A Voice in the Wilderness →
Just a great piece by Republican outcast David Frum on what’s wrong with the GOP. Terrific and terrifying.
Just a great piece by Republican outcast David Frum on what’s wrong with the GOP. Terrific and terrifying.
Businessweek has a story in its latest issue about Sony. It was on the front page of Daring Fireball and linked to a couple of times in my Twitterstream. As a long time Sony fan, I was interested to see what it said.
The article is terrible and I have no idea why anyone has linked to it (and, frankly, why Businessweek published it). It does little more than briefly summarise the situation at Sony over the past decade. Critical analysis is kept to the bare minimum. This despite the fact that it’s over 3,000 words. Where do all those words go? Partly into laying out Sony’s problems (or, to be more accurate, the problems identified by the apparently sole source for the story: Howard Stringer) and partly into just talking about Howard Stringer and his background. Don’t know who he is and can’t be bothered reading his Wikipedia entry? Don’t worry because the boffins at Businessweek have you covered. Want actual analysis? Well, shit.
As I was reading it, two things gave me pause to wonder how well the story had been researched. At one point, the authors Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards (as difficult as it is to believe, this piece of reporting required the efforts of two people!) point out that relations between the hardware engineers at Sony in Japan and the content guys in the U.S. were so strained at one point that Sony’s U.S. movie studio had difficulty getting Sony products for use in its movies. It contrasts this with the ease with which Samsung could put its phones in blockbusters like The Matrix.
By Samsung I guess they meant Nokia. Which, you know, is an easy mistake to make: one being a South Korean electronic behemoth and the other being a Nordic mobile phone manufacturer. I for one am constantly confusing Koreans and Finns (the ears are how you tell them apart).
Later in the article, Stringer uses the phrase ‘Lehman shock’ to refer to the global financial crisis that began with the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. The article says that this is Stringer’s ‘shorthand’ for the GFC. This should be setting off warning bells. Have the writers of this piece done any research about Japan? ‘Lehman shock’ is not Stringer’s shorthand; it is the way that Japan refers to the global financial crisis. Shouldn’t you have, like, asked someone what this term meant if you hadn’t heard before? Maybe it would have cropped up in all the background interviews you did with Japanese people?
It’s then that it hits you that there is a remarkable absence of any reporting involving Japan.1 Sure, Sony’s a global company, Stringer himself is Welsh-born (which the article duly notes) and Kazuo Hirai (the article suggests he is likely to succeed Stringer) divides his time between the United States and Japan but Sony is still a quintessentially Japanese company. What do its problems about combining hardware with software say about Japan’s problems combining hardware and software? What do its problems about embracing the Internet as a delivery platform say about Japan’s problems embracing the Internet as a delivery platform? What do its problems about adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO say about Japan’s problems adapting to change, particularly that brought by a foreign CEO? I don’t know because these questions are never even asked, let alone answered.
Sony is a company of engineers, we’re told, and that’s the reason software sucks. Memo to Businessweek: Google? Chock full of engineers. Microsoft? Ditto. Apple? It’s engineers all the way down (to Jony Ive).
Now granted they’re a different type of engineer and maybe what you meant were hardware engineers. Maybe this says something about the problem besetting Sony. (Ooh, an avenue for inquiry!) Any reason to believe that’s changed? All these new whizz-bang products from Sony like tablets and phones and laptops, I guess they’re all going to be running same great new Sony software now that Stringer’s reoriented the ship? Oh, what? They’re running Windows and Android? Software written by someone else? That Sony has no relationship with? Did you ask Stringer (or indeed any Sony executive) about whether they consider the outsourcing of their software to third parties an issue? That it prevents them from adding anything unique to their products that might differentiate them from cheaper ones from Samsung and other manufacturers? Oh. No, I guess not. I guess you were too busy admiring the Central Park reservoir.
There is a great article to be written about Sony. This is not it.
Don’t be evil.
So a while back, I started treating my blog as a place to store both my thoughts on particular topics as well as links to things on the Internet that I thought were interesting. This may have been frustrating for some of you who were following my All Entries feed and suddenly saw this onslaught of links everywhere.
For you people, I present the Articles feed. The Articles feed is an RSS feed of the articles (that is, full blog posts) that I write with the links removed. What if you don’t really care for my writing but think, hey, you find some interesting shit around the Internet? I have you covered as well.
Hope that’s helpful! And thanks for reading!
I’m one of those people that think Sony’s problems lie in its almost complete inability to write software that human beings are supposed to use. That said, Rob Beschizza makes a pretty persuasive case that, at least when it comes to the PC, Sony’s problem is as much it’s inability to actually sit still (as it were) and focus on a design.
On the changes to the keyboard on the most recent Sony Vaio laptops:
The computer keyboard isn’t a place where radical UI design changes are desirable. To extend the marketing metaphor, it’s like the typeface of a book. You’re stuck with the same old alphabet, in the same configuration, and your job is to preserve its usefulness while investing the work with with a certain character. The smart choice is to design something good and stick with it.
But Sony does not. The changes to the chiclet keys in the Vaio Z, however slight, show that it can’t even refine its own winning ideas. It’s as if Sony was using Helvetica before almost everyone else, then switched to Arial when the world followed suit.
