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.

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 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.

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 …

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

Let’s see if we can use an app to solve these problems … Vouchers can be pushed to the phone, but then how to validate them at the checkout? I suppose I could get a code to give to the cashier, but that’s clumsy, and again I might give the code to someone else. We need to make arbitrage a bit more difficult. We could do that by pushing the vouchers to my phone only when I enter the supermarket, but how to know this has occurred? GPS isn’t that accurate …

So how about this: When I enter the supermarket, I scan a QR code on my phone that is posted at the entrance. This code changes daily, and prompts the app on my phone to download my targeted offers for that day and show them to me. This also alerts the supermarket’s checkout computer that I’m in the store, and activates the discounts when I swipe my loyalty card at the checkout.

I still think this is a bit clumsy, what we really need is a better GPS system …

A smart thing to do would be to figure out products that I don’t regularly buy and give me special discounts on those. I obviously have high demand for the products that I do regularly buy, so there’s no point to give me discounts on those, my demand is inelastic. But give me a discount for something I have low, elastic demand for, and I might buy it. If chosen carefully, this could increase my total spending (rather than just cannibalising my existing spending) and increase revenue for the supermarket.

Of course this raises the question of why I didn’t do this already when I visited the local supermarket near to my home. You might say I’m lazy, but the economist in me has other answers -

I only visit my local supermarket infrequently, so I would need to buy larger quantities, with the accompanying risks and costs of spoilage and storage, plus less daily variety in my lunch.

It’s a little inconvenient to bring the lunch with me on the bus, and I might forget.

I have to decide what I want for lunch in advance and give up the option value of deciding at the last minute.

So, apparently I was willing to pay a price premium because of these costs. But now having a supermarket very near to my office means I can have the best of both worlds. The supermarket should be able to charge a higher price and extract some of the surplus, but they don’t seem to be doing that, so it’s all gain for me!

So MNP is not necessary for the new network to compete for all customers, and in fact the new network is at an advantage in terms of attracting customers with ‘bad’ existing numbers. (Whether or not customers with ‘bad’ numbers are valuable customers is another question, however.)

On top of this, unless there’s some system for alerting customers about which network the people they are calling belong to, MNP possibly introduces some confusion about the cost of making a call, if there are different prices for calling on the same network versus calling other networks. This could have effects on customer behaviour and competition between networks that are more subtle … without a formal economic model it’s hard to be sure.

Anyway, I don’t have any strong conclusions here, just that there are some aspects MNP that might not be immediately obvious. And it’s interesting how a simple tweet can get you thinking about all sorts of things.

• 80% of customers served within 10 minutes
• 80% of telephone calls answered within 30 seconds
• 80% of email inquiries responded to within 7 days

Why is it considered acceptable to take SEVEN DAYS to answer email, while walk-in customers should not be kept waiting for more than 10 minutes and telephone callers not more than 30 seconds?! If anything it should be the other way around …

(Note my carefully crafted search engine optimal title for this post :) )

Diners will take this into account when deciding where to eat, reducing demand for restaurants that don’t accept reservations, everything else equal. It also means such restaurants are nearly impossible to use as a venue for special occasions such as birthdays or a date, which effectively ‘prices’ such customers out. Finally it makes establishing long run relationships with diners difficult as you may be able to get a table one time but not subsequently. This makes it difficult to build up customer loyalty.

From the restaurant’s perspective, these losses must be balanced against the benefits of possibly having a higher table occupancy rate and not having to deal with last-minute cancellations. But, overall, I think not accepting reservations is a somewhat short-sighted strategy and the truly successful restaurants in the long run will not adopt it.

Publishers are clearly leaving money on the table here. Even if they cannot give up the dead tree model, they could offer something like iTunes Match for books and provide digital versions to people who have bought physical books. Or allow people to swap a physical book that they own for a digital version. Since the self scanning process destroys the book anyway and it sounds like a lot of trouble, people should be willing to pay something to exchange their physical book for a digital file. And since the publishers presumably already have the books in some sort of digital format, the marginal cost should be pretty close to zero. Sounds like a real win win is possible.