Tag: Apple

Underneath is Love

Companies outsource Y2K tech work, then while at it, their software development.

From manufacturing to marketing, R&D to customer care , jobs went overseas to cut costs.

Then we tout culture-building, crowd-sourcing etc…

The truth is, we did not care about our customers or corporate culture.

Yet, it’s culture that reinforces brand.

Weak corporate culture links to weak brand.

From Zippo to Zappos, we see that companies which care always win in the end.

Apple is sitting on a mountain of cash ( near Mountain View) while the FED is predicting another 18 months to full recovery.

The economy has been divorced from life, as if mathematics could exist without math teachers.

Beginning students can tell you that far from it, economics is closely linked to real life (Valentine Day spending? Teacher’s Day bouquet).

We have focused on the transactions and not the people doing the buying and selling.

Great companies know how to get the right mix of technology (efficiency) to free up its people for customer care (effectiveness).

Zappos deliberately designs its work space to foster collaboration and fun culture.

In-and-Out Burger championed a work ethic second to none (mouth-watering double-double).

Customers are intelligent creatures.

As we outsource, automate and streamline our workload, let’s keep it in-house the customer care department.

Customers are not kids to be sent to day care. They call because they have some concerns that need immediate resolution.

When done right, these are our evangelists and advocates. Millions of these transactions will turn complaints into compliments.

Want to ride the wave to the mountain (of cash)? Love the ones you have. They are still the ones who are easier to keep than acquire.

Culture decoding online

The Great Gatsby got another round of remake, this time in 3-D.

With help of steady cam, we are invited into his mansion of many rooms.

This should give a feel for the place and Gatsby’s desire to revenge through success.

We too ,with IT 3.0-enabled, can take our “Monte Christo” acts online.

For years, we were passive recipients of others’ content via radio, Morse code, newspapers, magazines, text books, letters, phone calls, television, record players, juke box and boombox, car radio, CB radio, telegram and fax , overhead projectors and film projectors. The list is long and crowding out the museum of invention, just like copies of content fill our home library.

Unless you are into retro and antiques, then be content with whatever current devices you are using.

But the narrative has shifted. We are to reinvent ourselves online, with new tools (mobile) and technologies (social media).

Any change will directly impact a few people at first, then the majority.

40 years ago, nobody got a cell phone. Now, almost everyone got one.

The laggards in this case are our parent’s generation, who experience both culture and digital divide.

Don Tapscott has kept a tap on this topic with his decade-long research.

Digital generation definitely are multi-taskers who live a double-life on and off-line.

Lecturers will have to double-check their notes to make sure they are up to date. (as of this edit, they just came out with a software to help teachers with grading, to concentrate more on face time with students).

Their values no longer stay in the realm of information transmission.

Instead, the best contribution a trainer can do is to zoom-out, to show historical trend, and to help bridge the analog-digital as well as technology-society divide. Leaders shouldn’t be curators or gate keepers.

They are meant to be Chief Knowledge/Culture decoder.

We have moved beyond the state of data-deprived to data-deluge.

No firewalls can stop data from hopping node to node. No network can claim exclusivity and monopoly of domain.

What we won’t find in life can now be found on-line e.g. self-reinvention, self-branding, self-fulfillment.

Gatsby had failed the first time to impress his lover. So he came back, in 3-D, right across the lake.

Whatever was missed in the first version will be self-correcting (e.g.Google translation algorithm.

While the writer is analog, what you are reading is digital.

And you might be reading this in 2050 and beyond. Try to decode that!

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Vietnam’s outsourcing factory

I have heard about TMA Solutions new building in Quang Trung Software Park, but I have never got a chance to stop by, until yesterday.

1,200-strong, TMA begins to look like an army of engineers (my friend and guide showed me a beehive behind the building, after we had toured their lobby where Vietnam‘s historical artifacts were on display, next to the museum of telephony).

“It is to show the stream of history, culturally and technologically, so our engineers could get a sense of where things might be going” said my friend.

I could relate to that.

Users and programmers don’t exist in a vacuum.

We live and breathe the same air as everyone else.

Honda got hit not once but twice last year, both in Fukushima and in Thailand.

While incubators and laboratories are necessary for concentration and collaboration, they still function within a larger ecosystem.

Users tend to move on to the next big thing more quickly than companies.

Two great benefits TMA could offer to prospective clients:

– its time-tested know-how

– young work force who can stay on for however long the project requires (end-to-end outsourcing).

Yes, we had a sort of working lunch and then marketing presentation.

