Saying that Android is going to lose the tablet wars isn’t exactly sticking my neck out. I’d like to defend a bolder claim, however: Android would lose if the tablet wars were restarted today, without Apple’s massive entrenched lead in apps, marketing and mindshare. The makers of Android tablets scored a catastrophic own-goal by waiting to see whether the iPad would be successful before committing themselves to making competing products. Implicit in all the Android apologist’s reviews of new Android tablets is the idea that Apple’s head start is the reason they’re more successful, and that Android has merely to catch up lost ground (a bit of battery life here, an optimised UI there) and it’ll once again be a level playing field. The Apple fans rightly mock this as grading on a curve, and yet it might be justified if the apologists were right that Android will inevitably catch up. Unfortunately, they’re wrong.

Apple make their devices differently. They have full control over the OS and the hardware, and design them from very early on in the product cycle to work together. Apple deliberately aims at a subset of the market, and eschews features that this market segment doesn’t want. They have mastered the art of taking features out of a product.

Tablets are not just bigger phones or smaller laptops, they are used entirely differently. Tables are consumption devices much more than they are creation devices. They excel in cases where a keyboard isn’t needed or gets in the way, but at the price of losing flexibility. People aren’t using tablets for web development. They aren’t doing serious photo manipulation. Or non-trivial data analysis.

It seems to me that the aspects in which tablets excel are exactly the aspects in which Apple excels. People who want tablets want a streamlined convenient experience, and are prepared to compromise on features in order to get it. Plenty of people exist who want more out of their mobile computing device than this, but they aren’t buying Android tablets (and they’re definitely not buying those clip-on-keyboard hybrid abomninations): they just aren’t buying tablets at all.

It seems to me that this whole argument has a persistent technology myth baked into it: that since technology B arrived later than technology A, it is a suitable direct replacement for it. Tablet computers required a lot more technological progress to get right than laptops did, but that doesn’t mean that they will replace laptops like Homo Sapiens replaced Neanderthal man. TV has yet to stamp out radio, because the latter allows you to do things (like driving a car or cooking dinner) that the former doesn’t. Voice calling never “replaced” SMS (which in fact flourished long after voice calling), just as video calling shows no signs of making a dent on voice calling. The vast majority of content on the web is still text and not video (or audio), since video is not a better text.

New technologies are less disruptive than this, and in a different sense more disruptive. Less disruptive in the sense that the old market doesn’t go away or even change that greatly, but more so in the sense that you often need a whole different approach to succeed in the new market. Right now Apple is the only company that has what it takes to take full advantage of the tablet market, and if any rival does appear I doubt it will be based on Android.

Arista is a successful company that is growing fast, hiring smart people as fast as we can find them. We are looking for software developers in London UK, San Francisco Bay Area and Bangalore. To my mind, we offer the best of both the start-up and established company worlds. The company has a highly meritocratic, engineering-led culture where the best ideas win wherever they come from. The company is pre-IPO and able to offer share options with potential for very substantial upside. There are still lots of tough technical challenges to be completed. At the same time, the product has proved itself in the market place and we have established plenty of satisfied customers.

In any job, the thing that makes the most difference is the people you’ll be working with. Arista people are very smart, some fearsomely so, but also maintain a uniformly high standard of helpfulness and friendliness.

For more information about the opportunities available see our careers page. If you want to know more or to apply, I’d appreciate it if you’d contact me directly to let me know that you saw this post, but you can also speak to the company directly at jobs@aristanetworks.com.

Though I work for Arista, this is a personal blog post and represents only my personal views, not those of my employer. They didn’t tell me to write this, and indeed probably don’t know I’ve done so. Please check any facts with an official company source before you make decisions based on them. I’m writing this primarily because I want to see the company succeed, but I also stand to make a small financial gain on anyone I refer to the compay.

To me, the sensible response to this is to reinforce sympathy with a degree of pragmatism. If I can’t make much impact, I can at least reassure myself that any money I might give is targetted so as to produce maximum effect. And therein lies a problem.

It’s not politically correct to talk about this, but I don’t exactly blend in here, and while race doesn’t correlate perfectly with poverty, it’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a white person they will have money to spare. The upshot is that there is no shortage of people approaching me asking for money. The problem that gets to me is whether the people who don’t or can’t ask me for money need it more.

