Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • Mobile revolution in perspective

    Some people on the planet feel the need to bring some balance to this debate.   Not that there is much debate.   Everyone seems sure that mobile devices will conquer the planet.   Apps are growing like mushrooms.   Many with less meaningful content than an edible fungus.  This doesn’t stop marketing departments investing in mobile platforms for everything.   Everything.

    Don’t get me wrong.   I am happy that this is leading to some interoperability.   (Not so happy we are wasting a lot of global energy pandering to a very small minority of …well whatever Apple dreams up of, often on its own little island.  We should be talking about “tablet compatible” things, not “iPad” compatible.)   It is great that websites are getting better to navigate from different resolution screens.   I have been a road warrior and smart phone user since the days when this involved carrying a brick in my back pocket and being laughed at in meetings for using it.

    I have done work on a mobile phone.   Back in the days when you could find a phone with a decent keyboard I would even write thoughts like this on one.   But real individual information processing work gets done on a PC.   Unless you are in the business of only reading stuff or killing pigs by throwing birds at them from a slingshot.

    There are some rock solid obstructions to a mobile device being truly capable:  1. Screen resolution.   I struggle with netbooks because the 600 pixel limitation to the height makes getting anything done on the internet difficult.  Even 768 on many laptops is annoying.   2. Screen size.   Some of us are lucky enough to not mind ridiculously small fonts.   Not everyone.   The Galaxy Note is a step in the right direction. 3. Keyboard.  Again netbooks are a good example.  Read reviews and all the complaints people make about smaller keyboards.   For anyone that writes to make their living this is serious.   Virtual keyboards on touch screen never, ever, ever come even close and voice recognition remains a problem in the real world.  4. Multi tasking.   Even if Alt-tab isn’t your second nature, when you are working you are very often multitasking.   I’m not talking about an iPhone finally being able to run essential tasks simultaneously.   I am talking about 5 spreadsheets, 8 browser windows, a business app and a few other things running at the same time because I need to them to put something together.   Even a simple presentation will often demand 6 or 7 software applications running concurrently.  5. Speed.   When we are talking about serious work, the speed of the device is essentially stalling your thought process.   I am annoyed at upgrading to an 18 megapixel DSLR because it takes that much longer for my Core i7, SSD laptop to process the images.  Time is money and mobile devices are wasteful in this respect.  Unless they are a laptop.   Mobile enough!

    The list continues with other major or minor niggles.   “Niggles” being things that bother you.   Like the room being too cold.   Like your chair not being comfortable.   Like all those things you don’t want bothering you when you actually try to get some work done.   For anyone wanting to focus on a task involving the use of technology, a PC will continue to be the best place to get it done.

    Niggle free.

  • Apple doesn’t break the rules; it doesn’t have any!

    What is Apple’s mission statement?

    Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

    Seriously.  Not kidding, it is from the Apple website under “Investor Relations”.   If I had written a mission statement like that, even at that project at the end of Year 1 of business studies they would have failed me.    Even the other gem, hidden in the same section isn’t much better:

    Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

    Yeah right.   That defies all rules of mission statement making.   Pretty sure nobody in the company even knows it.   Apple’s mission statement was probably more like:

    We all do whatever is cool and seems to please the Allmighty Steve Jobs.   He always knows best, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense; he will make it work sooner or later.

    Forget social responsibility (no charity, iKill workers abroad) it is all about profit maximisation.   And now that Jobs is gone a few shareholders are daring to ask whether they might actually have a share of the monumental cash pile at last.    You can only pretend to be emotionally impaired by those times aeons ago when you were cash strapped and even borrowed from Microsoft.    Apple is one of the richest companies in the world.   More than 100 billion in the bank just sitting there for what?   And they don’t even pretend to have some masterplan!

    Forget increasing market share.   They could easily drop prices, increase product range or just buy a few companies and give away something of value like Google does.   Buy Adobe, give away Photoshop or something.   (More or less what they did with the digital video market which they then almost abandoned.)  But no, the ghost of Jobs walks the sleek halls of Apple still.   They still shamelessly do everything they can to maximise profit.   Nothing else.   After all, if everyone has a Mac how could they urge you to “Think Different”?

