I’m thinking about whether this is an atypical reaction by Apple and I think it’s not but I’m not sure.
The pattern is typical – more or less. Some criticism appears. Apple is dead silent for a few days. Apple has a comprehensive response to the criticism. (Alternative that also happens frequently: Apple doesn’t ever mention the criticism.) That’s what used to happen in the past, that’s what nearly happened here.
The difference is that they responded with a different message pretty quickly after the criticism (arguing that EPAT isn’t such a great certification) so it’s not true that they staid completely silent.
When it comes to the message itself, I don’t think it’s that atypical. Apple rarely responds to criticism, so there are few situations we can use to compare. It’s not as big a deal as Atennagate – so they picked a less involved way to respond (basically a press release instead of a press conference) – but in every other respect it’s pretty similar.
This time there is a clearer Mea Culpa but the undertone is still that EPAT is a bad certification. (During the Antennagate press conference the undertone was that it’s not really that big of a deal – and it was a much more obvious undertone.) The tradition of Apple execs writing letters is also continued.
I would only say that Steve’s letters tended to be more about presenting arguments. That has certainly something to do with the different purposes (explain why DRM/Flash are bad vs. admit that you were wrong and reverse direction) but I still would have preferred if Bob Mansfield had explained more of Apple’s reasoning.
Are you sure you aren't too far into the tea leaves here? Swap out the specifics in what you wrote and it could describe basically any corporate PR organization. Not everything has to be a what-would-the-dead-guy-have-done-differently kind of analysis. They goofed. They thought the market didn't care about EPEAT. It did. They flipped. Yawn.
Hm, I think you have a point. I’m reading tea leaves. I still think that’s an interesting point to ponder, even if the results are probably highly subjective and very much open to interpretation.
"Apple is dead silent for a few days." - Why is this special or even worth mentioning? You expect a multi-billion dollar company with 20K employees to discuss something like that happily in a public forum or so?
You would think it’s not special or worth mentioning, wouldn’t you, but it actually kind of is. Many companies respond to a crisis with very confused initial communication before they get their shit together and can internally agree on a message and strategy.
Apple has been pretty consistent in being able to just stay silent until they really have something to say. (I think that has more to do with their general lack of chattiness than anything else, though.)
John Gruber wrote on his blog that all federal US agencies require EPEAT for computer purchases. While government business is probably not that crucial for Apple, it was still stupid to withdraw all products from registration and explains the reversal of that decision.
But Apple knew about the consequence beforehand. It’s easy to predict. (I would expect that even companies which are not all that competent can foresee something simple like that.) I really doubt that’s the reason.
I wonder if this was due to criticism, or cities and companies that have epeat requirements for purchasing.
San Francisco officials told the Journal this week that "they are moving to
block purchases of Apple desktops and laptops, by all municipal agencies"
due to a 2007 policy that requires all desktops, laptops, and monitors
procured with city funds be EPEAT-certified. [1]
and
In 2007, President George W. Bush issued an executive order mandating that
all federal agencies procure EPEAT-registered electronic products "for at
least 95 percent of electronic product acquisitions, unless there is no
EPEAT standard for the product," as outlined by the EPA. [1]
A lack of epeat bugs me, but I don't spend millions or tens of millions of dollars a year on computers.
Hm, I tend to think Apple (or any company, really) is clever enough to foresee the obvious consequences of policy changes.
This is one of those. Apple knew that certain government agencies are required to purchase only EPEAT certified hardware. They knew they would lose that business. And they nevertheless decided for the change, knowing that consequence.
That leads me to think that Apple changed direction because of other consequences they did not expect and (apparently) could not predict, in this case the public outrage.
I don’t see this as positive PR by any stretch of the imagination. This looks like Apple wanted to naughty things, got caught and had to reverse direction. Not positive.
If any conspiracy theory is plausible at all then it’s that they wanted to make EPEAT be more willing to change their standards – but I would imagine that even that is something you would rather do behind closed doors (maybe they did and it didn’t work).
No. You are not supposed to use retarded because that word has consistently been used to insult and denigrate disabled people. It's the same with gay. You are not supposed to use it as an insult. It doesn't matter whether the person you are insulting is gay or not.
My gay friends prefer "gay" or "queer" over homosexual. My black friends prefer "black" over African American. I could very well be wrong about the word retarded though. :)
You did not understand me. Using “gay” as a positive term isn’t a problem. “He came out first as a gay footballer” is a perfectly alright sentence. Using ”gay” (or “retarded”) as an insult is where the problem lies (with “retarded” the additional problem is that no one uses it as a positive term – and since it’s so overwhelmingly used negatively, using it neutrally isn’t really possible).
When someone tells you he likes My Little Pony and you respond with “Man, you are so gay!” then that’s a problem. You are using “gay” as in insult, as if being gay were a bad thing. That’s the reasoning behind why many people think using “gay” in that manner is a bad idea. That works analogously for “retarded”.
That’s not to say you can’t express, say, disgust at someone liking My Little Pony. “Man, your taste fucking sucks!” is a perfectly alright response no one will have a problem with (beyond disagreeing whether My Little Pony is good or bad).
