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Rabu, 03 Juli 2019

US lawmakers tell Facebook to halt the launch of its Libra cryptocurrency - Engadget

Christine Lagarde appointment risks making the ECB weaker - Financial News

Mario Draghi’s move to shape eurozone monetary policy beyond his retirement date — at least through 2020 — may prove to be the best decision he ever made as European Central Bank president.

His nominated successor, current International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, would come to the job without any central banking experience, and by most accounts devoid of the character that allowed Draghi to utter his famous promise in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to keep the monetary union together.

If in the next weeks European leaders confirm their choice to give Lagarde one of the world’s most important monetary policy jobs, they will increase fears that the eurozone will not be able to withstand the next serious financial shock, with the ECB crippled by the transformation of its ruling body into a bickering and ineffective mini-parliament.

The first reason is that the ECB would be headed by two personalities hailing from politics, without proper experience in central banking or a serious academic background: Lagarde is a former minister under French conservative presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and ECB vice-president Luis de Guindos is an ex-conservative Spanish finance minister.

READ The exhausted ECB dove insists it can still fly

Lagarde, 63, is a lawyer by training, and served as a lacklustre finance minister under Sarkozy. She was later convicted of dereliction of duty by France’s highest court of justice for having overseen a misuse of public funds while serving in that post. That did not prevent her from being renewed in 2016 to the IMF post that Sarkozy had lobbied for and helped her get in 2011.

Although some European leaders salute her political acumen and capacity to muster compromises from diverging governments in difficult situations, Lagarde has never seemed interested by the fierce economic arguments that split governments throughout the eurozone crisis. She has no discernible firm views on economic or monetary policy, save for sticking to the consensus of the moment. At the IMF she has proved a good bureaucratic operator, and an articulate defender of the policies conceived by the international organisation’s staff.

That is precisely the problem she presents as ECB president-nominee. Draghi knew where he was going and did not hesitate to venture way beyond the consensus that his central banker colleagues had agreed on or discussed. He led the way. Lagarde’s tenure is more likely to be one where the ECB bureaucracy will lead, and the president follows after checking what other eurozone central bankers stand for.

READ Central banks must guard their fragile independence

More worryingly, Lagarde’s lack of convictions will weigh on the deliberations of the ECB’s governing council, the ruling body made up of the 19 national central bank governors and the six members of its executive board. The risk is that, instead of being dominated by a president deft at steering the debate their way, it will be turned into a deliberative assembly incapable of making the kind of swift decisions needed in times of crisis.

Markets will have some reasons to fear the appointment of an inexperienced ECB president just as the eurozone is heading towards a troubled economic future. Inflation expectations are at their lowest in years; the region’s economy could be hit by trade wars and the slowdown of emerging markets; and European governments are either reluctant or incapable of moving toward the type of fiscal stimulus Draghi has been advocating for months. Meanwhile, European leaders have all but given up on any pretence of reforming the eurozone, or strengthening their still-fragile banking union.

In choosing a consensus candidate who is unlikely to ruffle any feathers, European governments have at least made sure their influence will increase on the ECB’s policies. This is worrying for the central bank’s ultimate independence. But in the short term this should be an indication to markets that, beyond the next year or so, the ECB may no longer be the strong reliable institution they have learnt to respect.

To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Pierre Briançon

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https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/christine-lagarde-appointment-risks-making-the-ecb-weaker-20190703

2019-07-03 09:52:50Z
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Selasa, 02 Juli 2019

Advertising Is The Last Thing Tesla Should Do - CleanTechnica

Cars

Tesla Model 3 Test Drive confirmation email - featured image - Loren McDonald

Published on July 2nd, 2019 | by Loren McDonald

July 2nd, 2019 by Loren McDonald

Fellow CleanTechnica writer Barry A.F. recently penned two impassioned articles explaining his arguments why Tesla should start advertising (see: Tesla Should Advertise and Tesla Should Advertise, Part Deux). I completely disagree, as I think traditional advertising is the last thing on which Tesla should spend its limited marketing budget.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Tesla should never advertise, just that it should not use traditional national TV, radio, and print advertising — and it should not advertise at all right now.

One of the things that Elon Musk likes to tout about Tesla is that the company does not advertise. He apparently has a strong disdain for advertising, which according to Wikipedia can be traced to ancient civilizations. But despite Musk’s personal dislike, there are actual strategic reasons for not spending Tesla’s precious marketing budget on advertising.

It is important to clarify, however, that while Tesla currently does not spend money on traditional national/countrywide or local/regional advertising, the company’s success to date in most markets is driven by a variety of marketing and customer experience-oriented activities. These include test drive events and meetups, website content, public relations, social media, showrooms and galleries, presence of charging stations, referral incentives, and email marketing.

