Do you know if they QA every device or just spot checks for quality of batches? I'd also guess this is only for US-sold devices as it'd be a bit prohibitive to ship them all from China to the US for QA and then ship them to Europe for sale. Is that the case?
I work in manufacturing test, so I can speak to this.
There's a difference between design/development test and manufacturing test. Thermal, drop, vibration, interference, etc. tests are design tests: they verify that units built according to spec are sufficiently reliable. None of the devices you buy have undergone these tests, because the tests are destructive. You wouldn't want to buy an iPhone that had been baked in an oven, or dropped on a concrete floor. It's best to perform these tests near where development happens, to enable fast iteration and easily involve the hardware engineers.
Manufacturing tests verify that individual units have been built according to spec. For example, that there's no electrical shorts, missing connections, cosmetic defects, etc. All of the devices you buy have undergone a large battery of manufacturing tests, which exercised all of the hardware features of the device. These tests are performed at the factory, because it's better to catch these failures early in the assembly process. For example, if a camera module is busted, you want to know before it's installed into an iPhone.
Of course Apple isn't unique in this way. This is just how manufacturing is done.
Thanks for the detailed response. I wasn't as aware of all that as I should be. I'd wager it varies based on the level of the brand, though. So, you could expect this with something like Apple or Samsung or HTC, but lesser brands may not even test their wares before shipping them. My recent purchases of a Monoprice keyboard and network adapter, for instance, both of which were DOA with obvious manufacturing defects.
"...Language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination." - On George Orwell's 1984.
Google is going crazy with this unbundling/rebundling nonsense.
There was once Google Voice, Google Chat, Google Talk, Google Hangouts and now Google Messenger! This is crazy.
Yesterday I opened a Google Drive spreadsheet via the Android "Drive" (which was earlier "Docs") app yesterday but when I tried to edit a cell was told I need to install "Sheets" to do so! I'm waiting for Google Save, Google Forward, Google Share, Google Delete. Sorry, scratch that last one cos we know Delete ain't gonna happpen at Google.
With regard to the messenger stuff, there is now only Hangouts, if you do things the "Google Way" - it integrates Google Voice, Google Chat and Messenger.
This Messenger app appears to be if you don't want to use Hangouts.
The Drive/Sheets/Docs/Etc. split is old news at this point. That happened awhile ago. I believe the split was a good choice though. It is the difference of Microsoft Works and the individual products of Office. It allows someone who only needs to read content, like I'm sure most phone users are, to have an app for that purpose and it allows Google to iterate on the individual apps on different cycles. This means more frequent and rapid updates for the individual apps, but it can also mean fewer updates for the user if they don't have the full suite installed.
I don't know what's happening inside Google right now but their products are becoming ridiculously fractured.
Android is the clearest example. They also just fractured one of their biggest, most successful products with Inbox.
This leads to an interesting paradox: Google aggressively kills or uproots projects, APIs and frameworks (Angular) with little regard for users but can't seem to apply the same ideology toward building a coherent app ecosystem.
One drawback in most analyses of digital monopolies I've read, including this one, is that they use a lot of past examples (IBM, Microsoft, MySpace or even Orkut) that do not capture the dramatically different tech landscape we're part of today.
Thanks to the trifecta of ubiquitous smartphones, pervasive Internet and no-holds-barred data mining, I'd argue that the tech landscape we inhabit today is very different from anything we've ever encountered.
Say a startup does create a better product than Google or Facebook, it can't charge for it, because everything is free. It certainly can't monetize it better than Google or Facebook because they have infinitely more data on users than any startup can even fathom. It has to go through Google's and Facebook's "gates" to find and retain customers.
Those precious few that do manage to pull off the impossible, like Whatsapp, will be quickly bought over by Google or Facebook. Thus closing off any gaps that existed in their defense and reducing the possibility of independent competition even more.
Any meaningful analysis of digital monopolies needs to understand this instead of just relying on past examples.
Edit: I'm not saying the EU is right, or that their motives are kosher. Merely that we need to do a comprehensive forward-looking analysis of Google's dominance, extrapolating from present data and trends. Using past data alone strikes me as lazy or self-serving.
> Thanks to the trifecta of ubiquitous smartphones, pervasive Internet and no-holds-barred data mining, I'd argue that the tech landscape we inhabit today is very different from anything we've ever encountered.
Say a startup does create a better product than Google or Facebook, it can't charge for it, because everything is free. It certainly can't monetize it better than Google or Facebook because they have infinitely more data on users than any startup can even fathom. It has to go through Google's and Facebook's "gates" to find and retain customers.
