Google's Schmidt the next Steve Jobs? Eh, not likely

I guess today's big technology CEOs are under a lot of pressure to be the next guru like Steve Jobs.  It's not enough to be smart, rich and powerful anymore.  I almost feel sorry for them; but not at all sorry for the fawning journalists who try to help them.

So here comes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who, according to CNN, "has been thinking a lot about our digital future."  Oh wow.

But I think Schmidt should stick to helping us search for cat videos and naked people instead, because he's obviously better at that.  Here's what I mean:

1) Online privacy classes will be taught alongside sex education in schools. 

Actually online privacy classes will be taught BEFORE sex education in schools, if we're talking about America or most of the developing world. We'd rather talk to our kids about anything but sex. We'd rather teach girls to shave and boys to braid hair. 

2) The rise of the mobile Web means the entire world will be online by 2020.

This is such a techie-naive, developed-world prediction. This may be hard for Schmidt to fathom, but there are billions of people in the world today who have no use for the Internet, no matter how cheap it gets.  

Only 31 percent of the developing world is online today; and only 16 percent in Africa.  About a billion homes have no Internet access.  And they're perfectly satisfied with their lives; or else, they can't afford, or relate to, anything that's on the Internet. They're barely getting used to sending text messages with their calloused, malnourished thumbs.  And smartphones, tablets?  Forget it!  Hundreds of millions of people alive today will die of natural causes without ever having googled anything and they won't regret it. That's my prediction, Eric Schmidt.

3) News organizations will find themselves out of the breaking-news business, as it becomes impossible to keep up with the real-time nature of information sources like Twitter.

Exactly. Because I trust Kim Kardashian over Wolf Blitzer to give me the latest breaking news. 

Seriously, first they predicted that the Internet would kill print news; now Schmidt is predicting that the Internet will kill Internet news.  Huh-what?

And what about every Republican over the age of 50 who gets most of his information from anonymous chain e-mails originating from 2003?  How is Twitter going to replicate that "real-time" experience for them?  

Here's my prediction: Internet news and journalism in general are going to move more towards the PolitiFact / Snopes model, because there are way too many lies out there nowadays and the fact-checkers can't possibly keep up.  

4) "Since information wants to be free, don't write anything down you don't want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future, this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you 'like,' and what others who are connected to you say and share."

This is a really shitty, self-serving prediction for Schmidt to make. Know why? Because we can regulate this with a so-called right-to-forget law that is coming soon in Europe.  And who stands the most to lose from such laws?  Google, Facebook, etc., because they make money selling our private data and Internet habits to businesses.  The Stanford Law Review estimated that they would stand to lose up to 2 percent of their global income just for refusing to delete our photos that we don't like.

5) As the Web expands, revolutions will begin springing up in nations with oppressive governments "more casually and more often than at any other time in history."

Ah yes, a casual revolution. That's one where an unacquainted group of dark-skinned, downtrodden lads in chinos and ironic plaid cowboy shirts sipping on Frappuccinos blog on their smartphones about their "lame" dictator and how they're "totally going to overthrow him this weekend"... sometime between the gym and Game of Thrones.

That's sarcasm, by the way.  The words "casual" and "revolution" do not belong in the same sentence, unless you also include the word "failed."

6) More people will use technology for terror. But a Web presence will make those terrorists easier to find, too.

I put this one in the category of, "Things will get a lot worse, but they'll get a lot better, too."  

Don't go too far out on a limb there with your prognosticating, Schmiddy!

Google chairman: 6 predictions for our digital future

By Doug Gross

April 24, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/23/tech/web/eric-schmidt-google-book/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Visionary 'lost' 1983 speech by Steve Jobs

I'm not an Apple guy at all, but I have to admit, Steve Jobs was visionary about the ubiquity of portable computers, Wi-Fi, the Internet and even voice-recognition programs.

What most of us knew in 1983 about personal computers was the Atari 2600, or maybe ColecoVision -- both strictly for gaming.  Jobs was thinking at least 20 years ahead.

You can listen to an audio recording of Jobs' entire presentation at conference entitled, "The Future Isn't What It Used To Be," here.

The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983; Foreshadowing Wireless Networking, the iPad, and the App Store

By Marcel Brown

October 2, 2012 | Life, Liberty and Technology

URL: http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-speech-from-1983-foreshadowing-wireless-networking-the-ipad-and-the-app-store/

Word of the day: skeuomorphism (and why it's bad)

I'm always glad to take pot shots at Apple's bandwagon.  Enjoy.

Will Apple’s Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt?

By Austin Carr

September 11, 2012 | Fast Company

URL: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-software-design-philosophy-cause-a-revolt

What's good for a business is not necessarily good for Business, or for Us

Since the 1980s, business schools have taught future executives that shareholder value maximization (SVM) is the best way to structure the operations of a firm and measure its performance.  Yet a few years ago, precipitated by the financial crisis, something changed.  Even Businessweek, one of the biggest cheerleaders of b-school since its ratings and admissions info is a cottage industry for the publication, acknowledged it in 2010: "How Business Schools Lost Their Way."  

