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Management and RIM

This is an incredibly mixed article on RIM, but one section in particular stood out to me as either bad reporting, incompetent journalism, or Apple fanboyism.

Success also bred hubris about RIM’s position in the market. By late 2009, it was clear that the iPhone and Android had redefined the smartphone, and that RIM needed to adapt. The company had to target consumers more aggressively, not just business customers. It also had to drastically improve the BlackBerry’s user interface and web-browsing capabilities, not to mention attract developers to write more applications for the BlackBerry platform. Smartphones became less about communication—RIM’s biggest strength—and more about consuming media.

What’s more, the company itself was becoming increasingly complex. RIM produces multiple handsets, each with different screen sizes and internal hardware. RIM will even customize the same device to suit the needs of different carriers. Apple, in contrast, produces just one iPhone model per year. The product complexity at RIM takes a firm hand to manage, and that becomes more difficult when the entire organization is undergoing a seismic shift.

I agree: adaptation was signalled (though not necessarily entirely evident) in 2009. I agree: the company had to update it’s UI and OS to match that of their competitors.

Factually incorrect: Apple produces a single version of their iPhone (they have CDMA and GSM versions, as well as multiple ‘lines’ of their product by year, as well as some version that have or don’t have cameras according to businesses’ needs).

It strikes me that, while RIM certainly has challenges, focusing on the number of devices is of variable importance. If a company has a routine or standardized production and policy cycle that accommodates different radio technologies, then the radio technologies themselves are of minimal importance for overall production of new and updated devices. What the author actually means to say is that there was an emphasis on radios rather that UI innovation. This is arguably accurate – I have a Bold 9900 at the moment, and the UI is dated – but the hardware is incredible.

RIM is, and has been, a hardware company for quite some time. Other than Nokia there is no company that even comes close to competing (and I say this as an ex-iPhone owner, and the current owner of a Samsung Windows Phone device). The real test is watching to see if RIM becomes a Nokia, or transcends the problems that beset Nokia.

At best, BB 10 will enable transcendence. At worst, it will herald RIM turning into the world’s (arguably) best mobile hardware vendor in the world.

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Speedboast Now Costing Customers Money?

Rogers’ SpeedBoost system temporarily increases the rate that data is transmitted to their customers in the earliest moments of downloading an item. This system is meant to get ‘bursty’ traffic to end-users faster that would otherwise occur, as well as initially buffer streaming video so that customers don’t suffer delays. It was initially couched as a free ‘extra’ but it seems like Rogers customers now get to pay for these ‘enhancements’:

… a Rogers representative insists that users are lucky that the hikes weren’t worse, given Rogers had to “absorb much of these costs.” The company insists the improvements include some additional TV channels and SpeedBoost, a technology that delivers a little extra bandwidth at the beginning of a download (Comcast users in the States know it as PowerBoost):

$2/customer is a hefty increase when all customers are aggregated. While DSL Reports suggests that this move is driven by a lack of competition in Rogers’ primary markets I think that this is only one element of the story. A key problem facing Canadian ISPs is the high market saturation in wireline Internet services; quite simply, it can be challenging to attract new customers away from their current providers to raise quarterly revenues. One solution is to increase prices in minuscule ways, such that you deliver increased “value” to shareholders while targeting monthly cost increases just below consumers’ pain (and flight) points.

This doesn’t make Rogers’ practices any less horrible for their customers, but I really think that focusing exclusively on competition – and avoiding a reflection on market saturation – is missing a key part of the broader story.

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Blackberry Playbook Sighs

This is the problem with having too many models, with too many disparate features and capabilities, on the market at the same time. The fact that the flagship of RIM’s smartphone empire – the Bold 9900 – can’t utilize ‘old’ apps is a sin. It should be there other way around, with old devices being unable to use applications!

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Flexibility and Low Working Standards

The New York Times has a piece that argues – though the narrative is highly forgiving – that the flexibility ‘demanded’ by contemporary technology firms (amongst others) can only occur if they’re allowed to outsource labor. The reason? In countries like China you can rouse 8,000 people out of their dorms in their walled factory-city and put them to work almost instantly. In China, the government will subsidize the costs of massive factory development. Because in China, you can find thousands of engineers – not ones with bachelor degrees, but with a middle-ground space between high school and university – within two weeks.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Never forget that language like ‘scale up and down’ really means ‘add and shed labor’, which is further translated to ‘pay people so they can live and work and then rapidly fire them without cause.’ Moreover, the reason why supply chains are so effective in Asia are because most of the bits and pieces of today’s gadgets are manufactured in dense techno-factory domains. These locations are incredibly hazardous to individuals who work there and the environment they are located within.

The ‘common sense’ of locating these factories in China shouldn’t obscure the fact that the West is benefiting off the hard labor of foreign citizens that costs those citizens now – with their health and lives – and may poison them in the future – both as their factories destroy the local environment and return toxic e-waste in the form of disposed products.

There is an ethics to technology. We need to start actively thinking about them.

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Google to Internet: “Papers Please”

I don’t dislike Google. Many of the company’s products are incredibly delightful to use. I support a fair amount of the company’s public advocacy work, though not all of it (caveat: the same could be said of almost all organizations I’m sympathetic towards). That said, I think think that their policy regard real names and pseudonyms if fucking absurd. As noted by Ars:

On Monday, Google Product Vice President Bradley Horowitz wrote on Google+ that the company will roll out its name policy changes this week. One change is that anyone will be able to add nicknames in addition to their real names. The more significant change, however, is that Google will also let people use pseudonymsinstead of a real name, but there are caveats. Horowitz indicates that the pseudonym must be established and well-known in order to qualify for a Google+ profile.

