Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Not flops at all

    I suppose that by definition any attempt to list the 10 Biggest Computer Flops of all time is probably doomed to failure.  The very fact that something can be remembered means that it made an impact – the real failures are probably the ones that we can’t remember.  Even given that problem, this is an odd list.  The author tries to explain what he means, but leaves me even more confused:

    What do all of these stories have in common?  Yes they were all mistakes (at the time), but almost all of them paved the way for some of the largest success’s in computing history.  Sometimes for the same company, sometimes for other companies.  The lesson here is persistence, determination, and perseverance. 

    Well, first of all I think it’s just wrong to say that many of these were "mistakes at the time", and even the ones that were mis-conceived were not neccessarily "flops".  Surely a flop is something that was expected to be a huge hit but didn’t live up to expectations, rather than applying hindsight and saying that they might have been much bigger.  Anyway, here’s the list: 

    1. The Xerox Alto
    2. NeXT computer
    3. IBM PCjr
    4. Apple Newton
    5. Apple 3
    6. Apple Lisa
    7. Microsoft Windows ME
    8. Microsoft Bob
    9. IBM OS/2
    10. Gary Kildall’s CP/M

    I don’t think the Xerox Alto belongs on the list at all.  I suppose it’s possible to imagine that Xerox could have carried on developing the idea and sold millions of them, but that was never their intention.  Instead it was a highly innovative product that demonstrated what could be done, and a precursor of the modern personal computer, and not a flop at all.

    I suppose CP/M is in this list because it could have been chosen as the operating system for the IBM PC. However, the deal was never done (there seem to be conflicting accounts as to the exact reason) and Bill Gates managed to do a deal for them to use MS-DOS instead.  Who knows what might have happened if IBM PCs had run CP/M, but the fact is that CP/M was not a flop – in fact, it was highly successful.

    OS/2 is interesting, because it was originally a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft.  When the latter decided to focus on Windows NT, IBM carried on and there was a time when it seemed possible that OS/2 might become a serious rival to Windows, but it was not to be.  It’s probably fair to say that this was a flop because IBM had high hopes for OS/2 but ultimately had to give up on it (and eventually got out of the personal computer business altogether).

    Windows ME wasn’t so much of a flop as a dud.  If it had killed off Windows then it could certainly be regarded as a flop, but instead it was nothing more than a minor setback.  Around that time there were a whole series of different versions of Windows (98, 98SE, ME & 2000), and I guess that ME was only ever going to be a step on the way to Windows 2000/XP.  The sensible thing to do was probably to stay on Windows 98 until Windows 2000 came along, and I don’t think Microsoft cared too much which version you purchased.  So, I’m afraid that it doesn’t deserve to be on this list even if it was rubbish. 

    To be honest, I can’t even remember Microsoft Bob.  It was certainly a failure, but I think that the word "flop" implies that it was supposed to be a big success but it bombed, rather than just being an idea that didn’t work out.  Anyway, didn’t Microsoft later use a similar concept for the extremely annoying Office Assistant ("It looks as though you are writing a letter.  Would you like some help?".  Er, no thanks). 

    As for Apple, I thought the whole point of the company in its early years was its heroic failures – great ideas that never quite worked.  Somehow it survived, and then started getting things right.  You could probably pick any number of their products and label them flops, but I’m sure that some people would argue that they were actually wonderful. 

    One genuine flop I can remember from a long time ago was a personal computer called the Camputers Lynx.  It was much hyped as a superior alternative to the Sinclair machines that were popular at the time, and it did have a good keyboard, but it was over-priced, with a weird version of Basic and very little commercial software available.  Now that’s what I call a real flop.  Yes, I’m afraid I bought one.

  • One day late

    Well, it seems that Oasis finally got their inaugural flight to London off the ground, almost exactly 24 hours late.  Not a good start, but at least everyone knows about the company now!

    What amuses me about this is that everyone seems to have fallen for the ‘budget airline” angle.  It’s all very well to quote the price for a one-way fare exclusive of taxes, but when you double it and add taxes it isn’t really so much cheaper than the special offers from the established airlines – and these prices only apply for a limited number of tickets. 

  • KISS

    It never ceases to amaze me the way that contestants on The Apprentice "over-think" the tasks they are given. The classic example was when they were asked to promote a product in a sports store and one team put on a great event but actually reduced the sales of the product compared to a normal day!!

    Another thing to watch for is when an all-male team is given a "guy task" and they are sure that it’s going to be easy for them. There have been a few of this, notably one with a sports car in an earlier series, and you just know that it will all go wrong.

