Apple claims that US factories can’t respond at the speed of business, and that it makes good-faith efforts to improve working conditions along its supply chain.  Oh, and everyone else does it, too.

You know something?  They’re both right, and the argument here is at cross-purposes.  But yes, Apple and Timothy Cook have a special responsibility here.

The problem is that Apple supports its fast response to market trends through business practices that no American would tolerate.  Yet it practices them in a part of the world where they represent a distinct improvement over past working practices.

I’m a believer, probably more so than most of my fellow countrymen, of the economic and intellectual value found around the world.  Free trade, and the ability to source for business rather than political reasons makes us better and wealthier in the aggregate.

I am not going to fault Apple for doing what is best for its business, and for taking advantage of the skills and unique value that can be found in other parts of the world.  The company does have the obligation to work to improve the practices of its suppliers, but it also has an obligation to its customers and other stakeholders.

The New York Times and others are right to point out that there is a cost to a larger world society for our infatuation with electronic toys.  That burden falls on all of us, not just Apple, but Apple is a very active and visible part of that culture.

Could Apple conduct business differently?  In one sense, it is doing just what its competitors are, only better.  But it has a position that enables it to consolidate and extend that advantage far into the future.  It is in a very cutthroat business, where one error of strategy can relegate it to has-been status within a year or two.  But that position also affords it a window of opportunity to create another revolution, this one involving US manufacturing, and manufacturing technology in general.

Ultimately, Steve Jobs (and Timothy Cook’s) assertion that American manufacturing can’t respond fast enough for its business is arrogant and unhelpful.  But it’s also a challenge to the US.  It’s not about waking up thousands of factory workers in a dormitory and feeding them biscuits and tea.  It can’t be, now and especially not in the future.  It simply won’t work after this relatively brief period of history.

Timothy Cook, if anyone has the power to single-handedly change manufacturing in the US to deliver business responsiveness within the parameters of our social covenant, you do, as much as Henry Ford did over a hundred years ago.  Do it, and don’t shirk your position of responsibility here.  You are at the pinnacle of American ingenuity; let’s see you say that it can be done.  And then deliver, as most of us believe that Apple is able.

But the culture is one that is foreign to me.  Salespeople are both encouraged and incentivized to remove barriers to a sale, and that’s largely a good thing (a sales engineer friend cynically refers to this as “lie until they buy”).

But barriers can also exist for legitimate reasons.  For example, lowering the price until the sale is no longer profitable makes sense only in the most exceptional situation, such as if there is a strong expectation of future business at a better price.

Or there may be legal restrictions on a sale, such as certain pharmaceutical sales of unapproved drugs in the US.  It turns out that it is also a crime to advertise such products, which is what got Google into hot water not long ago (sorry, great article, but largely behind a paywall).  In the sting described in this article, Google sales executives enabled a man playing a role as an illegal drug provider to bypass the company’s own restrictions against such advertising.  In the end, Google paid a $500 million fine rather than be prosecuted.  Apparently there was some evidence that problems with these advertisements were well known within the company up to an including Larry Page.

The incentives to making the sale can be significant.  Certainly there is the individual component, both in sales commissions and in the recognition of your peers and management.  In most tech companies, the best sales professionals go to “Club”, a fully-paid motivational trip to an exotic locale (Hawaii and Caribbean resorts are common).

But the pressure on sales professionals can be significant.  They have quotas that are often unrealistic, and sometimes don’t get good support from the rest of the company.  They are often the “first up against the wall when the revolution occurs”.  And sometimes the line between legitimate and legal doesn’t seem all that clear.

None of this is meant to condone Google’s likely illegal behavior in this matter, or to apologize for boorish and occasionally illicit sales behavior in general.  But I want to point out that at ground level, it’s at least understandable, if often ugly and ambiguous.

If only it were so easy to revolutionize education.  Education was supposed to be revolutionized in the late 1980s with the availability of PCs (and Macs) in the classroom.  Some schools went so far as to have close to a one-to-one ratio of computers to students, so that each student would have ample opportunity to benefit from substantial time on the computer.

The results were mixed, due to a combination of a lack of teacher understanding of how to make use of computers, the inability to change curricula to take advantage of the strengths of computers, and inconsistent use between and within schools.  In practice, very little changed.

A few years later, the Web became public and popular, and schools spent embarrassingly large sums of money to network and connect to the Web.  More changed, but the curricula pretty much stayed the same.  Little changed in the way of learning outcomes.

It’s entirely possible that iPads, or tablets in general, can become more or less living textbooks.  These textbooks may even be kept more or less up to date, incorporating recent events and trends.

But that’s not going to revolutionize education.  In my mind, the major impediment is that curricula and practices are largely and rigidly standardized.  You can’t substantially change primary education until you change the process.

And then there’s ZDNet’s look at Apple’s EULA, where Apple appears to claim a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output.  Apple wants to monetize its so-called revolution in ways that stretch the bounds of credulity.

I don’t blame Apple for this pretty transparent attempt at increasing profits with very little effort.  If I were Apple, I would probably try to leverage my technology and market position in similar ways.

But the iPad isn’t going to change education.  As big and successful as Apple is, public education has far too much legacy inertia behind it.  Apple simply can’t pretend that a decent hardware product and a dubious content licensing model is going to move the needle here.