The Case Against Traditional Mass Advertising For Electric Vehicles

“Many manufacturers secretly question whether advertising really sells their product, but are vaguely afraid that their competitors might steal a march on them if they stopped.”
— David Ogilvy (Source: Brainy Quote)

Automotive advertising is a big business, with automotive companies spending an estimated $33.8 billion across 10 key countries, including $18 billion in the US in 2018, according to Zenith. Other key statistics:

More than 50% of all automotive advertising expenditure goes to television – 54.5% in 2018 (Zenith)
Zenith forecasts the internet’s share of automotive ad spend will rise to 25.6% by 2020
The average cost for an automotive lead is $205 (Lion Tree Group)
Advertising as a percentage of gross sales = 8.2% in 2018 at US auto dealers (NADA)
Advertising expense per new vehicle retailed = $624 in 2018 at US auto dealers (NADA)
95% of vehicle buyers use digital as a source of information, and twice as many people start their research online versus at a dealer. (Google study)

What is important to understand about advertising is that what the channel is good at is influencing a consumer to buy a specific product or service that they already have an interest in purchasing. It is also good at creating brand awareness and preference.

I recently spoke at a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) event at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and one of the professors shared analysis he conducted on online advertising effectiveness for autos. What he uncovered through buyer research was that almost all of the consumers who click on an advertisement for a car and who then go on to purchase that car were in fact already planning to purchase a vehicle.

The implication is that most digital ads for automobiles drive a tiny percentage of incremental automobile purchases. Automotive ads do not motivate consumers to buy a car, but rather increase the likelihood that they will buy a car they were already planning to purchase or considering.

“Advertising says to people, ‘Here’s what we’ve got. Here’s what it will do for you. Here’s how to get it.'”
— Leo Burnett (Source: Brainy Quote)

Advertising generally does not excel at nor is cost effective in educating consumers on new product categories. Advertising is generally a passive activity and unless consumers have an existing interest in a product or product category, they are much less likely to engage with the ad.

George Levy of Car and Driver recently penned the article “Why Few TV Commercials Promote Electric Cars” and rightly explained that:

“The other knock against ‘selling the category’ is that if you need to convince people to consider a particular kind of vehicle, it will probably take a long time to convince them to make an actual purchase.”

Using advertising to convince someone they should buy an electric vehicle instead of a gas-powered car is not going to be money well spent. Electrify America and Audi are pursuing an “educate the masses” advertising approach, but they have deep pockets and can wait for sales to follow years later — Tesla needs buyers sooner. For educating car buyers on the benefits of electric cars, there are simply more cost-effective marketing approaches than advertising.

On the other hand, targeting someone who is considering an EV and who is researching the Jaguar I-PACE with an ad for the Audi e-tron or Tesla Model X is going to be much more successful. They are in the consideration phase and would be very interested and attentive in understanding the differences between those models.

Jaguar I-PACE Google search results page. | Screenshot by Loren McDonald.

Why Now Is Not the Time for Traditional Advertising

This brings us back to Tesla and 6 reasons now is not the time for traditional advertising:

Traditional advertising is expensive: TV, radio, and print advertising are very effective at what is called reach. Want to reach 10 million American consumers all at once? Then a national TV ad can make great sense and return an effective ROI because that may be the only way and most cost-effective method of reaching such a huge audience.

For several years, GoDaddy spent a lot of money with in-your-face, politically incorrect ads during the Super Bowl for its domain and hosting services. Derided by ad critics, and offensive to many, the ads basically put GoDaddy on the map for what is in essence fairly commoditized services. (I admit to using GoDaddy for my own sites and domain services despite also having disdain for their past ads. But despite my dislike for those ads, GoDaddy was top of mind when a few years later I began buying domains and needed a web hosting provider.)

But that is an example of where advertising works — increasing brand awareness and buyer preference — not education of a new category or creating demand. I knew what I wanted, but did not previously have a high brand preference for any provider — GoDaddy was top of mind.

Not the right stage of the market: Electric vehicles are still a new product category and in most markets are only being purchased by innovators and early adopters. (The few exceptions are markets such as Norway and the San Francisco Bay Area, where EVs have basically already gone mainstream.)

Rogers Diffusion of Innovation. | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

In 2018, only 1.97% of new vehicle buyers in the US purchased an EV. But that percentage is actually inflated due to California having an EV purchase share of 7.87% and accounting for 46.8% of all US EV purchases. Elsewhere, 27 states in the US had an EV purchase share in 2018 of less than 1%, and 43 states were less than 2%.

2018 California EV Sales Reached 7.8% & 46.8% of US EV Sales-Loren McDonald-EVAdoption

2018 California EV sales reached 7.8% & 46.8% of US EV sales. | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

Trying to reach less than 2% of the market means that most of your advertising dollars are wasted on consumers with little interest in electric vehicles.

2018 EV sales share by state. | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

EV buyers have already decided to go EV: Most buyers of EVs have already decided for a variety of reasons that they are going to purchase an EV over a gas vehicle. People rarely walk into a Chevrolet or Nissan dealer planning to buy a gas car and drive away a few hours later in a Bolt or LEAF.

As I wrote in “EVs Require Consumers to Consider New Factors During Their Vehicle-Purchase Process,” consumers have to know where they are going to charge, be comfortable with potential range limitations or concerns, perhaps install a home charger, accept potential charge times longer than gas/diesel refueling times, be okay with generally spending more money upfront, and other factors. EV buyers have a multiple-step thinking and decision process they have to go through when considering an EV.

Consumers must be marketed to very differently in various US markets: What will motivate someone in West Virginia to purchase an EV might be very different from someone in the state of Washington. While there are probably many commonalities among early adopters located in these very different markets, the messaging to these potential buyers may in fact need to highlight different features and benefits of electric vehicles.

