By Conner ForrestMarch 21, 2014, The challenge in analyzing the Apple v. Google rivalry is deciding which metrics to use. Here are four data points to get a grip on who's winning.
The showdown between Apple and Google has evolved into the most heated rivalry in the business world and the tech industry. The moment Google announced its entry into the smartphone market in November 2007, tension began to brew between the two tech giants. As the companies engaged in PR and legal fisticuffs, hardcore users took their sides and began spewing venom.
While Apple was originally focused on hardware and Google was all about internet services, the two companies have increasingly infringed on each other's space. Apple beefed up its online services with iCloud and the iWork suite, while Google has refocused resources on smartphones and wearables. While someauthors recommend "promiscuity" when it comes to ecosystems, the majority of fans take a hard stance for one or the other.
And, the battle rages on.
Apple and Google are often compared using a variety of metrics, without a clear understanding of what those metrics mean. Here, we will look at four metrics and how we can use them to draw conclusions about how these two companies really stack up.
Mountains of cash
One of the obvious choices for measuring the success of a company is how much money it is making. The chart above shows the quarterly revenue for Apple and Google from each throughout in 2012 and 2013. It should be noted that while Apple reports revenue on a traditional fiscal calendar (Q1 ending in December and reported in January), this chart reflects calendar year quarters, with Q1 ending in March.
The first thing to note is that while Apple tends to make between three and five times as much revenue as Google does, their revenue is far more volatile than Google's. The first thing that we can infer is Google's revenue strategy is still largely dependent on selling ads. Apple's revenue spikes wildly around the holiday season because of their retail operation, but Google's remains far more stable throughout the year. According to Frank Gillett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, this is because their physical product offerings have yet to make up a substantial part of their revenue.
"They're not fundamentally a product-driven company. When you sell a physical good you are beholden to seasonal buying cycles," Gillett said.
Even as Google positions itself to sell more hardware in the coming years, their revenue will probably never reach the level of volatility experienced by Apple. According to Gartner analyst Van Baker, Google is seeding the market with an OS to get more people to use their services, so it can sell more ads. So, it is likely that ad revenue will remain the foundation for Google's overall revenue moving forward.
The challenge for Apple is that it has long been rumored to be working on a television set and a smartwatch, but it hasn't entered a new product category since it released the iPad in 2010.
"The longer it goes without them launching a new product offering, the more people will question their ability to innovate," Baker said.
Race to the top
When it comes to understanding just how valuable a company really is, many people will turn to that company's stock price. Of course, stock prices are unstable. As I am writing this piece, Apple's stock (AAPL) is sitting at $528.39 and Google's stock (GOOG) is bringing a cool $1,200.93 per share.
But, the price of the stock alone doesn't tell you how valuable a company is. You have to take into account the total number of outstanding shares along with the price, which determines "market capitalization." Apple's market cap peaked most recently in Q3 of 2012 with the announcement of the iPhone 5, then fell quite dramatically over the next year, but it has started to rise again. Apple's run over the last few years has been unprecedented, but it's not clear if it can continue their momentum from the past decade.
"Apple has had such a dramatic run, there is skepticism as to whether or not they can sustain it." Gillett said.
Google, on the other hand, has seen a steady rise in their market cap over the last two years, despite coming under increased scrutiny for their privacy practices. Unlike Apple, whose ability to innovate has come into question in the post-Jobs era, projects like Glass, Tango, and Ara have shown Google's willingness to take risks.
"Google has certainly shown the ability to lead innovation efforts," Baker said.
Innovation is not dead at Apple, but is has yet to announce another breakthrough, revolutionary product like the iPod, iPhone, or iPad. Both companies have been regularly buying up new, young companies; hopefully to revitalize their product offerings.
Those product offerings will likely fuel the biggest fire between Google and Apple — the war for mobile customers. The battle for mobile OS users is the face of the Apple/Google rivalry, and the numbers behind it are largely misunderstood.
Misunderstanding the market share
"The smartphone market is a basically two-horse race right now."