Helen Dale at Skepticlawyer on the risks that naturally arise once you start charging fees (particularly high fees) for university education:
[F]ee paying students will demand things of the course providers that those who received their education for free or for very little never did (or do)…
Most of these demands, at least initially, are legitimate and fair: better quality teaching, part-time provision, course materials included. I recognize those demands because I’ve made them myself. No-one likes to feel they are being played for a sucker. As yet, British students — at least at the better universities — have not succumbed to the ‘grade inflation’ so common in the US, but as the fees climb, I can see it becoming inevitable. First the demands coalesce around good teaching, grading consistency, provision of quality course materials. In time, however, they become ‘I paid my money, where’s my degree?’
Author and blogger Julie Koh has a great write up of Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers on her blog. Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, you’ll get something out of this.
My friend CC and I have an ongoing back and forth as to whether Nintendo (and, to a lesser extent, Sony) is going to survive the rise of smartphones. I confess most of the heavy lifting is being done by Horace Dedieu and Dick Schmidt at Asymco. This post sets out the pickle Nintendo finds itself in.
Speaking of Dedieu, I’ve just finished reading The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M Christensen. I want to write a fuller post on this in the coming days but it’s difficult not to see Nintendo as almost the prototypical example of Christensen’s disruption theory. A number of quarters of excellent profits with the world praising management before all of a sudden they dive off the edge of a cliff.
This is a great piece by Andy Baio on the dangers to anonymous bloggers using Google Analytics.
When I was a young boy we had little junk food in the house. I would go over to friends’ houses and be amazed at the assortment of crisps, Tim Tams, Arnott’s shapes, Nutella and confectionary of all sorts.
In my house, there were two types of snacks: fruit (predominantly apples) and plain biscuits. The biscuits were rarely chocolate-coated and were always, always of the home brand variety. For my birthday, I would be able to get a box of Arnott’s barbeque shapes.
I don’t mean to imply that we were poor. We were certainly not. My father was the principal at a high school and my mother was a teacher. We lived in a small, rural town in New South Wales where things were pretty inexpensive. My parents made a decision not to purchase those kind of foods for, what I assume, were health reasons. My mother did (and still does) delight in eating chocolate but it was clear that the chocolate in the house was hers, not ours (there was a sort of unspoken protocol that we could eat some of her chocolate but only if we basically took so little that she would barely notice).
I say all of this because I wonder if it is this that engendered in me a deep love of junk food. Was it the fact that I couldn’t have it that made me obsess about it? That had me spend my hard-earned money in high school buying a packet of crisps each lunchtime? That makes me crave eating it still?
Although this explanation is tempting, it is not supported by all the evidence. I have a younger sister and a younger brother, all within 3 years of me. While my sister definitely has a sweet tooth my brother does not seem to be possessed of the same desires (indeed, he has always been something of a cook and seems to delight in well prepared meals). If it were as simple an explanation as upbringing, we should all be so afflicted.
Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that I adore junk food. I consider myself a connoisseur of it in the way others might consider themselves connoisseurs of fine wines. I recently went to Singapore and was particularly disappointed when I discovered that there was no McDonald’s at the airport. I generally try to sample the McDonald’s in each country I visit and had skipped an earlier opportunity to eat at a restaurant because I assumed there would be one at the departure lounge.
However, I have, of late, become concerned about my eating habits. When I started eating more junk food as a teenager, I was aware that it was not good for me but I remember telling myself that there would come a time when I would put away such childish things. But I am now 29 and I realise that time is not coming. If anything, I am getting worse. The increase in my disposable income has allowed me to consume more junk food than ever before. I am not proud to admit it but there have been occasions where I’ve eaten pizza three times in a week or where I’ve gone to McDonald’s more times in a month than I’ve had breakfast.
I’m not obese. I’m blessed at the moment with a metabolism that has allowed me to eat junk food like this and avoid a ballooning waistline. But surely that cannot last. More to the point, while the consequences of eating like this may not be visible from the outside, it surely cannot be good for me on the inside. I must be increasing my risk of a heart attack, cancer, etc. These are not things I want to be doing.
The central problem for me is that I just have very, very little interest in food preparation. I cannot stand the tedium of cooking (the fact that I even consider cooking tedium probably says more than anything about my attitude toward it). And so I will steadfastly avoid cooking as best as I can. And junk food is convenient. Not only is there no preparation but there is no cleaning up to do either (another thing I am always happy to avoid).
And so I find myself struggling to eat well. I know eating well is a good thing to do. I know that not eating well is a bad thing to do. I know the things I need to do in order to eat well. I know the foods I need to avoid. And yet I struggle heartily to cook meals for myself for more than two nights in a row. If I go more than a day or so without some sugar or salt rush, I find excuses to go down to the shops.
I sit at my desk wondering how everyone else does it. Are they really all going home to cook? Are they just living at home with their parents and letting them do the heavy lifting? Are they eating as unhealthily as I am?
All of this feels like the very definition of a First World problem. Here I am complaining about my inability to eat properly. Not because I lack the financial resources (or even the food), but simply because I cannot be bothered and because I have enough money to pay something else to cook food for me.
I am not sure what the way out of this mess is. I am not sure how to eat well. I mean, I know what I have to do. I’m just not sure how to make myself do it. Enforce some kind of regimen on myself? Grow up? Just put up with the heart failure? I don’t know.