This can only be done through very targeted forms of marketing, such as search engine marketing, direct mail, email marketing, look-alike ads on Facebook, and online targeted display and retargeting ads.

US state EV sales share by various factors. | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

Not enough supply: As many people have pointed out in the comments in Barry A.F.’s two articles, at least for the Model 3, producing enough units at scale remains Tesla’s biggest challenge. The Model S and X, on the other hand could, could benefit from some additional marketing to boost sales, especially with numerous luxury EVs coming to market. But Tesla’s biggest competitor for the S in particular is the Model 3.

Other, more effective marketing approaches: For the above and other reasons, there are simply more cost-effective marketing approaches for Tesla to sell more Model 3s, Ss, and Xs. These include search engine optimization, content marketing, test-drive events, social media, email marketing, and PR. Educating the market on EVs is also best done through other non-advertising forms of marketing.

Marketing and Customer Experience Activities Tesla Should Focus On and Consider

The following is a look at what Tesla should continue doing, even expand, and some ideas on potential new activities:

Events: The top two ways to sell Tesla models are to have a potential buyer take one for a test drive and to have prospects talk to current Tesla owners. The company has in the past organized Tesla meetups and drive events and should expand these events.

I’ve personally been to a Tesla-sponsored meetup event at the Half Moon Bay Ritz Carlton and Model 3 drive event at Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters. We went on a Sunday last year for the latter event and our test-drive rep told me that on the Saturday before 1 out of 10 people who took a test drive purchased a Model 3 that same day. A 10% conversion rate is amazing!

Tesla Model 3 Test Drive confirmation email -| Image Source: Loren McDonald

Tesla Model 3 test drive confirmation email. | Screenshot by Loren McDonald

Social Media/Twitter: With more than 27 million followers on Twitter, Elon Musk’s mix of tweets on Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and other topics repel his haters and Tesla shorts, but keep Tesla talked about not just on Twitter, but on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels. And then the press writes about many of his tweets, meaning that a single tweet from Elon Musk could ultimately reach 100s of millions of people worldwide through multiple channels.

Screenshot by Loren McDonald

The @Tesla account currently has a not-too-shabby 3.9 million followers and a strong social media person has been apparently been hired to manage the account. The difference in humor and engagement since this person’s hiring has been noticeable and should lead to greater visibility for the company.

Email Marketing: Tesla needs to continue to leverage email marketing to nurture prospects who have shown an interest. The company currently makes decent use of the channel, but doesn’t appear to be leveraging offline and online behaviors to deploy real-time and highly targeted emails.

Tesla Model 3 leasing email. | Screenshot by Loren McDonald

But a second area would be to create more of an educational email marketing program to attract and educate people who are potentially interested in EVs but are still in a learning phase and are not yet ready to buy an EV or a Tesla yet (and perhaps don’t read CleanTechnica).

Galleries and Showrooms: Stealing from the Apple playbook, Tesla has opened an estimated 200 showrooms and galleries throughout the world. Tesla announced plans earlier this year to cut back on these showrooms, which I believe is a huge mistake. Often located in upscale shopping malls, these showrooms are an ideal fit with the buyer demographic at these mall locations and they keep the Tesla brand and image front and center with upscale shoppers.

These are often the first opportunity for consumers to sit in a Tesla and ask questions about the cars, charging, etc. As opposed to a traditional dealer location and model, Tesla showrooms reach and attract consumers who aren’t necessarily in the market for an EV. Tesla showrooms are about building Tesla as an aspirational brand, which is foundational to the company’s success.

Orange County Tesla showroom circa ~2012 — my first time in a Tesla. | Source: Loren McDonald

Rather than cutting back on showrooms and galleries, Tesla should instead make greater use and hence improve the ROI of these locations and leases. The company could hold seminar series at showrooms, providing tips and education on various EV topics. They could also invite in speakers from utilities, charging installers, local EV organizations and clubs, and turn the showrooms into educational centers that get consumers more comfortable with making the leap to an electric vehicle.

Targeted Search Engine and Social Media Ads: While I am not in favor of Tesla spending budget on mass advertising techniques, there are some targeted approaches that probably make sense — especially in markets with high EV purchase rates. These include search engine ads targeting searches for competitive electric vehicle models and social media look-a-like ads. These latter ads target consumers who have the same demographic and psychographic attributes as current Tesla owners. These ads target consumers highly likely to consider an EV and can be based on offline and online behavior that already shows interest in Tesla.

Continue to Build out the Tesla Supercharger and Destination Charger Networks: While Tesla’s two charging networks exist primarily to provide easy access to charging for current owners, they also serve as very effective “billboards” for the company. Their existence at wineries, upscale hotels and resorts, along major highways, and in shopping mall and retailer parking lots reminds potential and current buyers that owning a Tesla means you rarely have to worry about access to charging while out and about.

They also simply keep Tesla’s brand in front of non-owners. And to that extent, Tesla should consider, where possible, increasing the branding at Supercharger locations. This could include digital signage that displays real-time charging statistics and ads for Tesla. They might include an interactive digital kiosk where consumers could get information about Tesla products and schedule test drives.