No less than former GE CEO Jack Welch, the hero of many a business school case study, has seen the light and fallen from his high horse, calling SVM "the dumbest idea in the world."  Perhaps that's because GE lost 60 percent of its market value since Welch left in 2001?  Is GE that much worse now, or was it overvalued then?

Explaining what Welch meant, Forbes' Steve Denning argued that in practice, SVM is not so much about executives' maximizing the firm's value, but rather managing (or manipulating) investors' expectations of the firm's value.  Citing the example of GE, he concluded that Welch & Co. were clearly managing the firm's earnings with uncanny precision.  Denning argues for regulatory changes that could thwart the influence of managed earnings and managed expectations, and get business back to the previous dogma of management guru Peter Drucker that, "There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer."  

Using other words, celebrated business leader Steve Jobs echoed Drucker's classic sentiment to biographer Walter Isaacson.

Meanwhile, alternative theories like the Triple Bottom Line and Porter's Shared Value have started to gain credence.  More companies are at least paying lip service to it, and the related concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).  Personally, I believe CSR is bunk.*  Expecting firms to focus on something other than their bottom line is misguided and naive, no matter what they state on their websites and annual reports.  It's not what they're made to do.  What are the internal incentives for firm employees to promote CSR?  Few or none.  Meanwhile, CSR gives irresponsible firms PR cover for their misdeeds.

(*When CSR really works is when consumer watchdogs, labor unions, environmentalists and other organizations shine the light of public scrutiny on the firm's lofty stated aspirations.  Yet this is just public regulation by other means -- and arguably not the most efficient means -- not the result of public altruism by the firm. And crucially, these public critics are often not even the firm's customers, shareholders or employees, but rather "stakeholders" in the most amorphous sense of CSR, meaning they may have no direct economic stake in the firm's performance.)

But I want to talk about the public arena.

Tragically, the theory of SVM has been accepted by many policy-makers and academics as the best model not only for individual firms, but also the model around which to structure our economy.  In effect, these public-sector cheerleaders of SVM gave up their prerogative and obligation to engage in precisely the kind of long-term planning for the common good that firm-level SVM is a incapable of doing.  What is good for the firm is the firm's decision; what is good for society is not.  It's ours, the people's.  

Yet too many have swallowed the Kool-Aid that the "invisible hand," i.e. the mystical, untraceable aggregate of millions of individual business decisions, leads to the best outcomes in all respects for society.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this misguided belief compels policy-makers and regulators not to meddle at all; they should get out of business's way and let the magical accounting of economic debits and credits do its thing.  Because better outcomes for society simply aren't achievable.  Nay, a committed group of human beings with a singular purpose has no purpose, in their view, outside the confines of the firm.  

(The one exception to this rule of human endeavor, conservatives tell us, is private charity, which they believe should replace publicly-funded safety nets.  Yet a simple look at poverty statistics pre- and post-LBJ show us that charity never was, and never can be, nearly adequate to "mop up" the Dickensian poor among us.  Indeed, the key failing of private charity -- with its high overhead, wasteful duplication, lack of scale, and most importantly, non-reporting on performance -- is that it is at its weakest when it's needed most: during economic downturns.)

Certainly, we must strive for a delicate balance between impeding business and giving it free dominion over society.  Unfortunately, today we hear many thinkers and politicians on the Right calling for chainsawing regulations and giving polluting industries and exploitative labor practices free reign over our economy -- all in the name of creating jobs.  Indeed, I have no doubt that gutting regulations would boost those firms' bottom lines in the short and even medium term, and even create jobs.  What worries me is the long term.  When our productivity suffers from lack of skills and capital that have been exported, never to return.  When unaccounted-for pollution creates enormous health costs which nevertheless exist in the real economy yet are absent in polluters' financial statements.  When we have privatized every government service and public asset until we are at the mercy of executives whose primary motivation is this year's bonus, and next year's "golden parachute."  

To whom then do we appeal for amelioration, when there is nobody to appeal to but impersonal market forces?

"The Dumbest Idea in the World": Corporate America's False - and Dangerous - Ideology of Shareholder Value

By Lynn Stout  

August 29, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/dumbest-idea-world-corporate-americas-false-and-dangerous-ideology-shareholder-value?paging=off

Steve Jobs' record on workers' rights

Americans and American media tend to pile on. When it comes to rich, "self-made" tycoons, they trip over themselves to lavish praise and attention on the already rich and famous.

So while everybody is piling on the praise of Apple's Steve Jobs, who is retiring as CEO (but will be chairman of board), let's not forget where part of Apple's high profits came from: easily exploited overseas labor.

According to a review conducted by Apple itself: less than 1/3 of all Apple factories obeyed Apple rules about not forcing factory workers to work more than 60 hours a week; only 57 percent of its factories complied with the Apple's policies on occupational injury prevention; 95 factories did not perform regular safety inspections; and 54 factories failed to give their workers adequate safety equipment.

Remembering Steve Jobs' Record on Workers' Rights

By Mike Elk

August 25, 2011 | In These Times

URL: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11863/remembering_steve_jobs_record_on_workers_rights/