I ran accross a bunch of interesting stuff this past week, and in the tradition of @ninakix, I share them with you with a bit of my own commentary thrown in…
Lost in the Cloud,
A New York Times OpEd by Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain points out some serious considerations that make the “cloud” model risky and perhaps a bit unattractive. I like that he lead with something that many people might be too embarrassed to admit is on their minds: trust. He writes:
“‘If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you.’”
This is important and not at all naive. Making the cloud model work will require trust. He also focuses in on how the cloud may impact innovation by creating computing environments completely under control of single companies.
Why Is Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?
A Wired piece by Fred Vogelstein
This is a longer read but fascinating: Partly a profile of Christine Varney, law partner at Hogan & Hartson, expert in online law, and, new head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, as well as of the massive company she is keeping a close eye on (Google). Vogelstein points out how the public perception of Google has turned of late and questions whether Google is in touch with that. A quote in that light:
“Google has always been about taking risks, but I think they have been taking too many risks with their reputation in the past three years,” one former executive says. “If they don’t fix it at some point, that is going to get them in trouble.”
In regard to anticompetitive corporate behavior, I still have a hard time agreeing with the suit against Microsoft. Gates himself said that the tech industry moved too quickly for a company to truly have a monopoly, and it seems to remain true today, even for Google. We’ll just have to see…
Disconnecting Distraction
A short essay by Paul Graham
Paul Graham writes about how he discovered that the internet was wasting his time and what he did about it. Here’s an instructive clip that actually provoked quite a bit of laughter from me as it’s often difficult to separate job from distraction in my line of work:
“Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.”
Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard
A Vanity Fair article by Nina Munk
This is another long piece, which, frankly, you must sift through to separate the facts from gossip and over-the-top quotes. An example of over-the-top:
“‘Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,’ remarked Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967. ‘And now they’re coming hat in hand, pleading to the faculty and students to bear the burden of cutbacks. It’s a scandal! It’s an absolute scandal, the way Harvard has handled this financial crisis.’”
And an example of facts:
“Once upon a time—that is, the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008—Harvard’s endowment stood at $36.9 billion, way, way up from $4.8 billion in 1990. No other university endowment in the world comes close to matching Harvard’s. Yale’s endowment, the second-largest in the nation—$22.9 billion for fiscal 2008—is nearly 40 percent smaller than Harvard’s. Stanford’s is less than half the size: $17.2 billion, as of last year. Then came the Great Recession. In the second half of 2008, even more quickly than it had taken off, Harvard’s overheated endowment collapsed. Last December, in a letter written to the university’s deans, Harvard’s president, the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, and its executive vice president, Ed Forst, revealed that Harvard’s endowment had lost $8 billion, or 22 percent, in the first four months of the fiscal year, from July through October 2008. To put that number in context: $8 billion is greater than Columbia University’s entire endowment ($7.1 billion as of fiscal 2008). Not since 1974, when Harvard’s endowment shrank by 12.2 percent, had the university seen losses of such magnitude. Anticipating more dire financial news, Faust warned her deans to expect a 30 percent loss in the endowment for the year. Other universities were showing big losses in 2008, but at Harvard, given the scale and size of its endowment, the numbers seemed inconceivably large.”
All in all, it’s clear that this is a very significant crisis, not just in terms of the university’s own financial future, but also for Massachusetts and our country at large. This will have long and far-reaching effects on education, and research in a variety of fields, not to mention the academic reputation of past, current and future students.
Process, Myth, Change, Self A blog post by David Sherwin
It took me a read or two to get what I think David Sherwin means by “myths,” which would probably be better off said simply as long-term themes or ideas. Myth implies something that, while a “big” or lasting idea, is ultimately false or at least distorted, so then why design for myths? I think you’ll see what I mean in this quote, where he leads with saying that we should design for meaning rather than ornament, which I completely agree with:
“meaning is what we should be pursuing above and beyond any ornamental detail as we progress through the design process. If you want what you’re creating to last forever, you should be designing to embrace myths instead of thinking of the way to shine up that brochureware website or logo. This is the dirty secret of the branding gurus—products and brands that hook securely into the zeitgeist contain too much information contingent on brief trends, as opposed to designing for myths that are somewhat stable over time, stay relevant and meaningful, and aspire towards persistence over time. (Though myths do change, the overall container for a myth can be tested, designed, and generally does not exit cultures as the speed of, say, a LOLcats meme.)”
I’m really thinking maybe I shouldn’t have yelled at that Chinese guy so much
A blog post by Fake Steve Jobs
I actually debated including this with the other articles I read this week. Yes, I did read it, but like most of the content from this blog, I find it somewhat risky to endorse. It’s often pretty tough to discern what this author’s point of view is beyond lampooning Steve Jobs, and in this particular post, he touches on some issues that are profoundly disturbing. Here’s a quote that gets to the point:
“We all know that there’s no f****** way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives. You know that, and I know that. Okay? Let’s just be honest here. Just for a f******* minute, let’s all be honest. This time it’s getting to me. It really is. For a long time I couldn’t stop crying. Since then I’ve just been sitting in my office with the blinds shut. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s why I wasn’t on the earnings call today. I’m just numb. I’m asking myself, Is this really worth it? Is this what I want to do with my life? Can I live with myself?”
First, the author is absolutely right. It’s irresponsible of us to critique China without facing the repercussions of the moral and ethical standard we demand: fewer things that cost more. I want to say that I’m willing to accept that, but typing such a sentiment on my year-old MacBook seems naive at best, disingenuous at worst. Still, it’s a fact that if we must accept sacrifice if we are to expect progress. The second portion of the quote is the disturbing piece. Fake Steve Jobs describes what I assume he expects Real Steve Jobs to feel in light of the suicide of a Chinese factory employee who misplaced an iPhone prototype. The insinuation is that the monolithic force of Apple values the bottom line more than the lives of those it depends upon for that bottom line. Ultimately that is probably true, and confronting that truth should not simply put fear in the hearts of Apple execs, but also in all of us who support the dominance and ubiquity of the Apple brand by enthusiastically buying more and more of their products. So what do we do? Well, for starters, we ask the same questions: “Is this really worth it? Is this what we want to do with our lives and the lives of others? Can we live with ourselves?”
*Update* (Fri Jul 24 2:51pm) @justnolan sent me a link to this comment thread from Hacker News which has a discussion of Chinese factories, conditions, ethics, etc.
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