Steve Jobs Versus Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg has no social skills, but he created the world's most popular social network. He was born the same year that Steve hurled his Macintosh against his Big Brother, IBM. Twenty-six years later, Mark’s empty eyes stare at us from cover of Time Magazine with the headline, “Person of The Year”. The public voted for Mac-toting troublemaker, Julian Assange to receive the award. In fact, he received twenty times more votes than Mark. However, the news icon decided Mark was a safer option to connect with the Time brand name. The nut-shelled reason that Mark is on the December cover is that he has connected one-twelfth of the world’s population. Time explains itself:

Facebook makes cyberspace more like the real world: dull but civilized. The masked-ball period of the Internet is ending. Where people led double lives, real and virtual, now they lead single ones again. The fact that people yearned not to be liberated from their daily lives but to be more deeply embedded in them is an extraordinary insight, as basic and era-defining in its way as Jobs' realization that people prefer a graphical desktop to a command line or pretty computers to boring beige ones.[1]

Steve blew his chance of winning this accolade in 1982. Does Steve really need the award anyway? Consider some of its previous recipients: Stalin (twice), Mao, Nixon, and George W Bush.

Hollywood has made a scathing and critically acclaimed film about Mark called The Social Network. Like Pirates of Silicon Valley, it details the mercenary tactics behind building a digital empire. The film was released on the heels of a hot trend of people leaving Facebook. Information Week[2] reported that Peter Rojas, founder of Gizmodo and Engadget, and Google guru, Matt Cutts have turned off their Facebook pages in protest against the enfant terrible who built it. Mark is making influential enemies, but his worst enemy is himself. He Shanghaied ConnectU and then joked about it, “They made a mistake ha, ha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the Facebook thing comes out”. He hacked Harvard reporters’ accounts to stop an investigation about him.[3] He stole the check-in feature from Foursquare. He stole public facing profiles from Twitter. Then he changed his customers’ privacy settings three times.

Mark’s office is a twenty-minute drive from Steve’s. The Apple CEO was generous enough to be the first to sponsor Mark through his Apple Students Group.[4] Steve also featured Facebook pages in his iPad commercials. In June 2010, the un-grateful start-up up-start scrawled on his Facebook page, “This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make calls." Later, he replaced the iPhone with an Android.[5]

In September, Forbes Magazine announced that Mark is richer than Steve.[6] Regardless of Mark's rank in a rich man's magazine, Steve reigns supreme as the entrepreneur teenagers most admire. This is Mark’s most important demographic, and his greatest loss if he wants their support. The 2010 Junior Achievement Teens and Entrepreneurship survey placed Steve as number one favorite. Mark was down the list at number six, behind Oprah. A look at the questions reveals why this Steve was numero uno. Thirty-one percent admired entrepreneurs who “make a difference in people’s lives”. Wealth and fame earned only ten percent of their vote. Twenty-four percent said, “Controlling your destiny” was the key motivation to become an entrepreneur like Steve.[7]

Just like Steve, Mark travelled from place to place in India on a “vision quest” for a month of “pleasure and contemplation”. Though for Steve, he found less pleasure and more disappointment than contemplation. Both men returned to the States only to sleep on the floor and foster formidable enemies. Mark kicked out his co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, whereas Steve’s co-founder left the company on his own ticket. Unfortunately, Mark doesn’t have the protection of Steve’s charismatic personality. He’s a PR train wreck.

Following in Steve’s footsteps, Mark tried to diffuse the harsh light shed upon him by the bio-pic by appearing on Saturday Night Live with the actor who portrayed/betrayed him. Unfortunately, Mark lacked Steve’s control over the event. The largely improvised sketch merely cemented the film’s portrayl.

The Social Network’s composer, rebel-without-a-pause Trent Reznor, won the Oscar and the Golden Globe for the score. The digital virtuoso had this to say about Mark,

When I see the media heralding Zuckerburg, putting him up on a pedestal of genius and mentioned in the same breath as Steve Jobs, I highly disagree with that. He was in the right place, at the right time, with a functional tool.[8]

The one thing Mark has over Steve is a knack for social networking. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et cetera all know how to play nicely with one another. Old man Steve just doesn’t get it. Social networking involves alien concepts that Steve can’t quite grasp: community, altruism, gift economy, the non-rival good. He tried to create a social network called Ping for his iTune people to connect with each other. The oracle of social media, Mashable.com, says the clunky Ping “lives in a ghetto of its own. It doesn’t interact with other social networks at all, and that breaks one of the cardinal rules of social media if you ask us.”[9] It seems the open social concept grates on Steve’s closed up sociopathic sensibility. Steve tried to connect Ping with Facebook, but Mark pulled that plug soon after Steve announced Ping.[10] How embarrassing.