Those precious few that do manage to pull off the impossible, like Whatsapp, will be quickly bought over by Google or Facebook. Thus closing off any gaps that existed in their defense and reducing the possibility of independent competition even more.
I feel like you just described the exact circumstances in which Google and Facebook came up in the world. Competing against huge entrenched interests, couldn't charge for their products, and remember that Brin and Page tried to get acquired and Zuckerberg refused many offers. If history had gone a little differently and had Zuckerberg changed his mind, both companies would be little more than footnotes today, absorbed into some existing behemoth. Meanwhile computing infrastructure today is far far cheaper at gigantic scales.
I don't think we can conclude much from the fact that very few companies become hugely successful these days; that's always been true.
> Merely that we need to do a comprehensive forward-looking analysis of Google's dominance, extrapolating from present data and trends. Using past data alone strikes me as lazy or self-serving
present data and trends are a direct result of the past, and while things do change, it's not clear that today is fundamentally different than 10 years ago and those aren't all still instructive examples (while remembering we're hopelessly under the foot of biased sampling here)
Past examples also such because they are bad examples. The Antitrust case against IBM was dropped because it dragged on so long and by the end IBM had lost the monopoly allready. The real story is the guy who was going after IBM died and nobody else was perticularly intrested in keeping it going.
The same goes for microsoft, I dont think the antitrust laws led to the weaker market position it now has. There product sucked, people moved on, and forced microsoft to up there game.
Internet Explorer had greater than 90% market share at the peak, and Microsoft was vigorously arguing that it was such an integrated part of the operating system that having a choice was impossible. The whole problem with monopolies is that it doesn't matter if their product sucks because you don't really have any other options. People can only move on if they have a choice.
The hole court case was about bundling, nowdays everybody does that. Can you imagen any operating system beeing sold without preinstalled browser?
Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?
When apple had much of the smartphone market, there was not antitrust against them, but there was a browser on that phone. Also if you cant put any software on a computer you sell, then the logical conclusion is that we should only be allowed to sell pre installed kernals, everything else would be abusing monopoly position (assuming there is a high market share in the OS). Microsoft probebly had 99% market share in defragmentation tools back then as well.
The faulty assumition is that the product is the operating system, in reality the product is more then just the operating system its a hole bundle of diffrent software.
> The hole[sic] court case was about bundling, nowdays[sic] everybody does that. Can you imagen[sic] any operating system beeing[sic] sold without preinstalled browser?
The case was in the days when browsers were much less interoperable. There was a real concern that bundling IE would make it easy for MS to make everyone buy IIS, because that would be the best server to use to serve sites for IE.
It didn't turn out that way for a variety of reasons (among them the rise of Mozilla, impossible to predict at the time, and the amazing growth of Apache), but that doesn't mean the lawsuit was wrong, knowing what we did at the time.
> Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?
ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.
Its the nature of markets and competition that you dont always know whats going to happen.
Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor it actually happens the state should stop it? Thats kind like the movie minority report.
Even if that had happened, they could have forced the competition to be more like IE but they could still have added features.
It was the same with IBM, everybody was afraid they would take over the world and explained why they need to be stopped, but things happend and they didn't. Thats pretty much the story of every single case, were some tech company seams like its talking over the world. Knowdays facebook seams to be the big baddy that need to be stopped. People are just afraid because the dont have the imagination to draw up alternatives.
All I see its companys growing and shriking and in 99.99% of the cases it not because of some antitrust laws.
> ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.
How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm on there computer and how many would have known were and how to look for other browsers?
> Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor[sic] it actually happens the state should stop it?
No, it is my opinion that when a company deliberately tries to break the law, it should be prosecuted for breaking the law, even if what it was trying to do was actually futile. Just like it's still a crime to mug someone even if it turns out they don't have any money in their pockets.
> How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm[sic] on there[sic] computer and how many would have known were[sic] and how to look for other browsers?
So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented.
Binding two of your products to gather is not breaking the law. Trying to achive suggess is not breaking the law. Every company is trying to break the law, because every company tries to get 100% market share. Every company tries to integrate there products with each others.
> So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented.
So Microsoft should give you a featrue to download from the competition. If anything the would just not tell anybody were the alternatives are and give people a easy way to download IE. So you would end up with the same problem, everybody would just be downloading IE.
It was enougth to give people access to the internet and everybody went and download the alternatives.