That's how Van Baker described Android's scrap with iOS in the mobile market. While many people try to equate the iOS/Android with Apple/Google, that is a misguided comparison as each mobile OS does not define its parent company's revenue stream. Still, mobile OS market share does help us to understand how each company is doing. Well, sort of.
The initial problem of measuring success by market share sales is that you are comparing Apple, which created the iOS software and accompanying hardware with Google, who created the Android platform, which is mostly distributed through third-party vendors like Samsung. Baker said that a more fitting comparison of market share by sales might be Apple v Samsung. According to Baker, "In some ways the battles with Samsung are a proxy for battles with Google." Even still, Google is dealing with a bigger issue than just iOS v Android.
"Whose operating system is on the device is not a very insightful metric for what the heck is going on," Gillett said.
If you look at the raw numbers for sales market share between Android and iOS devices, Google seems to be dominating the space. In Q4 2013, Gartner reported that Android had 77.8% worldwide market share while iOS had only 17.8% share. One quarter prior, Android had 81.9% and iOS took second place with 12.1%. It is worth noting that, according to ComScore, iOS market share in the lucrative US market is about 40%, while Android accounts for around 50% of US sales. The problem with these numbers is that the do not take into account the fragmentation that Google has allowed with the Android platform.
Gillett said that when you see these big Android market share numbers, it represents parties who have done one of two things. It represents a party that either grabbed the open source code and created a device that is nominally Android, with no access to the Google secret sauce; or, that is using the Google Play services to create a device that is fully integrated into the Google ecosystem.
Many of the low-end "Android" devices coming from the Asian market are of the open source variety, but even the branded orthodox Android devices have their own challenges. Devices like the Kindle Fire and some of the Lenovo tablets run a version of the Android OS, but push their own proprietary apps above the standard Android apps. For example, some of the Lenovo tablets might encourage a user to use their own proprietary mail client for the device instead of Gmail.
"I'm going to crudely assert that less than one third of Android devices are truly engaged deeply with Google's digital platform," Gillett said.
The fragmentation and confusion we see here are reason enough that we shouldn't be measuring success by sales number alone, but we should also look at how consumers are using these devices.
OS usage and engagement
The chart above shows the percentage of total web traffic worldwide, across all platforms, that is taken up by Android and iOS. While Android's usage percentage is climbing, it only started to climb to a competitive level toward the end of 2013. Apple, on the other hand, has seen consistently higher usage than Android, despite capturing less of the fewer overall shares in 2012 and 2013.
These numbers assert that Apple has more engaged customers than Android does and it sees more mobile usage. While Google may be innovating more than Apple currently and working to make tech integration more seamless with services like Google Now, that's not yet selling point for average customers. The fact of the matter is that Apple has established itself as a trusted brand, it has created a product that is a status symbol to own, and it prides itself on the ease of use of its products.
Another measure of engagement, and possibly a measure of trust, is the number of credit cards that each company has on file. Forrester Research conducted a US survey that found Amazon had 91 million credit cards on file. In second place was Apple with 41 million cards on file, and Google came in a distant third with 22 million cards on file. So, Apple has nearly twice as many customers who trust them with their financial data as Google does.
Bottom line: More people are engaged with their Apple devices, and more people are spending money on their Apple devices.
"The biggest opportunity for Apple is to dramatically expanding the capabilities and usage of their online services platform," Gillett said. "Google's opportunity is to figure out how to create more of a win-win between Google and the device makers who use Android today."
Google has built more momentum in innovation and product development, while Apple has maintained momentum building a more profitable business. Whether it is Apple or Google at the top of the heap, you cannot deny that they are both building platforms and business models that will shape the next decade in the tech industry.
By Peter Coy Janet Yellen, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, speaks during a news conference following a Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington on March 19
Janet Yellen may have just committed the first substantial blunder of her chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. The mistake: being specific when the occasion called for generality. “The more experienced [Ben] Bernanke knew to avoid clarifying deliberately vague statement language,” Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, wrote in a client note after the financial markets reacted badly.