Steve invited Mark over for dinner in early October, 2010.[11] Perhaps there’s something these two can learn from one another. Whatever conversation transpired, they must have agreed to disagree on agreeable terms. When Mark heard that Steve was taking a medical leave in January, 2010, he posted on his Facebook with his iPhone, “Steve, you've done so much good for the world already. I hope you get better soon.” (150 people ‘liked” this). Nevertheless, Facebook maintains its distance from the lone wolf Ping.

At the Silicon Valley dinner with MacHead Obama, Mark sat on the President’s right hand side whilst Steve sat on his left. Steve was the only man not in a shirt and tie. Guess what he wore?

[1] Grossman, L. (2010, December 15) Person of The year: Mark Zuckerberg. Time Magazine.

[2] Diana, A. (2010, May 11) Facebook Deactivations Gaining Attention. Information Week.

[3] Carlson, C. (2010, March 5) At Last – The Full Story Of How Facebook was Founded. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/how-Facebook-was-founded-2010-3#we-can-talk-about-that-after-i-get-all-the-basic-functionality-up-tomorrow-night-1

apple-facebook-ping-2010-9#comment-4c992c097f8b9acb60a80700

[5] Matyszczyk, C. (2010, June 14) Facebook's Zuckerberg disses iPhone, removes post. cnet.com. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20007712-71.html

[6] Bertoni, S. (2010, September 22) Facebook’s Zuckerberg Now Richer Than Apple’s Steve Jobs [blog]. Money Talks. From Forbes.com. Retrieved from: http://blogs.forbes.com/stevenbertoni/2010/09/22/facebooks-zuckerberg-now-richer-than-apples-steve-jobs/

[7] Junior Achievement (2010) Latest Teen Idol: Steve Jobs. Retrieved from: http://www.ja.org/files/surveys/2010-Teens&EntrepreneurshipPart2.pdf

[8] Adams, S. (2010, October 11) Interview: Trent Reznor discusses The Social Network soundtrack. Drowned In Sound. Retrieved from: http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4141283-interview--trent-reznor-discusses-the-social-network-soundtrack

[9] Axon, S. (2010, October 16) Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg Talked Ping Over Dinner. Mashable.com. Retrieved from: http://mashable.com/2010/10/16/steve-jobs-mark-zuckerberg/

[10] Swisher, K. (2010, September 2) Steve Jobs on Why Facebook Is Not Part of Apple’s New Ping Music Social Network: “Onerous Terms” [blog]. BoomTown. From AllThingsD. Retrieved from: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100902/steve-jobs-on-why-Facebook-is-not-part-of-apples-new-ping-music-social-network-onerous-terms/

[11] Guynn, J. (2010, October 15) Apple's Steve Jobs pings Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for dinner. Los Angeles Times.

Steve's jobs' Cultural Revolution in China

What Steve needs right now is a very large market of fashion victims who are used to abuse and neglect. He needs a country with an exploding number of nouveau riche who don't care if his products work properly or not. They just want them because they're cool. He needs 1.3 billion consumers who will blindly buy anything American, even if they don't know what an app is - especially if they don't know what an app is. Steve needs an over-inflated population of buyers who are less concerned about open or closed, and more concerned about the prestige of owning a trendy western gadget. He needs a nation where the media is controlled with an iron fist so it doesn't bother big business with trivial concerns like selling defective and over-priced products, or helping them get an A on their assignment. He needs China.

The iPhone 4 was released in China on September the 24th, 2010. This author was lucky enough to be there at the time. The China Daily mentioned very little about Android's crushing blows to the iPhone’s market share. The Government controlled media only vaguely mentioned some issue with the iPhone's antenna. An item that did not make it at all to The China Daily was the government ban placed on the alleged iPhone copycat MeizuMe. Steve defended the iPhone-friendly Chinese Communist Party by stating the ban was justified "because they stole our ideas and intellectual property."[1] The China Daily either condemned or outright ignored these anti-revolutionary issues. Instead, every article about the iPhone 4 was simply a breathless countdown to the arrival of the American wonder-phone.

