A New Dynasty?

It's been a couple of weeks since CES, but I thought this was an interesting article: blogger Jeff Yang comments on the decline of Japan as a consumer electronics powerhouse in favor of Korea and eventually China. During the 2008 fiscal year, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Sharp lost a staggering total of $12.1 billion. At the same time, Samsung alone earned $9.64 billion. What could have caused this shift in power?

N'Gai Croal suggests that product ecosystems are perhaps more important than the products themselves now: "Back then, it was all about building the best product. But in a digital era, it's all about the network effect -- it's not as important to consumers that any individual product is superior, so much as that all of your different products work well together." In addition, some say Sony's insistence on proprietary formats such as Betamax and Memory Stick has worked against them by hindering adoption (maybe I'll do another post on Blu-ray sometime). Then again, proprietary formats don't necessarily prevent products from achieving widespread adoption. Apple has a long history of proprietary hardware and software, locking users (willingly or unwillingly) into their product ecosystem. Why, then, has Apple succeeded where Sony failed? Is it possible for proprietary formats to win over open-source or common standards in the long run?

Design Morality

Just yesterday, Google released an announcement that it may consider withdrawing itself from China in light of the Chinese government's censorship policies. Google had suffered backlash in 2006 when it agreed to censor its results in China, so many praised Google for finally standing up to the Chinese government. Others see it as a last-ditch attempt to salvage some good press out of a poor branch (Google has struggled to increase market share past 25-30% in China, and Google could rebuild what reputation it lost in 2006).

Whatever Google's motives, it brings up the interesting point of morality in business, and in design. Matt Parkinson spoke last quarter about designing for human variability, and how design may result in disproportionate exclusion of certain demographics. As designers, we need to ask ourselves the question: is the greater evil for a designer to do work he opposes, or to deprive end users of the value the designer could have added?

One of Google's 10 "commandments" is to "Do no evil". Is censorship evil, though? Regulation of information occurs in parental control, and website age restrictions, and fewer people argue against it. It might be argued that censorship is a sub-optimal solution due to the net reduction in available information--sub-optimal, however, is not evil. I personally contend that Google censored in China is better than no Google in China.

Let's hear from you: when faced with a situation where there may be no perfect solutions, what and how do we prioritize?

Blog Revival, Round 2

So much for more updates. Now, though, with a forced revival of this blog for class purposes, I guess there will be more content to look forward to... eventually.