Virtuous Cycles and Making Electric Cars

On Virtuous Cycles and Apple Cars..

On occasion, a little hyperbole can make one feel better. But malaise gives way to molar grinding when slavish sycophantism is offered up, instead.

Now that Apple has run out of roadmap for its flagship computer/smartphone/tablet hardware line, it makesperfect sense for the company to go make a car.

You know: if eBay money qualifies you for space travel, then iTunes lucre should get you at least a car company. And the sad thing is the press buying into this hook, line and sinker.

MarketWatch writers have even coined a new term to serve as the mantra for the We Must Be Smart or We Wouldn't Have All This Money dogma: Virtuous Cycle. Read here: http://goo.gl/Nud0K2

Now, I am old enough to have witnessed a couple of these virtuous cycles come and go. Not the least of them was Enron whose black box model for changing a gas pipeline company into a virtual energy company (their words, not mine) which could do no wrong in business was certainly a virtuous cycle. Of course, we know which square Enron landed on when the cycle's end became inevitable.

Forget that Apple has no experience making big things. They'll find folks who do, right? Sure.

Forget that we are nowhere close to being able to supply electrical power- from any combination of sources- to power a complete transition to electric vehicles in the next one hundred years.

And, forget the fact that a company which has never, ever successfully operated a commercial software initiative is expecting to enter into embedded, life-critical software applications development?

Must miracles abound to make this happen? Or just properly shaded glasses?





#apple   #applecar   #enron   #virtuouscycle   #iphone  #ipad   #macbook   #elonmusk

Is Apple's retail store doomed?

 

My first experience with Apple's retail store was in Timonium, MD. I went there to pick up a new PowerBook Titanium laptop.

Waiting for my order to be filled, I strolled between the stylish tables bearing laptops, towers, massive displays like a newly arrived Cardinal swaggering through a Vatican library. The deities were surely smiling down upon this place.

I admired the boxed software arranged neatly into wall shelves as I would have a Pollack or a Raphael. Yes, the current selection was slim but I knew this would be remedied as this new OS X operating system surely became the industry standard. Software providence would abound.

Cue Reality
Apple hardware suffered the same failures as any PC did; OS X wasn't really that much better than Windows and most business software tools we wanted never showed up for the Mac platform.

In the Apple stores, software shelf space shrank and computer hardware gave way to iPods, iPhones, iPads and headphones. The word entertainment made more sense than computing.

Changed World
Since Apple opened its retail stores the world has changed in ways which leave these outlets less useful.

Android has devoured the mobile market leaving Apple with but 12% of the global share. This means consumers are actually choosing between the three major platforms - iOS, Android and Windows - and this is being done at Target, BestBuy, the carrier's retail store or online. Not at the Apple store.

Adding to these woes, Google's Chromebookecosystem is chipping away at Apple's market share in the hardware channel. Microsoft's beta release of the cross-platform Windows 10 is experiencing record-setting downloads which may foretell a shift of Apple hardware users back to the PC fold. Happened to me!

Bricks & Mortar No More
Apple seems to be guiding itself toward revenue streams which offer little to draw consumers into their retail stores. Apple Pay and a new music delivery system won't need bricks and mortar to thrive.

Considering the costs to maintain these properties in high traffic, upscale areas, a shrinkage of the Apple retail system is inevitable.

The deities may no longer be smiling down on the Apple retail stores, perhaps.






#apple   #appleretailstore   #android   #chromebook  #windows10   #ipad   #ipod  

Snuff Dipping Man Stories

Ninety-nine Year Old Snuff-dipping Man Stories
Or, 150 Years Is a Long, Long Time

As a five year old, I met a ninety-nine year old man who enthralled me with stories about his days as a boy drummer in the Confederate army.

He was born and lived his life in a hand-hewn log cabin where he claimed to have hidden gunpowder and ammunition stolen from the Union soldiers underneath the gray, weathered porch boards. There may be some literary license in that tale, I caution you.

The old man reminded me of Popeye the Sailor with his long, jutting, stubbly chin and crooked toothless smile. I was also mesmerized with the little snuff dipping stick lodged in the corner of his mouth floating up and down against gravity with his every spoken syllable.