Tesla Kettleman City Supercharger — view of lounge from charger stall. | Source: Loren McDonald

In the last year, I’ve taken two road trips from Northern California to Southern California and back — trips of nearly 900 miles — in our Tesla Model S 60. The 60 only has about 205 miles of range, which has meant at least 3 stops along Interstate 5 to reach our destination. I simply would not have considered these trips in any other EV except for a Tesla.

Electrify America, EVgo, Tesla Superchargers - DCFC Locations & Stations -5.25.19 Source: Loren McDonald - EVAdoption

Electrify America, EVgo, Tesla Superchargers — DCFC locations & stations as of May 24, 2019. | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

For the next few years, these charging networks will continue to be one of Tesla’s biggest competitive advantages and one of the reasons why EV buyers choose a Tesla over other brands. But Electrify America and EVgo (in the US) and Ionity (in Europe) are rapidly building out their fast-charging networks.

Tesla must continue to build out the Supercharger network to keep a very real and visual lead on the other networks. One key is to continue to expand the number of connections at key locations. Tesla already has a sizable lead with an average of more than 9 connections per fast charger location, compared to 4.5 for Electrify America and 2.7 for EVgo. These large “charging centers” are very visible and provide huge branding and awareness for Tesla.

Ratio of DC fast chargers to # of locations - US March 31 2019

Ratio of DC fast chargers to # of locations (USA) March 31, 2019 | Source: Loren McDonald/EVAdoption

Secondly, I believe Tesla should build out more super centers such as the Kettleman City location that has 40 fast chargers and a lounge with restrooms and a coffee bar. They should locate these in much more visible and high-traffic locations and partner with a food service management operator to run them, potentially at a profit.

Family eating at Tesla Supercharger Kettleman City lounge. | Image Source: Loren McDonald

These locations could also have separate parking for non-Tesla customers who could refuel with food and beverages, while also viewing Tesla cars, battery storage systems, and solar panel systems. These Supercharger super centers can serve as visible showrooms and increase awareness and brand preference. These locations might even include opportunities to test drive Teslas, or at minimum schedule them.

Public Relations: Tesla is a PR machine. Most companies have PR teams and agencies that spend hours and hours crafting story ideas and pitches, byline articles, infographics, studies, and other content that they hope the media and bloggers write about and cover. Tesla does not have this challenge.

There are several reporters at outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg, and others that cover Tesla either full or nearly full-time. Then you have sites such as CleanTechnica, InsideEVs, Electrek, Green Car Reports, and dozens of others that cover Tesla exhaustively.

But most of the coverage around Tesla is focused on the company itself, its products, or Elon Musk. Tesla is not much of a source for broader EV trends, market developments, incentives, and EV and charging tips.

Tesla should invest in a content marketing team that produces content that the PR team can use to proactively drive overall awareness of EVs. Since about 40% of EVs sold in the US are Tesla models, that broader awareness and education would benefit Tesla more than any other automaker.

Solar/Battery Storage: There is a variety of research that points to the connection between consumers who install solar panels and then also purchase or lease an electric vehicle. My own recent regression analysis project that looked at 29 factors that might affect EV sales in the 50 US states and Washington, DC, found that the ratio of solar installations to EV households had the second highest correlation. Solar in essence is the gateway drug to consumers buying EVs.

While Tesla’s solar business has declined recently, the company should aggressively target this market of existing SolarCity/Tesla Energy customers and those who have installed solar solutions. These customers understand the benefits of going green both to society and their personal pocket book, so will take little convincing to buy an EV.

Tesla Solar panels and Powerwall | Screenshot from Tesla.com by Loren McDonald

Website Resource Center: In business-to-business (B2B) and high-consideration product/service markets, building out content-based website resource centers is a very successful method of driving traffic from search engines and converting site visitors to email subscribers where you can continue to educate and nurture prospects into customers.

Tesla currently has very little of this type of content on its website, and what content it does have is generally embedded within the buying or consideration phase rather than awareness and discovery. Rather than having consumers end up on competitor or general EV and automotive sites for answers around EVs, as the market leader, Tesla should own this topic area and use the inbound traffic to grow its email database and nurture these prospects into customers. (Editor’s note: I oppose this idea on personal, selfish grounds — I think those people should be funneled to CleanTechnica, not Tesla.com. 😉 )

Webinars, Podcasts, and Videos: There are dozens of YouTube channels and podcasts devoted to Tesla or Tesla and EVs in general. Tesla should consider developing its own webinar and video series. These webinars could educate both current and prospective customers on topics such as charging best practices, how to use navigation to optimize for minimal charging time on trips, home charging installation tips, interviews with hosts and users of destination charging locations, factory tours, owner interviews, Tesla executive interviews, feature explorations, and more.

They could also explain how to take advantage of state and utility incentives, and could feature interviews with utility and energy executives to dispel myths about the grid. This series could explore issues around mining and minerals or the benefits of marrying solar, storage, and EVs. While the industry is already doing much of the above, the online traffic isn’t driving people directly to the Tesla website or gallery locations — which is a huge missed opportunity.

Product Features: While features such as Ludicrous Mode, Autopilot, the vehicles’ longer range and efficiency, overall performance, and other features are not actual marketing activities, they are constantly talked about on social media and written up in the press. In other words, Tesla’s product features are its best marketing tactic.