Investors are dying to know when the Federal Reserve will start raising its target for the federal funds rate, which has been stuck on the floor at zero percent to 0.25 percent since December 2008. The Fed has repeatedly refused to be pinned down. In its statement today, for example, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) said “it likely will be appropriate to maintain the current target range for the federal funds rate for a considerable time after the asset purchase program ends [emphasis added].”
At her first press conference since becoming Fed chair in February, Yellen was asked what the Fed meant by “a considerable time.” The correct answer to this question is, “We weren’t specific for a reason. Go away.” Yellen, having been connected with the Fed in one capacity or another for most of the past 20 years, should have known that. Instead, she said, “You know, this is the kind of term it’s hard to define, but, you know, it probably means something on the order of around six months or that type of thing.” That was a bit quicker than markets had been expecting, so interest rates rose and stocks fell. The comment “sent equity markets into something of a tailspin,” wrote Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Michael Wallace of Action Economics in Colorado called Yellen’s specificity a “gaffe.” He wrote that Yellen made “the mistake of ‘taking the bait’ and providing a time reference for the purposefully ambiguous phrase.” It wasn’t the only factor in the market selloff today—new economic projections by members of the FOMC were also a factor—but it did make a difference.
It’s a fair bet that other FOMC members will be suggesting to Yellen that she stick closer to the script next time she addresses reporters.
For more than four years, General Motors (GM) struggled to shed the loser image of a corporation that needed a $50 billion taxpayer bailout in 2009 to survive a self-inflicted near-death experience. Now, in the wake of a February recall of 1.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts and other discontinued models, GM’s much-derided status as “Government Motors” has unlikely appeal. Company lawyers are counting on its 2009 bankruptcy arrangements as a bulwark against a litigation threat that grows more ominous by the day, following GM’s admission that it knew of faulty ignition switches more than a decade ago and failed to fix the problem.
Whether or not the GM legal strategy holds up, the recall mess has revived the company’s reputation for unreliability and created a crisis for Mary Barra, its new chief executive and the first woman to lead a major auto manufacturer. The carmaker took a $300 million charge in its first quarter to cover the costs of various recalls, including a new one announced on March 17, covering 1.55 million newer models such as the Buick Enclaves and GMC Acadias that have faulty air bags and Cadillac XTS sedans with brake flaws that may result in overheating or engine fires. Detroit has had better months.
For the moment, the balky ignition systems pose the most serious legal threat to GM. If bumped or weighed down by a heavy key chain, the switch can shut off engines and power systems and disable air bags, the company has acknowledged. For drivers, having the car go stone dead in 60-mile-per-hour freeway traffic is nothing short of terrifying. For plaintiffs’ lawyers, the scenario translates to courtroom gold.
The manufacturer so far has linked 31 crashes and 12 deaths to the defects found in certain smaller Chevrolets, Pontiacs, and Saturns made between 2003 and 2007. In cold statistical terms, a dozen deaths over a decade doesn’t sound like a disaster. Some 30,000 people die every year on America’s roads; manufacturers in the U.S. have recalled 38 million cars in just the past two years. None of the defective GM models are in production any more, so the universe of ignition-related fatalities should be limited.
What’s the big deal, then? First there’s the dismaying fact that some GM employees have known about the ignition flaw since 2001 and failed to fix it. “The process employed to examine this phenomenon was not as robust as it should have been,” GM has said with exquisite understatement. Having quietly settled a couple of ignition defect lawsuits over the years, GM had already turned over thousands of pages of internal documents to plaintiffs’ lawyers, some of which show worried discussions among engineers about the problematic switches. Combine consumer deaths with an admitted failure to act promptly—the fatality list is bound to grow now that trial lawyers are advertising for cases—and you’re looking at allegations of a coverup: Which top executives knew what, and when did they know it?
GM refuses to answer inquiries about how many suits have been filed since the recall, but you can bet the figure will grow in coming weeks. The Justice Department has begun a criminal investigation to supplement probes by the Department of Transportation and various congressional committees. The dirty laundry will come out.
