
High Ground Maneuver (Scott Adams on the iPhone 4 press conference) - salar
http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/high_ground_maneuver/
======
abstractbill
I really do hate to admit it, but if BP _had_ said _"All of the easy sources
of oil have been found fifty years ago. If the oil industry stops taking
risks, many of you would be out of work in less than a decade. We all want a
future of clean energy, but no one sees a way to get there as quickly as we
need to. We will do everything we can to clean up the spill, and to make
things right with the Gulf economy."_ then I think I would feel better about
the company than I do now.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The core difficulty with that statement would be that it's wholly false. The
cause of the loss of the rig and the ongoing spill was not due to
unexceptional circumstances it was due to negligence on BP's part. BP
management overrode the better judgement of Transocean personnel and they
ignored the established operating procedures and best practices of the
industry. Had those procedures been followed there would have been no loss of
life, no loss of the rig, and no spill.

Instead, BP chose to cut corners in an attempt to save a tiny amount of cost
on what was likely to be a hugely profitable operation regardless. There's no
excuse for that.

~~~
kujhygtfghj
Alternatively BP followed the lax standards required by the US rather than the
stricter standards required in the North Sea. If it had applied all the extra
european safety standards then somebody else could have extracted the oil more
cheaply and would have outbid them for the rights. Then this would be a shell
or esso or gulf oil disaster.

Blaming the foreigners for the US safety regs is like a country with no
driving tests or traffic laws blaming Ford for car accidents.

~~~
InclinedPlane
What evidence is there that BP fully lived up to US safety regulations? I'm
not sure that's the case but I don't have all the details.

Personally, I don't view BP as a "foreign" entity, they are a trans-national
corporation.

Regardless, you do make a good point, if the US had as stringent of standards
as required in the North Sea likely none of this would have happened.

~~~
kujhygtfghj
I don't know, although there were items like a blowout preventer that would be
required in other areas.

I also don't know what the contract was, was BP in day-day charge of the rig
or was that the company the rig was leased from? The capping operation was
apparently being done by Haliburton!

I do know that the US has 4x the industrial accident rate of
Uk/Germany/Scandanavia and it's not due to foreign companies.

------
zmmmmm
> He spoke indisputable truth

Scott Adams' problem seems to be that he is living inside the reality
distortion field. Part of the whole problem with Jobs' handling of this is
that he has repeatedly failed to tell the truth (at very least not the whole
truth, but arguably he has lied in an absolute sense). To be specific: Jobs
stated that all phones have this flaw. But _all phones do not have this flaw_.
The flaw is that the phone has an antenna that is shorted by the user holding
it a normal way. No other phones have this flaw. It is an outright lie. Jobs
himself made a big deal on stage about how no other phones have this kind of
antenna when he was selling it as a good thing. Now he says that all phones
have the same problems that are caused by this unique antenna design. No they
don't. It's a lie.

The real tactic here is simply to gloss over the truth and hope you get away
with it - at the moment I'm not sure whether Jobs has or not.

~~~
othermaciej
If you lose signal, does it actually matter if it's caused by bridging two
antennas, or by shielding, or capacitive coupling, or whatever phenomena cause
other phones to degrade in signal quality when held?

It seems like what really matters is not the specific physical process that
causes signal attenuation, but rather (a) how likely are users to run into the
problem, relative to other phones; and (b) how severe is the problem, when you
do run into it?

Harping on the mechanism seems like a way to try to score gotcha points,
rather than a genuine concern for users of the device.

~~~
recoiledsnake
From the Q&A session:

>10:43AM Ryan from gdgt: You showed people almost covering the entire phone in
their hand, but on the iPhone 4 it can happen with just a touch. Can you
explain that difference? Bob: When you touch the phone, you put yourself
between the signal and your phone, so when you touch that spot you can
attenuate the signal, and if you grip it with your whole hand, you can
attenuate it even more. We don't build phones with an antenna on top...

>Hmm, that didn't really sound like an answer to us.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
There's some Apple bloggers collecting evidence that this applies to all
phones, with excerpts from manuals and such.

<http://dontholditwrong.tumblr.com/>

Interestingly almost all of them say "don't touch the external anntenna" (as
in the old-fashioned stick out the top kind) yet no-one has connected these
statements with the revolutionary design decision of making the external
antenna into the part of the phone you hold.

------
jamesbritt

        But the central question that was in everyone's head 
        before the press conference - "Is the iPhone 4 a dud" 
        - has, well, evaporated.
    

That was never the central question in anybody's head. No one thought the
phone was a _dud._

A more common question was, will Apple own up to making an avoidable design
flaw? Look around the Web at the responses to the press conference and decide
just what questions have evaporated, and what new ones appeared.

