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Looking at the comments of any major tech blog, and many a mainstream newspaper website one would think that as soon as Apple’s exclusivity contract with AT&T runs out (thought to be in 2010 sometime), the California-based computer firm will leave the mobile network behind. I would be wary of over-speculating about AT&T being in a headlock from an Apple tough-guy position. I think the danger to AT&T of losing exclusivity has been exagerated by some commentators.

Take the following example Megan Lavey’s position in a recent TUAW post:

AT&T has long been the subject of grumbling from the community of US iPhone users who want to use their phones legitimately. Ever since the original release back in 2007, it feels like AT&T has been trying to play catch-up when it comes to service and tower availability. But, the release of the iPhone 3G S might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The ramifications for AT&T will come when it sits down at the negotiation table with Apple to extend its current gig as exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States. Apple won’t forget that AT&T didn’t have key features in place when they needed to be there. If Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, or any other carrier can convince Apple that they would be ahead of the game while AT&T lags (and, believe me, it wouldn’t be that hard of an argument to make), Apple will take its toys and go elsewhere.

I don’t think this is going to happen, and here’s why. Just by chance I watched Steve Jobs’s interview with Walt Mossberg at 2007’s All Things D (D5) Conference, and I was struck by the sense of loyalty that Jobs expressed when referring to how Cingular took a risk on Apple in accepting the iPhone to their network while Verizon (we hear) wouldn’t give them access. The quote arrives just before the two minute mark:

“I think Cingular invested in us, they took a gamble on us, and likewise we took a gamble on them. So, I will never forget that.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the Wall Street Journal and Walt Mossberg’s ‘D’ Conference in 2007

AT&T, at the time called Cingular, may not be the strongest network, but as CEO Randall Stephenson mentioned in this year’s D Conference, the top complaint for all mobile phone networks in the US is signal; it’s not unique to Cingular. There’s no saying there will be any less of a mob decrying Verizon signal strengths were Apple to release an iPhone CDMA version. I imagine Apple could likely keep a level of pragmatism and institutional memory in its decision making process – it wants the best business result but it also wants a carrier in the US that it can actually deal with, and back in 2007 (let alone 2004 when they started working on the iPhone), Verizon was so locked up in their own software packages, network restrictions and carrier lock-ins, I can’t imagine how a pairing of such companies would have worked.  The cultures are, ironically, too similar; both Apple and Verizon want to have full control over their ‘product’ and thus a melding of minds just wouldn’t have worked at the time.

This is not to say that there is no possibility of Apple adopting Verizon as a partner, but I think the importance of institutional memory and personal relationships is incredibly within Apple, evidenced by the number of times that key employees have been hired and rehired again after any attempts to jump ship, taking people like Jon Rubinstein and Craig Federighi as obvious examples.  Who knows whether Verizon will care about Apple’s products once they’ve got them. For the moment the iPhone is AT&T’s golden egg and thus they work to retain it. Once it’s gone how will that relationship with Apple play out? Will AT&T remain accommodating? Verizon might be added as a carrier, but it won’t be without considerable fight and, I’m guessing, significant anguish.

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I’ve been reading quite a few pieces and obituaries about Anita Roddick, the maverick founder of retail chain The Body Shop. She died this week aged 64 of a brain haemorrhage. It seems to me that many people were surprised by her death. I’ve been struck by, and deeply moved by the outpourings of admiration from some of the most impressive people one could hope to know, all of whom are writing of their profound respect for a woman who, at the most basic level, sold soaps, moisturisers and shampoos. She hadn’t been in the news quite as much of late as she once was, but her presence in the UK and world retail conscience was undiminished because the activities of The Body Shop continued to push the ideals that she had always espoused. She was a colourful figure through her determination that one doesn’t have to sacrifice moral standpoints to be a successful businessperson. Her campaigning and her use of The Body Shop as a campaign tool has meant we as a society have recognised and adopted causes never before addressed.

