Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Business

The Apple Paradox: How they are hurting all of us
I remember getting my hands on the first iPhone. “So where is copy-paste?” I asked. Oh, I was “ignorant” and “not aware of best user interactions principles”. Sure, whatever. A few years later, iPhones had copy-paste of course. Or the Mighty Mouse, a revolution (according to Apple) which introduced…the right click we all had relied on for decades already before their big announcement.
And now…the magic button on the iPhone. This isn’t business as usual, nor should we let them get away with it again. Apple is a company whose outsize effect on user interface it is time we all question. Sure they control more than half the smartphone market in the United States. But that’s about it! And even there, somebody should grow a set and state the facts.
Apple, we have had enough of your pointless changes. You want a super thin MacBook? Go ahead, leave it with just one USB port. But don’t expect everyone to follow just because of your multimillion advertising prowess. You want to remove the iPhone’s multifunctional home button? Be our guest, but what do you have to say now that you are bringing it back?
The problem is that Apple has an effect on everything. And it shouldn’t. Because they really are not the best at UI. Not even close. Their criteria is not the best user experience but how to sell more iPhones. They add and take away ports in order to sell more dongles, adapters or their new accessories. It is all about, and only about, their bottom line. They are making fools of all of their users and it’s about time you wised up to this fact.
Tweaking the Bluetooth protocol to make it different and weird and incompatible isn’t clever. It costs the entire planet billions in waste. There are international consortiums where these things are discussed and agreed upon precisely because we need our stuff to work together for as long as possible, as easily as possible and as widely as possible. Apple is laughing in the face of its users in the most disrespectful way possible too. Adding two buttons to your daily phone isn’t funny. There is a learning curve and a massive cost all the way up and down the chain of everything around the iPhones.
It’s not just iPhones. We have all suffered greatly from every “weird” choice Apple made these past decades. Even when we don’t use Apple products. It affects everyone. They weren’t weird for any other reason than profit. The DoJ is right. Apple has made something worse than a walled garden with iOS. It is a dictatorship that demands payment every few years in the latest Apple products.
Free market. You can choose to stay within that garden. But don’t pretend that it is the cutting edge of technology. Nor the best design choices. It is costing the entire planet to look at Apple as anything else than an extremely selfish niche company playing dictator.
September 18, 2024
Greenwashing with a twist: come to Greece!
In the image above is a small undefined area in Central Athens as it is projected to become. In an extremely densely populated where a parking spot can cost you 100 euro a month or more. Most people just drive around until they find a space, or try to “hold” a spot using crates or their kids and spouses and other tricks.
As you can see the cars park more or less without any plan because, well, Greece, it is an “undefined” area, much contended public space in the city is like that. But then some brave mayor thinks he has a solution! In this case to turn it into a park! The most obvious advantage is that nobody can say no to more green in a city already suffering from global warming. And better still, find a corporate sponsor. Problem solved!
Well not really. Not at all.
This is prime real estate in the most densely packed part of town. It is glaringly obvious that it is an absolute waste not to use the underground opportunity. I wouldn’t even suggest using it for car parking, unless it was a high rise car parking with a green park on top. Probably a center for micromobility would be best. Have charging stations for ebikes and escooters and such. Greece is sorely lacking in availability and support for these. Imagine getting out of your house, walking through a small park and going down to pick up your scooter to work instead.
But that’s not how politics work in Greece.
We need a quick win. Not some boring , long term, expensive actual solution. We just need something for the press releases. And the corporate sponsors love it. Like the pointless “green solar island” the VW group has been harping about for ages. This is just an excuse for PR and corporate people to get free trips to Greece as a mini holiday. So everyone looks good, feels good, gets what they want in the short term.
Except the inhabitants of this area just lost the open space and some invaluable parking spots. Sure, go ahead, make a park. And watch it dry up when the funding does the same. We have seen it a million times.
It is not easy or pleasurable to oppose any green park project. I remember when my local quarries started planting trees on the side of the road I was torn. They were not only illegally in dangerous places by the road but – more to the point – they were only in those places they needed to be in order to hide the quarry!
Sometimes however we need to say no. Do it right, or don’t do it all.
