Personal Log: Social Media Detox, Not Sure I Like It
The Great Fire Wall Is Alive And Well Yesterday I arrived in Beijing, China. It’s my first visit to the Chinese capital and I’m excited to speak about innovating in the Cloud at Oracle’s Cloud World event (see Figure 1). Upon arrival, I went through my usual motions of logging in to wifi, taking pictures […]
5 Weeks in Shanghai Behind The Great Firewall. My (Nonprofound) Learnings.
Unless you follow SaaStr on Quora, things may have looked a little quiet here for the last 5 weeks. Well, that’s because hosted WordPress (what Saastr.com is powered by), along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a good chunk of Google, are all blocked in China by The Great Firewall. Quora for now is unblocked. You […]
Social Media is Really Tough in China. At Least There is Quora.
SaaStr is in Shanghai for the month of July. While I have internet access and an iPad … it’s tough to stay connected with the domestic SaaStr audience. Why? Well, first almost everything is blocked: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress (as an app and URL — individual sites with custom URLs sometimes barely work, sometimes not at […]
China Re-Starts Hacking Program
This is important. According to a story in the New York Times the Chinese Army is back in the business of hacking into American computer systems to steal intellectual property and government security secrets. After a three month lull that coincided with a tongue lashing by the Obama administration the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit 61398 […]
The Hacking War
We’ve been avoiding or at least minimizing comment on the latest round of computer hacking allegedly by a special unit of the Chinese Army. However as stories have flowed in the New York Times, like this one, it is abundantly clear that the Chinese have been hacking into many of the organizations that our democracy […]
China’s Incipient Recession
It was only a matter of time before slack demand in the rest of the world backed up into China, the world’s biggest manufacturer. According to an article in the New York Times finished goods have been piling up in Chinese warehouses, car dealers’ lots and in the spaces between other things in factories. China is […]
Tim Cook’s US Manufacturing Reality Distortion Field
Tim Cook visiting Foxconn People say Steve Jobs had a “reality distortion field“. His powerful charisma and messages were said to have the ability to make people believe in what he wanted them to regardless of the facts. Now Tim Cook is trying to deploy his own reality distortion field of sorts, and it’s working […]
Open Season on China
I picked up Time and BusinessWeek in the mailbox yesterday and they both had unflattering China covers with words like lies and corruption. With our elections and their leadership transition coming up, Chen Guangcheng and Bo Xilai will be household names on both sides of the Pacific this summer. There are some entities – companies […]
IPad, Mercantilism and the Chinese Plantation
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald This is not a post about CRM. If you could apply Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence to a thing or group endeavor—always a dubious […]
Apple and US labor
Steve Jobs supposedly told President Obama ““Those (iPhone) jobs aren’t coming back,” according to this article in the New York Times. Apple’s labor in China is also showing up in much hand-wringing in the Presidential race. Let’s explore a few other dimensions of the issue: The Chinese labor is a small part of the iPhone […]
