The Stripy Strudel's Journal

Some people ask me why I dislike Apple when they make good things, nice and comfortable, which “just work”.

In order for things to work (and especially “just work”) with other things, there are standards. All electrical appliances have plugs of the same shape, and that's why they can be plugged into any socket of the same standard. You don't need a Siemens socket to plug a Siemens hoover. Anyone can make a socket into which a Siemens hoover can be plugged. Any hoover can be plugged into the same socket. The owner of the apartment chooses the electric power supplier or even produces their own power. A Siemens hoover will still work in a new apartment after moving because the sockets there are the same. Even Eskimos who live in igloo and herd penguins have sockets into which a Siemens hoover can be plugged.

An Apple hoover can only be plugged into an Apple socket. There is no publicly available schematic for Apple sockets. Chinese manufacturers have disassembled a sample and started making sockets into which Apple hoovers can be plugged, but using such sockets voids the warranty on your hoover. Not every hoover can be plugged into an Apple socket. Electric power in Apple sockets is supplied by Apple's partners and is more expensive than on the free market. Apple sockets cannot be found in every apartment, but I must admit that Apple builds beautiful apartments. Apple sockets are never found in igloo because Apple has no interest in that market. Nobody knows what the plugs of the next generation Apple hoovers will look like, and whether they can be plugged into Chinese sockets.


© Martin Bekkelund, 2008.

This is a picture from the photo-report about the demonstration in Oslo against accepting the OOXML format pushed by Microsoft as an ISO standard. A banner can be seen in the picture: «Nei til nye stikkontakter» («No to new sockets»). On the right, with a megaphone in his hands, is Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software and the inventor of the CSS technology. To him I'm grateful for the idea of the plug-and-socket analogy which I somewhat developed here.

By the way, here is an article in the Norwegian newspaper VG where the bottom picture captures yours truly taking part in the demonstration.

UPDATE: No, it's not a Siemens advertisement. I just needed some placeholder.

UPDATE: For the sake of justice I must admit I've got no complaint against Apple's browser department. Thanks to these guys for their decent and fair competition, for active participation in the web standardization process and for active cooperation with fellow browser makers on security issues.

По-русски: iРозетка

According to a story of unknown credibility, on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries investors considered automobile to be economically hopeless. Nevertheless, Henry Ford had managed to obtain a credit of $1400 to build automobile construction under very tight conditions. It seemed that the revenue from car sales wouldn't be able to cover the investment within the term for which Ford could get the credit. Henry Ford might never have become the man who made automobile available for millions of people — if not for the idea, brilliant in its economical efficiency, that came to his mind. The idea was to produce cars deliberately less reliable than it was possible, and to make money by selling spare parts. A quote attributed to Ford: “I make cars to sell parts for them”. The new business model let Ford build a profitable enterprise, return the credit in time, and become the world's first mass producer of cars.

Ford brought much to both industry and society. For example, the modern 40-hours week and the very notion of “weekend” became de-facto standard after having been implemented at Ford Motor Company. However, one of his innovations, namely “to make a worse product than you can when it's economically justified”, gave the world a dubious gain. Of course, if not for Ford, someone else would have come up with this idea, great in its simplicity; or maybe someone already had implemented it before him. Today you can see live examples of this wherever you look, and it's time to think about the reasons and consequences of this phenomenon.

It's important to note the difference between production of goods or services of simply low quality and production with quality deliberately lower than the producer is capable of ensuring. For example, a software producer who releases software with bugs doesn't necessarily fall into this category because it's impossible to get rid of all bugs (moreover, it's possible than the capabilities of this producer are so limited that they can't make less than one bug per ten lines of code, or that the programmer does a bad job because he's underpaid). We are more interested in a producer who releases software without sufficient debugging in order to make money on paid support or upgrades. So what are the reasons that can make it economically justified to make deliberately worse products than it's possible?

• Releasing unreliable products stimulates demand for add-on goods or services (spare parts, repairs, tech support).
• Short life of the product stimulates demand for more units in replacement of broken or worn out ones.
• Low prime cost of a low-quality product allows to bring the consumer prices down and obtain greater revenue by entering the mass market.
• Low-quality goods are possible to produce faster or in larger quantities, which leads to competitive advantage over those who make quality goods.
• In the modern market, quality is no more the primary tool of competition, inferior to, for example, efficient advertising.
• The market has come to a situation where, for the above reasons, all the competitors release low-quality products; under such conditions it doesn't make sense to try to achieve better quality in this branch because the consumer will have to choose among the available offers anyway.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that Henry Ford's approach is widely implemented in modern industry. Of course, many consumer products, such as cars, we'd never have seen without it, or they would be elite goods available to just a few. On the other hand, the lowering of quality directly affects the consumer. It's especially prominent due to the last reason in the list: as a chain reaction, it impels the makers to skimp on quality more and more in order to gain competitive advantage by other means (low prices, high volumes, advertising). Competition based on “who makes better” seems to have been left out of the modern economy and survived only in particular branches with very specific markets.

Each one of us is both a producer and a consumer. At work, we take part in production of goods or services, the rest of the time we consume what others produce. As a consumer, everyone is, of course, interested in having quality goods, however, as a producer, one might find it profitable to skimp on quality. Obviously, a single person's attitude towards quality can be contrastingly different when they routinely switch between the two roles. This means that there must be a conflict point somewhere where two approaches meet. In my opinion, there are three possible models for a person's attitude towards quality:

1. One can accept that most of what one consumes is of low quality, just like what one produces.
2. One can have double standards and expect high quality goods from the market while making low-quality production.
3. Finally, one can demand quality of the goods offered and have the same attitude towards one's own output.

It's worth noting that an employee who follows the third model is inevitably in explicit or, more commonly, implicit conflict with the employer who strives to save on quality.

I must say I'm of the third kind. The second model I can't fit in my head at all, and for the first one I'm probably too old-fashioned. Having done some creative work well brings me direct æsthetic satisfaction, and it's for this satisfaction that I'm working in this particular branch and at this particular enterprise. Recently I've turned down an offer of a significantly higher salary elsewhere for a job that I could do but which was completely uninteresting to me. Having taken this decision, I've realized that I don't only work for money; an important part of what I get from my work is the very æsthetic satisfaction that I wouldn't have if I did a worse job than I can in favor of, say, production rate. This means that my and my employer's goals are unfortunately different: I squeeze the maximum æsthetic pleasure from my job by doing it as well as I can, while the employer strives for tighter timeframes, higher volume and everything else but quality. This conflict of interest is currently implicit. If it becomes explicit, I'll have to change my job.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?

• Model 1.
• Model 2.
• Model 3.
• A totally different model (please comment).
• I don't face this problem (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above.

По-русски: XXI век: прощай, качество?