It is clear that Elon Musk and Tesla executives are keenly aware of this. Fun features such as the holiday lights and doors feature on the Model X, Santa and sleigh on the Autopilot display, and recent video games featured on the center screen keep Tesla in the news and, most importantly, talked about and shared on social media.

But there are a number of more serious and innovative product-centric areas Tesla is focusing on and could add, including:

Launch the first 400-mile range BEV, which will be a significant industry milestone (expected by the end of 2019).
Wide rollout of V3 of Superchargers, which offer the quickest real-world charging speeds.
Charging partnerships with retailers and hotels as well as food service operators.
Tesla app features such as the ability to order food and have it delivered to your car while being charged. A bathroom finder. A smart feature that sends you a push notification or SMS message alerting you that you didn’t plug in your Tesla.
An AI-based navigation feature that more accurately predicts necessary range needed to reach your destination, but also predicts when, where, and how long other drivers will charge and that routes you to the optimum Supercharger to avoid wait times and/or maximize charging speeds.
Improved voice interaction and integration with smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

The features and performance of Tesla models combined with the charging advantages of the Supercharger and Destination Charger networks remain the company’s most effective forms of marketing. Tesla needs to not just continue, but step up its innovation and market-leading features to ensure maximum awareness and demand generation. Forget fart apps, focus on real innovation.

Beyond the above marketing and customer experience activities, Tesla needs to step up its game in the following areas:

Rebuilding trust with customers and employees.
Improving quality and customer service.
Making customer retention a top priority.

There are a lot of things Tesla can do to increase awareness of electric vehicles and drive demand for its own vehicles, but mass advertising should not be one of them — at least until EVs become mainstream.

Tags: advertising, Tesla, Tesla advertising, tesla superchargers, Tesla Supercharging

About the Author

Loren McDonald writes about the factors driving adoption of electric vehicles and the opportunities and challenges the transition to EVs presents companies and entrepreneurs in the auto, utility, energy, retail and other industries. His research and content are published on CleanTechnica, his own blog/site, www.EVAdoption.com, and in his upcoming book "Gas Station Zero" about the huge shifts and changes in multiple industries driven by the transition to battery electric, autonomous and shared vehicles.

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https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/02/advertising-is-the-last-thing-tesla-should-do/

2019-07-03 03:58:06Z
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Apple Sans Ive - TechCrunch

Well, this has been interesting. After almost 30 years with Apple, Jony Ive is leaving, to found his own firm LoveFrom with his friend and frequent collaborator Marc Newson — also leaving Apple. The response to this news has been predictably histrionic from Apple watchers and press.

The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that:

Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy
Apple is doomed because he is leaving

If those narratives look contradictory then you have eyes.

If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jony’s last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress — while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him.

Ok.

Ironically (or perhaps inevitably) even the phrasing of the tweets that accompanied these stories were couched in inflammatory positioning. Tim Cook’s email (actually quite plainly stated) was touted as ‘scathing’, the Journal posited the question: ‘Why hasn’t Apple had a hit product in years? A look at the internal drama around the departure of its design chief helps explain.’ A conclusion that its story only hints at.

Most watchers of the company that I know who were asking and listening to Apple people over the past couple of years are aware that Jony has been on borrowed time with the company. Shocking, this was not — a surprise it was always guaranteed to be given how much control Jony keeps over how and when he does press.

Back in 2015, it was clear that Jony wanted to do less paper pushing and more pencil pushing. And the past decade of Apple has been nothing if not an explosion of management challenges. Enormous growth in product volumes, splintering product lines that made an attempt to leave less room under the pricing and feature umbrella and, yeah, a hell of a lot more people.

“Many of Apple’s critics are purely nostalgic,” Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies puts it. “Wanting Apple to go back to the days when some of the designs were more bold, iconic, possibly polarizing, but in that time Apple was selling tens of millions of products not hundreds of millions of products. This is a crucially important point that many in the public sphere miss. “

All of that growth means that the job of someone like Jony would naturally shift from scooting a pencil around a drafting board to something more like management — or, in Apple’s case, teaching.

I’m not the Journal’s (or any other publication’s, thank god) public editor. So I will not be fisking the stories that have come out about Jony and his work habits. I’ve never been that good at it and I don’t really have the stomach for it these days. I do have thoughts, though about the way that these anecdotes are tied together in a narrative.

Given that I have covered the company closely for years, I know a lot of the people who were involved in some of these situations. Jony did, in fact, move to holding design meetings at his house in SF. They absolutely held design meetings at The Battery to collate device opinion. He has a design studio in other homes like Hawaii and London. He has absolutely spent more time in the city than down at Apple headquarters over the past few years. The design teams, in and out of the industrial design people, absolutely saw less of him than before.

There are also bits and pieces in the various stories over the past few days that are not, as I understand them, accurate, or represented in an accurate context. But the more important point is that no one I know felt that Jony had checked out or abandoned the team.

As he stated himself, Jony was just plain tired. What prolific designer do you know that is excited about doing more management and less design?

Also, I fully reject the narrative that Apple has somehow floundered because Jony has been absentee. During the period, the company has shipped some enormously successful products — including the major category hit Apple Watch. As one note, I found the criticism that Jony wanted a gold watch so that made the Apple Watch a boondoggle to be enormously hilarious.

