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Apple Abandons Environmental Certification

Apple has pulled its products off a U.S. government-backed registration of environmentally friendly electronics, see http://www.epeat.net/2012/07/news/wsj-cio-journal-apple-removes-green-electronics-certification-from-products/. EPEAT (created through funding by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and manufacturers, and Apple was one of its designers!), awards products a seal to certify they are recyclable and designed to maximise energy efficiency and minimise environmental harm.

Apple stated that its product design needs have diverged. Apple creates tightly integrated products (iPhone, iPad) so one could think that that might be a reason. For instance, the new Retina MacBook Pro has its batteries glued into its case. Naturally, that makes replacing as well as recycling more complicated if not impossible. So in that light, does Apple’s move make sense? I don’t think so.

Tight integration is a phase in the product cycle, suitable when separate components put together would not achieve a satisfactory whole. Certainly this approach made sense for some new products, but considering the market now of phones, tablets and laptops, the ones from Apple are not that far removed in specifications or engineering. Basically, others have caught up and at that point the tight integration works out more expensive.

For Apple, tight integration has always been a bit of a habit. Products have often been not particularly extensible. You’d buy a model and stick with it as-is, until you were ready for a new one. A similar story applies to its external interfaces. Some decisions made brilliant sense such as dropping disk drives (original iMac), a move which later enabled the magnetic lid and magnetic power plug. But apple also had digital DVI plugs while most monitors still used VGA, then for some laptops it went to MiniDVI, and most recently it’s shifted to a new media port. This is a nuisance for owners of such equipment even when they upgrade, as now they’ve also had to buy new adaptor cables which are not exactly cheap. Many owners do put up with it, even though the set of equipment turns out quite a bit more expensive while the specifications are in fact very similar to other brands.

The latter is no surprise of course, we’ve analysed before what people actually buy, and it’s generally not “a computer”. They can purchase convenience, efficiency, even lifestyle and status. If you fit within the toolset (of equipment and apps) that the Apple environment provides, it’s indeed convenient and efficient. It’s a niche, but actually a fairly large one.

So we are left with two questions… does tight integration preclude making components easily replaceable and recyclable? No. It’s a design choice. If you set specific targets, the design will work within those targets. A battery can be fixed by sliding into a casing, or use a sticky gel or other adhesive that’s easily removed (think along the lines of the 3M wall fixtures with their double-sided sticky tape). That’s just one example. When you set a bunch of requirements, you can find suitable ways to resolve the need. Swatch did this years ago by setting a strict limit on the manufacturing cost of its watches. The designers worked out ways to use fewer cogs, and the ones they did put in were made of plastic rather than metal. The objectives were achieved.

Does the target niche market care about the environmental credentials of the products? I reckon they do and increasingly so. Typically reasonably affluent, the demographics of Apple users has a large overlap with the group that care for environmental matters. The procurement processes of many government organisations are also reliant on EPEAT compliance, so there too Apple will lose out.

My rough guess is that Apple is repeating a past behavioural pattern, for dogmatic reasons. Previously the decision would have been made by Steve Jobs with no care for any factors other than the merits at the time. Therefore, merely repeating his past decisions would be unwise: they made sense in the context, which will be different now. Corporations are particularly good at repeating behaviour that was successful in the past, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always the best move now or even good for them (or its customers). And in this case, I reckon it’s going to bite.

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Vendor abuse of authority, lock-in, and non-judicial policing

Picture this:

“Sorry sir… yes, we sold you this hammer, but we really must insist that you only use brand X nails.
Oh you don’t agree? Well, with regret we render your hammer in-operable. Good day sir.”

Unlikely scenario? You’d think. A hardware vendor cannot expect to get away with that, except when they’re vendor of the kind of hardware that contains software. See http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/cisco-locks-customers-out-of-t.html where Cory writes:

Owners of Cisco/Linksys home routers got a nasty shock this week, when their devices automatically downloaded a new operating system, which locked out device owners. After the update, the only way to reconfigure your router was to create an account on Cisco’s “cloud” service, signing up to a service agreement that gives Cisco the right to spy on your Internet use and sell its findings, and also gives them the right to disconnect you (and lock you out of your router) whenever they feel like it.

Unfortunately, Cisco is not the only one – I’m not even singling them out, they just happen to be this week’s occurrence. Each case is slightly different, but I presume you’re already at least vaguely aware that Apple can remove apps from your iPhone and also shut down those mobiles remotely, and that Amazon can remove eBooks from your Kindle device, to name a few examples with well-known names. Technically, similar things have been possible for a long time – the recent development is how vendors use this capability. What remains is for the vendor to regard it as justified and use it as a valid business practice, and for you to decide whether to accept it.

When you use a service you agree to adhere by the defined terms and conditions. From time to time those terms get updated and you can either agree or choose to not use the service any more. If you don’t like the way your bank changes its terms, you can take your business elsewhere and there is generally legislation in place to prevent you from getting charged nasty exit fees for making the transition for this reason. This freedom becomes rather more difficult to exert with some online services, where there is often no covering legislation, and either no equivalent service or no way to get your data out and across to a new service.

It’s even more of a mess when dealing with hardware. While you purchased a physical device, you are now no longer really the owner. That is, you hold the physical casing, but it it’s useless weight unless and only so long as the vendor allows you to.

In the European Union there’s just been a ruling that a vendor must allow a software license to be transferable (see http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-cannot-block-the-resale-of-its-software-in-europe-7000000189/) which of course also affects devices with embedded software and I presume other licensed material such as eBooks as the ruling refers to anything licensed by a copyright holder and not software specifically.