    So it was that three men (Sean, Michael & Lee) were very happy that they were leaving the hair salon behind and heading for a football game where they could do guy things (selling steaks from Outback Steak House). And they were sure to win. We saw them secure an exclusive arrangement for the cheerleaders to perform next to their tent, give out fliers to lots of people, and generally look as if they were on top of things. 

    The girls also wanted the cheerleaders, and dopey Michael nearly let them have some of them, but once that distraction was out of the way they got on with selling more food at a higher price, and delivering it (so they could take larger orders). Sure, the guys had the cheerleaders, and an eating contest, and a "money pit", and lots of fun, but they didn’t sell enough food (or possibly their prices were too low). So they lost. 

    In the boardroom, Lee and Sean focused on Michael’s willingness to let the girls have some of the cheerleaders rather than insisting on the exclusivity they had negotiated. Carolyn felt that this proved that he wasn’t tough enough to run one of Trump’s companies, and I’m sure she was correct.

    However, that doesn’t mean that it was correct to fire Michael rather than Lee. The reality is that there are probably only a few of the candidates who could actually do the job for which they are competing, and Trump fires usually some of them at an early stage for making a small mistake or saying the wrong thing in the Boardroom. Then there are the contestants who can only have been chosen for entertainment value, but whom Trump would never be crazy enough to hire. Which leaves us with the contestants who are neither one thing nor the other, including both Lee and Michael.  Lee seems too inexperienced to win, but is a good enough politician to survive countless visits to the Boardroom, Roxanne seems competent without being outstanding, Allie has been inconsistent, and I really have no idea how Michael has survived this long.

    So, if you ask me, Lee doesn’t deserve to win, but this is hardly an outstanding group of candidates and somebody has to get the job, so I suppose anything is possible. I saw one suggestion that Trump should fire the lot of them and hire Rebecca instead.  Hey, that works for me. 

    Anyway, the reason that Gold Rush lost was because Lee did a terrible job as Project Manager, so he should have been fired. That’s how it works, isn’t it?  Yes, Michael is dopey, but it would seem perverse to fire him for being willing to let Synergy have some of the cheerleaders when that clearly wasn’t the reason why they lost.  They either needed more people to sell the food, or higher prices, and they would have won.  Lee got the strategy wrong and should have paid the penalty. However, Trump agreed with Carolyn that Michael had demonstrated his unsuitablity for the job, and so he fired him.  Another lucky escape for Lee, I feel.

    (more…)

  • Weeks rather than years

    At the beginning of the month, both the SCMP and The Standard ran stories about Oasis Hong Kong Airlines not having received government approval to operate (see earlier post).  The Standard was particularly alarmist, quoting a government spokesman as saying that it might take years.   However, the company appeared to be optimistic, and it seems they were correct, because last Friday the Civil Aviation Department issued the company with their Air Operator’s Certificate.  You can read the company’s press release here, and their first flight is due to depart tomorrow afternoon.

    The SCMP’s story was negative in a different way, reporting that travel agents were advising people to use other airlines.  This prompted a curious reply from one of the agents, saying that Oasis were an important business partner and their company had not advised people against booking with them.  This was published as a letter rather than a correction, so I think they were saying that the individual employee who had made the comment was not reflecting company policy.  As I said before, travel agents will surely prefer to sell more expensive tickets on the established airlines, but I suppose they have no wish to upset Oasis.  Equally, I don’t think Oasis are relying too much on travel agents to sell their tickets.

    Later this week, Air New Zealand start flying to London, and they have some special offers – their Premium Economy at HK$8,700 (plus taxes) seems like a good deal as they have more legroom than Virgin & BA, and they also have more legroom in economy than anyone else flying this route.  Competition has to be a good thing!!   

    UPDATE: The BBC News website first reported that the first flight took off as scheduled – and then changed their mind and informed us that it had been delayed because of problems getting permission to fly over Russia.  I think they hope to fly on Thursday instead.  Not a very auspicious way to start business.

  • Your closed ones?

    The BBC had a story last week about the Beijing authorities efforts to improve the quality of English (Beijing stamps out poor English) and a follow-up with some examples sent in by readers (Signs in ‘Chinglish’).

    This is indeed a rich vein of comedy, but one that is fraught with difficulties.  So I try to avoid throwing too many stones from this glass house.  Incidentally, I came across this site that attempts to explain why it is so difficult to translate from Chinese to English.

