Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Stephen Judd,
I find the hagiographical tone for another domineering CEO a bit much to take. Chris’ comments may be in poor taste but Apple and Jobs’ brand values are definitely in conflict with the realities of high-tech manufacturing among other things.
I’m glad you put it that way. Daisey’s scathing response to any attempt to assess the Apple-Foxconn-suicide-factory narrative isn’t very helpful. He just declares the Chinese government’s national suicide rate statistics “unreliable”, but Auckland University’s Statistics blog examined a range of data and concluded that the suicide rate among employees at Foxconn Shenzhen was indeed lower than that that of the general population.
And it’s five times lower than the suicide rate at France Telecom, which saw 46 suicides in 30 months.
As far as I can tell there have been three suicides among about 450,000 workers at Foxconn Shenzhen this year (the place is basically a city). This improvement may be a result of both external and internal pressure on the company (20 Chinese universities collaborated on a withering report on working conditions) or simply because the 2009 cluster was an anomaly.
This isn’t to say Foxconn is a great place to work – at the bottom of the ladder is clearly is not. But to focus only Apple and even only on Foxconn seems to be to miss the point in quite a serious way.
Daisey also seem to have a touching faith in the value of taking manufacturing back to the US – which, in the food industry anyway, permits hideous employment practices.
As he points out, the cost of assembly is a relatively small part of the price of your new gadget, but Apple, Nokia, Sony, HP, Intel, Microsoft etc use Foxconn not only because of its pricing but the sheer scale and speed with which it can produce things.
When can we step back and assess the Jobs reputation as a whole if not now?
’Bout now, I reckon. Hopefully without drive-by snark.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Stephen Judd,
The crucial technology and the actual design was always the work of other people, like Wozniak, Ives, Raskin, Tesler, the PARC crew, Frog Design, BSD, Mach, yadda yadda. As far as I can tell, what Jobs brought to it was superb taste and a singular ability to yell at the right people the right way to do things he personally could not.
Well, yeah. Exactly. But there's a whiff of faint praise there.
Susan Kare, the artist who created most of the original Mac typefaces and the key interface elements of the operating system, said this about working with Jobs:
He was running Apple when I met him, but he was interested in the Macintosh at every level. It seemed to me that he was a person capable of making meaningful contributions in hardware, software, advertising, icons, fonts. Sure, he's a well-known and controversial figure, but I had a lot of respect for him because I never knew anybody who had such a broad band of ability to contribute good ideas in many realms. Not that every single idea was The Idea, or the best idea, or even good, or that he wouldn't listen to others. I think he definitely has a style of pushing back and being critical, to push you to see if you had explored every option. I remember him as great to work with, being excited over things that were new that we had done that we could show him, and it being a very motivating factor, because when he's happy and pleased with an idea he can make you feel great.
Because no matter how big you make the room, a room full of technologists is unlikely to deliver you a great product, let alone a series of them.
-
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
it’s very good and shows we’ve lost a very good parliamentarian.
Perhaps, but while I like Simon a lot I don’t think his legacy as Justice Minister is that much to be proud of. The right to silence should never have been under threat. Ever.
Amen to that.
I know of some good lawyers and law students who have a very, very poor opinion of Power. He's viewed as a provincial conveyancing lawyer out of his depth in the portfolio.
Speaking of which, Judith Collins got her ass handed to her by Steven Price this week. Ouch.
I hope Chris Finlayson’s bosses can refrain from throwing him any more hospital passes. He does add value.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to James Butler,
Since OS X is Unix, if you want to fsck, you can just open a terminal and type “fsck”. Why does it need to be a button on the mouse?
I used "fscking" as a humorous alternative to "fucking". But you probably knew that ...
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Rich Lock,
In that respect, what he was doing was in some ways seems closer to the artisitic process than it was manufacture or commerce. It was a singular vision, not that of a committee or focus group.
I think you're right. And that nature meant we were always going to have to endure the occasional weird design choice. The longtime aversion to putting fscking buttons on the fscking mice, for example.
Actually, Apple mice in general. I can't recall a good one, and some of them were/are basically unusable. I use a Microsoft one!
-
From The Onion: Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies.
-
Hard News: LATE OCTOBER: Life in the…, in reply to JacksonP,
It is hard to articulate the scope of the issues raised last night. I would encourage everyone to listen to the RNZ broadcast, although I will be interested to see how they deal with some of the free ranging discussion (i.e. expletives). Lady Hillary seemed comfortable enough though.
Lady Hilary was definitely fine with it all. But yeah, there'll be a wee bit of editing of that for daytime play.
Well done again Russell. You do this stuff extremely well.
Yeah, I do. A few lessons for next time, but it very much seems that I'll be doing some more LATE events.
I'd love to do something with a serious budget one day, though. That would be good.
Our performers last night all seem to be really happy about their evening too.
And Phillip Patston is a bloody legend.
He is.
-
Hard News: LATE OCTOBER: Life in the…, in reply to JacksonP,
Was a great, thought provoking, evening. Made me think so hard my brain hurts.
It was quite a diffuse topic, and I spent a bit of time working on a structure for it, but I really didn't know how it would go. The key was leading with the personal stories, I think, and having the audience laughing along from the beginning. Laughter opens up an audience emotionally.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Bart Janssen,
As I said I understand the issues and I believe they are important.
And we have discussed them at considerable length at other times here. I'd be happy to discuss what Daisey says too, but I don't want to in this thread.
-
Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Richard Grevers,
He also understood marketing (in the fullest sense of the word) better than any of the competition. The upside of that is that it de-geeked technology and put it in the hands of people who would have shied away from it otherwise – the downside that they managed to put style over substance in many of their products.
And yet, these are the products that creative people are associating with the real, productive work they’ve done over decades. So I don’t accept that characterisation – with a few notable exceptions like the Cube. (Yes, I’m ignoring the dark years.)
And it bears noting that at Webstock ’11, about two thirds of the room was using Apple products.