It's oh so quiet

Serenity is not something you associate with crisis. And, yet, opening the bedroom curtains this morning, that's exactly what I encountered. The sky was poster paint blue, the sunshine bright and inviting, and a pair of postmen traded banter from an appropriate social distance, delivering to opposite sides of the street. The usual hustle and bustle of this London suburb has dropped off a cliff. Our turn-of-the-century street in the "village", as the town is referred to (despite being well within the capital), had almost been returned to its original state, save for the scattering of residents' cars parked up and down it.

Yesterday was the same - the silence only occasionally broken by frantic delivery vans charging over the speed humps, their drivers desperate to make the next dump-and-run as part of their new game of contact-free Knock Down Ginger. Even though we're in the midst of a medical crisis, the urban soundtrack of emergency vehicle sirens around here has also been turned right down. On any given day, living close to a high street and its intersection with another local artery, ambulance, police and fire engine sirens are an almost constant cacophony as they battle their way through choked streets. But not now. It is eerie. People really are staying at home.

The other notable silence is in the air. When Heathrow is running takeoffs from its easterly runways, there is usually a steady stream of planes in their initial climb overhead our part of south-west London. But not any more. Last night the quiet was broken only by a helicopter. It reminds me of Tuesday 11 September, 2001. I was living in Sunnyvale in California, in an area served by three international airports - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. On any given day there are hundreds of planes in that airspace, including flights making their 180-degree turns over Sunnyvale itself to line up for landing at SFO. 9/11 unfolded in real time for me. Having been awake, unusually, at 6am and watching CNN as I eat breakfast, a report came in of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Initially it was assumed to be a light aircraft or one of the many helicopters that fly up and down the Hudson River, delivering banking executives to Manhattan's heliports, or taking tourists on sight-seeing flights. Very quickly it became something else.

By 6.45am my time, the Federal Aviation Authority had grounded all commercial aircraft within the continental United States. It was a full twelve hours later that I emerged from the apartment for some fresh air, having spent the day in my pyjamas, frantically channel-hopping to see if any one broadcaster had more news than the others. My break for freedom was to drive up the 101 freeway, with no particular destination in mind, just a desire to see something other than my living room. It was as I drove that I noticed how clear the skies were, and how clear the freeway was. One of the San Francisco Peninsular's two main motorways was notably free-flowing at a time of day when traffic would normally be solid. On an impulse, I came off the 101 at Millbrae and drove up to Junipero Serra Park, which has a view over to SFO. It was then that I fully realised how silent it was. Nothing overhead, nothing moving on the ground. Planes that had been given the 'All Stop' order appeared to be scattered all over the airport's taxiways, like toys abandoned by a child ordered to the dinner table.

That night, around 2am, I was woken by the noise of a jet aircraft flying overhead. The nights were warm in California that September, so I'd left a bedroom window open. As the jet - possibly a fighter - approached, I felt myself bracing. No one knew for sure if that morning's attacks had ended, and middle-of-the-night paranoia meant that there was a fair chance that whatever was approaching could be heading for San Francisco, or the heart of Silicon Valley or, frankly, anywhere. The next morning we gathered at the Philips campus in Sunnyvale, everyone numbed by the previous day's events, all trying to get some collective semblance of understanding of what had happened on the other side of the country. Everyone who lived in the South Bay reported the same experience as mine, of being woken by the sound of an aircraft, and wondering where it might go.

That Wednesday morning we all assembled around the campus barbecue pit (about as Silicon Valley as you get) for an impromptu moment of sombre reflection and to sing (or, in my case, attempt to sing) the Star-Spangled Banner, the US national anthem before returning to our desks and try to get on with some work. I remained there for a few minutes longer, still trying to get my head around the lack of noise in the sky. Amid the continuing uncertainty, the calm, the beatific calm, was as unnerving as it was peaceful. Today, outside this house, it is a reassurance that people are paying attention to the instruction to stay at home. Or, at least, they are in this village.

Computer says no. Again.