The areas I tend to frequent are naturally the wealthy parts of town. The people who come into contact with me, therefore, are typically people with jobs that give them access to such areas (and there are usually security guards around to ensure that undesirables don’t get through). Though they may well be in crushing poverty, they are unlikely to be at the bottom of the heap.

I believe the process of donating money can work in two ways: you can be motivated by the desire to see greater justice in the world and the recognition that such justice is a greater personal reward than whatever else you might spend the money on (I’ll call this feel-good charity). Or you can be motivated by guilt, shame or embarrassment, and donate in order to assuage that feeling (I’ll call this feel-bad charity). I would contend that, quite apart from the pleasure it gives, feel-good charity should be embraced (and feel-bad charity avoided) since it tends to lead to better decisions on giving in the most efficient way.

Don’t misunderstand me: this isn’t just about emotions versus rationality. Though it’s true that rationality is the main advantage of feel-good charity, it needn’t be an emotionally sterile experience. Personally, my reaction to the injustice of someone working harder than I do to bring home a few dollars a day is just as emotive as the pitying of someone living in squalor.

So how can we recognise and avoid feel-bad charity? One clue, I think, is the presence of cues designed to make you feel good about giving. Over here, someone asking for money often addresses you as “bwana” (roughly, “sir” or “boss”) in an effort to curry favour. If you give them anything at all, you are usually thanked effusively and often wished God’s blessing. Tellingly, the amount of money requested is usually minimised, as if to reassure you that both parties understand you want to get out of this uncomfortable situation with as little impact on your life as possible.

I’m going to make the bold assertion that all these things are wrong. Not just irrelevant, but actively harmful to the cause of bringing about a more just world. I don’t mean to say that the respect and gratitude people show isn’t sincere, though they wouldn’t be human if the feeling wasn’t mixed with a measure of unspoken resentment and envy.

If I recognise that someone has been unjustly treated in life, then I should be helping them (and taking satisfaction from helping them) regardless of how grateful or otherwise they are, and regardless of whether they thank me for it. I should also be offering whatever help they need, not paying just enough to make it someone else’s problem. To make fighting injustice contingent on the recipient’s thanks is degrading to them and, in some sense, to me.

Now comes the tricky part of the argument: I would encourage people to actively avoid feel-bad charity—and that means ignoring pleas for help when you might otherwise have yielded to them. Worse, since feel-good charity is often less frequent and less visible than giving loose change to beggars, it might appear that I’m encouraging people not to give at all. Saying that giving money to beggars only encourages further degrading behaviour is, sadly, an argument that’s been used to justify giving nothing at all, and that would definitely be worse than the status quo.

Feel-bad charity may be easy to identify and avoid, but feel-good charity has to be actively sought, and I’m afraid I don’t have any good answers here. For a time I was very encouraged by microfinance and the likes of kiva.org as a way of bringing out the best in the charitable process, but I worry that this alone can’t solve some of the bigger-picture issues of infrastructure that are clearly important. In any case, you have to be a great believer in trickle-down economics to convince yourself that microfinance can substantially benefit the most needy. In my view charities ought to fill the gap here by using expert knowledge to ensure that money is allocated efficiently, but it seems to me that in practice capital allocation is driven as much by PR and internal politics as it is by objective need.

Does anyone else have any good ideas? Suggestions welcome.

As I mentioned before, some of the roads are pretty close to not being roads at all. In fact, it’s rather better driving on a surface like this than on a road with occasional chunks of raised tarmac still around.

Our journey to work takes us through some of the high-density housing districts, which can be seen at the background of this picture. The contrast between the middle-class areas and the poorer parts is striking.

The majority of people in Lusaka get around by walking or by bus. The buses are all blue and white minibuses, which all seem to be crammed with twice the number of people that would be reasonable. As far as I can tell the driver owns their own bus and personalises it to their taste (notwithstanding the enforced colour scheme). Most drivers choose to decorate their bus with nicknames or slogans, often with a religious bent (though sometimes that religion is Manchester United). My favourite example declares, in big red capitals, “NO JESUS NO LIFF!”

