Jobs: He being dead yet speaketh

Ever since I went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion, people have asked me about Steve Jobs as Messiah. So today’s sad news does call for some comment, perhaps.

This may be time to stop all the clocks and disconnect the telephone, but I do not anticipate a literal resurrection.

Howbeit, quite apart from anything of historic import Mr Jobs may have achieved in his garage with Woz back in the eighties, he did resurrect a corporation.

I sometimes encounter the idolisation of business leadership, even among those appointing vicars. I never quite want to drink this particular kool-aid. When I was a lad the UK had the third or fourth greatest trading economy in the world. Its slippage to the low twenties has to have something to do with the quality of its business leadership since the sixties, that has not always been stellar. The Church hath little need for more of the UK's often class-ridden, stale, vain, self-indulgent business leadership. It’s already riddled with that stuff.

Furthermore what passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices.

Not so Mr Jobs. As well as providing a creative context in which the world’s greatest designers, men like Jonathan Ive, could flourish he did provide genuine moral leadership on occasion, rooted in his own experience, and free for all. In the often murky world of business leadership it shines out, as a Monty Python character once said of Oscar Wilde’s wit and wisdom, like a stream of silver bats’ pee in a dark cave.

So here, in memoriam, are two passages for pondering from Mr Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart..

Not to labour the point, he went on to discuss his own diagnosis of terminal cancer and say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

iPad: Unobscure Object of Desire

After a few days of use, how is the iPad? I’m coming to terms with fear of being mobbed or robbed, and it certainly is very much lighter, slicker and more lust-evoking than other devices. It is particularly strong as an eReader, not only for the reading experience itself, but also because it straddles the various formats superbly. Video is wondrous compared to other techtoys.With the number of developers out there, and the low price of apps for it, the future seems bright.

The screen is delightfully bright and clear, if too easily subject to the aesthetic ravages of iggy-wiggy fingermarks. Operational basics come as no surprise to horny-handed iPhone users like me. The user experience is breathtakingly simple and elegant. Doutbless it will require considerable software bells and whistles to be all it could be, but the basic idea is sound. Software developers may indeed start working towards apps that will make it function more and more as a business tool, and such software is out there, in embryo, already.

What can I do I couldn’t? Not a lot, perhaps, although I am revelling in having a Hebrew Bible (proper Biblica Hebraica 4th Ed) with on-screen analysis of words — touch the word and up comes the BDB. This feature would, in itself, have saved me at least a term as an undergraduate! But these are obscure pleasures. Whatever your game may be, this gadget is going to raise it, as well as impress your teenage offspring durch technik.

Is it ethical to own such a thing? What about poor working conditions in the Foxconn factory in China? I’m afraid mine was winging its way before the media had splashed this story, and now there are various contested narratives around it, including a story from Foxconn that the suicide rate among its 800,000 workers (13 attempts this year) is, in fact, significantly lower than the Chinese national average. Interpreting the data is not easy, and my main impression is of how ignorant I am about Chinese cuture and society.

Apple itself is almost certainly as embarrassed about this story as Nike was over the one a few years ago about its subcontractors’ factories in the Philippines. It certainly lifts the veil on a major aspect of current Western production practice, and it’s hard to know whether the rumoured Foxconn plan to transfer its operations to Taiwan is good or bad news. There is something questionable about the whole economic model we are using for production these days, perhaps, and all of us in the west are implcated up to our armpits. Time for a bit of badgering on Facebook, perhaps, but the whole model everyone is using may be smelling slightly fishy, and worthy of further investigation. How will the development of a new middle class raise standards in China? In this new industrial revolution, it’s a question worth asking about all our techological objects of desire.

As to the bigger picture, I note that the value of Apple surpassed that of its auld enemy Mirosoft on 26 May ($223 Bn over Microsoft’s $219.3 Bn) — Deep joy, that this was achieved by design-led engineering.

Jonathan Ive and colleagues deserve the credit; the English may have lost their touch for footie, but they can still do design.This device, above all, shows the power of simplicity.

Is there no limit to the iPad’s artfulness? Practically speaking, it needs multitasking and, perhaps a clearer way of showing where it stores files. There is also some kludginess about file transfer to solve, and battery life could always be extended. There is a major need to develop productivity software before it can quite substitute securely for a laptop,. You do really need a £49 bluetooth keyboard before you’ll want to write your next novel on it with iWork or similar.

All this is small fry, however, compared to the wonderful way the device brings together engineering and function-led simplicity so elegantly into a convincing single device. At launch, however, I have to give it five out of five strawberries, as well as take a mental note to pay more attention to the soft underbelly of production ethics in future.

Looking back in joy, forward in hope

Normal service has been a bit slow over the past few days because of our silver wedding anniversary on Bastille Day. The kids mugged us on Saturday with a susprise party in the garden for a few old stagers, we had a day together yesterday. We are really grateful to family and friends who have sent good wishes and even presents. We much look forward, God willing, to an even more cosmic next 25 years. The possibilities are almost as exciting as the ones a French TV commercial implies you get with a certain well-known make of laptop:

MacBook New Feature from COREANOMAC on Vimeo.