I have to come to realize that my life stands squarely between two extremes. Behind me I can reach back to the year 1853, or so, through the remembrances of an old man, and before me is a seven year old child who could live to be ninety-nine, too, carrying with him these same stories: crossing a 150 year time span.

I was among the last people to hear Uncle Elijah tell his stories before he died sitting in his rocking chair, creaking across those same gray porch boards of his childhood home.




#civilwar   #conferedatearmy   #drummer  

Note: While I am waiting for my nueropathways to re-map, I am recycling some very old blog posts from the past.

From Jellyroll to Jagger

Our seven year old is infatuated with the Rolling Stones circa 1965.

He has a vintage (read that, old) Sony stereo setup with a great vinyl turntable which has not stopped turning since the holiday school break began.

While listening to his favorite Rolling Stones song,Satisfaction, from the album Out of Our Heads for the six hundredth time, something dawned on me: that song is fifty. years. old.

Would anybody in 1965 have been listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Al Jolsen or Irving Berlin songs from 1915 on the hi-fi and dancing around the room? I doubt it and there must be some meaning hidden deep in the grooves of vinyl LP's that we just don't understand quite yet.

Puzzling us is the nature of the game.

Image: Songwriter Jelly Roll Morton ca 1915 and Mick Jagger ca 1965.


(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Words & Music Keith Richards & Mick Jagger, ©1965 ABKCO Publishing

(With a professional songwriter as a significant other, I am conditioned to add songwriter attribution wherever and whenever required!)

#rollingstones   #mickjagger   #satisfaction    #jellyrollmorton  

Show less

Touching Enola Gay

Atomic Secrets
Who gets tossed out of a museum?

I'll admit it. Aside from me, I know of no other person tossed out of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I blame it on atomic energy.

Most folks traverse the wonderful exhibits at Air & Space maintaining a sense of decorum. And most are satisfied to admire the various aircraft and spacecraft from afar. But, not I on that particular day in 1998.

My downfall was the Enola Gay exhibit in Gallery 103. Somehow, standing next to the very airplane that dropped the first atomic weapon in history drew me to that decision point where bank robbers open bank doors and regular schmoes like me become willful scofflaws. I decided to touch the airplane.

I milled around the exhibit casing the joint and waiting for the crowds to thin a bit before making my move. I located the barrier with the least distance between me the plane's nosegear.(see the attached image)

I considered the length of my arm's reach against the fulcrum presented at my stomach as I leaned in and determined it could be done.

I looked at the nosegear, then I looked at the security guard standing in the shadow near the main entrance door. I narrowed my eyes, fixed my glaze upon him and he upon me likewise in the fashion of two cowboys facing off in the dusty street in front of the saloon. It was him or me now.

The guard took a step forward from the shadows never breaking his gaze on me. "You aren't going to touch the exhibit are you?", he asked. "Yes, I am.", I croaked in my best Harry Callahan voice.

Doing so, he informed me, would be sufficient cause for him to escort me to the front door of the museum and throw me out. I replied, "That's fine."

At that precise moment I leaned over, stretched out and touched the nosewheel assembly; the guard grabbed me under the arm the way law enforcement officers are trained to do, and we silently made our way to one of the entrance doors on Independence Avenue. He released my arm and pushed me through the open door and I landed back in sunshine. 

I turned around as he called out to me. "You can go around to the other side and come back in. I know why you touched it but I gotta do my do my job. Just don't touch any more exhibits today, brother." 

I thanked him then walked around the building and re-entered the museum on the Mall side with a scofflaw's spring in the step and atomic glint in the eye. I had touched history.

Current Enola Gay exhibit at National Air & Space Museum: http://goo.gl/x4iwmE

Image: National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC website.


#enolagay   #nationalairandspacemuseum  #hiroshima   #littleboy   #atomicenergy  #atomicbomb   #b29   #tibbets  

The Convenience Store War

....Why Your Quadrotor will be Banned

Seven-11/Nine-Eleven
The September 11th attacks on the United States changed the scope and scale of war forever. After centuries of set-piece warfare with armies massed along imaginary battle lines and supported with massive rear-guard supply chains, we entered into the era of the Convenience Store War.