With Mao dead, the Chinese need something else to follow that makes them feel they are part of something larger than the individual. Since the 1980s, China has found salvation by opening itself to the Western market of shiny things.

The Chinese have an aversion to orderly queues, so there was no line outside the Beijing Apple Store. Instead, a messy crowd of a thousand fashionistas with new money swarmed around Apple’s glass doors for two days before the iPhone’s release. When the doors finally opened, the staff raced around slapping high-fives with the faithful. The first fan-boy to receive his Judas Phone, was embraced like a long lost son. The mob chanted “Apple, Apple, Apple”, and then “iPhone, iPhone, iPhone”. The only ones not chanting were the migrant farmers and housekeepers hired by executives who felt that waiting with the proles was beneath them. They probably wished their boss had sent them out for a bag of dumplings instead of some gadget they themselves would never own.

Many of the crowd were scalpers with armfuls of cash, who hauled away dozens of iPhones, only to re-sell them within minutes. These were no ordinary scalpers. They were Chinese scalpers - representing a long tradition of heavily organised and dodgy entrepreneurialism. These guys worked in teams. They wiped out the store’s inventory before regular customers had time to reach for their Mastercard. Forlorn and empty-handed, the regular customers were led away to alleys by the canny scalpers who made at least ten per-cent profit on a resale. Within a week, Apple laid down the law. New rules dictated that people must make reservations online to buy only one-phone per day, and they can’t leave the store unless they sign up to service provider on the spot. This was no problemo as Chinese citizens were used to being told what to do.

You can normally count on Chinese retailers to sell Western wares at about half the Western price. Apple products are the exception to the rule. Chinese fan-boys shelled out double the price paid by their Western brothers. This meant the average Chinese probably worked quadruple the hours of a Westerner to earn enough Yuan to buy the shiny new gadget.

Steve would not be there for the frenzied launch, but his spirit was everywhere in the capital. In crowded back alley markets, displayed on folding tables, little plastic Steves could be found. The dolls wore perfectly miniaturised black turtlenecks, Levi 502s, and New Balance 991 sneakers. They stood in good company next to little plastic Obamas. The President as okay with his doll - unlike Scrooge McSteve. One month later He would eradicate the Steve dolls with a single letter to its Chinese manufacturer.[2] Such swift unquestioning response is why the Chinese market agrees so nicely with Steve’s megalomania.

At the Beijing Apple store, this author approached one of the staff and asked,

"Sooooo, how's the antenna problem going?"

"Apple fixed it before they released it in here in China"

"Oh right? What did they do to fix it?"

"I don't know. I was just told they fixed it"

"Okay."

Moving on to another youngster in the signature blue t-shirt:

"Soooo, sell a lot of covers in this store?"

"Yeah, sure. Covers are popular cos you know... it’s necessary."

"Necessary?"

"You know? The antenna problem."

"Oh yeah, the antenna problem."

Afterhours, the empty store remained fully lit up. The carefully composed track lighting cast a heavenly glow upon row after row of iPhones and their cornucopia of beautifully crafted accessories. Two young security guards sat on stools inside the locked glass doors. They’re a lot less threatening than the two gorillas that keep the same watch within the Sydney Apple Store. One of them texted his girl on an old iPhone 3. He couldn’t afford the new one just yet. However, regardless of which model he has, he still won’t be able to access Facebook, thanks to the Chinese Communist Party.

[1] Electronista (2010, October 10) Steve Jobs: MeizuMe “stole our ideas”. Retrieved from http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/10/10/apples.jobs.explains.meizu.shut.down/

[2] Snol, L. (2010, November 24) Apple Bans Steve Jobs Doll: One Less Thing. PC World.

