Category: Commentary

I made a mistake earlier this week and dared comment on an article on ubuntukids which reminded me of a certain gastric delicacy. We had a couple of replies, one from the author which was in English and the other which was probably in Esperanto. The author was pretty gracious (though I was most definitely mistaken!) and though he has yet to actually produce any examples of open source innovation (as opposed to straight copying), I think he’s not a bad sort. The second replier came back to add a bit more vitriolic ad hominem attacks. Apparently my arguments can be discounted because I’m an “effete arrogant Mac bastard” and I’m not artistic because I use the default WordPress theme as opposed to some pretentious brightly coloured theme hocked off a free themes site. Poor me. That’s what I get for only having half a brain.

One of the advantages of having half a brain is that, for the most part, it seems to put me in the lead (certainly compared to that resident of Illinois) in terms of sheer brain mass.

The London Underground could really learn a lesson or three in how to entertain customers.

Ever been on the Tube?

For me, because London is a rare treat, the Tube is a guilty pleasure and I consider it much like le Metro. It’s true that the stations under London perhaps hold less art, attraction and glamour than their counterparts in Paris, but I enjoy the trips, the freedom and the novelty.

If you’re using the Tube every day, however, it can be a chore. I’ve had less than stellar experiences when working away from home – the blasts of hot, stale body odour which fly around some of the tunnels, the cramped body crushes during the rush hours, the wall of people facing you when the door opens and the general misery of people who cannot find room to smile because of the oppression of the same grind, day in, day out.

The Lady who does the Voice of the Underground, voice artist Emma Clarke, has been sacked by the London Underground for allegedly criticising their services. Apparently she described the Tube as “dreadful”, referring to the fact that at every station she would have to listen to herself saying Mind The Gap. The L.U. took this as being her impression of the service as a whole and as a result, fired her after 8 years of work. They fired her via the media. And are not engaging in conversation.

That’s the way to deal with customer feedback.

How crazy is that? The best way to deal with criticism is now officially to plug your ears with your hands.

Now I know I’ve stated a preference for “firing the customer” in cases where the customer is proving to be seriously uneconomical. There are always going to be some troublesome customers and there will be times where a parting of the ways is best for all concerned.

Similarly a friend of mine emailed me yesterday with a customer services report. He was cold-called by a competitor of mine and grilled about his services and purchasing. When he said he used “us”, the caller hung up on him immediately. Is that the way to solicit business? Certainly when we’ve been called by their customers we’ve been nothing but courteous (and we don’t do cold-calling). Of course they may be a bit sore about the revelation last year that they used us for their hard work which caused some laughter in some parts.

Just be nice to people, it really works. If you be nice they’ll tell maybe 10 people. If you treat them badly, they’ll tell everyone.

The proliferation of sites like Flickr (and their options for aspiring photographers to license their work) as well as cheap online stock photography web sites is apparently damaging the livelihoods of professional stock photographers. Chances are you can find the image you want, get it for a small fee (or even just an attribution) direct from the creator and if not, have a good chance of making it yourself.

He now has to produce 60 saleable shots in one session rather than the 10 he used to aim for and the budget cuts affect his entire operation.

God love him.

Funnily enough the creator of Microstock was a photographer who was trying to sell his photos and none of the agencies would touch him. So he created something which threatens to destroy the delicate balance of the stock photography world.

Tough shit.

It’s not as if someone couldn’t have seen this coming. It’s time for everyone in every industry to take a long hard look at their business model and wonder whether or not a punk kid with a laptop could take them down legally by undermining their business with something a consumer would prefer. Again, this was pointed out by Rich Segal on his blog that entire development teams in corporations need to consider that while it may take 6 months to add a feature button to a product in their workflow, a “good enough” replica of their app could be build in a modern IDE by the punk kid with a laptop, utilising services like EC2 and S3 from Amazon to provide on-demand CPU and storage.

It’s not about protecting the status quo but rather trying to pre-empt what will happen and getting in there first. It’s about not worrying about what your existing competitors might do and more about the ones who may blindside you. This should drive you to create, to innovate, to be better, to be the best.

