You also need to give people the chance to make mistakes and learn from them. I don’t envy a lot of the young developers who get micromanaged all the time and never have a chance to try something.
Kinda, it wasn't shot down. The US actually started down the path of conversion. The real reason that US metrication failed was that conversion was voluntary. The UK went through a similar change but metrication was mandatory for all industries. In the US most businesses and industries just decided it cost too much to change so they didn't.
When I did a little home improvement project I always thought what a PITA it is to multiply 5 and 3/8 inches seven times. Let alone divide that number by 3. Metric is so much easier.
The imperial system is a problem in daily life. Most of my American friends don’t know how many ounces are in a pound or how many teaspoons in a tablespoon. This makes price comparison at shopping very difficult and cooking is also harder. Sure you can survive but imperial is just an incredibly inefficient system.
it really doesn't help that you being non-american, could conceivably be talking about any one of about 20 different 'pounds'. America itself only uses the avoirdupois pound, but if you thrown internationalism into the mix, it could be a troy pound, an ISP or a non-US avoirdupois pound, maybe we're even talking about a russian pound... and that's all before we get to pound-mass vs pound-weight/pound-force
here, let wikipedia muddy the waters even more for us:
Comparison shopping is difficult because the stores are allowed to get away with marking interchangeable items with wildly dissimilar units (type and/or magnitude), quoting per item, per ounce, per pound, per gram, per quart, etc., all on items that are sitting next to one another. All of the grocery chains that I've ever shopped at are guilty of this.
People who are serious about cooking know about the volumetric units used in cooking and the relationships between them. (teaspoons/3 = tablespoons)/16 = cups.
But your American friends who don't know how many ounces are in a pound? I hope you're kidding. That's basic stuff, taught in elementary (primary) school.
I am not kidding. Most seem to be resigned to the fact that it’s 12 or 16 and that’s close enough. Also nobody knows how many cups are in a pack of flour so buying something for a recipe is hard too.
These comparisons are much easier in the metric system : it is either per unit or per kg.
If it is per gram, it's easy still because *1000 or /1000 is very easy. (basically you just move the decimal point, no calculator needed)
It is because we count with base 10 numbers that metric is easy and imperial is difficult.
Another related thing is the nutritional value info box that every food item in the US is required to have. That's a good thing in itself, except the US allows this info box to show the values "per serving", which is usually a completely arbitrary measurement, making it impossible to compare two food items to determine which has more sugar, or which has more protein.
In the EU, the same thing exists, but it is always per 100g or per 100ml. No exceptions. So comparing two food items is always super easy. I don't know why the US allows this idiotic loophole of per serving.
Totally agree. Talking about culture or hanging up "inspirational" posters is usually a warning sign. Good organizations live their values and don't feel a need to constantly talk about them.
What you are describing is exactly what Agile should be. You have a team of people who care about the craft and they slowly improve processes based on real world feedback and experience. If something doesn't work you drop it and try something else. This happens in environments where people respect each other.
Management does not want to hear that software development is a craft. They want it to be a trade, with fungible workers operating in a predictable process with fungible components. The great tragedy of Agile is that it was co-opted as the vehicle of this transformation. It was seized by management, weaponized to other purposes, and then aimed right back at us.
Yeah, I've come to similar conclusions about Agile. It can be a great way for an already well-disciplined organization to think about the work they're doing. But many, many undisciplined organizations thought that Agile would be a catalyst for them to become disciplined. But the nitty gritty of "doing Agile" required EVEN MORE discipline than what all these organizations were already capable of exercising, so it just highlights all the frustrations everyone already has.
That does seem to be the downside of Agile. It's a collection of maybe a dozen different techniques and practices. But if one of those practices falters, whether it's the TDD, or the business side still wants a certain deadline, or you don't bother to demo at the end of a sprint, then the whole house of cards falls like dominoes..... checkmate!
From a business point of view Ballmer did an excellent job. The company grew every year and was always one of the top tech companies. The same will probably happen to Apple (and Google) too. They magic touch goes away but they will be solid companies run by business people.
2000-2013 was pretty... frozen.
You don't need to remind of the failed battle of Mobile (that even Gates said it would give them at least 400b).
Also the Xbox One launch fiasco, Surface RT, etc. And of course, the longhorn... Which I don't think is a Ballmer problem exactly, but it happened.
I think Apple’s problem will be that Jobs usually had a very good feeling which radical change will get accepted and which won’t. The current Apple will probably listen to customer feedback but I doubt they will be able to release game changers like iPod or iPhone.
Apple Watch has been a game changer in some respects.
I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been. And the feature set and their acquisitions e.g. Beddit gives a really interesting insight into where Apple is heading in the health sector.
> Apple Watch has been a game changer in some respects. I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been.