Obama, transition, leadership, hope

The US limbers up for its 1997 Blair moment; The staging may be Busby Berkeley, but the emotion is real, and the sense of release, and hope. Non-trivial moments in history are catured by images that become, to use a much abused word, iconic.

Icons are windows into the divine providence; Iconic images mark out the turning points in our story. Soldiers on Iwo Jima (US) or St Paul’s in the Blitz (UK) spoke of struggle and hope, the child being shot in Vietnam spoke of victimhood and futility of the war, the twin towers of the end of progressive secular dreamland. The next two days will throw up several images, one or two of which will surely become iconic.

But only if the promise is given substance, fulfilled. We shall have to wait and see how that happens, or doesn’t. Obama is Lincoln-theming his inauguration; a noble cross-party gesture, especially if like the President-elect, you are a competent constitutional lawyer who actually knows the first thing about Lincoln. Obama's epic struggle to get there, involved transcending a name which was hardly designed for the hour by Madison Avenue. Lincoln was dismissed as “a fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” whose speeches wcomposer of “illiterate compositions... interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” Nastier things have no doubt been said about Obama. The Tribune said of Lincoln that his shrewd course through the contraditctory torrents heading for the rocks at the Chicago Convention of 1860 was not trimming, “the result of ambition which measures words or regulates acts” but “the natural consequence of an equable nature and a mental constitution that is never off its balance.” So obscure was he that half the press were undertain as to whether his Christian name was “Abraham” or “Abram.” Lincoln came to his inauguration as a man who knew his own name, made public property.

Now Obama is on that spot, how is he supposed to do it? How do we all manage our expectations? Here are a couple of quotes to ponder about Leadership and future-making from the head of the best new West Coast religion to emerge in the past thirty years, Steve Jobs:

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

and, speaking of the kind of attitude he wants to grow in his colleagues,

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

Apple Futures rumours — Big iDeas

In case 2009 MacWorld disappointed you, it’s good to know creative thinking is still the order of the day at Apple: The much-touted Onion iWheel Computer may be a spoof, but could this idea, from Peter Serafinowicz, be a real iWinner?

Anyway, why stop the iPanjandrum at mere conventional tech equipment?

MacBook Air — Machine of dreams...

...especially for those of us who can’t honestly justify or afford one, but there appears to be no end to the machine's talents... here is Rahul Sood, CTO of HP’s gaming business using one as a cake knife... The most delightful barmy use yet for a computer, unless you know otherwise...

MK IPhone 3G Q Waterloo

Day off Friday. Time for hobbies. Like many Brits since World War 2, I love Queueing. I had a fantastic time at India House last year, eclipsed by five hours on the M40 before Christmas. Among great queues of the world, I experienced an unforgettable two days in the New York blackout of August 2003. In the end water sellers working for the Triads and a guy called Ricky with a yacht got my teenage daughters and me out of Manhattan and safe across the Hudson. Do you know, we were almost disappointed when it ended! So when I heard the IPhone 3G was comng out, I was thrilled. The whole online O2 upgrade system fell over on Monday because of sheer volume — auguring super queueing when the O2 shops opened Friday morning at 8.02 (geddit?). But where? I picked Milton Keynes — two O2 shops in close proximity. If no queue for one, there should be a real corker for the other.

Thus I reported for duty at 07·45 on Friday, to find just over 120 people raring to go. Like Oxbrdge high table, queueing pleasure depends largely on whom you get next door. Real names witheld, but I struck lucky. “Steve” was tatooed with various swirling curly wurlies, all dressed for Celebrity Love Island, with those ankle length camouflage combat pants so popular among Japanese troops who think World War Two is still raging. “Nigel,” let's call him, was a non designer faded polo shirt 60 pound skinny weakling, such as you might hope to find under a pile of bullies on the beach. “Maz” is in financial services, with square designer frames. Maz snickered out of work, tee hee. Keeping us all in line were about half a dozen O2 goons in designer apple tee shirts designed to mock the punters’ folly with slogans like “It’s here.”

Now some groups ain't no place for a lady — The Cardinals for example (Rome not Saint Louis). “Tracey” was there with two naughty little muppets in a stroller, but she shows up in pretty much every queue in Britain so she don’t mean nothing by it. Apart from her and two slightly yuppie suits, the rest, folks, was male. “What if the press show up?” asks Steve. “Good thing I've already got a girlfriend.” Interesting discussion about girlfreinds, and what they all thought we were doing. After this opening burst of cameraderie, we got back to playing with our old iphones and not making eye contact, in the rather ho-hum way males don’t, whilst staring at urinals. Time passed by.

