As reported by Chris Taylor, Paul Jané coined exactly the right moniker to hang around Air Canada’s scrawny corporate neck:
August 9, 2010
Apple execs’ worst fears coming true
Apple has seemed almost ham-handed in their attempts to control the media “storyline” since the iPhone 4 was released. If Eric Raymond is correct in his analysis, Apple will continue to struggle:
Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.
There’s an important point that, so far, all the coverage seems to have missed. You can only see it by juxtaposing the market-share trendlines for both 1Q and 2Q 2010 and noticing what isn’t there — any recovery due to the iPhone 4. This product has not merely failed to recover Apple’s fortunes against Android, it has not even noticeably slowed Apple’s loss of market share to Android.
Forget for now the blunder the trade press has been calling “Antennagate”; I had fun with it at the time, but bruising as it was, it’s only a detail in the larger story. With the iPhone 4, Apple tried to counter the march of the multiple Androids using a single-product strategy, which was doomed to fail no matter how whizbang the single product was. As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.
As I’ve noted before, Apple had been running a very slick, very successful media image-building strategy of coolness and technological sophistication. For several years, they barely put a foot wrong in their complex dance of marketing and public-perception-influencing. When something finally did go wrong, they clearly lacked the ability to respond gracefully and recapture the wavering affections of both the reporters and the readers.
In short, the short-term effect of “antennagate” could have been limited to a one-off glitch: give the punters a free “bumper” for their phones, do it quickly and ungrudgingly, and reap the PR reward for being pro-active and showing that you care for your customers. Instead, the “smartest guys in the room” managed to squander almost all their accumulated goodwill in a few short weeks of bluster, denial, and arrogance. Nice work.
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Lovely little bit of legal legerdemain
Colby Cosh points out that Catch-22 was really a highly accurate predictor of Canadian law:
To put it another way, you can conceivably be tried for “participating in or contributing to” a criminal organization even if it didn’t get around to committing any crimes, you didn’t do anything to help it actually commit crimes, you didn’t know what particular crimes it might be thinking of committing, and you couldn’t possibly pick anybody else in the group out of a lineup.
This might seem to make things pretty easy for the police and the prosecutors. Nonsense! According to them, their job can never be easy enough. Like farmers and civil servants, they cease complaining only intermittently to inhale oxygen, and there is no shortage of Joint Multi-Level Integrated Discussion Committees before which they can retail their grievances.
[. . .]
Justice Minister Nicholson, in introducing the new schedule of patently less serious and mostly victimless “serious offences” on Wednesday, offered a dazzlingly simple heuristic: “The fact that an offence is committed by a criminal organization makes it a serious crime.” You will note that this introduces a curious logical circularity into our manner of upholding justice. How does the law define a “criminal organization”? See above: a criminal organization is a group of people that bands together to commit serious crimes. How do we know what a serious crime is? It’s any activity that is characteristic of criminal organizations. What, you thought Catch-22 was fiction?
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Not news: many Americans prefer religious to scientific answers
Scientific American pretends to be surprised by these findings:
When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”
Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.) The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality. White evangelical Protestants have the highest denial rate (55 percent), closely followed by the group across all religions who attend services on average at least once a week (49 percent).
I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion.
H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.
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The inevitable decline in public respect for the police
Paul Bonneau examines the declining levels of respect among members of the public for the police:
I’ve gotten the impression lately that cops aren’t getting very much support in Internet forums these days, even in places where in the past you’d find almost unqualified support. About everyone seems fed up with ’em.
I wondered why this should be. Why are they becoming so much more frequently scorned?
[. . .]
I think one reason cops are hated is that people generally don’t like being scrutinized, and put under suspicion for minding their own business; they really, really don’t like that. Cops are always checking you out, looking for a reason to “brace” you (an old meaning of the word that looks very useful these days).
The War on Some Drugs has to cause some hatred, as more and more peoples’ lives are ruined by it. Indeed, this prison industry boondoggle has stained all aspects of the “Justice” system, not just cops.
Another reason is that cops are treated, and see themselves, as superior to the rest of us. In innumerable ways, cops are always given the benefit of the doubt; certainly legally, and also informally — although the latter seems to be fading a bit, as trust in cops fades. They are “The Only Ones”, we are “mundanes”, “proles”, peons. They can lie to us, we can’t lie to them; they can beat us up and torture us, but if we touch them it is “assault”.
Along with this insufferable attitude is a self-regard that what they are about is important and good. I suppose everyone suffers from this malady, but usually it does not impact a person as it does when one runs into a cop in the throes of it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good, will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” What are cops, if not “omnipotent moral busybodies”? At least when the Mafia runs a protection racket, they don’t deceive themselves they are doing you a benefit. One appreciates the Mafia’s honesty, in comparison.
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IPv6 still not ready for primetime?
As you’ve probably heard, the current internet addressing system, IPv4, is running out of unallocated addresses. The replacement is called IPv6 and was supposed to be in use by now. Security concerns are holding it back:
The internet’s next-generation addressing scheme is so radically different from the current one that its adoption is likely to cause severe security headaches for those who adopt it, a researcher said last week.
With reserves of older addresses almost exhausted, the roll-out of the new scheme — known as IPv6 or Internet Protocol version 6 — is imminent. And yet, the radical overhaul still isn’t ready for prime time — in large part because IT professionals haven’t worked out a large number of security threats facing those who rely on it to route traffic over the net.
“It is extremely important for hackers to get in here fast because IPv6 is a security nightmare,” Sam Bowne, an instructor in the Computer Networking and Information Technology Department at the City College of San Francisco, said on day one of the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. “We’re coming into a time of crisis and no one is ready.”
Chief among the threats is the issue of incompatible firewalls, intrusion-prevention devices, and other security appliances, Bowne said. That means many people who deploy IPv6 are forced to turn the security devices off, creating a dangerous environment that could make it easier for attackers to penetrate network fortresses.
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