June 21, 2024
Rigged elections, Open AI, the NBA finals and the next Google CEO
Just switched off the first Mavs-Celtics game. Since the iconic rivalry of the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, NBA Finals ratings have never recovered. Strangely enough however the lowest TV rated series was the most interesting to me. It was 2020, the year of “the bubble”, an innovative solution the NBA found to continue working despite restrictions.
And it won Joe Biden the elections.
At a time when we were all stuck at home watching Netflix they managed to produce top level basketball and a potent political message at the same time. Every match was a black lives matter match, a platform for players to talk about the importance of voting. Personally I truly believe it made the difference by getting especially black voters determined enough to overcome all of Trump’s hurdles in order to vote against him and swing the election. It wasn’t easy post Obama to keep their support, especially in the COVID mess of disinformation.
Lebron James is a divisive figure in the world of basketball. Billed from a very young age as “the next Michael Jordan” he is in fact much much more than Jordan can even imagine. (Yes, I have written about him before, here is a good summary of a lot of things I admire in him.) Mostly because this athlete had the courage to stand up against an acting President. He alienated half his fans forever. But he was right. And he didn’t win that ring “for Cleveland” like the last one he got. He won it for social justice, so he could have a platform to make change.
LBJ is what I call “a benevolent dictator”.
This is a term I have often used to describe Google too. I laughed out loudly when reading magazine titles about how “open AI is challenging Google in artificial intelligence”. Nobody is even close. Google, much like LeBron James, is several steps ahead of everyone. Google makes assists to everyone for as long as possible and only hammers specific baskets in if and when necessary. LeBron this season at age 39 single handedly outscored the entire much hyped Clippers team in the fourth quarter to come back from a 19 point deficit. Google can do the same any day of the week to Open AI.
With much power, comes much responsibility. Blowing out opponents simply makes nobody watch the game. LBJs history, much like Google’s is a constant string of everyone doubting them. You rarely see a LeBron James team blowout opponents. I have oftened wondered why I am awake at 4am (Greek time) watching him play. I now know and it is addictive, he is very cunningly making sure the end result, what you bought a ticket for, is worth watching. It is the exact opposite of watching Giannis play. But even an aging LeBron can turn games around when he really needs to, he controls the narrative. He knows when the league isn’t going to give him MVP, he knows when the league needs a different team to get a championship. He adapts the story, sure. But the end result is always worth watching if you know what you are looking for.
Sundar Pichai, if you ever need help, who you gonna call?
PS Lebron it’s time you switched to a Google Pixel.
June 7, 2024
Do no evil: ranking tech giants
Meta for sure is the most evil large technology company of our times. It is at heart the extension of an extremely immature mediocre hacker. Time and time again proven unreliable or just straight lying to everyone’s face. Even if we accept that it has grown so much that it is now difficult for Facebook to act as bad as it used to, we know it will try. How? It’s the little things every day. The lack of resources in policing content. The experiments are still running on users all the time. The lack of transparency. Heck you can’t even export your data normally, they keep trying to hide deactivation menus or make not accepting cookies harder than they should.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to connect people. He just wants to connect your wallet to his bank account. Plain and simple. Facebook and Instagram are the crack cocaine of our digital world and he is always looking for ways to make them even more lethal to our psychological well being and social cohesion. There is simply no upside to any of Meta’s products. And even if there was some social aspect to them it is submerged in constant changes and lies of the platform. One minute they are promoting facebook pages, get everyone to invest in those, the next they have relegated them and nobody sees them in the newsfeed. Then it was video, the future of everything, go build studios in your companies….oh no, he ended that too without warning. Nobody should take anything Meta says seriously anymore.
Microsoft is of course evil but in a more traditional way. This is old fashioned monopolistic behavior. They build their products in all the ways they can to lock customers in. Not as bad as Meta because after all this is the software that runs a lot of the planet’s infrastructure and day to day business. But they do their best. Complicated pricing structures that get you started and then hold you by the balls. Lobbying to governments with shady deals that turn into long term locks. They open up when they lose, like with mobile phones, just enough to try and keep a finger in every pie. Just so they can weasel their way into your company’s backbone and get you paying a monthly fee for something or other. And somehow that monthly fee grows over time. They always find a way. Microsoft is evil on a state level of lobbying and backroom dealing. But at least they also get stuff done for the planet and occasionally actually improve their products.