~~~
megablast
I disagree, you must have been reading different stories to me.

There was a lot of vitriol directed at Apple, and a lot of people were saying
it was a huge problem for them. People are still saying it now. Check out the
recent slate article posted here, or techcrunch, or response from HTC/ BB/
Nokia. A lot of people (in the media) do not see this as resolved.

I am slowly learning to hate the media all over again.

~~~
axod
Why? It's a badly designed phone. There's a reason every other cellphone has
an internal antenna. Good on people for calling Apple out over the lousy
design, failure to test properly, and so far, the failure to take
responsibility. If I had bought an iPhone 4, I'd have accepted a refund.
Bumpers? case? eugh come on.

~~~
ericd
If the vast majority of the people think it's overall a much better phone than
the 3GS, is it really a badly designed phone?

I don't own one, but the whole antenna thing sounds massively overblown by a
press hungry for some controversy. Anandtech went so far as to say that the
phone was better overall in marginal reception areas than the 3GS.

~~~
zmmmmm
That's a false dichotomy. It can still be better than a 3gs overall AND have a
serious design flaw. Technology has moved on and made the 3gs obsolete in so
many ways that it can easily move the overall experience to a new high
watermark while still having a serious flaw.

~~~
wvenable
If it gets better reception than the 3GS in some situations and worse in other
situations, how is that a _serious_ design flaw? What makes it a flaw rather
than simply a design trade off?

I've had many high tech devices _way_ more flawed than this and they didn't
get 22 days of coverage, a press conference by the CEO, or some free fixes.
Hell exploding laptop batteries got less coverage than this! I don't even own
a iPhone (and don't intend to get one) but these comments are over the top.

------
sbaqai
Something I think that needs to be mentioned is that what was happening to
Apple in the media is similar to what happened to Toyota with their
acceleration issue a couple of months back.

The number of complaints of "unintended acceleration" shot up after it was
initially covered in the media. There was no real focus on investigative
journalism, or analysis of the actual statistics by news organizations. There
was also the whole rigged ABC News broadcast, which they admitted later to
faking. Toyota's Recall became the top most reported story in Jan-Feb 2010.
And IIRC, as the media hysteria was winding down, the NHTSA concluded the
majority of unintended acceleration was driver error.

In Apple's case, they had made a weakspot into a visual accent. And Jobs
mentioned their algorithms made things appear more dramatic than they were.
Both of these things were probably dumb, but dumb-like-the-recessed-headphone-
jack (gaffe), not dumb-like-the-Microsoft-Kin (flawed design). The software
fix is already out and the hardware will probably get fixed next iteration
(perhaps coated?) and isn't a big deal. Yet the media coverage greatly
outpaced the issue, and again no mention of statistics or data.

There are a lot of parties interested in seeing these reputable companies take
a dive. It's great for competitors; but more cynically - its great for hedge
fund managers with certain short positions... Reporting misinformation and
sensationalizing news for securities price manipulation isn't new, and it's
been done to Apple before.

From 2006:

 _Aaron Task: Okay. Another stock that a lot of people are focused on right
now seems to be Apple._

 _Jim Cramer: Yeah. Apple’s very important to spread the rumor that both
Verizon and ATT have decided they don’t like the phone. It’s a very easy one
to do because it’s also you want to spread the rumor that’s it not gonna be
ready for MAC World. This is very easy ‘cause the people who write about Apple
want that story, and you can claim that it’s credible because you spoke to
someone at Apple, ‘cause Apple doesn’t –_