    But that is no mission statement either.   To cater to weird designer type people and make them feel special.   I made that up but it would still be more accurate than what they have now.    So Macs are stuck at much less than 10% market share globally and iPhones not much more than that, 25% globally for the optimists.   Depending on your mood you can do statistical hoopjumping to consider iPads a threat to the global status quo or not.  To force other technology companies to produce cooler gadgets than the geeky stuff they did so far.   That would show some awareness, some commitment to helping the planet in some way.   It would give us an idea where it might be heading and all that stuff we learnt about missions statements.   We all thought it was really necessary for a well functioning company…

    Sorry to be the party pooper but this doesn’t make sense.   What is the point of this company again?   And without a magician to tell us that the emperor is not naked, how will it pull off any future tricks?

  • Bernulli, calculus and copyright protection

    In what was probably an early example of distance learning, the rich French military man Guillaume François Antoine, hired Johan Bernulli to mentor him.   There was even a written agreement but much of the teaching happened through regular mail.   The  Marquis de l’Hôpital sent questions, Bernulli sent answers.  All went well.   Even when the student published a book based on these letters as his own.

    “Infinitesimal calculus with applications to curved lines” is such a useful book even now, that nobody really focuses on the fact that it was plagiarism at its worse.   He hadn’t informed Bernulli and didn’t even directly mention him at all in the book other than a vague sentence about “this work is of course based on a lot of fine thinking before me and has been influenced by thinkers before me and contemporary to me”.   It is irrelevant to a large degree because it is simply the material in a different form, that of a useful compendium textbook on infinitesimal calculus.

    There are a number of interesting facets to this story in view of ACTA, SOPA and all the modern copyright wars.   (By the way, why is Business Software Alliance keeping such a low profile as the world rages against ACTA?  ; ) One is that the book initially appeared anonymously.   Possibly so that the marquis could evaluate its success before claiming it.   The other was that Bernulli didn’t react at first.   As the years past and the book became a reference point he increased his complaints though!   Up until recently, even prominent mathematical historians like Struik wrote: “By 1696 the first textbook on calculus appeared, the Analyse des infiniment petits,written by the Marquis de l’Hospital under the strong influence of Johann Bernoulli, who for a while had tutored him.”  The same person who described it as a “strong influence” later fumed “Let the good Marquis keep his elegant rule; he paid for it.”

    Rather old school copyright thinking, eh?

  • Mac vs PC: is anyone ever going to run proper benchmarks again?

    OK, it is a sign of age.   Do you remember back when people actually tested computers for their performance?   I especially fondly remember Charlie White’s heroic efforts.   He is now high up the Mashable food chain and doesn’t “attack” Macs anymore…. heck he writes about them like everyone else.   But who does actually give Apple machines an honest run for their money?   I’m not talking about their business practices, whether they do any charitable donations (they don’t) or kill loads of people in their factories without any serious signs of caring or doing much about it.   This is a techie question, not a social responsibility sermon.

    It is a well established (statistically, theoretically, practically and well…obviously!) that Apple has journalists wrapped around its finger.   It’s i-finger or i-whatever it does.   It gets more coverage for free, more positive coverage and more simply adoring coverage than anyone else.   It gets in more movies than anyone else.   And it doesn’t pay for it.   They are marketing demi-gods.   The only recent mac vs pc test I could find ends up almost equating the two solutions even though the Mac is $450 more expensive!    (To be fair they end the comparison like this: “So, if you love Macs, stay put. For everyone else, the choice is simple: Save your money and buy a PC. It’ll get the job done.” )

    But wait a minute.   These are, for the most part, tools.   Not gadgets but machines we use to get a job done.   Sure most of the iPad lot are just scrolling up and down aimlessly and playing Angry Birds.   But for every 100 PCs out there, at least half are for actually producing something.   In a finite Universe with finite time.   We should care how quickly it gets done.   If you are crunching numbers, running a business, serving a customer, these things matter.   Which is why you don’t see Macs in mission critical environments.   They are not only more expensive; some businesses would pay for the style.   They are also slower.

    I will gloss over the pro Apple arguments.   About a sleeker interface, myths about it being more stable or more safe none of which apply for many years now and especially since Windows 7.  I am talking about performance.   You use Photoshop?   You should care if it takes forever to load an image, or twice as long to execute a plugin effect as an equally priced PC.   You spend all day doing it.   You could be gaining valuable hours of free time.   There are good business reasons why Apples are slower.   Not just because Apple spends all day figuring out how to sell phones, not PCs anymore.   Even seemingly secondary things like hybrid HDD drives have good Windows drivers months or years before they have any compatibility with Macs.   It’s simply not worth the time of any manufacturer to bother doing any research for a company like Apple with such a small hold on worldwide PC sales.   And on top of that, Apple doesn’t make any partner’s life easy of course…

    Back then, even with huge, proven differences in performance of common tasks, Mac fanatics simply refused to change.   Even when they finally conceded that they were slower, much slower, they came back with “yeah, but PCs are ugly“!