The gold watch had 2 distinct purposes:

Jony wanted to make it
It set expectation that this was a product worth wearing all day

I think it is 100% possible and fair to argue that the first point means Jony had too much power or that it was him exercising that power in a way that felt foreign to Apple’s egalitarian ideals about computing. But the fact is that, regardless of how many they sold, it made a splash and did, in fact, push Apple into the world of fashion and wearable conversation in a way that it hadn’t ever before.

That toe-hold gave them time to figure out what the Watch is actually for and it is a very real success for the company. During the same period, Apple shipped the iPhone X months ahead of schedule, and major updates to every line including the iMac.

I can certainly understand one or more members of the design team resenting the lack of intimate one-on-one time that Jony used to spend with the team when Apple shipped fewer products in more time. And not all of Jony’s influence over the past few years is pristine in hindsight. The MacBook keyboards still suck, I’ll give you that one.

Basically, all design is worth critiquing, and Jony isn’t above that. If something doesn’t work consistently or feel human centric, then it doesn’t matter if 1950’s Dieter Rams himself designed it, it’s crap.

But the argument that Jony derailed product at Apple looks like complete nonsense when you observe the facts. And every design team member I’ve spoken to over the last 4 years has said that Jony, while at times difficult, demanding and intense, has also been an enormous enabling force when it comes to spending the time, resources and energy it took them to get a product or feature to the level they wanted. Resources like on-the-ground materials consultation in China, collaborations with artists around the world, research into the effects of a design — the willingness to ‘do the most’ in search of a solution. None of that went away.

That said, if Jony doesn’t like managing, guess what Jony is not going to be enthusiastic about? As Shel Silverstein put it: “If you have to dry the dishes, and you drop one on the floor, maybe they won’t make you dry dishes any more.”

There is certainly calculus in everything an executive at any big company says publicly — but I think you can believe Jony when he says that he feels like he can be useful elsewhere.

“I certainly have an ambition and feel almost a moral obligation to be useful,” he says in this FT piece. “I feel I’ve been fortunate enough to work with remarkable people over the last 30-plus years and have worked on some very interesting projects and solved some very difficult problems. I feel keenly aware of a responsibility to do something significant with that learning.”

He wants out, and that’s what he’s doing. But he’s not leaving the company in terrible shape, from either an overall perspective and from an internal perspective.

Let’s move away from the anecdotal. What’s more interesting to me than any of this Jony shit talking is where Apple design goes from here.

Apple has put Evans Hankey and Alan Dye in charge of design, reporting to Jeff Williams. Wring your hands all you want about Apple becoming an operations company but, like, where have you been for the last 10 years?

Yes, Apple is a different company now, and it should be. While Jony has given us some amazing work (and some amazing what the hell moments) over the years, its going to be fascinating to watch a new leadership tackle the next era at Apple.

I think it’s also smart of Apple not to announce a single ‘Jony replacement’ at this juncture. Any immediate comparison would likely not do them any favors and this gives the team time to find a new center and a new direction over the next couple of years. I think someone will emerge as the design lead here eventually, but I’m not sure who.

Evans, as I understand it, was hand picked by Jony to lead the ID team as a manager, a job she’s already been doing. She’s a capable design manager with hundreds of patents to her name. More importantly, Apple has a historic and systemic policy that they don’t just put people in to do a job, they put them there to learn from them and to teach them. The Apple way of doing things is institutionalized and taught to new hires.

This institutional tissue, I believe, will survive Jony leaving.

One of the things that struck me the most about a lot of the recent stories is that it painted members of the design team as feckless automatons that could not proceed without Jony approving every move. That’s not true and honestly not even possible. There’s no way Apple could ship on the schedule they have done over the past few years if Jony being late to a meeting would handicap them.

There are a lot of very smart and very talented people at Apple and they are not all named Jony.

I’m also very interested to see how Alan Dye gets on with Apple. He’s got a calm, understated demeanor in person that can come across a bit flat, but he’s clearly very engaged with the task. He’s respected by Apple designers who feel that his work speaks for itself internally and that he has the chops. One of the arcs of Dye’s tenure has been to unify the look and feel of iOS across its platforms in terms of typography like San Francisco.

One of the biggest potholes that the software design team has ever hit, in my opinion, was iOS 7. It needed to be a break with the past for some legitimate reasons, like the expansion of iOS onto new platforms like the car, the watch and beyond. But Jony brought print, not interaction, designers from other parts of Apple in to flesh out the final design and that ended up presenting as a radical new but also radically less usable iOS.

iOS 7, to me, has always reminded me of an apocryphal saying I heard but can’t remember where. It’s about the notoriously difficult to drive Porsche 911: Porsche made a beautiful mistake, and it’s spent 50 years fixing it.

The 911 was a car that was designed to be imbalanced from the beginning by placing the engine in the rear, to emphasize power transfer to the ground via weight and traction. Also, no joke, so you could still fit groceries in it.

Unfortunately, it also enabled massive oversteer, with the car swinging wide on corners incredibly suddenly if pushed too hard. Porsche has refined that design with every iteration, improving every other aspect of the vehicle like traction, larger wheelbase, steering, braking and gearing. Just to get it to a place where the original vision remained intact, but, you know, less fire and dying.

Apple has done much the same since iOS 7, taking a concept that it felt was necessary and continuing to pull it back into a place that feels more usable.