SeekingAlpha argues that Apple should alienate and compete with it’s main suppliers of processor chips and one of their suppliers of graphics processing hardware in a method to incrementally increase profits.

With Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) stock price deteriorating, could Apple (AAPL) be its white knight?
The 10 reasons and most apparent advantages of this acquisition are:

The best one to round out the 10 is “Keep AMD American”.

Sure, buying AMD would have the free bonus of having ATI too. But it would completely alienate NVIDIA and Intel – neither of which is desirable. Apple currently has the luxury of competing suppliers. Intel vs AMD. ATI vs NVIDIA and though they only use Intel’s processors, their hardware uses a mix of ATI and NVIDIA graphics. If they bought AMD they’d be locked into using AMD processors and ATI chips because they’d be insane not to.

No.

The argument on seeking Alpha makes sense from the point of view of eking tiny margins but no actual business sense (where business is defined as the art of maintaining mutually beneficial financial relationships.)

And frankly, the xenophobic, insular attitude of keeping AMD American adds further hubris to the whole argument.

Whatayaknow – anonymous Author.

Stephen Fry gets into an argument about global warming (which is a good read in itself) but also starts off with this gem of an observation.

when I get into a debate I can get very, very hot under the collar, very impassioned, and I dare say, very maddening, for once the light of battle is in my eye I find it almost impossible to let go and calm down. I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America. I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust.

This honest trashing of an opponents argument I’ll refer to as virtual spittle. Not a derogatory thing but the act of arguing vehemently that were you face to face no doubt you would exchange mouth liquids and pieces of your last meal in the defence of your stance and the systematic unravelling of the opponent’s.

I found this to be especially true when debating points of importance in arguments on RPGnet and also in the daily grind. I get passionate about certain things, the way Stephen does. Global Warming, Operating Systems, doing the right thing the right way and other topics are areas that, to be honest, I avoid arguments in. I try hard not to get pulled into them not because my devotion to one or other side is all-consuming but because I have found that the recipients of my virtual spittle and verbosity are simply not up to the muster. I love a good debate, especially in a pub; we argue, we go red, we express exasperation and then we order another round. There’s no harm and no foul.

On RPGnet, a community I don’t love, any virtual spittle is received with the immediate shut down of the argument. The debatee is the first to hit the buzzer and cry foul. They produce the Passive Aggressive trump card. They don’t understand that it is possible to tell someone to “fuck off” and still be friends. It’s hard to explain that I’m not Passive Aggressive, I’m just Aggressive because they don’t know the difference. “Passive Aggressive” as an accusation is just a way they can get out of the losing side of an argument and not lose too much face. They’re just not ready for debate.

In the daily grind, I try to fix things that are so terribly terribly broken and it seems obvious to me that the process is so mangled and the supposed contributors are so wrapped up in their own way of doing things that they cannot conceive of anything better. Arguably I might be just their mirror counterpart but the difference is that I was hired to fix it. It so happens that my colleagues in EMEA are embracing the new way of doing things because they have had the benefits explained face to face and, perhaps more as a testament to my debating ability rather than the value of the points I was raising. In North America, however, the case is not the same. They’re agreeing to everything on the various conference calls and give lip service in emails – but when it comes down to fixing the things that are broke they’re like a classic Romero Zombie, mindlessly replaying the actions of their former life. When we Europeans correct them there are two definite approaches. One is typified by my manager, a political animal who has dealt with the Americans in the company for more than a decade and the other, well, it’s mine.

• Subservient – where you accept what they say and calmly try to work around the issue, use vague terms, ry not to get their backs up and finish the conference call with a couple more assurances and nothing actually changing
• Assertive where you actually say what’s wrong.

Yes, I tend to be Assertive in these cases because, at the end of the day, they’re paying me to come in here and fix the problem and I don’t want to waste my time or their money. If they’re happy with me being generally ineffective and nothing changing then they should let me stay at home with the kids and still pay me because I’d be achieving about the same.

So I’ll continue the way I am. Being aggressive, being forthright, honest about the issues and not afraid to trash another argument. But it’s not personal, it’s just impassioned debate.

And yes, it’s my round.