It has disappointed, actually, according to the very article we are commenting on: "The company sold about 10 million units in the first year, a quarter of what Apple forecast"
You're not wrong, but the context here is that iPhone sells over 200 million units a year. The chances of them having any other products which can even come close to matching that, is very very low.
The original iPod is a peripheral for people who already have Macs. Even later on, the iPod is a peripheral for people who already have either a Mac or a Windows PC.
My point is, peripherals can be successful and game-changing.
You're right, but I think the key here is that Mac and Windows support - essentially covering near 100% of the addressable market - made the iPod what it was.
The day watch becomes standalone and/or compatible with Android is the day it has a chance of becoming a true game changer. Until then I wouldn't even describe it as a peripheral, but just an accessory for an iPhone really.
> I don't think anybody expected it to be as successful as it has been
How do you measure success? Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone or any other kind of Apple device. Even in Japan where Apple has the lion share of the smartphone market I hardly see people with an Apple watch.
> Because there is no way any comparison with the number of people who own an iPhone
Apparently you measure success by "besting the single greatest consumer product success story in a generation". By this metric, virtually nothing would be considered a success.
Meanwhile, Apple became the biggest watchmaker in the world as of 2017. After only three years of producing watches, they unseated literally every other watchmaker in the world on revenue. That seems pretty damned successful to me.
Funny thing was that stories about how the Apple Watch is a flop continued well past the point when Apple lapped all of the watchmakers out there. Some bullshit stories just won't die.
Certainly in Sydney. I notice because I think they're over priced at AU$250, and I'm surprised how many school kids have them. I would lose them in a week.
Heaps in Melbourne as well. Personally I find them daggy; if they're anything like the earphones included with the iPhone 3 they'd fall out of my ears if I just turned my head.
Samsung Buds OTOH stay in (and don't have the daggy bits hanging out).
I also have had problems with Apple's wired earphones staying in, so I was skeptical of the AirPods. But they stay in great. Turns out that most of the problem was the weight of the cord.
The amazing thing about the classic Apple designs was the way they managed to be textbook Veblen goods while also appearing to be gender and class neutral. They were aspirationally expensive, but not blingy.
That changed when gold and pink started to creep into the design vocabulary and the prices started moving up. The classic designs were more democratic. Not everyone could afford them, but they managed the neat trick of appearing to be visually inclusive rather than aggressively exclusive.
From that POV, Watch has been a design failure. It lacks the social status of the high-end I-have-money watch brands. It's neither expensive-but-neutral nor an outrageously self-indulgent statement product. The expensive straps and stainless steel variants made a pitch for the latter, but it was never convincing.
As a signifier it's visually bland and even slightly vulgar, which is why it hasn't had the same cultural impact. It's also why it works for C1/C2s but not for the ABs. Sales may be fine, but in its current form it's never going to be the covert high status product that Apple used to do so well.
Apple products, while expensive in a general consumer goods sense are not anywhere near the pricing of a typical Veblen good, they have never been particularly status driven throughout their history in either computers or phones, and their sales violate the textbook definition of a Veblen good, sales dropped substantially when prices increased.
Apple is much more in line with a premium brand driven good like Nike, or Sony.
A true Veblen good phone would cost like $20000, be gold cased and nobody you know would own one.
The lack of involvement is generally a problem in companies. Not only with reorganizations but also with things like remodeling of the workplace. Instead of getting feedback from the people who eventually have to sit in that space management usually closes itself off and doesn’t explain the reasons. Once it’s done you will see a self congratulatory email how great things will be.
That doesn't explain why inequality within the US keeps growing. As a whole the country is doing well but somehow the benefits go a small number of people while everybody else is stagnating.
We’ve also had a combination of tax and regulatory policy that has encouraged capital formation and increasing returns to capital, so labor’s share of returns has decreased.
To add to that, capital is exponentially more portable than labor. With globalization, capital in the form of investments can move wherever it needs to to grow, it's borderless. Labor however, in order to grow wealth has to physically move. Remote jobs for basic labor doesn't exist - that's almost exclusively knowledge work.
So if you're a coal miner, your ability to create wealth is extremely limited to certain physical places. If you're a remote Java dev, you can code from anywhere and grow wealth much easier, but there is a serious time cost to switching work. If you're an investor and just need to drop money into an account, not only can you do it from anywhere, you can move things around more or less immediately with little (relative) cost.
It's about portability of the thing that is growing the wealth. Labor = slow, Capital = fast.
Sure it does. US consumer demand rises after WWII because of GI bill & repurposing of capital -> competition drives prices down -> Securities & Exchanges Act essentially mandates firms optimize for returns to capital as a fiduciary duty to shareholders -> producers look to countries where standards of living demand lower wages to maintain market positions -> US jobs decline but shareholder value grows -> wealth concentrates in the hands of those who have the opportunity to be a shareholders