Muffin 1 — Chocolate Chip
15 minutes in
Cheerful o2 goons come round with muffins and bottled water (H2O — geddit?). Ominously, labels picture the millennium dome. The Triads charged $20 a bottle for water at LaGuardia in the NY blackout. Then the feds showed up and started giving it out. So are these goons Triads or Feds? No charge. It’s the feds, with the news they think they have enough stock for all of us. IPhones as well as Water. Deep Joy!

Muffin 2 — Blueberry (not Blackberry)
45 minutes in
Funny, but this queue hasn’t moved for half an hour. Steve points out to me, and Maz agrees, that whilst 120 people started and about 20 of them seem to have gone in, none has come out. Scary, ja? Perhaps, I suggest, everybody is coming out as an o2 goon. Maz has been to Goa, initiating small talk about queues in India. None of us can bear to go to the front and check out what’s really happening, so we soldier on in faith. Russian soldiers at Borodino wondered if God was testing them. Stay or go? This is the summit of all queueing, the contest between anticipation and despair. One little guy’s carpark ticket runs out and he cracks. The three of us hang on in there, just.

Muffin 3 — Cherry
75 minutes in
Sturdy o2 goons come and fold the queue back on itself to stop a neighbouring boutique complaining. As we pass the shop front, a cheery o2 goon mocks the punters’ folly personally by flinging wide the glass door and crying “smell it!” Than comes the moment we have all been secretly dreading. An old lady potters over from Boots and asks the crucial, searing question — “what are you boys doing here?” O ground swallow me up! Steve deals with it for us, on condition we all agree to avoid future eye contact with old ladies until we’re safely in the shop.

Zero muffins.
95 minutes in.
O2 goons turning nasty. One comes out to warn us they have run out of 16 meg Iphones. One or two faces drop. This is a moment of decision — does voracious geeky desire to finger the latest in any form outweigh geeky desire to have the biggest and the best? Actually I only wanted an 8. No really. It was the free upgrade package on 8’s got me here in the first place. Honestly. All surrounding geeks instantly agree with me, apart from Tracey and the muppets, who bottle out. Ha! another test, and we have passed!

Moreover, when the going gets tough the tough get going. Time for radical thnking. Nigel has a lightbulb moment. “Tell you what,” he says, “If we gaffer tape our old 2G 8gigs back to back to a new 3G 8gig, we'd have 16 gig anyway!” Great Thinking, Nigel. Thank you for sharing that. Maz takes Nigel aside gently to explain some of the drawbacks of his strategy. But we are impressed by the way the boy’s mind works.

Minus three muffins
100 minutes in
Joy! the front of the queue. Geeks all phone girlfriends, then remember girlfriends thought they were somewhere else. All geeks have some explaining to do, and this occupies the final three minutes of teetering Bridge-of-Doom anticipation.

09.35. Ushered to the Secret Place back of the store. Heart pounding, palms sweaty. Little black box in hand.This is it.

09.37. O2 upgrade system crashes. We’ll ring you when we can upgrade you. At any rate my old one still works. Actually it’s rather a good phone. Why did I ever want to upgrade it anyway? T. S. Eliot said the end of all our searching was to arrive where we had begun, but knowing what we were doing there. Sort of.
I think we’ve learned something today.
The end of all queuing, friends,
is Vanishing Point.

Cup Runneth Over in MK — Official

Day off with Lucy in the vibrant new City of Milton Keynes. New Apple Store, now open. A couple of weeks ago I thought they’d veiled the Apple Store for Lent. Ruddy good idea, if Apple were serious about helping me in my struggle against temptation. Who am I that I should serve an episcopal Area that now has its very own Ikea, Lego Shop and Apple Store? She hung onto the plastic, though. Good move. Damage Report Minimal. We got away with a tee shirt and ideas for a birthday present.

Shock! horror! phone that works!

I've never detested any bit of kit as much as my last phone. It wouldn't sync properly, and it randomly cut people off instead of answering their calls. All I could ever get on it was a Mickey Mouse version of the internet which Costa Plenty. I never could get it to send an email. Vodafone blamed Sony Ericsson and Sony Ericsson blamed Vodafone, spiced with a lot of PR crap about how personal they were and how special I was and “Oh dear, you've got an Apple Macintosh.” It installed everything they texted me, but I never could get access to a human being to help. I hated it so much I once almost chucked it in the river, then remembered all I'd get off the insurance was another one. Anyway its contract has now reached end of term. I’m free. I've got an iPhone, and after ten minutes automatic setup it all does exactly what it says on the tin. Phew. I'm only sorry they don’t have the iBible yet in the UK...

Design 101: The power of simplicity

A bit of fun, with a message. Big institutions fug things up when they bolt things on to try and help. We fug up our buildings and worship almost by accident as various things grow like Topsy, then wonder why people can't make head nor tail of them. Bishop Colin and I held a clergy day at Gerrard's Cross with Richard Giles earlier this year (following an earlier initiative by Bishop Stephen) about this issue.

Before you ask "What do our buildings and worship say to people?" ask "How would Microsoft package an iPod?"