But it’s the spirit of the group, the speed of execution and the spread of product (cloud computing) that will work in TMA’s favor.

If they grew  (at least no lay-off)  in hard times, how much more in good times.

I am afraid this is counter-intuitive. But organizations need to secure talent just as much as they secure property and product.

When all boats rise, talent can then command higher salary leveraging supply vs demand.

As engineers huddle in conference rooms and cubicles,  consumers are shopping for the greatest and latest.

In turn, these technologies (cloud, social media apps) enable new applications (e.g. Google + Search) which in turn reshape consumer expectations.

It’s the loop, of empathy, of hits and misses (Betamax) and the drive for perfection (Apple).

Outsourcing is just a phenomenon, but man’s search for meaning and connection has been around much longer.

Get to the bottom of this, you will get to the bottom line.

I like my guide’s side comment “look at Napoleon! he was so short, yet so imperial”.

I just know from seeing the beehives behind the building that worker bees are busy at work, coding and collaborating, and  in the process saving tons of money for clients. Clients who now can sit back and choose from a score of outsourcing factories. Let the game begin. Stay hungry, stay curious (Jobs’ commencement address at Standford).  Vietnamese engineers at TMA can discount the first advice and focus on being curious. This, their shrewd leader had already anticipated. He wanted to leave his legacy via the museum of  ethnology (past), and technology  (future).

Team building

I invited a new classmate to join our volleyball team. Thought I kill two birds with one stone: we could use a tall guy, and I couldn’t bear seeing him unfriended during recess. Turned out he couldn’t play well, but we got to be friends for life.

We pitched in to buy a professional ball. Took it out for a test-drive.

Before I even got my chance at that spanking new white ball, it bounced to the street, ran over by a car, and voila! Memory of shared disappointment.

But Team!

Then we went out and had some lunch. The neighborhood gangs there just walked up and started to punch each of us to the ground. Back then, one of our oldest classmates had a brother in the army. He went home and took out an M-16 to scare away the hoodlums. Team!

Later in life, I have always been a team player: my brother got married, OK.

I would take care of mom, heck with my broadcasting career! Team.

The Boat People died at seas? I stood up and joined two other graduates. Together, we rolled up our sleeves, and spent our summer in hot, crowded and often times, violent (due to cramp living) prison-turned-refugee camps.

Team!

When it was my turn to lead, a joint Chinese and Vietnamese team (historically at war as nations) I made sure we spent a lot of time around food,

sharing meals and sharing deals. Team.

Families broke down because they forgot that Team came first.

Great teams just don’t happen by accident.

It needs everyone to commit to a common goal, and yes, it needs to define clearly who it is competing against (Apple vs IBM, MCI vs ATT or Samsung vs Sony).

Team needs various personalities to achieve optimal results.

But personality conflicts cause headaches.

Team leaders should embrace diversity of opinion, temperament and  ( emotional and social) intelligence.

Let conflict boil to the surface. Team’s fiber could withstand some strains and be made stronger as a result.

You know your team is fully functional when it moves as a unit: each knows his/her SWOT. Team leaders are not always right. They just know how to draw out the best in each member.

Team has its learning curve and maturity as well.

Even the best team can’t stay together forever. When you get teary at goodbye, you know you had a good team experience.

I would trade a B teammate over a A lone wolf any day.

No wonder Southwest Airlines consistently outperform its nearest competitor.

People who work there seem to and do have fun. They sing to, they smile at and they serve you as if each flight were their last. Because of this, we have yet seen SW last flight since their opening day.

We did not choose our families. But team does pick you as much as you let yourself be changed by it. Nothing worthwhile is accomplished without great teams. And no rewards greater than that of a team bringing home the first prize. Esprit de corps. That’s what it is all about. The high-fives or the tap on your shoulder when you are down and out (World Cup Final).  Come on! Focus! Next play!

Ask my tall classmate whose first handshake ends up lasting a life time.

Strange sounds, familiar shores

Instead of “I woke up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me…” like Paul McCartney,

I woke up to strange sounds these days: peddlers who use “low tech” au parleur (bull horn) mounted on bicycles or tri-cycles (selling boot-legged CD‘s). In fact, it was my first time got chased by pleasant sound from behind (most of the time, it was emergency vehicle with a sense of urgency). By music here, I mean, not Beatles‘, but Slow Rock (nhac Sen), lamenting heart ache and heart-break.

In the evening, you can hear metal belt sound for in-home massage ( I have never tried).

I miss those wood-on-wood sound of a noodle peddler.