Steve Jobs Versus Chelsea Isaacs

The Long Island University received a decent educational discount on a load of iPads. One of its journalism students had three questions for Apple regarding the purchase so that she could finish her assignment. The three questions have yet to be revealed; but what has been revealed all over the web is that Chelsea Isaacs felt entitled to no less than Apple’s help in writing her little paper. Of course, she received no response from Apple media relations. This should come as no surprise to a journalism student who should know that there are far bigger players than Little Miss Isaacs who meet with the same silence. On the eleventh-hour of her deadline she decided to email Steve, knowing full well, by Steve’s reputation, that if he replied, it would be both terse and newsworthy - and it was: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.” Then later, “Please leave us alone.”[1] It was probably not the smartest thing for Steve to type out to a proto-celebrity like Chelsea.

Within twenty-four hours, her pouting pretty face was all over the news. She got her fifteen minutes (perhaps it was less) on ABC's Good Morning America Young Chelsea played the victim in front of the cameras, with a generous helping of purring and cleavage.[2] Then her career really took off. With the help of her buddy and his camera, she did a YouTube video on an iRobot press event in New York. She received a warm welcome from the hall packed with geeks who enjoyed her adorably clueless purring questions, her high boots, and her other assets. Her piece de resistance occurred when Chelsea mispronounced iRobot CEO Colin Angle’s name. She pronounced ‘Colin’ like ‘colon’. Microsoft invited her to the Windows 7 launch in New York under the pretence that she had “won” the opportunity through a competition. At the event, Chelsea declared that she is “still going to look at things objectively... I have very strict values." She sounds just like a real grown-up journalist. In the next breath, she fumbled the ethical ball, "I wouldn't be comfortable giving [Apple] a dime."[3] She was seen at the event using her Macbook.

TechCrunch did a background check and found she had written a glowing review of herself on Wikibin – a website where Wikipedia entries go to die: “The most desirable hand model in the United States and Canada” – thirteen years ago "...an electric presence with an extremely evolved sense of the human psyche... a Renaissance Woman". After TechCrunch found the Wikibin listing, the entry attracted thirty very creative derisory comments, including this gem:

Chelsea,

We here at Yapple computers in California can't stand yammering yentas. My public relations people are all too busy watching the company stock price to actually do any work. Those who aren't watching the the stock price, eyes fixed to monitor, are out buying BMW's, Botox, boob jobs, or contimplating giving money to poor mexican villages in the hopes that only the good ones come to California to work for less than minimum wage cutting lawns and cleaning thier homes. [4]

So please Chelsea (or Yammering Yenta), leave us alone....

Steve

To celebrate her entitled stardom, Chelsea did so much clubbing that she scored a job writing a nightlife column for newyork.com. Early one bleary morning, a hung-over Chelsea uploaded a video diary entry to her Facebook account. She flirts with her imagined geek fans, plays with her hair, and lectures about society and ethics. "People are taught that they are smaller than The Man… you should feel entitled to getting what you want," she slurs wantonly.

Chelsea can’t complain too loudly considering she still got a B/B+ on her paper.

Why dedicate so much page space with this flake? There is a need to illustrate that Steve’s customers are a reflection of his own entitled misbehaviour. The spoilt and deluded customer culture of Apple is a mirror of the brat who resides in the company’s head office.

No other CEO is so personally engaged in the building of his company’s product. He has laid out some lovely toys in the market for us. Steve doesn’t hold a gun to our head and make us pay the inflated price tag. There are always cheaper, and sometimes better, options for us to choose if we don’t want to pay for the apple mystique; but people line up to buy Apple anyway. Their hope is that these products will somehow enrich their lives and social standing. The downside to customers putting a company on a pedestal is that it’s a long way to fall when the customer turns on you. For example,

The MacBook Air received a mixed response after some fans — who were hoping for a touchscreen-enabled tablet PC — deemed the slim-but-pricey subnotebook insufficiently revolutionary. Fans have a nickname for the aftermath of a disappointing event: post-Macworld depression.[5]

Just as Steve switches opinion of his acolytes from zero to hero and back again, so too do his customers swing in their regard of him. Some of these customers are entitled brats who love to abuse the free press for their own gain.

[1] Walsh, S. (2010, September 29) Steve Jobs' 'frenemy' strikes back. CNN Tech. Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-29/tech/steve.jobs.frenemy_1_e-mail-address-customer-tech-media?_s=PM:TECH

[2] abcnews.go.com. (2010, September 21) Steve Jobs to Student: 'Leave Us Alone' [Video file]. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/steve-jobs-student-chelsea-isaacs-leave-us-alone-11688144)

[3] Fried, I (2010, October 13) Student in Jobs spat sours on Apple, not journalism. [Blog]. From Beyond Binary. cnet.com. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20019467-56.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=statusnet

[4] Wikibin (2010) Chelsea Isaacs. Retrieved from http://wikibin.org/articles/chelsea-isaacs.html

[5] Kahney, L. (2008, March 18) How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong. Wired Magazine.