So now you can sell on your device at least, but if you keep it the vendor can make you jump at will. In Cisco’s case they require that you sign up for certain services, and they also reserve the right to shut down your device for uses they find undesirable. A key problem there is that what they find undesirable may be what someone else finds perfectly ok and the latter may be backed by the applicable law of the land – yet that won’t matter.

However, the vendor reserves the right independently from the law. That is, they don’t require a legal ruling in order to take action, they can do so at their discretion. The fact that they technically can is indisputable, but the fact that they now explicitly declare this is a very worrying development.

It’s non-judicial policing, and I believe it to be very wrong. In most countries, we have chosen to outsource such tasks to a criminal justice system (police and courts). These days, posses and vigilantes are generally frowned upon. But now they’re back, in the form of corporations. And so far, they’re getting away with it.

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Spammer Selling Anti-spam Tools

Today I received an unsolicited email starting

“The email tsunami has swamped everyone, [product name] helps you clear the debris and pinpoint the messages you need.”

Ironic? To say the least. If you’re part of the problem and actively contributing to it, don’t try to sell me a solution. That’s just obnoxious. That company instantly disqualified itself from ever getting any business from me. There are always alternative offerings, so I vote with my feet&wallet.

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Outsourcing your Public Presence

Many companies and organisations, large and small, now only interact with people through sites like Facebook and Google+. That is, no longer do they have blogs and other items on their own site that allow comments and other forms of interaction. For example, one of my local radio stations (ABC 612 Brisbane) posts links and items on their Facebook page, and while I can still send them an email, essentially all the interaction with the program makers and other listeners happens in the Facebook threads. I find this a very troubling development.

Let’s look at what the drivers are. Very simply, an external service provides convenience with less internal effort, so it saves money (many companies don’t have any web skills internally at all). Users can share posts easily with their connections, and thus an organisation possibly gets wider exposure. I understand all that, but what are the consequences of this development?

As a sideline – there’s also a perceived advantage for the user, and that is that they’re not handing over their name/email and possibly other information to so many companies – instead it’s concentrated with a few, and that makes users feel more comfortable and in control. Whether they are actually (in control) remains to be seen, as it provides information behemoths like Google and Facebook with even more ways to profile people and tie things together. What are the long-term consequences of that?

While in the case of Google+ you can get your data out, that only applies to a fairly limited recent range of time. Last time I tried, I could only export my items from the last 60 days or so. Posts prior to that were actually completely gone. Not the kind of public record a company looks for, is it? Historical threads can be quite important, particularly when people search for topics that you’ve been involved with. Even a long time later, such links provide an important source of traffic and potential business, and also support the ongoing public image. Facebook basically just owns your data, but at least it doesn’t have a limited lifetime. That is, as long as that’s what Facebook decides to do with it. Either way, you’ve handed over a lot of control, in return for some convenience, but definitely with negative consequences for you and those add up over time, even if the provider does not disappear or decides to do things with your data that are not to your benefit.

Are there alternatives? Disqus appears to be doing well. It takes care of the registration/login tasks and handles the comment process for posts, but it integrates with an existing website or blog system. I do like this approach better as it doesn’t shift your existence (in terms of the URL where users go) to an external site, but nevertheless there’s still a risk, the provider can go away at some point. Where is your data (user contacts, comment threads), can you still access it, can you get it out, and then can you do something sensible with it to not loose this rather valuable historical asset?

While pondering this article I thought of Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow technologies and author of the book “Bootstrapping Your Business” which Upstarta gladly recommends as many of the concepts are closely aligned. I’ve met Greg when I organised a conference in the US, his story is pretty interesting. He bootstrapped RightNow in 1997 and the company went public in 2004. What RightNow has been doing was quite pioneering, they allowed companies to outsource much of their customer interaction (support tracking system, online helpdesk, feedback forms, etc) while keeping the original branding. So it was a hosted, branded, service. As you can see, Disqus is doing something similar, but just for comments. While not many of the public would have heard about RightNow, they did really well and helped many companies deliver customer service – a typical business-to-business service. We’re not talking small fry, by the way: huge multinationals such as Proctor&Gamble use them. Their current range of services is extensive, so you can just imagine how they can really enable companies, but… at the same time really tie them to this service.

Late 2011 the company was acquired by Oracle Corp. What will happen now? Oracle has bought out many other players in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) sphere. Typically the clients get absorbed, and the original products disappear. Naturally the exact flow differs per company and product/service. However this ends up though, will it be good for the clients? I doubt it. They had a service they liked, and now they’re going to have to adapt to a new environment, or leave.  Do they even have that freedom? Imagine the huge cost of migrating to another provider (with similar risks) or taking the services in-house. But who pays for the changes if they stay? Business processes would need to change either way. I realise it is a very rough picture that I’m drawing, but the crux is this: these businesses are now highly dependent on the external service, so the extent that they get high costs forced upon them in order to survive – and if they can’t afford it, bye-bye company.

This flow of events is entirely typical, companies make business decisions that are entirely valid at the time. They outsource tasks that are not part of their “core competencies”. Even looking towards their future, with some attention to the possible risks, the decisions appear to make sense at the time. Yet the companies get bitten later, so something  has happened and that is the kind of thing that Upstarta loves to investigate. Were the choices correct, were the risks fully understood, and the consequences considered? It keeps happening to big seemingly smart companies, in different contexts (Dell computers getting slowly eaten by AsusTek: first they produced some components for Dell, then mainboards, then complete systems. And then it went directly to market with its wares, bypassing Dell).

In case of Dell/AsusTek it’s a typical example of disruptive business, but it’s interesting as well as disconcerting to observe this in the context of these critical services such as a company’s interaction with its own clients. Is that, perhaps, too much risk to take?