Again, I don’t want to ban people from using “gay” or “retarded” as insults. But when they do I will call them out and explain my reasoning.
> with “retarded” the additional problem is that no one uses it as a positive term
Not true. In the automotive world "retarded" is used quite often in regards to your distributor, vacuum and timing. By adjusting things, your timing can be advanced or retarded. It is not a negative thing. It is simply how engines are tuned.
It truly is a shame that a very legitimate word (retard) with a very legitimate meaning (to delay or slow progress) that had been used in legitimate ways for years was co-opted to insult people with diminished metal capacity. (While technically true, it is mean. Much like calling me whitey is technically true as I am white... it is generally an insult.) If not for that, the use of phrases like "well that was retarded" would still be legit uses since it is in spirit of the original meaning and not too far from saying "well, that was stupid". One could even argue that in a slightly less PC world we could still be using it to describe things and actions... just not people. But that is wishful thinking. The damage has been done.
Side note: It is some what also the case with the word "gay" which used to just mean "happy". Although, when people say "well, that was gay" they are generally not meaning "happy" so we've pretty much departed from that. I don't know the whole history of the N-word, but I don't believe there was ever a non-hateful use of the word (even taking into consideration its origin).
> When someone tells you he likes My Little Pony and you respond with “Man, you are so gay!” then that’s a problem. You are using “gay” as in insult, as if being gay were a bad thing.
Maybe some people do think it's a bad thing. Who are you to be the arbiter of objective truth, ethics and correctness on that point, to which all other person's thoughts must conform? And note that "bad" does not have to mean evil, it can just mean undesirable, disgusting, weak, defective, or non-ideal. For example, there's a good argument to be made that homosexuality is a flaw from a biological and evolutionary standpoint. It's certainly not a condition which leads to reproductive accomplishment given that M+M and F+F cannot literally produce a baby. And note that nothing about that argument says that homosexuality is morally wrong. A lot of people think shit smells bad, for example, though they don't find it evil or a "lifestyle choice", since it's a biological process.
> It's the same with gay. You are not supposed to use it as an insult.
When you say "not supposed to" I'm curious by whose authority are you claiming that? For sake of argument, let's say there are some people out there who view homosexuality as an undesirable or defective or merely an "icky" thing. For example, they may not feel a gay man is evil or making a lifestyle choice, necessarily, but they may find it disasteful or uncomfortable, and they may not think it's psychologically healthy for two gay men to raise a child. Yet the "gay is 100% OK" crowd tends to demonize a person if they don't think exactly the same as they do. But if they do feel it's a negative thing, or something they feel is gross, why can't they use it as an insult? Just as they would use the insult of fat, stupid, ignorant, etc. By whose authority are certain insults not "allowed"? Is there some holy document which declares precisely and completely objectively which words you can and cannot say, or which thoughts you can and cannot express? And not I'm not talking about legal documents, those are clearly made up by humans, and vary by culture, time, fashion, etc.
It's this kind of nuance which is at the heart of why so many people don't agree with so-called Political Correctness. It's seen as an almost facist or Big Brother kind of thing where one group of people make these pronouncements about what some other group of people are and are not allowed to say, or think. There are shades of grey involved, clearly, where some cases are "black", and some "white-ish" but a whole lot of gray. But people on the P.C. bandwagon -- which also seem to correlate highly to US college students, professors and academics, especially non-STEM -- get on this moral high horse about what sounds like a very narrow and very strict definition about what's Right and what's Wrong to say or think. Which itself, to me, seems ludicrous at best, and unethical and oppressive at worse. A kind of close-minded authoritarianism about supposedly being open-minded and free. (BOGGLE)
Here's how I'll disagree. I hereby claim the following premise: that grabbing someone's ass is just grabbing someone's ass. At a minimum. Inherently. It may or may not be "harassment" depending on other particulars. And it is definitely not clearly inexcusable. Not always, not inherently. More specifically, grabbing someone's ass WITHOUT their explicit consent beforehand is NOT necessarily harassment, and therefore is not necessarily inexcusable. Again, it's just grabbing someone's ass. (Oh noes!) WHETHER it's bad, whether it's harassment or "inexcusable" depends highly on the context, the environment, and the two people in question. Indeed, the word inexcusable means it cannot be excused. But clearly if say a handsome hunky man grabs a pretty woman's ass at a bar or on a dance floor one night, there's music, dancing, alcohol, people are feeling frisky or lonely, looking to hookup, etc. and the guy finds the woman attractive, and especially if she finds him attractive (this is key), and she's in the mood (this is especially key), guess what? She may excuse him. That's a strong bet to make. It's happened before, it's happening now I'm sure all over the world and it's going to continue to happen for a long time into the future. People have sex. Behind closed doors they get nekkid and fuck like rabbits. And for every time you hear a woman saying in public she wants to be treated with respect, treated like a princess, be respected intellectually, etc. you'll hear another woman (possibly the same woman in a different context or mood) saying she likes to be hit on because it makes her feel more attractive and desirable, she wants men to touch her, she wants men to be aggressive and dominant with them and she sometimes, deep down, honestly, she wants to set all higher-ordered thought and pretensions aside and get fucked long and hard like an animal -- the whole "ravished by a pirate" fantasy, or "swept off her feet by a rich handsome witty man" fantasy, to cite just a few among hundreds of similar variants and archetypes. (I'm not making this stuff up, fellow HN'ers, this is fairly common out there outside academia and software engineering-land.) It's all over the freaking web, in books, private lunch conversations, women's magazines, etc. And so for a variety of reasons, yes, sometimes due to men with bad social/romantic judgement, and yes sometimes due to inebriation, some ass grabbing goes on. And sometimes women like it. They fantasize about it. And sometimes they do NOT. But to call it always inexcusable harassment is clearly in violation with the facts of the real world. Is it happening more than it should? Probably. Is any real harm done? Not unless you have a very ethereal and non-physical definition of "harm". Which some people do, of course. And that's the larger, meta-problem that many of us have with discussions about this topic. It's not that we don't agree with you that sometimes men do inappropriate things, sometimes. They clearly do, sometimes. But it's this repeated meme some folks propagate that merely to touch someone constitutes rape. That a momentary butt-in-pants squeeze is somehow violent or life-altering or traumatizing. That flirting is always harassment, and so forth. There's a whole lot of survivorship bias which occurs. And there's a whole lot of nuance and shades of grey, that exists out in the real world, that I think gets sadly glossed over.