    What’s your excuse?

  • Germanic revenge: Greece and it’s Allies get what we deserve

    Even if you haven’t read Churchill’s account, there is no way in avoiding the conclusion that it was the way the Allies handled victory in the first world war that pushed Germany into the second one.   We took their pride, divided their land and burdened them financially to an inconceivable level.   Hitler’s words appealled to desperate, bitter and hardened people with nothing to lose, not die hard born fascists.

    So many years after the second world war Greeks are now complaining about money they feel is owed to them from theft and massacres during German occupation of Greece.   There is an important difference:   Germany worked it’s way out of the dismal situation we put it in.   Some Greeks, once again, lazily await a miracle.   They feel they are “owed” a magical solution to the current financial mess we got ourselves into.

    Selectivity in reading history is always a problem.   Maybe we need to learn more about the German miracle.   Precisely how Germany got from utterly destitute to the triple A powerhouse it is today in Europe.   Even if some people wish to treat them as enemies instead of the allies they now are.

    We would do well to learn more from them.   (One example I have refered to in the past is the mid sized German family business that we would do well to emulate.)

  • How to make a film like Theo Angelopoulos

    Ingredients:

    1. A CD with music by Eleni Karaindrou.

    2. A photo album, the kind you find in the lounge usually with scenery or black and white pictures.

     

    Instructions:

    1. Play the music.

    2. Flick through the photos.   Really slowly.  1-5 minutes on each usually is OK.

    3. You can (slowly!) move your gaze across the page occasionally.

    4. Think or don’t think of anything you like.

     

    The overall effect is remarkably similar to a Theodoros Angelopoulos film in my opinion.

    In a country stuggling to get a film industry working, Angelopoulos was a symbol of success though he didn’t actually much help improve anything.    Some loved him, other considered him Rotten Tomato material.

    In a country battling with anarchy the question why an old man (albeit a famous old man) was allowed to walk across a busy street and what sort of safety protocol his production company was following begs an answer.

    Personaly I won’t miss him at all.   Other than a striking resemblance to my dear uncle who shares his first name I found little of interest in his film and much to critique in his actions.   Greece has bigger problems than whether or not his films were boring.   If there is a budding new Theo Angelopoulos in the wings let’s hope he has a better idea how best to help his country abroad than the one that just passed.

     

  • Marketing myths: Beta vs VHS and the demise of Kodak

    Before the web there were just plain marketing gurus.  They were the closest we had to the to soundbite Twitter sized slogan makers we are used to today.   Before Google searches, they were the ones discovering interesting stories about products, companies and brands.   And they packaged them neatly for us with branded big fonts and style.

    A well known and well circulated in Marketing classes myth concerns Sony’s “failure” to promote Beta against VHS as a video format.   They usually forget to mention the main reason (Sony not wanting to go to bed with the porn industry) but – most importantly – they don’t even get their numbers right.   Did anybody bother to quantify the profits made from VHS versus what Sony made from Beta in the longterm?   Because as a broadcast standard for many many years I have seen that equipment being sold and rented for pretty big sums of money for more than two decades!   Even now there are TV stations ticking along with a dozen betaMax decks for A/B editing or even playout.

    If Sony lost the battle against VHS as a format for every living room, they did pretty well getting it in every TV station and post production facility and even better as a base for launching a huge business around media production.   Doesn’t look like a failure to me.

    Kodak going down has a similar smell already.   It is as if scores of writers had the obituary ready.   That little colored box in the marketing manual as a case study.   A perfect illustration of a big company getting arrogant and getting it wrong.   How new technologies overtake even the strongest firms.   How bad management is blind to change.   A company with more of a century of global domination seems an easy target.

     

    Maybe they should wait a bit before writing that chapter.

  • Goebbels needed in Brussels to change the flag

    “The European flag consists of 12 golden stars in a circle on a blue background. The stars symbolise the ideals of unity, solidarity and harmony among the peoples of Europe.

    The number of stars has nothing to do with the number of member countries, though the circle is a symbol of unity.”

    That is all you get when trying to discover what the flag is about from the official site.    Contrast it to your nation of choice’s story.   You probably have several versions of your country’s flag as it developed, rich in history and people, wonderful colorful fairytales connected to your past.   You probably know this information by heart because you learnt it at school.   You probably have some emotional response to your flag.

