I set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, to give it a proper test. Having used it for a week, I feel a bit like the first time I installed Linux on my computer – It felt good to give Microsoft the finger, but frustrating and rough around the edges.

I like that DDG doesn’t track you and doesn’t try to filter search results according to what it thinks you are interested in. But many times when I couldn’t find what I was looking for on DDG’s first page of results, I tried the same search on Google with more success.

Part of the problem is that DDG doesn’t appear to have anything beyond a basic web search yet. It doesn’t search news, doesn’t seem to search blogs very well, and doesn’t have image search. It will need all of these things to compete properly with Google.

The other thing about DDG is that it’s just a little slow. Searches that are more or less instant on Google take several noticeable seconds on DDG. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, somehow it increases my perceived cost of searching significantly, and makes searching feel like a chore.

Having helped to design a list-making app myself, I’m something of a connoisseur of apps in the category. So the new Clear app by Realmac Software certainly caught my attention. As you can see in the video, it takes minimalism to a new extreme, with apparently no on-screen controls at all, using gestures for every action.

It looks like a very striking design, brilliantly executed, and I’m sure it’s going to sell extremely well. I have a couple of comments though:

• Gestures are the keyboard shortcuts of touch apps. Clear looks pretty intuitive, but I’m not sure if I’d be able to remember them all. I bought Calvetica because it looked cool, but ended up using the built-in calendar app more often because I couldn’t remember the Calvetica gestures.
• Two-finger gestures require the use of two hands, which is not efficient, and sometimes not possible.

The New York Times has a detailed investigation into working conditions at Apple factories in China. I think there’s no doubt that Apple’s net contribution to economic welfare in China is massively positive. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have jobs that, while not fantastic, are significantly better than the alternatives.

The Times article fairly points out that conditions in Chinese factories of Apple’s competitors are just as bad, or worse. However, a company that has just made a record $13 billion profit in three months can expect to come under intense scrutiny. Apple tries to be transparent with its supplier responsibility reports, but it seems these are mostly bark and no bite. From The Times article:

“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”

Most interestingly, The Times translated their article into Chinese and posted it on a Chinese website. Some of the comments by Chinese readers were then translated back to English. Most of the translated comments are along these lines:

If people saw what kind of life workers lived before they found a job at Foxconn, they would come to an opposite conclusion of this story: that Apple is such a philanthropist.

Or these lines:

The story of Apple is just an individual case. There will be endless problems from Pear or Banana … even if you revealed Apple’s inside conduct. We have to solve the fundamental problems, which include labor laws, corporate social responsibility, China’s industrial policies and others.

Just when you thought Google had wrapped up the search market, along comes DuckDuckGo with fewer ads (ie a lower price of searching), and, more importantly, a different approach to filtering.

As DuckDuckGo explains, Google’s obsession with collecting data on you and using that to deliver more ‘relevant’ search results can lead to you living in a search filter bubble, where your own history and biases can affect what see. Thus leading to a vicious cycle of confirming your own prejudices. But maybe some people like to live in a cozy self-created bubble.

What do people really want? The market will decide …

Traffic is backed up on a main road and moving slowly. A small number of drivers want to enter the main road from a side street. The rules of the road say that drivers on the side street need to wait for a gap in the traffic, but drivers on the main road often slow or stop to let them enter. The cost is a momentary delay, the benefit is getting a smile or a wave from the driver who was let in, and perhaps a bit of good karma.

But there is an externality on all the other drivers queued up behind on the main road, as they are slightly delayed too. Thus there will be too much niceness and everyone gets delayed more than necessary. So next time you are thinking about being nice and letting someone in, don’t do it, and play your part to reduce negative externalities :)

This also made me wonder whether traffic signals use economic concepts when calculating the timing of their phases. With enough sensors in the road it should be possible to optimise (ie minimise) total delay.

In an interesting contrast to yesterday’s piece about why Standard Motor Products keeps much of its manufacturing in America, the New York Times has a lengthy article on why Apple products are not made in the USA:

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the 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.

Both Apple’s products and some of Standard’s products require skilled labour and fancy machines to produce. But to me it seems the difference is that Standard’s products are motor parts that have a relatively predictable demand and are not R&D intensive, so a high degree of manufacturing flexibility is not required. In contrast, the need to scale up production rapidly to meet demand for Apple products, and accommodate last-minute design changes, means Apple needs flexibility most of all.

Adam Davidson has a fascinating article in The Atlantic about manufacturing in America, and indeed why this continues to exist in spite of low cost competition from China and elsewhere. The article focuses on Standard Motor Products:

Standard will not drop a line in the U.S. and begin outsourcing it to China for a few pennies in savings. “I need to save a lot to go to China,” says Ed Harris, who is in charge of identifying new manufacturing sources in Asia. “There’s a lot of hassle: shipping costs, time, Chinese companies aren’t as reliable. We need to save at least 40 percent off the U.S. price. I’m not going to China to save 10 percent.” Yet often, the savings are more than enough to offset the hassles and expense of working with Chinese factories. Some parts—especially relatively simple ones that Standard needs in bulk—can cost 80 percent less to make in China.

Via Longform.org

Another interesting thing about iBooks – the maximum price is 15 US dollars.

The maximum price of an iOS app is 999.99 US dollars.

Apple’s new iBook Author software looks pretty cool. If I was going to write a book, I’d certainly be tempted to use it.

It’s interesting that the license agreement contains a little fuck you Amazon … all books created with iBook Author must be sold via the iBookstore (if you give the book away for free you can do whatever you want).

As far as I know, Kindle has a much bigger share of the ebook market than iBooks. But iPad has a much bigger share of the tablet device market. It’s typical and expected of Apple to try to leverage its share in devices across to content by providing cool tools to content developers. And cut out the publishers in the meantime – very disruptive.

Seems like a good response would be for Amazon to release similar software for authors. Not sure if they can match Apple’s polish though.

Update: Josh Gans points out the author agreement is not quite exclusive, you can take the content produced by iBooks and assemble it in another program and sell it through another channel.

The supermarket in my office building has two queues. One feeds a bank of six human checkout operators and the other feeds a bank of eight self-checkout machines.

In my experience so far, the human operator queue moves significantly faster than the self-checkout queue. Furthermore the self-checkout queue is noticeably longer than the human operator queue. This is despite there being two more self-checkout machines than human operators.

It seems to me that people systematically over-estimate their own ability to efficiently self-checkout. Leave it to the pros, I say!