Steve Jobs Plays With Semantics

Closed is such a negative word. Steve decided to play with semantics during an Apple earnings call under the hot lights of Wall Street analysts in October, 2010. He doesn’t usually speak at these things. However, he made an exception this time so the Wall Street guys could feel the power of The Reality Distortion Field.

"Google loves to characterize Android as open, and iPhone as closed. We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches. We think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, what's best for the customer, fragmented versus integrated? We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day... Open doesn't always win."[1]

Why is that so, Steve? Can we have an example? True to form, Steve is all tell and no show. Once again, everyone from Huffington Post to Washington Post shook their collective heads and watched The Reality Distortion Field fade before their eyes.

[1] Keizer, G. (2010, October 19) Steve Jobs talks trash about Google's Android, knocks tiny tablets. Computerworld. Retrieved from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9191782/Steve_Jobs_talks_trash_about_Google_s_Android_knocks_tiny_tablets

Revenge of the Nerds

Google Engineering VP & allround nice guy Vic Gundotra

A war was brewing and Android was getting a little cocky about their free-for-all advantage. Andy and his Google buddies decided “no more Mister Nice Guy”. During the Google Input/output keynote in May, 2010 VP of engineering Vic Gundotra decided to get tough on Apple. Look out, Steve. Vic sashays onto the stage wearing a lovely sweater and neat haircut looking like the nice affluent guy your daughter should bring home, but never does. “I hope you enjoyed that party last night” he says with a grin that implies safe, suburban mischief (I am thinking cucumber sandwiches and punch). Then he begins telling a story about Andy’s prophecy of a future without Android, "He argued that if Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice." There was applause; but not the rabid jubilation that Steve enjoys during his tirades. “That’s… a future… we don’t want,” Vic declares in his best big-boy voice.

"You need people like me so you can
point your fingers and say 'hey
there's the bad guy!'" - Scarface

Behind him, an illustration attempts to throw Steve’s 1984 commercial back in his face. The graphic uses rather vague imagery of some slacker kid overlooking a bleak metropolis. It seems hastily thrown together from Google’s stock image library. Vic’s cute idea is to portray his company as revolutionaries at war with Big Brother. Of course, the Big Brother he is referring to is Steve – the same man who used this style of marketing melodrama with much more finesse than Vic the Volvo-driver did. Very few in the press were impressed, especially not Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal,

“Note to Google: A scary search behemoth with a stranglehold on Internet advertising isn’t really believable as a victim of “The Man”–in this case, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.”[1]

Vic went on to make his only valid point, “If you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone, then welcome to Android.”

[1] Swisher, K. (2010, May 21) Viral Video: Google’s Laughable–But Not So Funny–Apple Tantrum. BoomTown. All Things Digital. Retrieved from http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100521/viral-video-googles-laughable-but-not-funny-apple-tantrum/

A Word From The Woz about Android

Android will have double Apple’s share of a trillion-dollar industry by 2014. Over 208 million tablets will be sold by then, and social networking will replace email as our choice method of saying hi to Mom online. These are the predictions of The Gartner Group.[1] They have been providing technology related market insight since the beginning of the PC revolution. These are serious figures, over which serious men in serious suits salivate.

Wandering into this debate is big cuddly Woz, Apple employee #1. Every young engineer looks up to Woz as the uber-geek who invented the PC. Steve fired an over-zealous Apple test engineer for showing Woz an iPad prototype for only a few minutes.[2] He has always played good cop to Steve’s bad cop. Woz is a nice guy, and he doesn’t mind telling you that ad nausem. One of most beautiful stories from the early days occurred when Woz shared his Apple stock among the employees who were neglected by Steve. In the Silicon Valley culture of mercenary ambitions, Woz has been called “uniquely un-driven” by veteran columnist and political analyst, Stewart Alsop.[3] Dan Lyons (AKA Fake Steve Jobs) described Woz as “the nicest, coolest guy you could ever meet”.[4]

