courier arrived, the enemy had decided to launch a full attack and all Napoleon’s troops can now do is pray and hide, or flee. Tolstoy’s point is that Napoleon’s power is projected onto him – first by his admiring staff and troops and later by historians. Napoleon plays that he is “Napoleon” – that he is in command, that he knows what he is doing. But in fact he too was a little cog in a big machine. When the machine got stuck, the genius of Napoleon disappeared. But in our historical narratives, we tend to mix up cause and effect. So the story is that the machine got stuck because Napoleon’s genius ran out.

Isn’t this also the case with Jobs? He played his role as the genius CEO and was lucky. Is there really more to say?

The best advice to generals, Tolstoy remarked somewhere, is to publish your strategy after the battle. That’s the only way to ensure that your strategy relates to what has happened.

I was intrigued by this ingenious, left-field approach. It reminded me of something that Gerard had said to me when we first worked together way back in 1978 – that War and Peace was quite a good text for students embarking on the history and philosophy of science, where one of the most important obligations is to resist the Whig interpretation of history — which is particularly seductive in the case of science.

I replied,

I don’t think Tolstoy’s analysis fits the Jobs case exactly, for two reasons: we have corroborated accounts by eyewitnesses/subordinates of Jobs’s decision-making at crucial junctures of the story (when the likely outcomes were not at all certain); and there’s the fact that Jobs’s strategy was consistent in an interesting way, namely that his determination to keep the Mac a closed system was a short-term disaster (because it left the field wide open for Microsoft and Wintel) but a long-term masterstroke (because it’s now what enables Apple to produce such impressively functional mobile devices).

To which Gerard responded:

I’m less convinced by the eye-witness reports: Napoleon’s staff also thought well about his judgements and determination (until the French were defeated and had to retreat from Russia, of course). What IS however a good point is that Job’s name appears on a large number of patent-applications (there was an interesting report about that in IHT/NYT last week which also pointed out that this could not only be motivated by the wish to boost Job’s (internal and external) company stature, as patent offices are keen to check whether the people who appear on patent applications have really contributed to the innovation.) Jobs seems to have been active not only on the level of “strategy” but also on the level of detailed engineering and design work in Apple (and that would be a difference with Napoleon: I don’t think Napoleon ever did some shooting himself. As I remember, he kept a safe distance from the actual fighting).

The more one thinks about this stuff, the more one realises how important it is to try and see technological stories in a wider context. For example, I vividly remember how Jobs was castigated in the 1980s for his determination to maintain absolute control over both hardware and software — in contrast to Microsoft, which prospered because anyone could make DOS and Windows boxes. Now the cycle has come full circle with Google realising that it will have to buy a handset manufacturer if it is to be able to guarantee “outstanding user experiences” (i.e. iPhone-like performance) for Android phones.

And that, in turn, brings to mind Umberto Eco’s lovely essay explaining why the Mac is a Catholic system and the PC is a Protestant one.

Later, another friend, Jon Crowcroft commented:

“Well Jobs is a Buddhist and Gates is agnostic – that certainly tells you something. People I know that talked to Jobs on various projects support the idea he had a major hand in project successes. I think his early failure was a common one of being too early to market; once he got re-calibrated after Apple bought NeXT to get him back, then he had it all sussed.”

Still later: Comparison between Apple and Microsoft is also interesting, as David Nicholls pointed out in an email. In terms of market cap, Apple is now worth considerably more, but:

While it is true that Apple is doing amazingly well at the moment, and ‘gaining ground’ over Microsoft, when it comes to the total amount of money made over the years, Microsoft is still well ahead.

I did a quick bit of digging and found that Apple’s total Net Income from 2001 to 2010 (the only figures I could find) is around $35.5 billion. In the same period Microsoft’s equivalent is $119 billion. These figures aren’t corrected for inflation but that obviously won’t affect the relative amounts.

Microsoft’s figures are available back to 1991, and the 1991-2010 total is around $151 billion.

Steve Jobs’s place in history

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I’ve written a long piece about Steve Jobs for today’s Observer. Extract:

When the time comes to sum up Jobs’s achievements, most will portray him as a seminal figure in the computing industry. But Jobs is bigger than that.

To understand why, you have to look at the major communications industries of the 20th century – the telephone, radio and movies. As Tim Wu chronicles it in his remarkable book, The Master Switch, each of these industries started out as an open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of incompatible standards, crummy technology and chancers. The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came when a charismatic entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher production values and greater ease of use.

With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system.

Jobs is from the same mould. He believes that using a computer should be delightful, not painful; that it should be easy to seamlessly transfer music from a CD on to a hard drive and thence to an elegant portable player; that mobile phones should be powerful handheld computers that happen to make voice calls; and that a tablet computer is the device that is ushering us into a post-PC world. He has offered consumers a better proposition than the rest of the industry could – and they jumped at it. That’s how he built Apple into the world’s most valuable company. And it’s why he is really the last of the media moguls.

David Pogue had an insightful piece about Jobs in the New York Times. This passage caught my eye:

In Silicon Valley, success begets success. And at this point, few companies have as high a concentration of geniuses — in technology, design and marketing — as Apple. Leaders like the design god Jonathan Ive and the operations mastermind Tim Cook won’t let the company go astray.

So it’s pretty clear that for the next few years, at least, Apple will still be Apple without Mr. Jobs as involved as he’s been for years.