    I do make a few exceptions to this rule.  Large international companies that must have access to native speakers really ought to check their translations before they are finalised…

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  • Scare stories

    I have now got round to reading Senator Inhofe’s speech about how global warming is all a hoax perpetrated by self-interested scientists and the media.  Before I get to that, though, I have been reading New Scientist magazine:

    "Further global warming of 1 °C defines a critical threshold. Beyond that we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know."

    So says Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Hansen and colleagues have analysed global temperature records and found that surface temperatures have been increasing by an average of 0.2 °C every decade for the past 30 years. Warming is greatest in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.

    Earth is already as warm as at any time in the last 10,000 years, and is within 1 °C of being its hottest for a million years, says Hansen’s team. Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from triggering runaway climate change, the study concludes (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 14288).

    and an editorial:

    AMONG climate researchers, the consensus is growing that global warming may be close to a tipping point beyond which runaway feedbacks could take hold, creating what George W. Bush’s top climate modeller this week calls "a different planet" (see "’One degree and we’re done for’"). Yet the political discourse that should be helping us find ways to respond to such warnings remains a mess.

    Last week, the Royal Society in London sent a measured complaint to the oil company ExxonMobil, asking it to end its long-standing and extensive funding of lobby groups that the society says "misinform the public" on climate change. What response does it get? Nothing from ExxonMobil and its lobbyists, whose contempt for one of the world’s oldest scientific institutions seems to rival their contempt for good science. Instead, we get lectures from climate change sceptics, such as the UK-based Scientific Alliance, which claims the Royal Society wants to "close down debate". It further charges that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the cornerstone of scientific consensus-building on the issue, has become politicised.

    This is farcical. The Scientific Alliance and its ilk have done more than anyone to politicise this debate, and now they have the cheek to claim purity of purpose. There is plenty of room to discuss the nature and extent of climate change, but the politically and commercially motivated abuse of science carried out by some climate change sceptics and those who back them needs to be exposed for what it is. Let the contrarians speak, by all means. But bullying, like censorship, has no place in scientific debate.

    Sadly, I think that the last thing that Senator Inhofe and friends want is a real scientific debate.

    (more…)

  • More misunderstandings

    Earlier this week Henry Tang said that the government would consider introducing some exemptions from GST (Tang unveils sales levy concessions – subscription required):

    On the public’s call for daily necessities to be exempted from a GST, Mr Tang said he would consider exemptions on public transport, medical fees, and primary and secondary school fees. The exemptions would cost the administration a total of HK$1.4 billion.

    Today the SCMP has a rather curious editorial on the subject (Rigorous GST debate should be encouraged). 

    What is disappointing is that the government has responded primarily to the populist arguments but dodged the intellectual ones. It is difficult to understand why it has opted to do that. One would have thought officials would try to win opinion-makers over to their side, so they could be enlisted to help secure public support for a GST. Instead, officials have chosen to go down the populist route too [by announcing exemptions].

    The major thrust of intellectual dissent targets the government’s rigid view of how it should manage its finances. Critics have questioned the need to treat land sales proceeds and land premiums as capital revenue that can be used only for infrastructure spending. Given the recurrent nature of such receipts, they wonder if there would still be a need for a GST if all or part of these revenues could be used for recurrent purposes. Arguably, the Hong Kong way of auctioning development rights already amounts to levying a sales tax on everyone, albeit indirectly through high housing costs.

    Well, it was OK up until that last sentence, which is just nonsense.  The facts are that a substantial part of the population live in public housing and so do not have to pay this indirect tax.  Well, to be strictly accurate they do pay a small part of it in an even more indirect way (because rents from commercial buildings get passed on to customers as higher prices), but that is insignificant compared to the high housing costs paid by the rest of the population.

    Since the government wants to introduce GST to extend the tax base, with the unspoken justification being that many people who benefit from public housing should also pay some tax, one might hope that the SCMP leader writer could get the facts right.  Especially when they are calling for a ‘rigorous’ debate on the real issues.

  • Whoops

    I came across a rather unfortunate juxtaposition of advert and news story in last week’s Economist. They had an article about the problems with the new Airbus A380 opposite an advert from ‘Invest in France’. The advert asks the CEO of Fedex for a "French success story", and he offers this:

    The new Airbus 380 is the latest wonder of flight.  The engines, wings and fuselage come from Germany, the UK, Belgium and Spain – all brought together for final assembly in Toulouse.  French manufacturers have provided numerous components, as well as the engineering know-how to bring this projection to completion.