When she began her store the western world was largely indifferent to or unaware of the causes of rainforest destruction, cosmetics animal testing, third-world exploitation, fairtrade and the homeless. Besides making money, her business served as one of the greatest political billboards the world has ever known, broadcasting its views based on our collective moral responsibility. Who, at the time, would have thought that a shop window could be so much more effective and persuasive than the pulpit or the stage? What religious leaders and green-politicians have been so long been trying to emphasize, The Body Shop’s marketing gurus were able to push home through the small-print of millions upon millions of product labels. The value of her campaigning, and the degree to which the Body Shop ethos has been adopted by popular culture is shown by the chain’s 2006 sale to L’Oreal. Being an ethical consumer is now equated with being a good consumer and citizen rather than being equated with being a radical lefty. Now, everyone understands the necessity of fair trade and care for the environment. As Alice Miles put it in The Times yesterday, ‘She was using moisturiser to talk about human rights, and animal testing, and the environment. Moisturiser wasn’t just a cream, it was politics… and it was big business.’.

May we only hope we can live up to her achievements and, in our lifetimes, work for similarly virtuous goals.

Dame Anita Roddick, entrepreneur and activist, born October 23 1942; died September 10 2007. RIP

Independent: Obituary: Dame Anita Roddick
Independent: Anita Roddick, capitalist with a conscience, dies at 64
NYT: Anita Roddick, Body Shop Founder, Dies at 64
GU: Roddick’s legacy: idealism and the smell of dewberries
GU: Anita Roddick, pioneer whose dreams turned the high street green, dies at 64
GU: Obituary: Dame Anita Roddick
GU Comment is Free: Adieu, Dame Anita
GU Comment is Free: One of Anita Roddick’s greatest achievements was recognising that beauty is an ugly business
Times Online: Anita Roddick’s ruse: it wasn’t the moisturiser after all

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I’ve been working for a great little Architecture firm in Birmingham that specializes in restorations and conversions of old properties into modern dwellings and offices – a perfect niche to be in where they’re based because there are so many old factories and warehouses that are laying empty and crying out for redevelopment. The company has many buildings in progress that were formerly industrial or municipal sites, for example, a council building or industrial mill that are being repurposed into apartments. They’re a small practice but quite creative and the collective office temperament is one unity and they focus on quality work. My role for them is small; while their practice secretary is on leave I run the office. It’s not a flashy job but I feel it’s important and if done well it can make everything the practice does run more efficiently and therefore makes the whole team more effective. I have really enjoyed my time working for them.

My unexpected act of kindness came yesterday when I talked to my agency, informing them of my returning to University for the year. On my starting with the company in the middle of the summer I’d been informed several times of how they weren’t looking to take on students. I had been bracing myself for an angry discussion with the representative I work with. I’d missed her on numerous personal calls to their office and therefore emailed with my update, wanting to get her the information as early as possible. I didn’t want her to set up more interviews that I wouldn’t be able to attend. Two days later I finally got through and, to my great surprise, she was as kind and complimentary as could be. It made me think of how effective she was as an employee for the firm. Had she been disappointed and factious I would likely have not returned to work for them, and they’d have lost the HR investment in finding me. However, with such an irenic and conciliatory response, I’m happy to return to to the firm when I’m next in the country.

Best of all, her compliments really made my day.

Frontpage image curtsy Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

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For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft. Moffett Field is nearly adjacent to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and the four-mile drive between the two locations takes just seven minutes, according to Google Maps. Other Silicon Valley executives have to fight traffic to get to their large jets parked…even farther away.

NYT: For Google’s Founders, a Coveted Landing Strip

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A new display technology to be released by Microsoft today called Surface could be a dangerous threat to Apple Computer (as well as others like Philips, Sony and Nokia). It’s essentially a multi-touch screen embedded into table that allows the user(s) to interact with it through using their hands as well as objects placed on the table itself. You could use your fingers to grab the edges of a photo to make it bigger or just drag it ‘into’ a mobile phone that’s laying on the ‘Surface’ and in connnection with the device. This dragging move would simply drop the image into the mobile phone’s storage. It could be used (according to Microsoft) to plan directions to or from a location (such as if it were placed in a coffee shop/airline departure or arrivals lound/museum).

What’s interesting about the technology is that the brains behind it are not all that revolutionary. Many of the techniques shown have been displayed in other forum like Jeff Han’s multi-touch talks at the 2006 and 2007 TED conferences, the music browsing application’s technique of flipping the album cover art to show a track listing (showed at Steve Jobs’ January 2007 Macworld (iPhone) Keynote). Embedded dots on the bottom of an article would read the pre-programmed intentions of an object (like a higly reduced Datamatrix machine readable barcode). The underlying technology isn’t new but screwing it all together in a pleasing way is. This is the realm of Apple’s strengths and Microsoft, in a number of areas of late, has been showing its design acumen is not as faulty as sometimes thought.