But despite these positive signs, there’s one heck of a huge elephant in the room — one unavoidable reason why it’s hard to imagine Apple without Mr. Jobs steering the ship: personality.

His personality made Apple Apple. That’s why no other company has ever been able to duplicate Apple’s success. Even when Microsoft or Google or Hewlett-Packard tried to mimic Apple’s every move, run its designs through the corporate copying machine, they never succeeded. And that’s because they never had such a single, razor-focused, deeply opinionated, micromanaging, uncompromising, charismatic, persuasive, mind-blowingly visionary leader.

By maintaining so much control over even the smallest design decisions, by anticipating what we all wanted even before we did, by spotting the promise in new technologies when they were still prototypes, Steve Jobs ran Apple with the nimbleness of a start-up company, even as he built it into one of the world’s biggest enterprises.

“I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it,” Mr. Jobs wrote in his resignation letter.

That’s a wonderful endorsement. But really? Can he really mean that Apple’s days will be brighter and more innovative without him in the driver’s seat?

And Charles Arthur argues that Jobs’s greatest legacy lies in being the man who persuaded the world to pay for online content:

Jobs pried open many content companies’ thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google’s Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven’t heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google’s offerings.

Jobs’s resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it’s also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven’t set the world alight (yet?) isn’t a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod’s life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It’s more like a reflection of our times.

So if you’re wondering how Jobs’s departure affects the media world, consider that it’s the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who’s going to replace that?

Introducing Professor Pleasure-Sloper

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There’s a lovely review by Jacob Heilbrunn of Adam Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography in The National Interest.

Of the best-seller that launched Trevor-Roper on the public stage — The Last Days of Hitler — Heilbrunn writes:

It was a piece of sleuthing that had been assigned to him by the secret services. Trevor-Roper’s friend Dick White, a brigadier commanding the counterintelligence bureau (later the head of MI5 and MI6), hit upon the idea of the inquiry and encouraged Trevor-Roper to carry it out beginning in September 1945. The idea was to dispel Stalin’s propaganda efforts to suggest that Hitler had escaped and was in hiding (in fact, the Russians had dug up his body in May 1945, and legend has it that Stalin used Hitler’s skull as an ashtray). Trevor-Roper displayed real initiative: it was a onetime opportunity to make history himself. He interviewed numerous Nazi bigwigs and tracked down Hitler’s last will and testament. He formed the fullest picture of Hitler’s final days, demonstrating beyond doubt that the Nazi leader had expired by his own hand in April 1945 and that his and Eva Braun’s corpses were doused with gasoline by his lackeys and set on fire. The skill with which Trevor-Roper fashioned his intelligence report bears comparison with the greatest historians:

“In the absolutism, the opulence, and the degeneracy of the middle Roman Empire we can perhaps find the best parallel to the high noonday of the Nazi Reich. There, in the severe pages of Gibbon, we read of characters apparently wielding gigantic authority who, on closer examination, are found to be the pliant creatures of concubines and catamites, of eunuchs and freedmen; and here too we see the élite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences.”

Trevor-Roper’s most basic insight was that, for all its pretensions to totalitarian control, the Nazi system was, in essence, an inefficient and chaotic court system that consisted of rival paladins each seeking Hitler’s blessing.

It is surely significant, however, that Trevor-Roper had not alighted upon the topic of his own accord. The criticism for the rest of his life would be that he never produced anything that matched it. Perhaps Trevor-Roper stumbled into his work as a historian more than he, or anyone else, really cared to admit. What’s more, the Nazi era turned into a lucrative gig for Trevor-Roper; as Sisman underscores, he was repeatedly called upon over the decades to attest to the reliability and provenance of Nazi documents, a task he was prepared to undertake as long as it was accompanied by an imposing fee. The Last Days alone paid for his Bentley.

I’ve always been morbidly fascinated by Trevor-Roper, particularly by his mordant wit and elegantly mannered literary style. He spent most of his life in Oxford and lost no opportunity to assert its superiority over Cambridge, but then astonished everyone by accepting the Mastership of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His time there made Tom Sharpe’s great comic novel about Peterhouse, Porterhouse Blue, look like a publicity brochure. Trevor-Roper spent much of his time at war with the Fellows, and the mutual contempt with which both sides regarded one another was a thing of wonder.

A friend of mine, a liberal American historian whom we will call X, was astonished once to receive an invitation to call upon Trevor-Roper Arriving at the palatial Master’s Lodge on Trumpington Street, he was ushered into the great man’s study. The dialogue then went something like this:

T-R: “Ah, X, good of you to call by. I would like to seek your advice”.
X: “How can I help?”
T-R: “I was wondering if you knew of any black, lesbian American historians”.
X: “I’m afraid that nobody matching that description comes to mind.”
T-R: (Thoughtfully) “Pity.”
X: “Might I ask why you are seeking such a person?”
T-R: “The Fellows are seeking to appoint a College Lecturer in history and I was looking for a candidate who would really annoy them”.

At this point the telephone rang. T-R picked it up and listened intently for a moment. Then, noticing that my friend was still there, he motioned for him to go, explaining “it’s my gardener”.

There’s a great screenplay to be written about T-R’s time in Peterhouse and Alan Bennett’s just the man to do it. He must know the background pretty well: after all, he played Trevor-Roper in the film of Robert Harris’s book, The Hitler Diaries.