Woz is one of Steve’s many PR nightmares. He just makes Steve look downright bad. Even his stainless steel business card is more famous and way cooler (!) than Steve’s card. Steve can’t control what Woz says to his legion of acolytes. If he ever did try to put a muzzle on Woz, it would only make Steve look worse. The tech press awaits with bated breath for any word from the Woz that he has doubts about an Apple product. Woz set off a storm of gossip after stating in an interview with Dutch paper De Telegraaf (translated by Google, mmm) that Android will beat Apple just like Windows beat the Mac. Woz said the key in both battles is open versus closed.[5]

[1] Gartner (2010) 2010 Press Releases. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/it/section.jsp?type=press_releases&format=xhtml&year=2010&show_archived=true

[2] Wozniak, S. (2010, April 24) Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell. Gizmodo.com Retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/5523673/steve-wozniak-on-apple-security-employee-termination-and-gray-powell?skyline=true&s=i

[3] Wolf, G. (1998, September) The World According to Woz: Start up. Drop out. Have fun. Pass it on. Wired Magazine.

[4] Lyons, D. (2009, March 7) Dancing With the Woz. Newsweek.

[5] Monterie, A. (2010, November, 18) ‘Apple maakte al eerder een smartphone’. De Telegraaf. Retrieved from http://www.telegraaf.nl/digitaal/8250271/__Besturingssysteem_Google_wint_race_om_smartphones__.html?p=3,2

Steve Jobs Learns That Content Is King ...again

Mobile app developers don’t like Steve's tightly controlled software fiefdom. Firstly, they need to buy a Mac to write an app for an iPhone or iPad. Steve had a philosophical spat with Adobe Flash, so developers can't use one of the most delicious carb-loaded ingredients in their programming soup. Steve has put restrictions on “sexy apps" in a noble gesture of preserving the good taste of Apple Inc. - thereby wiping out the most popular thing people want to see. “Folks who want porn can buy an Android,” Steve emailed one unhappy customer[1] (and I did). Mister Highbrow is fickle about what he lets people install on his toys. Mark Fiore’s political cartoon app was rejected for ridiculing public figures, and then it was suddenly approved after he won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.[2]

Hungry developers who want to make apps can either dine at Steve’s exclusive five-star restaurant for US$100-300 registration fee, or pig-out at Android Andy’s all-you-can-eat buffet chain for only US$25.

The end user is presented with a similar choice. Any app worth downloading on an iPad/Phone costs something. For example, iPad DJ, Rana June Sobhany, got bored waiting in line for her iPad so she began buying apps on her iPhone. By the time the store opened six hours later, she had bought $200 worth of music apps.[3] On the other hand, there is a bottomless pit of useful free apps available on Android.

Have you heard this one? “An Android user walks into a bar then leaves because the beer isn't free.” – tweeted by iMacthere4iAm.

[1] Siegler, M.G. (2010, April 19) Steve Jobs Reiterates: “Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone”. TechCrunch. Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/19/steve-jobs-android-porn/

[2] Stelter, B. (2010, April 25) Apple Allows a Cartoon App, and a Glimpse of Free Speech. New York Times.

[3] Mashable (2010, April 22) Interview with Rana June [video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CsNCk9gbRs

Cargo Cult of Mac

The long queues of people waiting to buy an iPad is reminds one of the Pacific Island cargo cults. These are the last people on Earth to whom money is just bits of paper. What they value above all is Western cargo. Both the cargo cults and the Cult of Mac believe in the divine nature of manufactured goods. Each cult believes that goods have been created by their god especially for them. It doesn’t matter if the object is a crate of corned beef dropped by the U.N or an iPhone ordered online, these things represent both the salvation and trappings of the first world.

There is a John Frum Movement in one of these islands ,which some suspect was named after a man called John from America. They worship American objects. The Islanders build coconut radios, which become totems of power in their village.

The Prince Phillip Movement of Tanna is a cargo cult that genuinely believes Queen Elizabeth II’s husband is a mountain spirit will one day bestow upon their village a cargo of miraculous goods from the sky. Like Steve, Phillip does nothing to shatter their delusion.

