舞台| On Stagea preparatory project for serious blogging

James Reynolds’ China: the Problem of Cross-Culture Communication?

Having been following this blog for some time: James Reynolds’ China.

The author, James Reynolds, is a BBC correspondent in China. Besides his duty to send reports back to BBC audiences, he also diligently keeps this blog as a more (in my opinion) personal source of information about China. Yet more diligently is he bombarded for his bias in almost all his blog entries by his Chinese readers and a handful of Westerners (by which the Chinese usually mean the Europeans and the Americans.)

Is he biased? I would say ‘yes’ (from a Chinese point of view.) Mr. Reynolds is overly concerned with the problem of pollution, human rights, and Tibet, and makes every effort to connect whatever piece of news to these topics.

And I ask for your sympathy for those angry Chinese commentators who do not wish to see their home country reduced to these issues. Good or bad, there are a fair amount of things worth knowing to a Westerner, so far as I know.

I very much appreciate those Westerners who bring the concept of “Zheng You” to the discussion. They understand that the Chinese traditionally take who criticizes as the best kind of friend, and ask the Chinese around Mr. Reynolds’ blog to behave accordingly. The only problem I have with this view is that by all (Chinese) means, Mr. Reynolds does not appear to be a friend.
Or maybe he is. Just that he does not “appear” to be. I only realized the problem this morning, that Mr. Reynolds had used way too much sarcasm than the Chinese would like to take. It is not that the Chinese cannot take criticism; but sarcasm seems to be a different matter. I myself does not welcome the use of sarcasm, and have personally seen sarcasm driving conversation the wrong way.

My only question now is: Is this sarcasm cultural? Or is it just James?

I’ve been to the UK myself. Having spent a year in London, I have not noticed that people in London (not necessarily Londoners) tend to use sarcasm more often than people in my home country (China) do. I also remember reading some advice against the use of sarcasm in communication, but that could be attributed to the Americans.

If it is the British (or Western, perhaps) culture to criticize with sarcasm, then the Chinese should learn to understand it: take the criticism, but forget about the bad jokes. Meanwhile, it is highly advisable that Mr. James Reynolds write his blog in another tone—a more “friendly” one—as he is now in China, it should not be too hard for him to find out about the true meaning of friend in a Chinese context.

Why We Need More Haters

This article is long due. As time goes by there are more and more cases, and this article by awflasher (in Chinese) inspired me to finally pick the topic up again.

Disclaimer: although this article is not baseless argument, it does not, however, provide all the necessary data, for the nature of the article is a blog post, and not an independent research. I will point you to the relevant data sources the best I can.

One recent big PR oops occurred with Microsoft China. Yes, I am referring to the Oct. 20 black screen issue (Google search result). Last October Microsoft China chose to distribute adverse patches through its update channel to catch and notify unlicensed users. This has led to great debate inside China, ranging from the guilt of using unlicensed software on the support camp to the “illegal” hacking of computers on the opposing camp, and everyone sounds somewhat reasonable—it is a twisted software market anyway, so maybe twist means should be employed to get things right? Personally, I am in support of Microsoft for its actions to crack down on software piracy, but the bottom line is that they have chosen the wrong target, and have little to gain (if not much to lose) in their anti-piracy actions. In China, common individuals do not have the money to buy what they can get for very little, (and they take no apparent legal risks anyway.) They are not sources of revenue for Microsoft in any foreseeable future. No matter what Microsoft does, they are very unlikely to pay; and in advocating the so called advantage of genuine Windows, Microsoft managed to reap their anger instead.

The Creative soundcard case is pretty much tied up to Microsoft, as Creative refused to update their drivers for the new Vista system. A guy on the forum then reverse-engineered Creative’s drivers and distributed the working drivers to old Creative soundcard owners. This angered Creative, as it apparently upset the plan to force existing users to upgrade their soundcard. In a public letter Creative announced that the choice of releasing drivers was theirs to make, and demanded the hacked version be removed. And then the repercussion came. Cannot help but wonder what if they had admitted their driver blunder (to cover up their real intention) and give up on the plan altogether. Dropping support for the hacked driver might be an option, too, which is evil enough itself; admitting bluntly that they intended to force an upgrade is even worse.

Update: I was not aware that Creative actually released a working driver for Vista after the fiasco. Clearly this does not sound as loudly as the original problem. I wonder if customers are forgiving enough.

Speaking of cover-ups, Asus decided to hide a small issue but ended up raising unwanted attention instead. A sample CPU put into one laptop is no big thing, and it is understandable why Asus would not wish to pay $5 million to prevent the news from coming out. However, firing an extortion case against the over-demanding customer does little to silence the issue. At this point which party is more morally upright and has the true story is not important any more; the damage is already done.

The fourth case may be less known to the masses. KDE (briefly put, a fancy desktop, if you do not know what it is) made a lot of news headlines in the Linux world, of which the negative ones tend to jump out a lot. The issue concerns the user-habit-breaking upgrade to Version 4.0, and has been covered quite objectively here, here and here. Like many other comments, my idea is that the KDE team mismanaged (or totally disregarded) their PR. In the center of the issue is the debate on whom KDE (and Open Source Software) is made for. The KDE team (or some vocal members on the team) does not seem to understand that when you are making a desktop, you rarely are playing alone; although at the beginning it has been pretty much a project to toy with exclusively within the developer community. I understand that KDE is not for profit, but this does not erase off its responsibility, for popularity and trust demand responsibility, too. My view is that the KDE team has not spent much to gain the trust of people it enjoyed just before the 4.0 jump, so it does not appreciate the trust and knows not how to maintain it.