It turns out that anticompetitive, monopoly-maintaining behavior is breaking the law. It didn't used to be, which is why we got antitrust law in the first place.
Every company tries to gain market share, but society, which creates the markets in the first place, suffers if they gain too much. That's one of the structural problems of capitalism.
If we are in favor of healthy free markets, we can't stand by as they decay into monopolies, which are not markets at all.
I am somewhat amazed by how long it is taking the population to move away from Windows, now that there are real choices for mainstream users (Linux Mint, OSX). The look of Linux Mint feels especially Windows XP/7-ish, which is probably why I and others feel so comfortable with it.
Why would you assume that everybody wnat to move away from microsoft? Most people are ok, they dont have a deep hate for microsoft and just wait until they can move away from it.
I tried to get people other things but usually they just prefered windows in the end. Sure part is familiarity but not all of it.
But what you described is just economy of scale. It's not really all that different than a large factory being able to manufacture a product at lower cost than a small factory.
As an Indian I can only add that I simultaneously feel a sense of pride (at how advanced the Indus Valley civilization was) and shame (at the fact that modern India is still rediscovering concepts like well-planned cities and sewage/water supply 2000 years later).
I live in a fairly well-off suburb of south Bangalore that has NO municipal sewage or water supply. Mine isn't an isolated case either as large parts of Bangalore have neither. Also, large parts of Gurgaon, arguably India's largest new city.
So how do we make by? Apartment communities have their own sewage & waste water treatment plants; rain-water harvesting; private garbage disposal (we segregate into multiple categories); drinking water brought in by water tankers that pump ground water (which the law doesn't really protect).
From a certain perspective I feel the same way about present day India. Half the food supply is eaten by rodents. Religious ideas cause the main river to be infectious. But I have hope that they will actually do something different than the West.
Centralized water supplies require a lot of money and upkeep. They lose water to evaporation. Central sewers and water are nice, but can lead to safety issues if the water pressure drops.
I would like to see India expand modern waste management ideas like composting toilets and local water collection. Depending on where the city is located a combination of ground water and rain water could provide 70-80% of the water needs. Recycling of potable to non-potable water could help stretch that even more.
To me India feels rather Confederate in its organization. I wonder if that would allow regional governors more autonomy to experiment with new ideas and techniques.
Flooding the market with Manchester cotton and blocking silk exports might have shifted village weavers back to agriculture, but there's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that India was remotely close to industrialisation when the British arrived (which in the case of the deservedly much-maligned East India company is some decades before Britain was close to industrialisation, when the UK already enjoyed much higher per capita income levels).
It's not as if Britain imported or invented India's extremes of social stratification. Ultimately it takes more than skilled silk weavers and a flair for building palaces to allow large scale industrial organization.
it is interesting to see the contrast of India and China vs. Japan which very convincingly announced itself as a major industrial power in 1904 Russian-Japan war.
"What followed, from 1867 to 1912, remains unparalleled in history.
...
... the scientific and industrial revolutions had raged around the blissfully unaware Japanese. This had to change for Japan to compete in the modern world. Accordingly, the oligarchs set the nation upon a course of modernization which would produce dramatic results. The first step was to foster a sense of nationalism and unity."
Interesting that "nationalism and unity" have been observed during many "leaps forward" in other countries too.
Where do you think the venture capital for investing and kick starting the industrial revolution came for? All the prizes and aristocracy having leisure to study science needed money. And India was the jewel in the crown for Britain.
So if you're a VPN user, you get extra special attention from the NSA.
> In the case of VPN traffic, a system called HAMMERSTEIN identifies the traffic and sends the metadata to a database called TOYGRIPPE. The TOYGRIPPE database is a “repository of VPN endpoints”14 that is used by targeting officers to determine if that computer should be a target for further exploitation 13. The TURMOIL VPN module also looks up the IP information in a database called KEYCARD to determine if the target should be tasked for targeted SIGINT collection or to recover the VPN key. Of special note is that this VPN traffic passes through a system called “TE-VPN PIQ Blade.” PIQ refers to the PICARESQUE ECI marking 38, which is associated with BULLRUN 16. The BULLRUN program is NSA’s effort to weaken and exploit encryption that protects digial SIGINT, whether by finding bugs in cryptographic algorithms or by manipulating standards bodies or companies into weakening encryption tools. It is safe to assume that PIQ is a compartment that contains the details of a cryptologic attack against a specific VPN technology (or technologies), which the NSA/GCHQ either found or paid for.