Cargo cultists are ignorant of modern factories. They are no different than Apple customers who don't know (or don't want to know) that many Chinese factory workers who build those lovely iPhone screens suffer permanent nerve damage from n-hexane poisoning.[1] Cargo cultists are skeptical when someone tries to explain modern business practices behind the scenes. They maintain that cargo is a miracle and mark themselves with the magical logos of civilized nations in homage to their god. This is not very different to the popular practice of Apple tattoo and the occasional scarification (left pic). The islanders build mock airstrips in case their god returns in their flying machine with more shiny objects. A similar ritual is the queue of MacHeads camping outside Apple stores.

Mike Daisey was a member of the Cult of Mac until he found out how his iPhone was manufactured and his illusions were shattered. He took his story on the road as successful monologue in the tradition of Spalding Gray. The cherubic monologist reminds one of a lost little boy grown angry that Santa Claus turned out to be a myth. New York Times calls him as “one of the hardest-working and most accomplished storytellers in the solo form”.[2] Washington Post describes his show as, “a blisteringly funny, icily penetrating account of the extraordinary influence and not-so-benign impact the man and his company have had on the world”.[3] Exploring “The Last Cargo Cult” comprises the first half of Mike’s act, followed by the "Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." Mike claims Steve as “not a micro-manager, he’s a nano-manager.” He researched these two stories by traveling to the Pacific Islands and the factories of China. In Shenzhen, he posed as a businessman to gain access to the workers. Both halves of his act dovetail into a whole that says something darkly humorous about our consumer culture.

Mike explained why Apple fell from his favor during an interview with Andrew Keen of TechCrunch.[4]

“Are you excited about the appearance of the new white iPhone 4?”

“No,” Mike chuckles from deep inside his generous girth as Andrew maintains his deadly earnest demeanor. ”Having spent time in Shenzhen, in factories, watching the circumstances under which the devices are made there’s something, sort of the height of hubris to think that (chuckles again) the significance of Apple being able to make an iPhone that is now white, but otherwise exactly identical to the old iPhone. …I own an iPhone and when I use it, I am reminded of the children who put the device together. …I spoke to many workers who were fourteen years-old, thirteen years-old, and twelve years-old. I heard stories to last a lifetime …the devices are lovely and they have a very real cost.”

Andrew: “Does it have to be that way?”

“No. The standard belief that we’re all inculcated with is that if we don’t use cheap, cheap labor in China, our devices would be so hideously expensive. …China should be acknowledged is a fascist country run by thugs. The special economic zone that was carved out in the south, where corporations were invited to participate, those corporations, which were OUR corporations wrote their own rules for how labor would work there. …Many of the changes that could happen have nothing to do with money …while I was there at Foxconn, a worker died after working a 32-hour shift. …the entire system in Shenzhen that makes our devices is deeply inhumane. It is designed for using up the workers for everything they have and throwing them away. …I spoke to many people who have mauled hands, mauled in machinery making not just Apple devices, but Nokia, Lenovo, everyone makes their technology the same way”

The final note is very good point. Why does Steve cop all the bad press when his competitors use similar factories? Perhaps it’s for the same reason that we decried the Nike sweatshops rather than Dunlop sweatshops – both probably exist side-by-side in the same third-world town. However, unlike Nokia and Dunlop, Apple and Nike tack on a hefty desire mark-up into their price tag. Therefore, these desirous products represent two ancient sins that continue to grate on our conscience even in our modern consumer culture – greed and vanity. Our Christian guilt shifts into overdrive.

At the end of the show Mike gives out Steve’s email address to the audience. During an Washington Post interview he said, “The only reason to speak the truth is to try and change the world." Steve believes in the same creed, for very different reasons. Mike quotes Steve’s only reaction to his show, “I don’t think he appreciates the complexity of the situation.”Washington Post poses the question, “What if, for example, people were to stop upgrading their stuff for a while?”[5]

Mike alludes to Steve’s need to drive our desires: “If you control the metaphor through which people see the world in technology today, you control the world itself”.

[1] Barboza, D. (2011, February 22) Workers Sickened At Apple Supplier In China. New York Times.

[2] Zinoman, J. (2007, January 21) The Need to Think Onstage Is Driving Mr. Daisey. New York Times.

[3] Marks, P. (2011, March 30) The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Washington Post.