But I’m just getting caught up on my posts after having been in Vienna, Austria for the last week, speaking at Software Quality Days.  A bit to add to the discussion is a description of Codecademy usability by IBM evangelist Antonio Cangiano on his blog Zen and the Art of Programming.  He had a smart but nonprogrammer friend work through the initial Codecademy lessons, and discovered that while the lessons themselves were fairly easy to follow, if something didn’t work right, there was no help, and the student was stuck.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but in general they boil down to the fact that some of the things that programmers take for granted.  And once you make an error, it’s very difficult to understand that error and recover from it.

That’s not a knock on Codecademy.  Most of the commenters to Cangiano’s blog have generally good things to say about its approach to teaching programming.  However, most of those commenters were already programmers, trying it out or brushing up on their skills.  Those that report difficulties were Codecademy’s target market – those wanting to learn programming for the first time.

It takes more than a willing body and good online instructional software to learn programming.  It takes a dedicated and prepared student with a specific set of goals in mind.  And it takes a variety of instructional sources, including an expert such as an instructor, a text for background, immediate and accurate feedback, and a community to exchange notes and ask questions.  It does also take a good instructional sequence such as that provided by Codecademy, but that’s simply not sufficient.

I discovered the next day that the proximate cause of this traffic was the announcement by Codecademy of Codeyear, a resolution to learn how to code in 2012. By signing up, Codecademy will send you weekly interactive lessons on learning programming.

This publicity has caused me to rethink the position I stated back in November. That position was that you didn’t learn programming on a lark. It’s a difficult skill, akin in many ways to learning a foreign language but also in some ways more difficult, and one that Michael Bloomberg is probably not going to pick up over the next twelve months.

Was I wrong?

Sorry, I still don’t buy it.

I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions in general. If you need the turning of the calendar to resolve to change your life in some way, you’re probably not going to make very much progress.

But I stand by my original statement. Despite the really impressive advances in programming techniques, it’s a skill that requires dedication, practice, and purpose behind it. You don’t learn to code to become a better human being. And while acquiring that skill may provide a keen appreciation of programming and computing, or make you a better human being, I kind of doubt it.

On the other hand, if you’re already a programmer looking to broaden your skill set, this may be worthwhile. If you work in IT in some capacity and see a career path into programming, this may help (but isn’t the complete answer).

But it’s not going to make you a programmer, or even technical in any sense. It won’t help you get a job as a programmer.

I speak from some experience. I began my higher education with two degrees in psychology, prior to pursuing first applied math, then computer science. Even with this background, in the heated tech job market of the late 1980s in the Boston area, it took me a long time to find a relevant job. One online course just isn’t going to do it.

Well, I’ve had my say. Sign up if you want.

Over the past few years, that dynamic has changed drastically. Increasingly, consumer technologies are driving innovation. After widespread consumer adoption, individuals are bringing them into the workplace, and they are becoming business tools.

To be fair, Apple had a lot to do with this dynamic. The iPod and later iPhone were clearly meant for consumers, yet both are a staple of business use today. I personally use an Android phone, but see just as many tech people with iPhones (regrettably, the Blackberry is almost extinct among tech professionals today).

It goes farther. If you scan the industry weekly on a regular basis, you’ll find that many of the stories are about consumer products and interests. Scanning the likes of Computerworld and eWeek, I see headlined news stories on Apple, Facebook, the Samsung Galaxy tablet, and Google TV, among others (of course, the Consumer Electronics Show is next week, which may be driving some of this).

It didn’t used to be this way. Today consumer technologies are getting the most attention by startups and entrepreneurs. There has been an explosion of social media over the last several years, but it’s not clear if that’s a cause or effect.

Why is business playing second fiddle today? I don’t know, and if anyone has any ideas (or wishes to call bullshit on this observation in general), let me know.

I wonder if this trend is cyclical in nature, and in the near future we’ll once again see innovation in business-oriented technologies. Or if this shift is more or less permanent. It’s fascinating to look at the behavior of businesses and individuals with the roles reversed.

But the beginning of the end wasn’t iTunes, but Napster, using an odd approach to music sharing over the Internet.  Napster was a peer-to-peer network that stored music downloads on all members’ computers, and enabled any member to search for songs across the network and download desired files from any member computer.

While it was an elegant and highly scalable computing architecture, in practice it simply didn’t work that well.  Few people had broadband connections at the time, and many downloads proceeded at modem speeds – 33 to 56 kbps.  Users often turned off their computer, or cut off downloaders in order to improve their own Internet performance.  Quality of shared songs was often poor.

I mention this because Napster is officially dead and buried.  In one sense, it was a victim of its own success.  Because millions of people around the world shared music, the music industry simply couldn’t ignore it.  But rather than copy it, or subvert it with its own solution, the music industry took a different approach.

Of course, the music industry protects its intellectual property, and has the money to do so.  It sued Napster, and also sued many of the more egregious individual downloaders.  Napster claimed in court that it merely provided the infrastructure; it had no central control over what users did with that infrastructure.

It was a disingenuous argument, but it still took several years for the case to wind through the court system.  Napster ceased providing the network, and was eventually acquired.  Now it is officially shut down.

But Napster demonstrated that there was a consumer interest digital music downloads; the question was whether people were willing to pay for them.  As iTunes proved, the answer was yes if the price was right.  Without Napster, the music industry may still not have figured it out.