C.f. stenography, hiding in plain sight, etc. Drawing less suspicion generally, and if you are in the "mainstream" e.g. a crowded place, your signal becomes more difficult to parse out of the chaos.
Playing the devil's advocate here, but why is the concept of free-agent developers who (a) command huge premiums, and (b) prefer working on short, intense sprints instead of with one employer, still not here yet?
I'm not saying 10X Management is an example, but why can't individual programming be valued like, say, acting/singing etc.?
Many consultancies work on this model, particularly in specialities where it is extraordinarily difficult to find anyone qualified or to retain them on W-2 payroll for a year at a time.
Hate to toot my own horn, particularly as I no longer do much consulting, but if a hypothetical software company said "OK we have a product and it works but we can't convince our Dev team to build marketing plumbing and they don't know where to start even if we ask" one could hypothetically have called me up, gotten advice like "You should probably do lifecycle email", and if you were incapable of shipping that yourself in two weeks I could fix that for you for $X0,000.
It works similarly if you need a crypto system validated, etc etc.
From what I gather (mostly through blog osmosis), you kind of fell into that career through the experience you had marketing BCC. How would you suggest someone do this intentionally, and in varying specialties?
That is, how do you decide to specialize in a marketable niche? Sure, if I already knew the marketing business I could probably worm my way into doing marketing contracting. Similarly, if I were an expert in cryptography I could start fielding requests.
What if, however, I'm just a proficient developer qualified in relatively mainstream technologies. By simple analysis of economic principles, I'm not highly valued due to the availability of general talent, so I have to subspecialize in some valuable niche. But how do I choose that specialty ahead of time? I can always choose an arbitrary specialty, but it's possible the demand isn't there.
My specialty, for example, may be in compilers, but I have an inkling feeling that being able to untwist some truly horrific legacy Win32 COM garbage may be the more lucrative endeavor. How do I test these theories without wasting a huge amount of time and money?
How do I test these theories without wasting a huge amount of time and money?
Take buyers and sellers of technology services out to coffee and ask what they buy/sell and what they would buy/sell but for the impossibility of finding it in the market.
For example, you could take me out to coffee. It's no secret what I would tell you there, since it is practically in 50ft tall fire letters on my blog: When I was consulting, I made systems which made software companies lots of money, most typically by applying engineering tactics to marketing/sales ends for them. The prototypical deliverable was "Your SaaS app now sends a lifecycle email campaign." My sweet-spot client is a software company with $10 million to $50 million a year in annual sales. (There exist hundreds of these, most of whom will never even be mentioned on HN, in any context.) I am not particularly a supergenius with copywriting -- I just apply a bit of formula, horse sense, and personal experience with experimentation, and it works much of the time. I picked it up with a bit of reading and a lot of doing. Do I think that the average HNer could do this 6 weeks after having announced an intention to seriously start doing this? Yes. Can my average consulting client find someone to do this full-time for them? No, not for love or money. Do I think this niche would support a consultancy full-time? Yes. This tiny little sliver of the global economy would support ten clones of my consultancy, selling 30 weeks a year, without coming close to satisfying market demand for this service.
Price is a signal that the market generates to cue potential service providers that there exists unsatisfied demand for a service. The fact that the market does not clear in e.g. marketing technology or cryptosystem verification or what have you, even at rates in the $20k+ a week region, should signal "Well, that would be a lucrative practice to be in."
It boggles my mind that you say the average HNer could do this in 6 weeks. Not in a "I don't believe you sense" but rather in a "that's so outside of my mindset that it doesn't compute."
And this is coming from someone who remembers reading stuff from you on Joel's Business of Software forums, so it's not like I haven't seen the full path from BCC to consulting to AppointmentReminder . . .
Personally, I fall into the trap of thinking, oh, I couldn't do that unless I master <insert obscure tech at the Knuth level here>. Which is clearly just not the differentiating skill here . . .
Are you a younger adult? One thing that may surprise you with a decade or so behind you is how much of the big stuff was only ever a few solid weeks of pushing away.
Building and running a company worth lots of money when we sold it, yes, took 8 years. But getting the company into the right trajectory to do that --- fits and starts, blind alleys aside --- was nothing like that much work.
Some things take "10,000 hours" to get good at, but a lot of really valuable stuff takes more like 100.
I'm actually older than most HN'ers. But a bit of a "late-bloomer" to being paid as a hacker.
Just didn't ever know that entrepreneurship was an actual option for people. Coming from a risk-averse and somewhat fatalistic family/peer group wrt work/career control hasn't helped.