One of the things that stood out to me at the time was that iOS 7 led with a ‘panes of glass’ metaphor. They weren’t all that explicit about it then but it seemed clear to me that they saw this as a way to support all kinds of interfaces from palm first to heads up. An evolution of the information appliance.

Dye and the design team (and Jony, tbf) have spent the last couple of years making big strides fixing the mechanical issues, but it was very exciting to me to see the panes of glass metaphor heavily emphasized at WWDC this year. They’re just panes with depth, texture and hopefully more accessible context this time around.

Even though Jony is a ‘unicorn’ designer, Apple has always thrived on small teams with decision makers, and they’re not all one person. The structure of Apple, which does not rely on product managers, still leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of the people actually doing the work. I’m not as concerned as a lot of people are that, with Jony leaving, there will suddenly be a slavish hewing to the needs of ‘ops over all’. It’s not in the DNA.

That doesn’t mean however, that there aren’t still question marks. Jony was an enormous force in this company. It is completely natural to be curious, excited and, hell yeah even worried about what his departure will do to the design focused Apple people love to love.

daniel arsham adidas futurecraft 4d bd7400 where to buy 2

An Adidas Futurecraft shoe with a midsole printed by Carbon

As for me, I hope that there can be a balance struck between the established patterns of Apple design and new schools of thought. No company should remain rooted in the past completely. There are wildly interesting things happening in design and manufacturing at the moment. Trends like programmatic or “AI” design that allow designers to define an algorithm and a set of constraints, and then generate ‘impossible’ shapes out of edgy materials to obtain a result unable to be sketched or sculpted by traditional processes.

The shoe pictured above is a collaboration between an artist and an algorithm. Daniel Arsham, Adidas and a startup called Carbon made this with the help of a design program that understands the goals and materials its working with, but charts its own path to getting there. This is the new school of design.

The compression of the design and manufacturing stacks into one segment is going to be the defining characteristic of this age of product development in my opinion. Apple needs to jump on that wave and ride it.

There’s a Steve quote, prominently displayed on the wall of the Infinite Loop 4 building in its old Cupertino headquarters.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

I’d love to see Apple’s design teams do just that, embrace these new schools of thought and find ways to integrate them into the way that it has always worked. There hasn’t been a more fascinating time to follow this company in years. Whatever happens it won’t be boring.

Lead image: Bryce Durbin

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https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/apple-sans-ive/

2019-07-02 18:40:48Z
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Mom furious with United Airlines after boy is placed on wrong international flight: 'Cosmic failure' - Fox News

United Airlines has issued an apology after a 14-year-old boy was reportedly instructed to board the wrong international flight on Sunday.

Anton Berg, of North Carolina, was scheduled to fly from Raleigh to Stockholm, Sweden, via a stop at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in New Jersey.

WOMAN WEARING SEE-THROUGH TOP KICKED OFF PLANE FOR 'DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR'

Once at EWR, however, Anton was ushered onto a Eurowings flight headed for Dusseldorf, Germany — rather than the Scandinavian Airlines partner flight he was booked on — despite his parents, Christer and Brenda Berg, paying United an additional $150 to escort the boy to the correct flight, WRAL reports.

Anton alerted his parents to the mix-up via text, but only after he was already on the plane, and began to realize he was on the wrong aircraft.

Brenda Berg claimed on Twitter that she was unable to reach United by phone, to notify them of the mix-up, so she began tweeting directly at the airline, begging for someone to confirm where her son was.

“He is an unaccompanied minor going to ARN. You probably put another kid in his place who is supposed to go to Germany. The ARN is due to take off any second. The Eurowings to DUS has stopped on the runway. Do something! - call me,” she pleaded, all while Anton was sitting on the tarmac.

CHRISSY TEIGEN FINDS TSA LOOPHOLE CONCERNING GRAVY

Brenda continued tweeting throughout the ordeal, claiming that no one from United had responding, or confirmed whether Anton was off the plane, for over an hour.

Anton eventually did return to the terminal in Newark, she said, though he was still unaccompanied.

Brenda was finally able to reach a representative, who said Anton was being rebooked on a different flight to Copenhagen. He arrived in Stockholm on Monday.

"When somebody says unaccompanied minor, wrong airplane, wrong country, everybody should’ve stepped up and done something," Brenda told WRAL, adding that the screw-up was a "cosmic failure" on United's part.

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Eurowings, meanwhile, said in a statement obtained by Fox News that Anton had “mistakenly received a boarding pass for the [Eurowings] flight,” which was boarding at a neighboring gate to the Scandinavian Airlines flight.

Eurowings said in a statement that he somehow "mistakenly received a boarding pass for the [Eurowings] flight" rather than the scheduled Scandinavian Airlines flight he was scheduled to board. (iStock)

“The boarding for both flights was handled by an external service provider who was in charge for both SAS and Eurowings,” the airline told Fox News. “The passenger mistakenly received a boarding pass for the EW flight to DUS instead of a boarding pass for the SAS flight to Stockholm.”

Eurowings added that the crew “reacted immediately and informed the captain” before the plane turned back for the gate at EWR, where Anton was handed off to Port Authority and Transportation Security Administration staff.

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United has also issued an apology for the incident.