Heck if I went to a bar or dance club at night and some woman grabbed my ass my reaction wouldn't be, "Oh no! That's inexcusable harassment. I feel so violated. I'm going to call the police. I'm being oppressed by the female gender again." Instead I'd be more like, "Well, hello ladies!" and feel complimented physically. (And how I'd respond would depend heavily on whether I was single or not, etc.) And again, of course, it depends on the situation -- it would be less appropriate in a corporate office setting during a workday, by a stranger, for example. But at an office party, at night, alcohol flowing, loud music, etc? Heck yes.
What you've said is valid, but is it useful? Probabalistically speaking, a random woman is going to disapprove of a random man grabbing her ass the vast majority of the time, which means it's usually inexcusable harassment. It shouldn't be done.
If it's valid, it should be useful. All true and valid things related to an issue should be useful. It's the false or invalid things, or the ignorant things, which should be useless. In an ideal world.
I don't think that's the case. Your point boils down to, "Sometimes women want their asses to be grabbed." It is true, but playing harassment roulette still seems ill-advised.
I don’t believe there is any high-skilled job where you can get away with no social skills in the majority of situations.
Those high-skilled jobs always require team efforts. Only rarely can a single person do something and make enough money with that. Yes, software development has probably more such opportunities than other fields (I’m thinking of the lone developer of Tiny Wings, for example†) but it’s not the normal case. You shouldn’t go into software development expecting to be able to work on your own.
As such, software development can profit from social skills just as much as any other profession. The normal case is that you will have to work together with other people to make things happen. (And even if you don’t, you still have to work together with customers.)
—
† Who is clearly an extreme outlier. He did the overall design, code, art and music of his game all by himself. There aren’t many people who are skilled in all those disciplines to be able to make such a high quality game. It’s also pretty obvious that he can’t do as much as others can as a lone developers even though he has comparable success (but he doesn’t seem to want to, so all the better for him).
Zoom tries to remove the scroll bars. It makes the window big enough so that the scroll bars disappear. If there are no scrollbars and the main content just automatically resizes with the window (e.g. in Aperture) it is equivalent to the maximize button.
The biggest problem with that is that developers make it work inconsistently.
Browse around iTunes until you find a track that doesn't quite fit horizontally. Click the "zoom" button, to make the window big enough. Oh wait, it doesn't.
If by "developers" you mean "Apple" then yes. I never use the "zoom" button because it exhibits apparently random behaviour.
Agreed. It's one of those "we'll figure this out later" things from the late 90's without any real programmatic constraints that led to a mishmash of pointless and unexpected behavior.
I personally can't come up with a good reason not to just remove the green ball entirely.
The pattern is typical – more or less. Some criticism appears. Apple is dead silent for a few days. Apple has a comprehensive response to the criticism. (Alternative that also happens frequently: Apple doesn’t ever mention the criticism.) That’s what used to happen in the past, that’s what nearly happened here.
The difference is that they responded with a different message pretty quickly after the criticism (arguing that EPAT isn’t such a great certification) so it’s not true that they staid completely silent.
When it comes to the message itself, I don’t think it’s that atypical. Apple rarely responds to criticism, so there are few situations we can use to compare. It’s not as big a deal as Atennagate – so they picked a less involved way to respond (basically a press release instead of a press conference) – but in every other respect it’s pretty similar.
This time there is a clearer Mea Culpa but the undertone is still that EPAT is a bad certification. (During the Antennagate press conference the undertone was that it’s not really that big of a deal – and it was a much more obvious undertone.) The tradition of Apple execs writing letters is also continued.
I would only say that Steve’s letters tended to be more about presenting arguments. That has certainly something to do with the different purposes (explain why DRM/Flash are bad vs. admit that you were wrong and reverse direction) but I still would have preferred if Bob Mansfield had explained more of Apple’s reasoning.