Google is much harder to consider evil because of the extremely unique business model. Billions of people around the world have never ever paid Google a cent yet they use Google products all the time. Google Maps, YouTube, Search, Docs, Android and other incredible and unique tools that are completely free. Unlike what conspiracy theorists try to tell you, free means free. In ten seconds you can get a Google account, 15GB for free and do absolutely amazing things on your phone, tablet or computer. Google is what I call a benevolent dictator. Sure, they could destroy the planet at any time. They could ruin all of us. They probably know what will happen a few years in the future better than anyone. But they don’t.
Chat GPT is an excellent illustration of this. The “T” in GPT of course being a Google invention that the company gifted to the world. Google could have released something similar a long time ago. They didn’t. The kind dictator knew it was too soon for humanity to handle it.
Apple shouldn’t even be on this list because it isn’t a tech company. A giant yes, tech no. Apple doesn’t innovate technologically. It is a lifestyle company. More importantly it is a staple of the American economy. Much like the dollar. Apple sells mainly in North America and doesn’t even bother to accommodate the rest of the planet in product design or support. They make products with last year’s tech copied from everyone or from companies it buys out. It makes “good enough” gadgets with the design language it has found works for it. It’s financial success has nothing to do with any groundbreaking technology. Banks don’t run on Macs and neither does anything else of any consequence on the planet.

So stop lumping “tech giants” in articles and opinions. They are nothing like each other. Sure there are product categories where they conflict. But it is completely irrelevant. The business models and the way they look at the world is so different that they should hardly ever be in the same sentence. Some of us, the people that really try to think about technology, society and business care about these differences after all. Show some respect.
February 8, 2024
Apple can’t buy it’s way into AI
Have you heard of Google Crowdsource? It’s been around for years,
a lot of volunteers helping Google become even better at AI. Thousands of people doing image label verification, or audio validation, handwriting verification and millions of other clever ways to help Google improve. I am Level35 because I found it interesting from the start. I enjoyed the tech talks from Google AI people and the seminars. You know, back when AI wasn’t all the rage like it is now.
Or maybe you have heard of Google Photos. A ridiculous in scale endeavour whereby Google gave the entire planet (after all 8 out of 10 smartphones run on Android, not iOS) infinite photo backup. Thus sucking up the greatest free database of images anywhere. Ever. While iPhone users all have phones out of storage because they don’t want to pay anymore than they already pay every month to Apple.
These are just two examples that you might not have thought of. Of course Google Maps, YouTube or Google Search are also on a scale way beyond anything Apple can even imagine. This isn’t like Siri, Apple can’t just throw 200 million to buy an SRI equivelant to catch up. In fact Siri is an excellent example because even when it was launched it was many years behind Google. Much like with Apple Maps, Apple seems content to have an inferior product simply window dressed for the North American market.
Google has invested long term in making Google Maps a globally relevant product. There has been a vibrant group of contributors adding to the quality of the data and the AI. Apple has been too busy trying to upsell devices at a greater profit margin to bother to improve its products. Some say it’s the “dark horse” playing “the long game”. They are ignorant and almost funny in their ignorance.
It isn’t just about massive datasets. AI focus has been at the core of Google’s existence from the get go. Converting Google search to Chat GPT like functionality was just the flip of a switch for Alphabet. They didn’t need to buy any companies because they are that company. And if it is about computing power again Google has the best model. They have been selling “free” services like search, maps, youtube and everything else for years, building massive infrastructure on the back of their ad business in ways that consumers consider a win win.
Apple’s endeavours in digital video creation are an excellent illustration of the extent of the hole they have dug themselves. A few decades ago the company thought that digital video creation would be the next DTP, the next saviour for their computing division. Even now with their touted advantage in processors they have just 20% of the global computer share. Back then they bought software like Final Cut and other more expensive digital creation tools and tried to package them in various ways to sell more Macs into studios and broadcasters. It didn’t work of course. Apple was not that kind of company, it made money from iPhones. There was no durability to the vision and the software started dying out with less and less updates. It went back to being a cute toy for some Apple loving film folk.