Not to worry, say Wall Street analysts and attorneys sympathetic to GM. The company’s bankruptcy restructuring buried pre-2009 liabilities, including those related to product defects, in the same grave that contains the remains of the “old” GM. The “new” GM got the productive assets and operations, free and clear. In a March 12 research note, JPMorgan Chase analyst Ryan Brinkman predicted the financial costs of the ignition-related recall would be “de minimus,” a mere trifle. Harvey Miller, GM’s lead outside bankruptcy lawyer, says the liability shield will hold. The time to litigate pre-2009 claims, Miller insists, “has long passed.”
Well, maybe. The prospect of showing corporate deceit—and the accompanying potential of punitive damages—has plaintiffs’ lawyers preparing a frontal assault on the Chapter 11 defense. On March 14, Bob Hilliard, an injury attorney in Corpus Christi, Tex., filed a proposed class action in federal court seeking $6 billion to $10 billion for the lost value of cars affected by the February recall. Hilliard separately represents the families of two teenagers who died in a 2006 crash of a Chevy Cobalt in Wisconsin. He alleges that the company improperly failed to disclose the extent of its potential liability during Chapter 11 proceedings.
“If you are aware of potential exposure to litigation and you don’t reveal it, that’s fraud,” Hilliard told Bloomberg News. “I’m going to go back to that bankruptcy judge and say, ‘You have to undo this, the liability of the old GM, because it was the new GM’s continued coverup after the bankruptcy that allowed people to be hurt or killed.’ ” Hilliard’s small firm, Hilliard Munoz Gonzales, is advertising online for more pre-2009 cases; so are larger plaintiffs’ firms such as Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco.
This kind of litigation tends to snowball, as Toyota Motor (TM) discovered in 2009 and 2010. After years of unexplained crashes, the company recalled more than 10 million vehicles because of floor mats that could get tangled with accelerator pedals and defects with the pedals themselves. The recalls led to lawsuits alleging another problem: that some Toyotas hurled themselves into walls and trees because of a software flaw. In its defense, Toyota suggested that many of the complaining drivers had stamped on the accelerator when they meant to hit the brake.
Government investigations found no Toyota software bug, but the suits kept coming. Last year, without conceding wrongdoing, the company agreed to pay $1.6 billion to settle litigation related to the reduced value of its autos. Then, after a federal judge in Santa Ana, Calif., signaled he’d allow jurors to assess conflicting evidence on the software issue, Toyota agreed in December to begin talks with plaintiffs’ attorneys to resolve claims tied to injuries and deaths. (Not coincidentally, the Hilliard and Lieff Cabraser firms were involved in the litigation against Toyota.)
Adam Epstein, a lawyer turned boardroom adviser, sees GM as even more vulnerable than its Japanese rival. “In the case of Toyota,” he says, “the specter of operator error muddied the waters for plaintiffs. With GM, like Ford (F) Pinto, there is a defect of which the manufacturer had considerable prior notice and elected not to act. The GM ignition matter is to the plaintiffs’ bar what the iconic poster of Farrah Fawcett was to teenage boys in the 1970s.”
Apart from any potential courtroom damages, GM faces the likelihood of long-term reputational harm. Consumers don’t care whether the company’s attorneys can plausibly argue that Chapter 11 makes it immune from older lawsuits, Epstein argues. “If the social media complex pillories GM for the ignition issue,” he says, “the finer points of bankruptcy law won’t matter.”
Toyota, which historically has enjoyed a far stronger reputation than GM for reliability, suffered greatly from the unintended acceleration recalls. After the complaints surfaced, its U.S. retail market share fell from 18 percent to 13 percent, though the proportion has improved slightly since then.
Barra, who became GM’s chief executive on Jan. 15, has said she knew nothing about the ignition problem until February. If that’s true, it’s truly scary. An engineer by training, she served in senior executive positions the whole time lower-level employees were fumbling around with the deficient switches? People at her level were kept in the dark?