    To anyone in communications or branding, what the European Union is doing is suicidal.   While there is much talk about “nation branding” and what individual countries do to themselves or to each other regarding negative press, nobody seems to care about the Union itself.   This goes against millenia of wisdom concerning economic and cultural development.   According to a summary:

    “Images of the EU are split:
    positive images:

    the EU as “strategic opportunity” for the partner countries; a trade giant; a
    supporter of multilateralism (or at least multipolarism); a model of regional integration; and
    a possible counterbalance to US hegemony, a protector of the environment;
    negative images:

    an actor whose policy is severely influenced by its own security or
    economic concerns; a neo-liberal actor in its external relations; and a protectionist power
    (CAP).  EU’s self-representation as a solidaristic actor is called into question. Moreover:
     Little evidence of the EU being widely seen as a “normative power” exporting
    universal values of democracy and human rights.
     No evidence of the EU being widely regarded as a social model to be imitated.
     No public reward for EU’s development cooperation policy”

    The current global economic crisis is focusing on the European Union for good reason; it is easy!   Any single sovereign country can deal with an external attack.   But in Brussels they decide by…committee.   In the worse sense of the phrase.   According to Nicholas Moussis in “Access to European Union law, economics, policies” “…the edifice of the European Union is divided horizontally in floors. The floor of the common market was built on the basement of the customs union. Apart from the four fundamental freedoms (free movement of goods, persons, services and capital), the common market floor consists of numerous horizontal and vertical compartments, which contain the common policies…”

    At least this author is trying to make it understandable.   Because moving from separate countries to any other system is something which citizens of Europe have not quite perceived yet.   The task is made harder by politicians in every country using the EU as a scapegoat for their political problems.   They used to point to some neighbor or other threat when they needed to rally up support; now they just point to Brussels.

    From a communicational point of view it is amazing.   We would assume that when you give a handout, you will demand some sort of media attention.   If I am bailing out French farmers, the least they can do is put up an EU flag.   Even better they should commit to some cultural change towards European integration.   Somehow the EU managed to squander its capital (economic and in terms of good will) without getting anything in return.   A feat only possible by a committee!   In any other human-to-human interaction there would have been more.   If the United States were set up as a “melting pot of cultures”, the European Union is set up as a feudal parody.   Immigrants entering the US learn about its constitution.   In Europe we can’t even manage that.

    The film industry is a great example.   A variety of Euroinitiatives concerning film making, film distribution and other cultural aspects of film and the results?   Absolutely nothing.   On average, European don’t watch more locally produced content, nor is European film thriving abroad.   We are neither helping Europeans become more aware of their cultural heritage nor telling the rest of the world anything about us.   And of course we are nowhere near making it a viable business in any of the country – members.   For the size of the internal media consumption market and the depth of talent in this field it is a simply amazing feat of incompetence.

    So now we need a Goebbels.   I don’t care who runs the ECB, I want to know who is in charge of propaganda.

  • How witchhunters taught the IMF all about communication

    I once famously wrote an article about the Business Software Alliance and how it’s methodology is similar to the Holy Inquisition.  The Middle Ages are to me a truly inspiring historical period, a time when many of our modern concepts were created.   Except they were in their more raw, essential form.  For example there were quite a few “tests of witchery” in order to ascertain whether or not someone was indeed possesed by the devil.  One was called the test of the tear.   Someone would recite in detail excerpts from the Testaments including all the sacrifices Christ made for us.   If, at the end of it,the accused didn’t shed a tear they were obviously a witch!

    My country is one of many areas of the world currently the focus of financial speculation.   And a pattern is emerging in terms of the communicational methods used.   Public statements of support for the enormous burden of measures dictated by the IMF are a bit like the test of the tear.   Another common test was conducted in deep water (either a lake or a specially designed big barrel) whereby the accused was left to sink or float.   But it wasn’t that simple; they were held for some time with sticks from outside.   So in effect they could be hurt in the ribs and made to get tired for quite long until they were truly exhausted; then they were let loose.    This is a lot like an economy taking a beating with rumors,  debt being rated “junk” and all the rest of the ways the international money markets work on a country to soften it up.

    The other great thing about witch hunting, is that it was a game that could only have one ending.   If the witch passed the tests it was because “the devil helped”.   In the same way there are plenty of countries much less guilty of mismanaging their finances than Greece.  Ireland is completely different for example.   But when the Inquisition comes to town we are all witches…