“Starting today we’re updating our policies and processes to broaden support for established pseudonyms, from +trench coat to +Madonna,” Horowitz wrote. Google may flag the name that a person intends to use and ask for additional information to confirm the person’s identity, including “Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license” or “Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following.” This would seem to raise privacy problems for those who need pseudonyms for safety reasons, but a post in Mashable says “Google will destroy all documentation you send them once the account verification process is complete.”

Seriously: your pseudonym has to be “established and well known”?! By who’s standards? If I have an offline pseudonym does that count? What if my pseudonym is ‘common’ and used by a lot of people – does that impact how well ‘established’ it is?

Google is actively trying to force people into their social network and they’re just being horrific to their end-users in the process. Demanding that people provide official documents to join a social network?! Ridiculous.

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RIM: Never Trust A Company Who’s Name Is A Sex Act

technicallycorrect:

Earlier today Joint-CEO’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down from their positions after 20 years in charge of Research In Motion (RIM), the producers of BlackBerry phones.

I’m a harsh critic of RIM, their phones are appalling in almost every regard comparative to their…

I disagree with the author’s 1, 2, 3, and 4 (of 5)  points on the following basis:

  1. The Playbook is actually pretty good;
  2. While streamlining some of the phone models might be a good idea, becoming a prestige brand like Apple will threaten RIM’s expansion in less wealthy foreign markets;
  3. Moving to an entirely new OS (again) isn’t as simple as it sounds when you’re a security-minded company. WebOS would likely need to be re-written from the ground up. Hopefully BB 10 is enough to compete with the current line of OSes (really, the competition at this point is Windows Phone OS; beating iPhone would be targeting an aged OS that is itself in desperate need of UI updates);
  4. I like screen-based phones, but can appreciate physical keyboards. This can be a space where RIM differentiates itself from Apple. Moreover, I see an awful lot of people typing on keyboards on buses, in classes, in coffee shops, and so forth: there’s an attachment to tactility that many are unwilling to give up.

I agree that more developers need to be brought on board (point 5). Not sure what can be done, specifically, other than create a welcome development environment, really work on outreach, and provide a good set of default API hooks that are robust and varied enough to create compelling applications. Ideally, RIM would do what they could to integrate core functionality into their devices in such a manner that they could extend that functionality with a minimum of effort. Apps are important, but a flexible and organic OS (that doesn’t get bloated) is as, if not more, important than apps themselves.

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American Copyright Gone Power Mad

The fact that American copyright holders basically govern an arm of the US government that can, and is, shutting down website URLs at the TLD root is terrifying. That degree of power, however, looks like nothing compared to what happened in the recent MegaUpload takedowns. Consider the following:

The width and breadth of the global police action are simply massive, and are, quite justly, being painted as a massive over-reach. The full indictment goes so far as to mention Canadian bandwidth provider Cogent, whose headquarter employees were even held and questioned during the raids this week. Indeed, anybody who provided bandwidth, rack space or Internet services appears to have been held, questioned, and/or pressured in the global raids.

The policy of seizing domains and hardware first, without any adversarial court process, limits every person’s ability to contest American efforts to silence free speech. Moreover, the maneuvers taken impose American understandings of American law upon all people living around the world. Such actions not only makes associating with certain others, and certain behaviours, legally dangerous but given a willingness to even threaten major ISPs’ employees it suggests that even third-party data transit providers are at risk. America is (rapidly) developing a policy process and technically-informed system capable of censoring any communication, any speech, any uploaded data that its rights holders believe might damage those corporations’ economic interests.

In the 30s and 40s there was a name for this kind of behaviour: fascism. We’re now witnessing the final stages of what was intended to be the greatest republic in the world go the way of Italy. All that stands between the RIAA and running considerable elements of American law enforcement are the courts.

God save us all.

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Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup Form

This is how you leverage a monopoly in one domain (search) to force yourself into other markets while strip-mining users’ privacy expectations. I’m so glad that Google is a ‘do no evil’ kind of company and that they value users’ privacy.

The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”

I would note that Facebook didn’t become successful by requiring people to sign up; it made the service cool and prestigious to drive early adoption. They also weren’t pushing people from one service into another, separate and unrelated, one. I can’t wait to see what the Europeans do to Google: it’s going to make the hell the Microsoft went through look like a brief, and sunny, walk in the anti-trust regulatory park.

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iPads in the Classroom: A Sound Investment or Bottomless Money Pit?

Klassen writes:

 To outfit a student body of 700 students at current prices schools would need to spend approximately $350,000, and that’s just for the hardware. To outfit one particular class, say Chemistry, with the needed textbooks—at Apple’s quoted $15 per book price—would likely cost a little over $10,000, to outfit the entire school with every textbook they needed for every course would cost significantly more than the hardware itself.

All told, an average size school would need to find approximately $500,000 to equip its entire study population with iPads and digital textbooks, and with most schools struggling to find funding for programs like art, music, and physical education, current financial priorities may be elsewhere.

 

My vote: an expensive money pit. Unless, of course, schools start deferring costs by requiring parents to pony up and pay for expensive Apple iGear. I’m sure parents would just love that extra expense of $500/year in hardware costs. I bet replacing damaged screens, stolen devices, and so forth will also improve parents’ sunny dispositions towards school systems that adopt Apple’s digital textbook extravaganza.

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Must Read on Apple ‘Saving’ Education

While I’m skeptical about the reasons that publishers are embracing Apple’s new iBooks Author system, Kieran Healy has a terrific piece that strikes to the problems with iBooks themselves: they’re a solution that insist on defining the problem. The issue is that, the problem it’s ‘solving’ is unlikely to be a significant problem actually facing educators, students, or the educational market.

The punchline in particular is great: Encarta is not the future. I’m not saying WHY that’s such a great punchline but you can find out if you go and read the article.