Barra now faces the dual challenge of fending off a litigation onslaught and persuading the marketplace that the new GM really is a different company making better cars. It won’t be easy; as a holdover from the sclerotic old GM, she’s not ideally suited to proclaim that a better day has dawned on Detroit’s largest manufacturer. “There’s no way she’s going to come out of this looking like some kind of hero,” says Dave Sullivan, an industry analyst with AutoPacific. “The best thing is to be honest and upfront and hopefully put this to bed as quickly as possible.” Expecting a quick fix seems naive.
With Jeff Green and Jeff Plungis
Barrett is an assistant managing editor and senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, Law of the Jungle, which tells the story of the Chevron oil pollution case in Ecuador, will be published by Crown in September 2014. His most recent book is GLOCK: The Rise of America’s Gun.
The first computer programmers and most celebrated mathematicians throughout history were women. In honor of Women's History Month, here are the oft-forgotten, influential tech pioneers. In this photo from 1946, two of the first programmers, Esther Gerston and Gloria Gordon work with the ENIAC computer.
Ada Lovelace, first computer programmer
Ada Lovelace, born in 1815 to famed poet Lord Byron and his wife, is known as the first computer programmer. When renowned mathematician Charles Babbage began working on his "Analytical Engine," she served as the key interpreter, describing exactly how it worked for the public. Specifically, she explained how the machine used algorithms and sequences--the world's first computer program. Her explanation was published in 1843. In the 70s, the Department of Defense created a combination of computer languages and named them "Ada."
Margaret Knight, famous inventor
Margaret Knight is considered the most famous 19th century inventor. In 1868, she invented a machine that folded and glued paper, which made the flat-bottomed paper bags still in use today. She built a wooden model, but needed an iron one to apply for a patent. Charles Annan, who worked in the shop with her, stole the design and filed for a patent. She sued, was awarded the patent in 1871, and founded the Eastern Paper Bag Co. She also invented several devices for rotary engines and a numbering machine.
Knight's paper bag machine patent
Margaret Knight worked in textile mills throughout her young life, and reportedly designed her first invention at the age of 12. Over her lifetime, she received at least 27 patents, the most famous being this paper bag machine.
Emmy Noether, the master mathematician
Albert Einstein called Emmy Noether the most significant and creative mathematician of all time. She was an extremely influential German mathematician who invented a theorem that explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. She also made huge contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. During Hitler's rise in 1933, she was expelled from her position at the University of Gottingen because she was Jewish, so she gathered students at her apartment to discuss mathematics and field theory.
Grace Hopper, computer programming pioneer
Grace Hopper worked on the UNIVAC in 1960. Hopper was a mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. She is perhaps one of the most well-known pioneers in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I., the first commercial electronic computer. This led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She also developed the first complier for a computer programming language, and is known for popularizing the term "debugging."
"Amazing Grace" Hopper
Here, Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, promotes Capt. Grace Hopper commodore with President Ronald Reagan present. The USS Hopper Navy destroyer was named after Hopper. The Cray XE6 "Hopper" computer was named for her as well. She also pioneered the testing for computer systems, advocating for networks of small computers in the 1970s to replace large systems.
Betty Holberton, first ENIAC computer programmer
Betty Holberton programs the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was one of the original six programmers for ENIAC. She also helped develop the UNIVAC and its control panels, as well as several programming languages with Grace Hopper.
Bartik's legacy
Jean Bartik, right, and Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, widow of John Mauchly, hold part of the computer he helped design. Bartik was one of the original programers for the ENIAC computer. She later went on to program BINAC and UNIVAC. She was later an editor for Auerbach Publishers, and worked for Data Decisions.
Top Secret Rosies, female programmers of WWII
During WWII, more than 2.2 million women were working in war industries. The factory workers were dubbed "Rosie the Riveter," which was paired with that iconic image of the strong-armed working woman. But women--including the six original programmers of the ENIAC--were also recruited to be "computers" (programmers) and do ballistic calculations. The programming was done so in secret, so they were not known or adored by the public. The first job for the six women was programming a trigger for the atomic bomb.