Right now Apple has no AI vision. It can’t even think of how to develop one. They are too busy trying to think of some gadget that will sell as the iPhone’s market share which is puny. For all you Americans reading, globally just 15% of humans use an iPhone. They all prefer products that are more affordable, more flexible, more open and with the innovations that Apple copies for their next flagship every year. They haven’t been beating world champions at the game of Go, nor folding proteins.
So when Apple inevitably announces what its plan are in AI, I would take them with a massive pinch of salt. Buying any company won’t solve their problem and no new technology they can announce will either. AI thinking is a long term project and Apple has been absent from the party.
January 13, 2024
Apple is too lazy to be any good at anything
I enjoyed a recent Google blog analysis of the changes to advertising due to cookies being phased out. Google had tried something different, it didn’t go far enough for privacy advocates, now they are trying again. That’s life, a give and take between interested parties. Well, unless you are Apple. The Cupertino approach is to dictate anything they like, whenever they like, usually without advance warning. They have been doing it with everything from the plugs to their machines, to other standards, to features they simply kill suddenly.
But this isn’t yet another rant about how insular and small minded Apple is, how small a part of the world they actually influence. This is a very serious warning to Apple investors: Apple’s lack of innovation and laziness will bite back.
Let’s take an example like Maps. Pretty essential tool. Does Apple think it will get away with just buying up some companies and occasionally updating maps of, well, North America? Amongst the gazillion things Google Maps does better is a simple callibration whereby you lift your phone, it looks around and figures out where you are. Why? Because Google bothered to drive around the entire planet. It has the images and the technology to process all that. And then it went a step further by crowdsourcing a constant stream of updates through it’s Google Maps contributor scheme. These aren’t just “nice little touches”, these are very serious stepping stones in achieving faster, better, more meaningful experiences to users.
Let’s take Siri. While the planet shoots ahead with voice search for more and more users, Apple is stuck in American English and an extremely limited real world application. Home automation? While Apple copies Tile (badly) and plays with a few retails sales, Google has paved a way through Google Home for thousands of developers and manufacturers to work together.
It is easy to say “we are dropping Flash next year” like Steve Jobs did so prematurely. What is hard is coming up with real world solutions so that stuff actually works, millions of websites and web developers need to find a way to do what they do tomorrow as well. “Oh Google is so dominant in search, it is easy for them” says anyone too lazy to think it through. Have you seen https://crowdsource.google.com/ ? Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are organized by Google to actually work on making AI what we all imagine it will become. A trillion data points can only get you so far. An army of volunteers are helping to get us a bit further, a bit faster. That takes community building, events. It takes transparency and information moving around freely. Things Apple never has done and shows no intention of ever doing.
They think that they can fool stockholders and markets with tricks like the M1. Some of us remember the last time they left Intel though. We all know how this ends in 3 or 5 years. Stunts like that can only go so far. In our globalized and extremely complex modern world even simple solutions that work need nurturing, explaining, selling to multiple interested parties. Real world problems take work to analyze and adress. It is more like gardening, yet Apple still wants to attack with a chainsaw all the time. Stop drinking the Kool Aid. It may not have cyanide, but it sure as hell has less and less of anything much better.
February 20, 2022
The biggest failure of global business
A trillion market cap is pretty impressive for a company that mainly sells to Americans. It’s not just the 8.5% global market share for computers that is pathetic. Nor the equally laughable share of global smartphones. Android is the defacto global standard, iOS is a joke. Yet for people living in Callifornia or New York (and them alone) it is important. And they are the people writing in tech magazines and blogs, they are the people in the media. They are the ones keeping the stock price so high for absolutely no reason.
It takes a lot to make a truly global company. Google develops its products in local languages, it makes tools we all rely on. Really rely on, not fancy toys. Things you can’t live without anymore. HP has local support. You know real support, real sales people, real local offices in every country in the world. Apple? Not even close! And they have never seemed to care. Too big to fail, too close to an all American symbol.
This does in fact present a real problem to users. With such a small loyal user base Apple doesn’t need to care about backwards compatibility, to take just one example. Unlike Windows or Android, they can just leave old users in the dust and demand you upgrade. It is amazing that I can still use a computer with Windows 95 for a lot of things (even running DOS applications!) or and old Android 4 phone. It will connect and work for most things unlike Apple devices. This is the real world of real responsibility. When major corporations, governments and institutions around the world rely on you, that is what you do, you care about connections and standards. You talk to other companies, you collaborate, you commit.