One would suppose that these organizations would learn the lesson from these blunders, but I am doubtful. Among the four cases, only KDE suffered apparent loss: the would-be “greatest release of the year” turned out to be the “greatest hype, controversy, or disappointment” of the year. The consequence for Asus is yet unclear—at least news about their products still comes out daily on the web; yet since Asus does not offer anything that others are not offering, it is reasonable to expect a shift in customer loyalty. For Creative, well, I myself ended up buying a Creative mp3 player this year, even after I heard about the issue—I have no intention to buy creative soundcards though. And for Microsoft, the much-hoped “Year of Linux” has not come up yet in the face of a failing Vista system and the black screen issue.

So it seems that we need yet more haters. More haters to balance the power of the big, and sometimes unethical, organizations. These organizations can do whatever they like to the customers and disregard any PR repercussions. But escalating tension might do no one good in the end; the selfish human nature might wash all parties down the swirl eventually. Free market rules cannot be applied to the big players, and insignificant players like individual customers must be empowered, legally or economically; or can we expect the companies to act more ethical instead?

How could unlicensed Windows be (more) dangerous?

Do you believe that unlicensed installations of the Windows OS are more dangerous than licensed ones? Microsoft is trying to make you believe exactly that. (Yes you read my lines right: both are dangerous anyway.)

Impact of Unlicensed Software on Mid-market Companies (click to download the paper), a white paper completed by Harrison Group and sponsored by Microsoft was published at the end of last September. The paper tries to convey to the mass that companies less committed to legal copies of Windows are more likely to suffer system failures, are less likely to be profitable, and save no significant amount on IT investment—exactly the kind of message that Microsoft is painstakingly pushing to its customers with the much debated Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) campaign.

However, this white paper is as flawed as the WGA. The paper provides data, but does not make valid use of it; on top of that, it is very quick at drawing baseless conclusions—exactly the kind of paper that I was told not to write in graduate school. While my education tells me to write a paper with prudence (hypothesis, literature review, question adjustment, data collection, analysis, careful conclusion and all), so much prudence that I feel a bit old school, this paper is so avant-gard that it just throws in three correlations and jumps right at the conclusion without even fancying about any interesting alternative explanations. Following are some selected problems that I find amusing:

1. The paper does not mention what kind of unlicensed software it is talking about until the last part (on research methodology), therefore the reader might form all kinds of misconceptions about the paper’s claim until they reach the end and discover that the very software is no other than the Windows OS. One cannot help but wonder why unlicensed Windows platforms are so dangerous to their owners. Dare I say that Microsoft makes it so?
2. Hardware is left out in the analysis. The paper is talking about the relation between software and system failures ceteris paribus (as if it has put good control on other variables such as the disk failures and overheated CPUs), but provides no evidence on such matters. Ceteris paribus, Microsoft needs some people to mistakenly install the CIH virus as their OS in order to make their claim appear believable.
3. Correlation means nothing. The paper compares the profitability of companies and discovers that those using licensed software fare better, but So What? Correlation does not suggest causality, and causality can go both ways.
4. Dummy variables, anyone? The paper includes data collected from four countries: the US, UK, China, and Brazil, but in analysis the paper ignores any possible differences among the four and always mixes up the whole data set. Now with a total sample size of 1580 and each of the four countries equally represented (as is claimed in the paper), one would wish to use some dummy variables, such as “US, UK, China”, in their regression, and try to see if there exists any national characteristics; but the paper seems curiously unaware of this approach. You think that the US and UK are very different from China and Brazil in software licence enforcement? You suspect that US and UK companies are more likely to be profitable and be industry leaders? Congratulations! You seem to have outsmarted the paper.
5. How are one more successful than the other if they earn much the same? Compare Figure E on company performance and Figure G on revenue, and you wonder which one would invalid the other. Maybe the companies are in totally different industries? So different that any comparison of growth and revenue is utterly pointless?
6. If you are committed to unlicensed software, why are you spending so much money on software? Figure G shows us that companies spend much the same on software regardless of their commitment to licensed software. Does the paper imply that the cost of legal copies of Windows is negligible, or pirated versions of Windows sell just as expensively as licensed ones? Or is the paper deliberately hiding from us the fact that companies which do not buy Windows (but use it nevertheless) have more resources at hand for other proprietary software (such as Adobe and Autodesk)?
7. Sample bias:
   

   Both IT Professionals and Business Decision Makers were required to indicate that they were extremely or very knowledgeable about how software was used and acquired for their company in order to participate.

   I am not sure if this is a good criteria, but certain companies with such knowledgeable people are less likely to have system failures? And does this criteria disturb the sample pattern across target countries?

8. Alternative software solutions? The authors of the paper write as if they do not know that there are operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. There are. Or else Microsoft does not have to bother with Linux license issues.

This white paper is, sadly, a piece of prostitution. The bottom line is that Microsoft should not have had such a piece fabricated and made itself the laughingstock.

By the way, I hope no one is affected by the annoying black screen for XP—another reason why unlicensed copies of Windows are just so bad…Or does this show that Microsoft actually believes that unlicensed installations have been just as good and feel obliged to do something to undermine their usability, but are somehow unwilling to tell people the truth?