    Er, yes… The Economist’s story on the facing page (The airliner that fell to earth) had a different perspective on this "success story":

    The immediate cause of the disaster was a breakdown in the snap-together final assembly process in Toulouse that has served the company well for over 30 years. Rear fuselages made in Hamburg were supposed to arrive in Toulouse with all their wiring ready to plug into the forward parts coming in from factories in north and west France. But the 500km of wiring in the two halves did not match up, causing huge problems. Failure to use the latest three-dimensional modelling software meant nobody anticipated the effect of using lightweight aluminium wiring rather than copper, which is to make bends in the wiring looms bulkier. Worse, the engineers scrambling to fix the problem did so in different ways. So the early aircraft all have their own one-of-a-kind wiring systems. It will take all of next year to introduce a proper standardised process.

    None of this would have mattered so much if the airliner’s fuselage had all been built in France. But Germany lobbied hard to land a big chunk of the A380, to add to the final assembly of some derivatives of the A320 family. Now the greater complexity of the super-jumbo has shown up the inherent weaknesses in Airbus’s production system, just as it faces a revitalised Boeing and a weaker dollar. Most of Airbus’s costs are in euros, but sales are in dollars. So Airbus’s new boss, Christian Streiff, must slash costs.

    Brilliant.

  • Not delicious, not French

    Which is worse: “ordinary” Chinese food in the UK or “ordinary” European food in Hong Kong?

    I’ll admit that I used to enjoy Chinese food in the UK. Of course, I knew that it probably wasn’t exactly the same as the Chinese food in China, but it was different from European food and I liked it.  However, I was quite surprised when I came to Hong Kong and ate out in a variety of restaurants and discovered that food was so different – and so much better.  Clearly, even the more upmarket “Chinese” restaurants in the UK had been offering a parody of real Chinese food.  I suppose they still are.

    In Hong Kong we have a similar story with many of the places that offer so-called European food, particularly at the lower end of the market.

    Delifrance is a case in point. If they opened up in France I think they would get lynched – their baguettes are a pale imitation of the real thing, and many of the fillings are very poor (or just plain weird).  The other day I had the privilege of eating a ham and cheese baguette in one of their outlets, and it was truly horrible. The bread was indifferent, the ham was the ghastly square manufactured stuff, and the cheese was of the processed variety. I’m sure that would be against the law in France.

    Talking of which, an awful lot of their food is faux-Italian rather than faux-French. For years they have sold so-called French Bread Pizzas (something that I had previously only ever seen in frozen food cabinets in supermarkets back in the UK) and now they serve pasta dishes as well. I will not claim to be an expert on Italian food, but I think I can confidently say that they are not authentic either.

    I suppose that a lot of this comes down to laziness and cost-cutting. If you can get away with selling cheap rubbish, then there’s no incentive to do anything different. It seems unfortunate that there are so many Brits who have a totally wrong idea of Chinese food, and a lot of Hong Kong people who have a similarly misguided idea of French food.

    Now, where can I get some Sweet and Sour Pork Balls?

  • More fresh air

    I was slightly surprised to see that France is going to ban smoking in public places (including bars and restaurants). About 15 years ago they introduced a law which was supposed to make it mandatory to have a no-smoking area in all bars and restaurants, but my experience was that this was largely ignored (at least in rural backwaters). A bar would have a sign saying ‘Espace non fumeur’ but it would be moved around to any empty table. Or an outhouse was designated as the ‘no smoking’ area. Or anything that would allow the customers to carry on smoking.

    Smokers and tobacco companies always predict terrible things will happen when new restrictions are introduced, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they. The reality is that people do adjust to the new rules.  It also has significant benefits for the staff who work in bars, as the BBC reports today (Scots bar workers health improved).

    It’s about to happen in Hong Kong as well, as reported in yesterday’s SCMP (Smoking ban set to become law next year – subscription required): 

    Major political parties also expressed support for the Smoking (Public Health) (Amendment) Bill and even a key opponent, catering-sector legislator Tommy Cheung Yu-yan said he expected it to pass. The bill will go through the second and third readings in the Legislative Council next Wednesday.

    Expected to take effect on January 1, it will initially ban smoking in indoor workplaces, restaurants, karaoke venues, private clubs, bars open to all ages, beaches, outdoor escalators and barbecue areas.

    It will be extended on July 1, 2009, to cover bars open only to those aged 18 and older, mahjong parlours, commercial bath houses, massage establishments, mahjong clubs and nightclubs.

    One area of contention – a government proposal that smoking areas of no more than 1 per cent of the total area be allowed in large in parks and playgrounds – was rejected by a lawmakers’ bills committee studying the legislation. “The government would like to leave some room for the park-goers because there is more fresh air in parks to reduce the effect of smoking to the other people,” the government source said.

    This being Hong Kong, I think they really do mean “more fresh air”.