“The safety and well-being of all of our customers is our top priority, and we have been in frequent contact with the young man’s family to confirm his safety and to apologize for this issue,” the airline wrote. “Once Eurowings recognized that he had boarded the wrong aircraft in Newark, the plane returned to the gate — before taking off. Our staff then assisted the young customer to ensure that he boarded the correct rebooked flight later that evening.

“We have confirmed that this young customer safely reached his destination.”

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https://www.foxnews.com/travel/united-airlines-boy-wrong-international-flight-cosmic-failure

2019-07-02 15:58:48Z
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Mom furious with United Airlines after boy is placed on wrong international flight: 'Cosmic failure' - Fox News

United Airlines has issued an apology after a 14-year-old boy was reportedly instructed to board the wrong international flight on Sunday.

Anton Berg, of North Carolina, was scheduled to fly from Raleigh to Stockholm, Sweden, via a stop at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in New Jersey.

WOMAN WEARING SEE-THROUGH TOP KICKED OFF PLANE FOR 'DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR'

Anton alerted his parents to the mix-up via text, but only after he was already on the plane, and began to realize he was on the wrong aircraft.

CHRISSY TEIGEN FINDS TSA LOOPHOLE CONCERNING GRAVY

Brenda continued tweeting throughout the ordeal, claiming that no one from United had responding, or confirmed whether Anton was off the plane, for over an hour.

Anton eventually did return to the terminal in Newark, she said, though he was still unaccompanied.

Brenda was finally able to reach a representative, who said Anton was being rebooked on a different flight to Copenhagen. He arrived in Stockholm on Monday.

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United has also issued an apology for the incident.

“We have confirmed that this young customer safely reached his destination.”

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https://www.foxnews.com/travel/united-airlines-boy-wrong-international-flight-cosmic-failure

2019-07-02 15:41:22Z
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Mom fumes as United puts her son on flight to wrong country - New York Post

A 14-year-old boy traveling alone from North Carolina to Sweden was put on the wrong plane during a transfer at Newark Airport, where he alerted the crew on the Germany-bound flight right before takeoff, according to reports.

The comedy of errors involving three airlines began when Anton boarded a United flight on Sunday with a codeshare ticket booked on Scandinavian carrier SAS, which does not have direct service from Raleigh to Stockholm, his mom, Brenda Berg, told Business Insider.

The boy was supposed to be put on an SAS flight to Sweden — but United placed him on a plane operated by German low-cost airline Eurowings bound for Düsseldorf, according to the news outlet.

SAS and Eurowings both operate those flights as codeshares with United.

“We booked him through SAS to visit his grandparents in Sweden,” Berg told USA Today in an email.

“SAS does not have an unaccompanied minor program for a 14-year-old,” she said. “We intentionally booked a long layover in a domestic location, so it would be easy.”

An unaccompanied minor attendant was supposed to take Anton to SAS Flight SK904 to Stockholm, she added.

“According to my son, the UM agent took him from the UM room at Newark to the Eurowings flight to Germany that he boarded,” Berg continued.

“The United agent handed my son’s paperwork to the agent at the gate, who immediately moved him onto the plane, apparently without looking at this UM paperwork.”

When Anton realized he was on the wrong plane, he “contacted a flight attendant, and the plane was turned around,” his mom said.

SAS agents quickly rebooked Anton, but he had to wait more than five hours for the next flight to Stockholm, she said.

A frantic Berg detailed the unfolding fiasco on Twitter.

“@United @SAS my son is in the wrong plane!!! EWR you put him on a plane to Germany!!!!” she wrote.

“They are booking him through Copenhagen. He will have 7hours of additinal (sic) travel. Still NO one has called from @united. I finally got through to a rep after 52 minutes and i am back on hold. Warning to everyone. Never trust @United with your children,” she said in another tweet before finally getting hold of a United manager.

“Ironically, @United if you hadn’t accompanied him, this would never have happened. He wouldn’t have counted on you to know what you were doing. #NeverUnitedAir,” she added.

United’s UM policy states that “this service is required for children ages 5-14 who are traveling alone.”

For $150 each way, the program includes a wristband for a child to wear and special bag tags so United employees can clearly identify them as being unaccompanied.

“Unaccompanied minors can only travel on nonstop United or United Express flights and United does not offer unaccompanied minor service connecting to or from other airlines’ flights,” according to the policy.

A United spokesman told Business Insider that a 14-year-old flying alone would normally not be allowed when an international flight is involved, but that because the ticket was sold by SAS, the check-in agent decided to allow Anton onto the connecting flight with the airport escort service.

The teen’s paperwork contained the correct flight information, but there was a gate change before he arrived at Newark for the connecting flight and the Eurowings plane was sitting at the gate at that point.

The United rep said the flight to Germany was awaiting one more passenger, whose name was similar to Anton’s, and the person escorting the boy assumed the passenger being called on the public address system was the boy.

“Once Eurowings recognized he had boarded the wrong aircraft in Newark, the plane returned to the gate — before taking off. Our staff then assisted the young customer to ensure that he boarded the correct rebooked flight later that evening. We have confirmed that this young customer safely reached his destination.”

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https://nypost.com/2019/07/02/mom-fumes-as-united-puts-her-son-on-flight-to-wrong-country/

2019-07-02 14:28:00Z
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