One of the best parts of HN is actually reading contributions from people like you and Patrick that break down what are frankly self-limiting thought patterns.
Isn't the fits & starts & blind alleys the actual work involved in getting the company onto the right trajectory? Empirically, the vast majority of time spent in startups is in that category, and if someone has figured out a way to reduce the time, you'd think they'd be rich by now. (Okay, you could argue that YC is a good example of an organization trying to systematically reduce the time spent getting a company on a breakout trajectory, and they are getting rich off it. But even then, a majority of YC startups never make it.)
You make it sound so simple, but how did you find your first customer?
>Take buyers and sellers of technology services out to coffee and ask what they buy/sell and what they would buy/sell but for the impossibility of finding it in the market.
My first customer was someone I knew from the Internet, who had a clearly achievable path to a programmer making him money. Without spilling his beans: he ran a decently sized business doing something on the Internet and was not a developer. There were some fairly obvious things about that arrangement which I could fix. I fixed them.
Thomas' company was, IIRC, my 2nd or 3rd client. He knew me from HN and the ability to talk about a topic of interest to his business over a cup of coffee. Take a look at his writeup of our conversation. You can reasonably assume that our consulting gig involved humming similar bars.
As to who in general buys programming services: go to meetups or events. Talk to people. If they buy, problem solved. If they sell, ask who (in general terms, if you're uncomfortable) buys from them. To a first approximation, everyone who has ever hired a programmer will again, at some point in the future, again hire a programmer. Same goes for consultants, etc.
If you just want to learn about realities of industry work passively, doing it for a few years is also an option. After you've built CRUD apps in a non-tech employer for 6 months you should have a 98% accurate mental model of which businesses routinely buy software in a fashion other than available-totally-off-the-shelf.
Another heuristic you can use is that one white collar employee represents $200k a year in revenue and that anyone with $10 million in revenue probably could benefit from custom software development.
I know programmers who fit your description but they are rare. I'm talking about extremely high-paid contract developers who operate as individual contributors and not as hands-off consultants. Those guys are brought in as firefighters on critical projects that are failing and have looming deadlines. For example, one of them has helped out on many sports video games, which have yearly releases on an immovable schedule.
Beyond that, most contract ICs are used as temporary headcount padding that are subject to much laxer hiring standards than full-time ICs.
Provisions in the law the gag participants from even talking about a violation of their rights are particularly insidious. Sure, they're Kafka-esque, but they also affect the poor, small and marginalized disproportionately.
What is a small business or private citizen to do if they cannot even talk about how they're being wronged against? How will they solicit the support of others? How will they use the free media/press (meant to be a bulwark against injustice) to publicize their cause?
This isn't isolated to just the NSA/FBI/DoJ, or the US alone. Ag-gag laws [1], "super injunctions" [2] and "secret trials" [3] are all examples of this dangerous trend.
There was a particularly apt quote from UK's former homeland security spokesman:
> Secret court hearings will hand a major propaganda victory to terrorists, a former security adviser to David Cameron has warned. Senior Tory MP Patrick Mercer said he had ‘grave’ concerns about the Government’s plans, which he warned would erode centuries of open justice.
> The former Army officer, who served as the party’s homeland security spokesman until 2007, also claimed the measures would succeed in destroying British values – effectively doing the terrorists’ job for them
> Provisions in the law the gag participants from even talking about a violation of their rights are particularly insidious. Sure, they're Kafka-esque
Nit-pick: people misuse the term "Kafka-esque" when they mean "Orwellian." It doesn't refer to insidious, purposeful, bureaucracy. It refers to bureaucracy that is irrational as a whole because of the mechanical, impersonal nature of its parts. E.g. to get a social security card you need to show your driver's license; to get a driver's license you need to show your social security card.
You don't need a driver's license to get a social security card. I didn't have a DL back when I got my SSC, I only needed proof of legal residence (student/work visa in my case) and employment (offer letter).
IIRC, I didn't need a SSC for the DL either, but it's been a while, so I'm not too sure on that.
Thinking aloud in terms of a "solution" - is it possible to build crowdsourced blocklists that can be subscribed to by users, and will refuse to let their phones connect to "fake" celltowers?
P.S. I'm not a wireless guy, so I don't know if there's any kind of a digital giveaway that can distinguish a fake cell tower versus the real one it is spoofing. If there isn't, then perhaps the fault lies with existing wireless comm. standards.
Not until the baseband processor is proprietary. And even then nothing prevents feds from just giving the towers new ids or just manipulating the blacklists.