Those were the best snacks a boy could wish for. Speaking of Vietnam childhood and music.

Steve Jobs and friends were listening to music with headsets so they could do it while laying down.

One of his signature photos was an empty room with just a lamp, with him sitting cross-legged.

Very Zen-like. Minimalist. Pure simplicity in design.

He went on to take classes in calligraphy (even Reed College curriculum was still too restrictive for his type).

The sum of all these experience gave us the I-pod with ear-plugs, and later on the I-phone and I-pad.

Studies mentioned that babies could hear before birth.

If this is true, I must have heard an early scooter, a vendor on wheels, someone trying to get the grill going, or a rooster announcing a new day.

Dawn in Vietnam and dusk in the US. (You can experience similar feel, let’s say by traveling down Mexico, but then they got the same time zone as in the US).

Sharing the same Moon.

Sharing the same hope, fear and dream:

Will my kids grow up “con nha lanh” (teachable), and not into drugs.

Will they stay or leave for strange shores?

Will they listen to our voice, those familiar sounds, or they will just “follow the money” and “hearing voices”.

In the end, especially in our flat world, the sound of jet engine and popping soda cans will bring us home from any strange shore.

For a moment there at my friend’s party, we danced and jumped to a familiar tune (sound), felt our hearts go on beating (The End of the World) and saddened “when you say, ‘goodbye'”. The day can’t go wrong when you “get up to the sound of music”, let’s say in “Beautiful Sunday” (when you said, you love me, hey, hey, it’s a beautiful day). Or at night, when soothing sound you first heard while inside Mummy’s womb was that of the noodle man’s peddling.

Faustian bargain

Most of us don’t face life-and-death decision everyday (gaining the world but losing our soul). Leave that to Caligula or Gaddafi.

Yet, a less wealthy Syrian, whose background had been oblivious even to himself, still got some press. Steve Jobs can still sell some books.

Like you, I was curious. So I browsed his biography. One snippet about Steve: he lived for ideas and did not mind recruiting the best of talents, wherever they might be : foreign country or far-out competitor (Dropbox was an example). We all read his introduction in Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check. Or about his last meal out (penchant for the Far East, relics from his early days seeking enlightenment). To this day, no one could explain why not once, but twice, some Beta versions of the I-phone managed to show up in Hanoi.

One man used his oil wealth to buy influence in Africa (calling himself King of Kings… the sun would never set on his Empire).

The other, used his sense of abandonment to “think different”.

Although both were ambitious, the market chose to follow Steve’s lead. We knew he would not settle. And he emphatically said so (Standford Address).

When I left my local Barnes and Nobles, I turned around and saw all those hard-cover books stacking up, all had Steve Job’s staring out the window.

As if to remind me not to settle.

I am sure people at Apple Inc and Apple stores still feel his midas touch. The book cover captures that magical feel, like the all-white room in John Lennon‘s “Imagine” video. Simplicity in life and in death.

Once in a thousand years, out of the abundant gene pool, emerged a few geniuses, in Physics (Einstein), in Arts (Van Gogh), in Music (Elvis), in Aviation (Wright brothers) or in Technology (Jobs).

Although we don’t face the Faustian bargain  on a daily basis, we have much to gain thanks to them. Now the burden is on us to make the most of this treasure trove. Go and invent your iNext.  Stay hungry and stay foolish.

800-GOT-PCs

Even the machine is toast.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2091333,00.html

I remember tuning in to CNBC last year to watch Steve Jobs live.

The event: the I-Pad.

Steve sat leisurely on stage, showing us on-screen all the touching touchy features.

The Apple II inventor inadvertently declared the death of PC (not right away, but it’s the beginning of the end).

However you look at it, once consumers are “spoiled” with lighter, faster and cheaper products,  there is no turning back. (Since when do we go out and buy a boom box to listen to music?).

Enligtment soon turns entitlement.

Perhaps someday, PC’s will turn vintage.

Even rustic. To be nature-preserved, in the Pacific Northwest, to load Win 10 and beyond.

In the age of Google Docs and cloud computing, mobile and jet engines, Cat Stevens just needs to pack up a tablet in “I am leaving, on the jet plane,…”

Seeing an opportunity in high-tech waste, an entrepreneur started collecting e-waste:

800-GOT-JUNK fleet.

He probably followed HP news closely, especially when the later announced the unraveling of its earlier merger with Compaq.

Junking a lot of mice, key boards, monitors, CPU‘s and speakers.

Even paperback books can’t seem to compete with E readers.