This device could be a success for Microsoft, and ironically if Apple were to have made it I don’t think it would be. Why? Because the technology relies on interaction with other companies and partnering with groups to place the device, something that Apple is very weak on. A great example is the iPhone currently on the route to release. It may be a fantastic product but months after its announcement, developers still don’t know if it will be open to outside applications or whether it will be locked down to only Apple-approved initiatives. Of course Microsoft isn’t always successful in this field: see technologies like its Spot watches and other devices that are based on FM radio transmissions of data over the air. The project is still running but never gained anything like the momentum Microsoft must have hoped it would attain.

What’s most dangerous about this development is that it makes Microsoft look cool and hip. If you can simply place your iPod Zune onto your Surface at home and it starts piping music through your home theatre system without the hassle of having to network it up with your PC then that makes Microsoft look good. Even better if you can do that with your Zune at a friend’s house. Or a friend’s player at your house. It’s the social interaction that is key and makes devices like this work. Getting maps at a coffee shop has limited appeal after a while. There’s no reason why you’d rather do it there than your PC at home, but sharing photos or videos of a recent vacation is much more fun at a local third-space than in your office cubicle.

The technology is amazing because it’s not the technology that’s interesting. It’s the content partners and the network of locations that counts. This isn’t perhaps the type of thing that’s going to be in an average home for some time yet but it’s the perfect thing to have in a B2C environment like a coffee shop/dentist waiting room or even a corporate foyer. These play directly into Microsoft’s strengths, and Apple’s weaknesses.

The WSJ’s D-Conference joint interview today between Jobs and Gates should be interesting.

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“For everything sold on iTunes, we get the majority of the 70-79p per unit sale price,” [one independent label owner] said, then added: “But for everything sold on the Ruckus Network we receive the princely sum of £0.005 per unit. That’s half a pence. My distributor then takes their 25 per cent off of that, leaving myself and the artists to dish up the remaining fractions of a penny between us.”

It’s not much better through Real Networks, he informed – for sales through that service, his label receives a penny per track, he claimed. The thousand tracks sold so far have accrued £10 to the label (to share with the artists) rather than, “the £790 or so we’d have got for the same amount of sales through iTunes.”
MacWorld: iTunes income substantial for music partners

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I’ve been looking at jobs this afternoon after a bit of prompting from a friend. I’ve been interested in technology and one of my key interests has been as a typical ‘Apple fanboy’. Paint me with that brush. I’ve also somehow diversified in my interests in that I’m also really interested in the financial markets, banking and investment. I don’t have any experience with any of this of course: I’m a student and students by definition don’t have any money. I tell a lie, I do have a little bit of experience, but not something serious. Some years ago, I flirted for about five minutes with the BBC’s Celebdaq game which attempts to act as a fake stock market for the star power of various celebrities, based on media coverage and traffic in selling ’shares’ in the celebrity and so forth. I tried it, and hated the fact that it was so subjective. I like to really know about a subject so that if I think about actually investing in it I know I’m not being silly. I don’t need to invest in someone like Britney Spears and then find that one fine day she’s shaved her head.

So out of this interest in Apple, and an interest in investments and stocks, I end up reading quite a lot of financial news. One of the companies that is best known in the analyst sector is IDC, a data analysis firm that offers guidance to investors on market trends in much the same was as others such as Gartner. They collect data or carry out their own research operations and form opinions on their findings. In looking at their jobs on offer today I found what I think has to be one of the most comprehensive lists of things they absolutely don’t care about in their employees.

I get the impression that they actually just want the best employees and don’t really care about anything else. This is the kind of company I could work for.

IDC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. IDC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, ancestry, sexual orientation, disability, handicap, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy-related conditions, or political beliefs.