Hedy Lamarr, actress and inventor
Hedy Lamarr was a famous Austrian actress and beauty icon, but she also contributed an important invention: the basic technology for spread spectrum and frequency hopping, which led to wireless communications. The technology manipulated radio frequencies to form an unbreakable code to prevent enemy interceptions. She worked on the invention with composer George Antheil in 1941, and was awarded a patent, but the idea was not implemented in the U.S. until 1962. Reportedly, she wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was not allowed. She was eventually honored for her contributions in 1997.
Katherine Johnson, first female NASA mathematician
In 1953, Katherine Johnson joined Langley Research Center as a research mathematician for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which eventually became NASA. At first, Johnson was assigned to an all-male flight division. Her assertiveness earned her a place at the meetings, which were previously only for males. At NASA, she joined the the Spacecraft Controls Branch, where she calculated the flight trajectory for the first American into space in 1959, as well as Apollo 11's flight to the moon in 1969.
Radia Perlman, inventor of STP
Radia Perlman attended MIT in the 1980s, and was one of a very small number of females in her classes. While working for Digital Equipment Corporation, Perlman invented spanning tree protocol (STP), fundamental for the operation of network bridges, as well as contributions to network design and standardization such as TRILL. She was named an Intel Fellow in 2010. Perlman has often been called the "Mother of the Internet," but she recently opened up to The Atlantic about disapproving of the title.
Anita Borg, lifelong advocate for women in tech
After returning from a conference that consisted of mostly males, Anita Borg started a mailing list for women in technology called Systers. Borg, a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from New York University, was co-founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women, a conference held every two years to honor research by women in computing, and eventually founded the Institute for Women in Technology, a nonprofit focused on encouraging women to enter the computer science and technology fields.
Summary: The disruptions that the Internet has unleashed on society have only just begun. Learn what the next stages will bring over the coming decade. By Jason Hiner |
Last week we celebrated the 25th anniversary of when Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the world wide web. While the web technically rides on top of the Internet—which had its origins a couple decades earlier—it was the web that turned the Internet into a world-shaping phenomenon. And today, the two terms are virtually synonymous among the masses.
Throughout 2014, as part of the web's 25th birthday celebration, the Pew Research Internet Project is releasing a series of reports on the impact of the web—as well it's future. This past week, in honor of the anniversary of Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal to create the web, Pew released the report, Digital Life in 2025. It surveyed a group of 2,558 technology experts on their expectations about the future trajectory of the Internet. It then mined that data for patterns and the most poignant comments.
The remarks that Pew highlighted from these experts include a little navel-gazing, fear-mongering, and overly-optimistic blather. But, the interesting insights far outweigh the drivel. While I recommend reading the full report, I've pulled out the most useful insights and listed them below.
1. The end of being online
"The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives," said Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, "We won't think about 'going online' or 'looking on the Internet' for something—we'll just be online, and just look."
2. A dashboard of your life
"When the cost of collecting information on virtually every interaction falls to zero, the insights that we gain from our activity, in the context of the activity of others, will fundamentally change the way we relate to one another, to institutions, and with the future itself," said Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future. "We will become far more knowledgeable about the consequences of our actions; we will edit our behavior more quickly and intelligently."
3. The data-layered world
"We will grow accustomed to seeing the world through multiple data layers," said Daren C. Brabham, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. "This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing and professional networking, and gaming, as well as policing and espionage."
4. Dealing with bad actors
"Of course, there will be bad acting by some, taking advantage of organizational vulnerabilities and gaming systems in other ways," said Doc Searls, director of ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Organizations in the meantime will continue rationalizing negative externalities, such as we see today with pollution of the Internet’s pathways by boundless wasted advertising messages, and bots working to game the same business. But … civilization deals with bad acting through development of manners, norms, laws and regulations. Expect all of those to emerge and evolve over the coming years."