The 9-11 attackers were few but they were able to establish a command and control system from internet cafes and public libraries on both coasts of the US; picked up wire transferred funds at the neighborhood grocery store; bought throwaway cell phones for field communications; bivouacked in weekly rental apartment houses; chowed down on nachos and beer from the corner convenience store then, lastly, rented four weapons of mass destruction from the airlines. The age of the convenience store battle had arrived.

Mastedon vs Mice
Like a scene from The Borrowers, the 9-11 attackers collected small items for their task with little or no notice. Individually, nothing stood out about these purchases, but in total, they added up to destruction on a massive scale.

Our response to this threat was simplistic: large scale conventional warfare and drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to deliver conventional weapons to conventional targets. So far, the success of our remote war campaign is not clear but this approach will not work in the future. 

What will be next? Think small; think mobile and add drones, quadrotors and small UAV's to your list of weaponry. And, if you believe that these small UAV's are incapable of carrying effective weaponry, you may need to re-think your position on that. 

Black Carded
That $300 drone on the internet may only have a fifteen minute battery life at its maximum all up weight, but a quick calculation of its operating range at its nominal flight speed can be a chilling thought.

Now, imagine the simultaneous launch of a hundred of drones each with a portion of the total payload. Scrambling jets or launching missiles to counter this threat will not be effective. Add open source availability of gps waypoints for complete autonomous mission operations to the mix and the safety of elected officials

Drone and UAV control technology is open source and globally available to anyone with a credit card or online bank account. After consideration of capabilities against market availability, we can expect governments around the world to call for an across the board ban on UAV's, and this will be futile and counterproductive.

The marketing convenience and near-anonymity of the internet opens the door for another episode of The Borrowers with a bad end. Let's hope we are ready this time.


The Borrowers: ©1953, Mary Norton
Image: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, ©1997 New Line Cinema.


#drones   #uav   #worldtradecenter   #smartbombs 

Google Glass Failed. I Blame Agile

Ok. Not every product is a winner for every company, and Google Glass is in the non-winning category, according to MIT.

http://goo.gl/vV0vYc

But there is a deeper issue in play here than Glass itself; a deeper problem in the system that is pandemic across the Valley: deliver early- others will finish it.

Deliver early is part of that larger, conceited, construct which idolizes failure as a totem and guide for arriving at the best product- a realtime Darwinism.

Delivering functionality incrementally to the user is now acceptable to developers (I doubt clients feel the same way.) but I hope this doesn't migrate into the car buying experience, though. "We're still working on that heater functionality, ma'am."

Failing early is now accepted as a development method because of its Darwinist weeding out of the bad things from the good. Of course, in the olden days engineers provided this same winnowing in a more erudite and predictable way.

Of course, now we can hoist up half-baked ideas like Glass and Google Apps for Business and then reward developers with a kegger.

This approach seems to work well in the marginally technical reaches of software development, but I wouldn't want to ride on a space vehicle created this way.

How did we arrive here? I squarely place the blame onAgile methodologies and practices.

Early attempts to deliver software solutions by mimicking conventional industrial methods (waterfall, Boehm, etc) failed, so we simply discounted the existing practices and created the dark-matter universe of stripped down development- XP, RUP, etc- which finally landed back to earth as Agile.


We couldn't figure out a way to deliver against classical requirements, so we invented the user story. We could never deliver incrementally against a calendar, so we invented sprints and a ship something, dammit mentality.

What we really created was an environment for throwing our spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. Hooray! Kegger!

No engineering. No examination. No peer review. Just crowd surfing software.

Applying this Agile mindset to product development, such as Glass, can produce unexpected results. Sometimes the product is a total failure, and sometimes the product provides some of the capability we intended.

For incomplete products we apply the final conceit oflet-George-do-it and proudly release an SDK with great fanfare then blame the third parties for failing to rise to the occasion.

I guess in a world limited to 140 character thought bites, this approach to product development should not come as a surprise. Kegger!!

#googleglass   #agiledevelopment   #waterfall  #boehm   #softwaredevelopment   #failearly  #disruptive   #conceit