[4] Keen, A. (2011, January 31) Exposed: Apple’s Terrible Sin in China (TCTV). TechCrunch. Retrieved from: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/exposed-apples-terrible-sin-in-china-tctv/

[5] Horwitz, J. (2011, March 23) Mike Daisey discovers the worm in Apple. Washington Post.

Tablet Size Matters

It wasn’t long before Android was saying “me too” in the tablet market that Steve created; but a seven-inch screen to compete with Steve’s 9.7? This should have been a no-brainer for the competition. Android’s task was to simply copy the iPad idea and make it cheaper, and maybe a little bigger, not smaller. If the tablet market were a locker room, Steve would be the envy of his lesser-endowed team-mates. He thoroughly enjoyed his rival’s myopia. He cheerily informed the world that the seven-inch tablet was “dead on arrival”.[1]

Steve probably shouldn't have baited the boys in the locker room. It wouldn't be long before his laptop-killer would be toe-to-toe with a laptop-killer-killer filled with (mostly free) killer apps built for Android - the iOS-killer.

The first iPhone-killer took as long as two years to come out fighting from the labs of Motorola – the same company who built the CPUs for the original Macs. When the iPad appeared, Motorola was quicker off the mark to play catch up than before. Within nine months of the iPad's rollout, the Android-loaded Motorola Xoom swaggered into the market like John Holmes with a 10.1 inch screen. It came in four colours rather than two, featured better picture resolution, and supported Flash. Of course it was a little heavier because it had more stuff: a microSD slot for 32gig card, a USB port, a barometer and even a magnetometer (a scientific instrument used to measure the strength and direction of a magnetic field - don’t ask). Unlike it's more glamorous competitor, a future upgrade to the faster 4G system is free. The Xoom is a hell of a lot easier to disassemble and repair according to teardown expert, Miroslav Djuric - director of tech comm at ifixit.com (a website which enjoys even more traffic than PC Advisor).[2]

Not that anyone noticed, but Xoom stole Steve's thunder two months before the less impressive second-gen iPad made its grande entrance. At the latter's launch, Steve made a surprise (not really) appearance on stage to assure the world that he's not at death's door. Watching him describe the iPad 2 was like watching a Burger King commercial. The Burger King voice-over never says a burger includes a slice of cheese; rather, it's a select choice filament of perfectly matured chedder. Likewise, each banal ingredient in Steve's sugar-loaded product is presented as a bonus - as if he's doing you a great big friggin’ favour to include it in the package. He went to great lengths to show how skinny his tablet really is by demonstrating that it’s thinner than his iPhone by half a millimeter - wow. If only he would include a set of the standard substandard 32 ohm Apple ear buds.

This author was at the Sydney Apple Store during the iPad 2 release. The staff cheerily declared that they refused take orders for the wonder-pad because they love to see the line-up on release day. The line continued around three corners of the block. One guy, who camped out for a couple of days near the door, already had an iPad 2. He just enjoyed the Apple queue. Half the horde would not receive their object of desire. Total stock sold out within an hour. It could be argued that Apple deliberately chose not to meet projected demand as a ploy to increase demand to ravenous levels. Apple and their customers share a sadomasochistic relationship. Apple likes to tease their customers by dangling sweets above their customer’s heads. After generating enough salivation, they snatch the precious lollies away. "Apple Store staff… have been instructed to tell people to just keep coming back and there'll be stock soon, with no indication of when. No other retailer would treat its customers' time with such disrespect", Reported MacHead and Sydney Morning Herald reporter, Asher Moses.[3] Later, Asher tweeted furiously, “Anyone found any stock of iPad 2 left? “ and later, “Apple says there is still iPad 2 stock available in Aus. Where? “. Apple customers love this game. They like that Daddy puts them in their place. Apple's endgame is to boost desire, and therefore profits. Meanwhile, back at the queue, an everyman walks past the true believers. In the time it took him to reach the end of the line, he orders a Xoom on the net using his Android smartphone – free delivery in two days.

[1] Chen, B.X. (2010, October 19) Steve Jobs: 7-Inch Tablets are ‘Dead On Arrival’ [Blog] Gadget labs. Wired UK.

[2] Ifixit.com (2011) Mororola Xoom Teardown. Retrieved from http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Motorola-Xoom-Teardown/4989/1

[3] Moses, A. (2011, March 29) Apple fans livid as iPad 2 sells out. Sydney Morning Herald.