Summer reading on trains and planes will never be the same.

Richard North Patterson benefited from E-revision of his latest, The Devil’s Light, upon the news of Bin Laden.

If anything, we can all feel a relief that cumbersome hardware and E-waste will be less taxing

on our ecosystem.

Computing is evolving and has gone mobile.

It’s all 1 and 0. So, why bother with all the weight or Wang?

Computing at the speed of light.

It is to show how fast the adoption curve has been since the Mini-Computer (whose inventor just died last year) to Personal Computer (whose inventor just died last week),

and even machine can’t escape its own cycle of birth, life and death (and rebirth, which is the euphemism for going vintage).

Just make sure you junk them responsibly. Call 800-GOT-PCs?

Chinese CEOs are (also) quitting

You know you got it right when others tried to copy your every move.

An Apple-like store in China, a Sony or Microsoft retail store in the same mall (Galleria, Houston).

Steven Jobs, the enchanter, is quitting as Apple has reached its apex, once surpassing Exxon (Google also had this Everest experience).

Maybe some Chinese CEOs like Jack Ma will get a similar idea (in their case, they aren’t going to take a calligraphy class. Instead they want to drive around in gold-plated automobiles).

Something, like style, just can’t be copied.

Design and innovation, like brand, is in you.

Zoom out from history, you will find clusters of creativity, among which Silicon Valley in the late 80’s.

Guy Kawasaki briefly mentioned the secrecy and partitioning at Apple. Planned self-disruption.

In that spirit, I am sure they had a succession plan in place at Apple.

Not as at HP, where the tablets are on sale for $99 (not for Third World charity).

We do live in a different era, when songs are downloaded for 99 cents, and tablet sold for $99.

We will soon get cheaper versions of the I-phone, perhaps via Sprint’s private-label re-sellers, such as Metro PCS. (as of this edit, T-Mobile is rolling out the I Phone 5 for $99 w/out contract).

Perhaps the Chinese CEO’s are calling it quit. After all, their society couldn’t make up their mind: to abandon their naval fleet (ancient history), or to build aircraft carriers (modern technology)? To build luxury car lines, or to buy Indian’s nano autos? To move up the value chain, or to expand overseas?

When emerging nations beat Chinese at its own game (cheap knock-off using cheap labor),

it’s time to quit. Oh, one more thing. At least Steve Jobs advised Standford grads to stay hungry.

Not to flaunt their wealth by driving gold-plated cars around. One high-tech start-up owner in the Valley did just that (crashing his Lamborghini and died after having sold his company just an hour before). Know when to hold and when to fold. It’s Steve’s secret sauce. Try to copy that.

Marketing genius

Charlie Chaplin would keep filming until he got it perfect (100:1 filming ratio to get the ladder to swing just right etc…).

In “the Kid“, the little girl would throw rocks at windows, while our handyman walks right behind to fix them.

Gillette would give away razors just to sell the blades (HP has done the same with its ink).

Levis would sell jeans during the Gold Rush, along with those who profited by selling picks and pickaxes.

Sony founder had his reps wear bigger shirt pockets to fit his “portable” radios (showmanship par excellence).

Hyundai founder tried his hands at the Pony, while Detroit was busy with its Pinto.

Pepsi had its “taste test” with blindfolded customers, while Wendy used little old lady for “where is the beef” campaign.

Barnes and Nobles followed Moses down the mountain, saying “let my people read” (beyond the tablets).

Woodstock organizers did the same when they decided to “let my people in”.

Costco built its shopping carts bigger than others (as a results, people bought more paper products) while Cisco bought up its competitors to solve innovator’s dilemma.

Apple launched its I-phone, with long lines wrapped around New York and San Francisco’s street corners. Chinese-Americans would buy them in bulk to stock up for their next suit-case entrepreneurial trip (where do they think the phones were first manufactured in?).

And the mother of them all is Facebook, where out of our own volition, we volunteer our intimate information, information we wouldn’t tell our mothers, so they can help advertisers target the right kind of demographics.

Marketing genius! They know about us more than we do ourselves.

Facebook went from on-campus to off-campus, from Tulane to Tunisia and flourished in an era of change, from Apartheid to ARPANET. The tiger is out of the cage, with its long tail. Nothing is for free. I learned that after my first 5 minutes of silent movie (wheeled around on the back seat of the peddler’s bicycle). Charlie Chaplin was timeless.

We all had our shares of being had by marketing genius, willingly especially during Super Bowl, the Davos of them all.