5. Disruption of the state
"The most neglected aspect of the impact is in the geopolitics of the Internet," said Randy Kluver, professor of communication at Texas A&M University. "There are very few experts focused on this, and yet the rise of digital media promises significant disruption to relations between and among states. Some of the really important dimensions include the development of transnational political actors/movements, the rise of the virtual state, the impact of digital diplomacy efforts, the role of information in undermining state privilege (think Wikileaks), and … the development of cyber-conflict (in both symmetric and asymmetric forms)."
6. Reinventing jobs
"The Internet, automation, and robotics will disrupt the economy as we know it. How will we provide for the humans who can no longer earn money through labor?" said Robert Cannon, Internet law and policy expert. "The good news is that the technology that promises to turn our world on its head is also the technology with which we can build our new world. It offers an unbridled ability to collaborate, share, and interact. 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.' It is a very good time to start inventing the future."
7. The power to tackle bigger problems
"The problems that humanity now faces are problems that can’t be contained by political borders or economic systems," said JP Rangaswami, chief scientist for Salesforce. "Traditional structures of government and governance are therefore ill-equipped to create the sensors, the flows, the ability to recognize patterns, the ability to identify root causes, the ability to act on the insights gained, the ability to do any or all of this at speed, while working collaboratively across borders and time zones and sociopolitical systems and cultures. From climate change to disease control, from water conservation to nutrition, from the resolution of immune-system-weakness conditions to solving the growing obesity problem, the answer lies in what the Internet will be in decades to come. By 2025, we will have a good idea of its foundations."
8. Sweeping away existing structures
"It is going to systemically change our understandings of being human, being social, and being political," said Nishant Shah, professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University, Germany. "It is not merely a tool of enforcing existing systems; it is a structural change in the systems that we are used to. And this means that we are truly going through a paradigm shift—which is celebratory for what it brings, but it also produces great precariousness because existing structures lose meaning and valence, and hence, a new world order needs to be produced in order to accommodate for these new modes of being and operation."
If you think the U.S. job market is snapping back, you’re probably not a teenager hunting for work. A report released today (PDF) uses new statistics and analysis to call attention to an employment decline that’s so big it would be considered a national emergency if it affected people older than age 19.
The study’s lead author, Andrew Sum, the head of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, brings a reformer’s zeal to the topic. In 2000, he points out, 45 percent of teens (aged 16 to 19) were employed. By 2011, the last year covered by the study, that ratio had plummeted to 26 percent.
“If the employment rate went down 20 percentage points for adults, what would you call it?” he asked me. “For teenagers, it’s worse than the Great Depression. The question is, why don’t we care?”
It’s not as if things are getting better, either. Last month the employment-to-population ratio for teens was stuck at 25.8 percent—significantly lower than in the recession years of 2008 and 2009.
The 28-page, chart-filled, multiauthor study, The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults, was prepared with the help of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. It focuses on the prospects for teens and young adults aged 20 to 24—the second-worst-performing group in the labor force–in the biggest 100 metro areas. It finds that staying in school accounts for only a small part of the drop in the teen and young adult employment-to-population ratio. The report also documents a “Great Age Twist”: The employment rate actually rose for workers 55 and older between 2000 and 2011. By 2011, 65- to 74-year-old senior citizens were as likely to have jobs as 16- to 19-year-old youngsters.
Unemployment is most severe among low-income teens—those who need jobs the most. Says the report: “So-called ‘disconnected youth’ or ‘opportunity youth’ are missing key education and employment experiences and are at increased risk for a host of negative outcomes: long spells of unemployment, poverty, criminal behavior, substance abuse, and incarceration.”
To Sum, youth joblessness is planting the seeds for bigger problems in the years ahead. He says history shows that people who can’t get jobs when they’re teenagers are less likely to find work when they’re older. “You could say you had a bad year, you’ll be OK next year,” Sum says. “That’s not the way the world works.”
The report offers several solutions, among them: Apprenticeships that give high school and college students a taste of work; classes that teach young people the skills employers are demanding; “on-ramps” that smooth the transition from school to work; subsidized jobs programs; and an expanded earned-income tax credit “specifically targeting younger workers without children.”