Not Apple. Despite popular perceptions, Apple doesn’t actually innovate. At all. They are great at marketing. Design maybe. Innovation? Not really. Not at all. If we talk purely tech they have nothing. The very public and obvious failures of their Maps app or Siri or anything that demands you to – well – actually work seriously on something, they simply can’t do it.
It’s a one horse pony. For a single market. And it’s time we all started treating it as such.
Clever street promo in Berlin which pops up at night. You know normal marketing from companies that sell computers that actually do the work the world runs on
January 13, 2022
Apple would have never made a vaccine even if it could
Look at the market share. Globally Android has 73% of the mobile operating market and iOS 26%. But in Africa it is more like 83% vs 14%. Only in North America is Apple ahead. And this has repercussions which I am amazed the rest of the world puts up with.
Unlike Google that tries to build products for humans all over the world, Apple is simply catering to its locals. It’s not just the languages it doesn’t bother including. It’s entire distribution and support is focused on the US, UK, France and a few other countries. That’s it. Apple has always acted – and still acts – as if it is a little Callifornian company that made it big. In America. And it doesn’t care about anyone else. The rest of the world can adapt to the products.
Is it working? Sure. The profits speak for themselves. Is it good for customers? Only if you are American. Here in Greece where I live, if you have a Mac computer you are the proud third minority after Windows (84%) and Linux (9%) as Apple only has 3% market share. Good luck getting any sort of support for your product, most Mac owners struggle to find a friend that knows what they can do about any issue. And they end up paying through the nose for good tech to help them out.
Globally OS X commands just 15% market share, even in the United States all those iPhone users aren’t buying as they total just 28% compared to 62% Windows users and even Chromebooks are making an attack and becoming popular. Yet somehow Apple isn’t irrelevant. Is it through innovation? Heck no! I would disregard their recent relative success with their own chipsets, it is a short lived fluke much like all those years when they were going to “burn Pentiums to the ground”. M1 is a party trick that fools only Apple die hards. No IT manager is falling for it because we all know Apple never sticks to anything long term. It is a marketing company, not a tech pioneer.
Is it important? I would say that it is a problem we need to take care of. It skews the market in a big way. A bad way. There are plenty exciting technologies that get shelved behind all the media focus on Apple adding a new button to its iPhone or something equally stupid as that in Apple’s constant efforts to copy Android whilst making it look like it thought of something up on its own.
So is Google better? Hell yeah! While Apple spends ages dreaming up of new ways to get their phones to use a different dongle that costs 80 dollars for no good reason, Google is out there making products for the entire planet. Saving lost languages. Making useful products we all use everyday like Search, Maps, YouTube and so many more applications of its advanced Artificial Intelligence that actually helps the planet. They are giving away protein databases to scientists and the infrastructure on which so much of the modern world progresses on.
Google is global, Apple is American.
And there is nothing wrong with being American. As long as they don’t try and sell their extremely limited in purpose and use case products to the rest of the world. In fact the way Apple refuses to follow international standards and constantly blackmails developers into their walled garden is costing the world economy every day. We live in a globalized world. Amazing collaboration such as what we witnessed recently with the COVID-19 pandemic can only be achieved though open standards and transparency.
If Apple was into pharmaceutical vaccine and developed a vaccine, it would be ten times the price of competitors, incompatible with anything else, they would not reveal their research results and would expect everyone to pay every year for an update. So why are you letting them control the devices you use every day?
July 29, 2021
The Greek Freak is killing the NBA: how a wonderful person is in conflict with an organization’s core values and audience expectations
“…so ….efficient!” The sportscaster was struggling to find the right words after the Bucks won the championship. Giannis Antetokounmpo had some pretty impressive stats. But other than a few blocks was he spectacular? No, of course not. He never is. Despite his unique physical gifts, the man can’t even make a cool dunk. Unless you are Greek or a Bucks fan, the game he plays is boring. It is…European. As an NBA fan I am disappointed. I think Adam Silver is worried. This game can not just be about winning and…efficiency.