The relatively small proportion of people who own cars doesn’t do much to counter the traffic congestion problems. Most intersections lack traffic lights, and can be a bit of a free-for-all. The picture above was taken at the point of turning right, merging into a queue of traffic.

Zambian driving style is remarkably relaxed in most respects. Certainly the rules of the road aren’t taken too seriously, and when merging with traffic assertiveness (i.e. shoving your way in regardless of anyone else) is seemingly expected. The ‘Lusaka shove’ works much like the ‘London shove’, except that the former is much less likely to provoke anger.

That’s not to say that the horn isn’t used in Lusaka, but it seems less to communicate anger with an idiot driver (as in London or Paris) than to communicate a general frustration with the world around you.

One of the drawbacks of having a banana tree in your back garden is that you have no bananas for 360 days of the year, and for 5 days you have more bananas than  you can possibly imagine, until they go black and have to be turned into banana bread.

I’m not so sure. On the surface, video certainly appears to offer the same content that text does, and do it in a more engaging way. However, difficult as it may be to admit for a technologist, I believe video gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

Consider the way you read a text with intellectually challenging content.  You can speed up, slow down, re-play and pause effortlessly and elegantly compared to the effort of doing the same with a video player. Re-playing an idea on a video player isn’t just inelegant, it’s so inelegant that I imagine it’s almost never done, even when the consumer would benefit from considering the idea again. Indeed, far from making it easy to go back, video pushes relentlessly forward, force-feeding the next sentence with utter disregard as to whether you are finished with the last.

Some may retort that this argument smacks of intellectual elitism, and that video content makes material accessible to the less educated. I wonder whether such people are confusing functional illiteracy (mercifully rare, even if not rare enough) with learned helplessness. Facility with reading develops with practice, and suggesting that reading is too tough for large proportions of the population is defeatism. I’m not even sure if it’s true in the narrowest sense that it’s easier for people to understand video than text (though it may be easier to consume without understanding): I can read a newspaper in French with some success, but give me the same news report in video form and I’m quickly drowned in unfamiliar language.

It’s not just on the consumption side. Composing a text is (to me at least) a calm, intellectual and rewarding process, where care can be taken over structure and thoughts can be put down, picked up and re-polished until they represent the absolute limit of the author’s capabilities. No matter how video recording and editing technology improves, a video blog post still needs to be recorded in one or at most a small number of takes, and considerable effort must go just into making the delivery flow naturally, at the expense of actual content. I’ve paused several times during the writing of this post to re-think, even though I started writing with a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to say.

I’m not naive enough to suppose for a moment that these arguments, even if correct, will slow the adoption of video in place of text. In the end, we choose what to consume more with our instinct than with our intellect. I’d be happier if a few more people displayed evidence of understanding the down side, though.

Judged by this standard, Zambia fares quite well. The land is flat, dry, and under-developed, but it has a genuineness about it that immediately appeals. When I last came a few years ago, the most striking sight was of people walking alongside the road carrying sacks on their heads. It seemed to me that there were fewer of them this time round, and more people transporting goods by bicycle.

Apparently a cyclist transporting 4 large sacks of charcoal might earn 10,000 kwacha for a day’s effort in the hot sun. That would just about buy a sliced loaf in the supermarket we frequent.

The Swedes [...] have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

It would be foolish to base decisions on this before more research has been developed further. But I wondered whether this model might offer some lessons to the software industry. Many companies set out to hire the most capable, intelligent people. Perhaps those that do so would do well to bear in mind that they will have a greater proportion of “orchids”: people who are capable of great things, but need the right environment to bring it about.

A little digging in the OED informed me that I am not actually correct in this pedantry. “Random” is a perfectly acceptable adjective meaning “arranged without goal or purpose”, in which form its use dates to the mid-17th century (so it isn’t a modern corruption). In point of fact, “haphazard” entered the language slightly later in the same century, and in this sense the words are synonymous.

However, I wonder if it wouldn’t be useful to enforce more of a distinction in the future, whatever the history of the language. Statistical randomness is a sense of “random” that came into use in the 19th century, but is increasingly important in modern times as we are persuaded of this fact or that fact by use of statistical analysis. If a drug is declared safe on the basis of “random” trials, you had better hope they are not merely haphazard.