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Following on from ‘Microsoft is Dead‘, I’ve just read another long essay in which Paul Graham, a computer programmer, author and venture capitalist, muses on the potential of the young, how large (technology – in his concept) companies should really be buying small startups instead of trying to hire all the good people direcly as well as the quandry of whether to stay in school or start your own business. Graham’s basic thought is that ‘the youth of today’ have immense power because we can take all the risks in the world and largely, come out unscathed from them. We can create our own companies and see how they almost value themselves within the marketplace rather than having to rely on a corporate master for a dollarEuro value on a paycheck. He acknowledges the risk that people take when considering leaving college, grad school or business school but also counsels that it may be the best decision one can make. It’s all a question of timing and of your own and your colleagues’ personal skill.

Here are some quotes, which I’ve shuffled around in order and context to make work here. The essay is worth reading in full. The link is below.

Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high….The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean…. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.

Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks… Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try.

What’s an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.

The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you’re 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. If you’re really productive, why not make employers pay market rate for you? Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get you?

-from Hiring is Obsolete by Paul Graham

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The sneaky ‘e’ is a wink to Madame Ségolène Royal who is the Parti Socialiste’s candidate. She’s been a bit creative with her campaign by appending an ‘e’ (signifying the feminine form) to the word président, creating ‘présidente’. This is notable because président is normally a masculine word, and because everyone is making a huge fuss about how she’s a woman. Early in the campaign (which only officially started today) she was asked, ‘But who will take care of the children?!’ France may be more progressive than some states but in other ways it seems as progressive as a glacier. They’re as chauvinist as any rabid Republican in the US, but fiercely proud of their liberties, equalities and fraternities, as long as that doesn’t include women being paid equally to men, equal treatment of immigrant groups and so forth. It’s a funny place; I love it.

At around 10:30 last night I was randomly channel surfing and came across a promo for the news of TF3 (Télévision France 3). Because I was in that exhausted phase that I get for a while after a really good but hard run, I decided to wait around for this news program. While waiting for it, rather unexpectedly, I was presented with 15 minutes or so of political ads for the various Presidential candidates. I read the newspapers here a lot so actually catching these things was fascinating; even more so because I’ve been taking a class on Political Communication in which the professeur would each week give us a summary of the campaign and often show clips of the high profile interviews of each (main) candidate. A couple things that I thought of on seeing these ads:

• At times the fringe parties do themselves no favors. They use their allotted time to show themselves chatting with ‘representative’ citizens on the street. This doesn’t work because combined with people talking in odd accents and too fast, fast cutting of the film, the subtitles (show for all candidates) and the possibility of picture-in-picture to make room for someone signing the broadcast, there’s too much going on. It looks disorganised. Viewers don’t care about having to watch other ‘ordinary’ people question a politician: they’re not very good at it. We know this because we have professional interviewers who find it hard enough with training. ‘Everyday people’ doing their job just makes the citizenry stupid.
• The far left liberals don’t need to put everything they display on a red background. It’s already clear they’re the communist party. They did, however, have by far the best presentation, with ‘live’ text on the screen and short snippet-like responses: the kind of thing needed to keep a viewer interested. How many people will really wait for 15 minutes to see all of the broadcasts? I’m guessing, not that many.
• Ségolène Royal had active and lively graphics but instead of showing a lot of what she had done, most of the time, as when they had dozens of clips of her in bubbles flying toward the viewer, it made the production look amateur. She was also the only candidate who didn’t face the camera head on. She looked like she really meant to talk to somebody else on the other side of the room rather than the camera.
• There was no mention of the Iraq war in any of the broadcasts. The top topics were unemployment (‘le chômage est beaucoup trop haut’), tax on business , immigration (‘nous avons toujours la peur dans notre pays’) and nationalism (‘being a citizen should be an honour not a right!’), the environment, economic protectionism (I’ll tell Bruxelles to…’) and a need for a renewal of social values. Many of the broadcasts seemed to say absolutely nothing at all, or at least ten seconds after their end I’d already forgotten the content.
• Neither Bayrou, Le Pen nor Sarkozy were on tonight. Perhaps that’s a special treat for tomorrow.

In the news, the thing that really struck me (call me strange), is that the ads on political billboards put up in every town (normally outside schools and other public buildings) are put up by ClearChannel. ClearChannel, an American multinational that controls billboards all over the world, hundreds of radio stations in the US and a large number of concert venues and promotion vehicles. I just think it’s ironic that a company that stands for so much that France is actively against is the one actually promoting their political process.

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