Everyone goes on and on about how Giannis worked hard and made it through adversity. Rightly so, it is an amazing true story and he is an awesome human being. But I didn’t sign up for a subscription to Reader’s Digest. I want my NBA back. The one with the show above all, the one where players focus on giving the crowd something unique to watch. Other than a few blocks, the Greak Freak is no freak at all. He is boring as hell. Ten years from now they will struggle to find anything to put in a show reel from his highlights.
Is it important? It is to me and it is to many of the NBA’s target demographics. We want stars that are stars, not “amazing hard working people”. I could go to a factory floor and watch that if I wanted to. Antetokounmpo is an anti star. He doesn’t hang out with other NBA players, he doesn’t train with them, he doesn’t know how to make an inspiring speech or even a fun meme.   Already in the United States, rich white parents take their kids to soccer, not basketball. Giannis may be black, but he plays like a boring white person who wins through being gifted and working hard. Admirable. Not NBA though. It will make the rift even bigger.
In a strange way it is similar to the election of Obama. Despite the rhetoric, a simmering racism ensured that in the next elections Donald Trump won. There were many more racists annoyed at Obama’s presidency than could publicly vent during his tenure. Something similar is happening now with NBA fans. Giannis doesn’t feature in rap songs because well, he is boring, he is an anti star, he does nothing like all the true NBA stars that built the league. True NBA fans are sad today. We are simmering with rage. We are not racist of course. But we hate “efficient”, boring players like Antetokounmpo.   When Kevin Durant slogs it out alone in Game7 it is epic. He generates stories, this is what the NBA is about. Giannis has one story, always the same story as his game does nothing to add to it, it is awesome, the boy that sold trinkets at traffic lights who went to the NBA. Fantastic. Let’s make it a movie. For DISNEY, not for the NBA.
I am Greek. Everyone here is ecstatic. I am sad they missed the whole point of what makes the NBA special. He was lucky to get a ring, now just watch as he fails spectacularly to even make it past the 1st or 2nd round in the playoffs the next years. Giannis Antetokounmpo should move to a European team as soon as possible and leave our league as we like it.
July 21, 2021
You are all wrong about Google. 2-5 years wrong.
It is fascinating to watch the media, analysts or financial whiz kids try to explain how and why Google does anything. How they enjoy the “failures” or run through the “threats” to the company. “Google just can’t seem to get it together in messaging apps” writes one guru. “Privacy issues could damage its advertising revenue” another. “Pixel phones never got market share” proclaims a title.
How little they know.
The only way to explain how Google does business is to imagine you are a two year old child. And Google is the adult. Not even any adult, a really smart and fit adult. Say you are playing catching and throwing a ball. You can hardly manage it, the ball falls out of your hands, you fall over trying to run to it. And Google will pretend to be at the same level of incompetence as you are for a while just to keep you happy.
We get glimpses of this at times. But Google is a pretty smart adult and doesn’t rush into giving things away. When pressed by the stockmarket or developments it releases something that wows us. Or something to distract attention. Take Apple’s privacy war for example. First move was the Pixel 3a. Easy. Destroy Apple’s margin by bringing the whole smartphone market to a much lower average price point. But Apple insisted. No problem. Google doesn’t need old fashioned methods of tracking users. Just burn the whole thing. Google has tools to track which are far more advanced. Much like the stupid European GDPR fuss, Google will always come out on top. It now announced it is reducing its cut of Play Store app and digital goods sales from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million of revenue a creator earns each year. Big deal! That will be around 600 million of just 1.6 billion in revenue a year. Drop in the pond. Whatever keeps the kids happy.
Because it is only pretending to be dumb when playing catch with you.
I reckon Google is 2-5 years ahead of most of its competitors in most important fields of whatever it does. And even if it isn’t, it can make up for it with other tools or knowledge to the same end. It is just carefully cherry picking so that we don’t all figure it out. Elon Musk is a brash three year old in comparison. He makes a big fuss about buying into cryptocurrencies. Google founders made moves in the same field long ago quietly. Because with the amount of data and the AI they have, they know things a long long time before anyone else.
So when online booking for hotels was announced recently, free for all, and retail shopping….soon free for the whole planet, well you see where it is going. Google decides when and how to release tools that can totally dominate. Don’t mess with the adult or they will get out the adult tools.
Feel free to drop the ball now.
March 16, 2021