Author Archive for homer

From Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in the New York Times:

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

…

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple’s manufacturing decisions exemplify the altered circumstances of high-technology commodity production in the contemporary world. The article describes the situation, but not the solution for regions and nations wishing to insure stable and remunerative work for their people. Note especially the conditions of daily life for product assembly workers sketched out in the article. The industrial revolution appears to be repeating itself yet again with similarities of both triumph and tragedy.

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From Scott D. Anthony and Clayton M. Christensen in Technology Review:

It has been a long time since anyone considered Xerox an innovation powerhouse. On the contrary, Xerox typically serves as a cautionary tale of opportunity lost: many obituaries of Steve Jobs described how a fateful visit by Jobs to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 inspired many of the breakthroughs that Apple built into its Macintosh computer. Back then, Xerox dominated the photocopier market and was understandably focused on improving and sustaining its high-margin products. The company’s Connecticut headquarters became the place where inventions in its Silicon Valley lab went to die. Inevitably, simpler and cheaper copiers from Canon and other rivals cut down Xerox in its core market. It is a classic story of the “innovator’s dilemma.” Xerox struggled to defend against threats at the low end of its business, failed to create growth in new markets, and found itself on the brink of irrelevance, if not extinction.

But now Xerox is turning things around. ….

Under [new CEO, Ursula] Burns, Xerox was now redefining its mission. “I kept asking people: What is it that we do?” she said in a recent speech at the Churchill Club. “The answer was always: ‘We’re a copier company, a printer company, a document company.’ ‘No, that’s not what we do,’ I said. ‘We help companies transform very complex and burdensome business processes.’”

Changing a frame of reference or the shape of an idea can bring about transformative change.

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Credit: Technology Review

From Jeffrey F. Rayport in Technology Review:

Since the dawn of managerial capitalism, collaboration and work have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to realize their greatest impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, depends critically on the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that collaboration enables.

But technology has changed how we collaborate, especially since the communications revolution began 150 years ago with the telegraph and the telephone. This wave of change continued with the commercialization of the fax machine in the 1970s and of e-mail in the 1980s. The last 20 years have brought a convergence of communications and computing technologies that has expanded the possibilities for technology-enabled collaboration, whether synchronous or asynchronous, proximal or distant. With voice mail, videoconferencing, instant messaging, chat forums, blogs, wikis, social networking, microblogging (through services such as Twitter and Foursquare), voice-over-IP, telepresence, and, of course, mobile communications and computing, never have we had so many ways to collaborate without having to be in the same place at the same time.

This article introduces the magazine’s “Business Impact” section for the month of March. The theme is technology-supported collaboration tools, which prove to be many and varied!

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