 _Aaron Task:They’re not gonna comment. They’re not gonna –_

 _Jim Cramer: So it’s really an ideal short. Again, if I were a short Apple, I
would be working very hard today to get that. The way you would do that is you
pick up the phone and you call six trading desks and say, “Listen, I just got
off the phone with my contact at Verizon and he has already said, ‘Listen,
we’re a Lucky G house. We’re a Samsung house. We’re a Motorola house. There’s
no room for Apple. They want too much. We’re not gonna let them in. We’re not
gonna let them do what they did to music.’” I think that’s a very effective
way to keep a stock down._

~~~
DenisM
_NHTSA concluded the majority of unintended acceleration was driver error._

it didn't, that story was a hoax.
[http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/19/followup-toyota-
strongly-...](http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/19/followup-toyota-strongly-
objects-to-nhtsa-allegations-it-plan/)

~~~
pierrefar
That article speaks of just allegations without providing any proof.

~~~
DenisM
What? NHTSA went on record that they did NOT conclude anything. The story
about NHTSA concluding anything was false. It was a hoax.

------
kqr2
Is there a list of other language "maneuvers" one can employ?

~~~
teejae
That's the domain of rhetoric. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric>

------
yanilkr
Over analysis. That might be part of authors line of work, but this reminds me
of something my humanities professor talked to some of us, engineers about
some time back.

Three doctors, a general doctor, an orthopedic doctor and a neuro surgeon are
casually talking to each other outside a building. They notice a man walking
abnormally, slightly dragging one foot. The General practitioner says, the guy
must be shot on the left foot thus causing the behavior. The orthopedic doctor
predicts, the guy was born with one foot longer than the other thus explaining
the behavior. The neuro surgeon predits, the guy seems to have suffered a
stroke in the past and this might be a result of that.

Now all of them are curious to know the truth and approach the guy in
question. The guy just had his shoe damaged.

------
stcredzero
For an example of a backfiring "high ground" maneuver, take a look at Mark
Zuckerberg's Hoodie.

[http://www.switched.com/2010/06/07/mark-zuckerbergs-
illumina...](http://www.switched.com/2010/06/07/mark-zuckerbergs-illuminati-
like-hoodie-reveals-facebook-as-the/)

Really, the message he wanted to convey included goals that sounded as lofty
as Google's. In short, he seems to want to organize the world's connections in
much the same way Google organized much of its HTML information.

Why did it backfire? Well, the intent was obvious to Mark, but not so obvious
to the audience.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/>

Also, a flop sweat during your interview/presentation is a big hurdle to
overcome.

------
marze
In the PR world, there is a saying that "all publicity is good publicity".

What about this antenna issue--is all the coverage a net positive for Apple or
is this an exception to the "rule"?

Just curious to know what others here think.

------
tghw
Dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529615>

------
ryanricard
I'm surprised he didn't mention the "Our phone doesn't have a problem," "All
phones have this problem" combo as well.

------
SwellJoe
Anyone else consider his response to be pretty much exactly the expected level
of arrogance and disregard for customers from Steve Jobs?

~~~
jsz0
I think it's supreme confidence in the product. Apple made some design choices
to make the phone thinner and more attractive. They think that's what a lot of
people really want. An extra dropped call here and there (+ <1 per 100
according to their numbers) simply isn't that big of a deal and they know it.
They're daring people to return the phone -- that's how confident they are in
its appeal. The sales, return rate and customer satisfaction numbers all back
this up. People bought it because it's thin, beautiful, and has really good
software. The antenna issue doesn't change that.

~~~
kelnos
I believe I read (in a Slate article?) that the dropped-call rate for the 3GS
is around 1 in 100. So an increase by another 1 in 100 actually _doubles_ the
dropped-call rate. It's a bit more significant when you look at it that way.

~~~
jsz0
I think that was just an example they used to show the "+ <1 per 100"
statistic was misleading. According to a ClearWave survey AT&T's average drop
call rate is somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5% so it'd be kind of shocking if the
3GS only drops 1% of its calls. So based on that the maximum increase in
dropped calls should be 15-20% We don't know if it drops .9 less calls per 100
or .2 less calls per 100 or if the 3GS drops more calls than the AT&T average.
It also disproportionally effects people who are in constant poor signal
conditions. So based on this logic (which could be totally wrong I admit) it
seems like most people aren't going to notice a dramatic difference in dropped
calls. One extra dropped call per week, month? I guess there's no way of
knowing.

