No, Mr. Friedman, Average is Not Over

Thomas Friedman has written two columns on the theme "Average is over." He wrote in his first article back in January that:

"In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over." (Average Is Over)

As an example of the kind of competition American workers have to deal with, he enthusiastically relate technological advances and alternative markets where global producers can get much more for much less:

“Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

If only American workers were as dedicated and desperate as those mostly young Chinese workers in their dorms. The answer to this challenge is of course education, which is the subject Friedman tackles in part two. He has been talking to Andreas Schleicher whose team at the OECD coordinates the international PISA test.

The results are dire, while the parents obviously think they live in Lake Wobegon:

"The U.S. does not stand out. It’s just average, but many parents are sure their kid is above average."

The solution that Friedman falls for is of course more technology. He quotes Schleicher:

“Imagine, in a few years, you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world,” says Schleicher. “And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ ” (Average Is Over, Part II)

But is this really the solution? Is it even the path towards one?

I'm not saying that America's educational system is in a good shape. Not at all, but I question the fundamental reasoning behind Freidman's techno-optimism. And I doubt very much that the socially, ethnically complex and diverse American nation could replicate the schools in Finland and Shanghai even if the parents could compare fMRI scans between school districts across the world.

Education is not an olympic sport where all that counts is a gold medal, or maybe a silver or a bronze. The big question is why we can't find a way to share the amazing wealth we have created. If we could address that question, there would be much less need to fight for a seat at the table.

Average is not over. It just needs to be better.

Apple Is Getting Greedy and Evil

Remember the famous ad where the runner threw a sledgehammer at Big Brother on the giant screen. Well, Apple has long since outgrown that rebellious mindset if it ever was there, and the whole spiel was not just sour grapes of being so small compared to Big Blue. Well, for all its design skills, Apple is a closed shop and has no intention of joining the open movement anytime soon. Being the perennial media darling, Apple gets away with a lot of things that IBM and Microsoft would never get away with.

Until now:

Ed Bott, a veteran computer journalist, virtually screams at the guys in Cupertino in his latest PC Magazine blog post about the end-user license agreement (EULA) Apple attached to its new iBooks Author program:

"I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program."

He continues:

"For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:
Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech."

Is that Apple getting rotten?

How To Read the iPad? Revolution Or Power Grab?

Sue Halpern have written essay about the iPad and its wider implications for the New York Review of Books. Here is her conclusion:

The Open Source movement and Creative Commons both derive from the Internet’s essential freedom, a leveling that allows designers and filmmakers and singers and craftsmen and any number of writers, activists, politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, many of them amateurs, to develop and disseminate their ideas. Imagine what the Internet, and our lives, would be like if, after inventing the Mosaic Web browser back in 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina not only required users to buy it but required payment for every click or download or page view. Try to imagine how a privatized, monetized Internet might have developed, and you can’t, because its evolutionary path would have been so different. Apple’s iPad apps may be ingenious. They may be fun and entertaining. They may be useful. What they can’t be is free of Apple’s control.

It is true that the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, comes with a Web browser app that takes the user directly to the Internet. Arguably, this makes these devices comparable to any computer and renders the complaint about gatekeeping moot. In fact, Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal. Keeping more than one window open at a time is not possible, and Apple’s refusal to enable Flash, a piece of proprietary software owned by Adobe Systems that underlies many websites and allows for animations and video, means that those websites are either not fully functional or not available at all. But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these? This is what is really revolutionary and game-changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything, it’s Apple’s Web, not the wide world’s.

If Apple want's to conquer the world, maybe we have to wait to see what Google's Android-tablet will look like when it comes.

Hans Sandberg

Note: Sue Halpern makes a minor mistake when she calls the Rocket eBook that Barnes & Noble launched in 1998 for the "RockBook." I was there at the pressconference on October 23rd with Stephe Riggio and the poet laureate Robert Pinsky.