Picture: British Airways

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” he probably wasn’t considering flying any distance in economy class. Airlines today are so cost-conscious (i.e. profit-minded) that those utopian days of the proletariat joining the jet-set are now a distant memory as we cram into 10-abreast seats too narrow, and in rows so tight we resemble the enmeshed and entangled bodies of Picasso’s Guernica.

Now, I know what an elitist (and faintly pretentious) thing that is to say, but as my new job will involve frequent international travel, which means flying economy in accordance with responsible company rules (unless upgrades can be scored by a combination of personal cash and general obsequiousness at the gate...), I have a vested interest. And because the majority of my airline loyalty points are with dear old British Airways, I will probably be defaulting to the creaking flag carrier, just to maintain my lounge status. Yes, that’s just how shallow frequent flyers are. Except that BA, once the “world’s favourite airline”, no longer is. In fact, events - largely, it would appear, of their own making - have contrived to make BA anything but.

BA's CEO Alex Cruz will probably be glad to see the back of September: earlier this month he had apologise before the media after it transpired that BA’s website had been hacked - possibly over the course of several days - during which data including customers’ e-mail addresses and credit card information (including critical three-digit CVV codes) was lifted, affecting some 380,000 transactions. Just this last weekend the airline suffered yet another “technical issue with some of our internal systems” (or ‘IT failure’ in clearer parlance) at its hub, Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. Once again, this led to horrendous check-in queues and delays of up to two hours (“slight”, according to BA) to flights all over the world as computers managing the entire bag drop-to-boarding process fell over.

Twitter, as ever, bore the brunt of passengers’ frustrations: journalist Andrew Neil vented: “Yet another computer failure at Terminal 5 Heathrow for British Airways. Now regular occurrence. Flights delayed. Usual shambles, not yet on huge scale.” I’d hardly call it “regular”, but BA’s recent history of IT disasters certainly warrants the “shambles” part. “I think somebody at your organisation should press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and just start again,” another tweeted. BA strenuously denied that computer failure was at fault, calling it a “temporary glitch with some of our internal systems”. In other words, an IT failure.

IT problems have been at the core of BA’s worsening reputation in recent years. Having rolled out its new “cost-effective” ‘BA FLY’ IT system in 2015, it has been beset with problems. Employees reported it breaking within only a few weeks of coming onstream, leading to heavy delays at Heathrow and Gatwick. Almost a year later, on 7 July, 2016, the system suffered another failure, causing enormous queues for check-in at Heathrow. The system was to break down twice more that month, and again the following September, causing problems for the airline throughout the world. And then, in May this year, BA suffered its most reputation-damaging outage to date, when an employee error brought down the BA network leaving 75,000 passengers, their luggage and their planes stranded around the world, leading to 670 cancelled flights and a heavy dent in BA’s profits to boot. It’s easy to blame IT failures, but then again, they shouldn’t be happening so often to all the ‘mission-critical’ parts of an airline’s day-to-day operations, like check-in, baggage and boarding. And a multi-million pound retail activity like a national flag carrier's website, shouldn't be getting so comprehensively compromised by hackers. The suspicion is that penny-pinching, as BA obsessively tries to compete with budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair, is undoing the reputation of an airline that once justifiably claimed to be one of the world’s best.

It’s no accident that most of my frequent flyer miles are with BA, built up mainly over the 17 years I lived abroad and made frequent trips back to the UK. However, over those years, the quality of BA’s service has noticeably eroded, and not just when ‘turning right’ into the supposedly cheap seats. Eager to cram in as many people has possible, even BA’s business class cabin has shrunk, squeezing rows tighter. Business class is where any airline makes its money, but without the high volume of economy passengers, a global carrier like BA would struggle. On short-haul flights, economy passengers now have to pay for snacks. This might be expected on budget airlines, but even when those sandwiches come from Marks and Spencer, it only adds to the cheapening of the BA product.The airline is also somewhat behind on what it provides for long-haul flights: the other week I flew to San Francisco on a 22-year-old Boeing 747. It’s a dear old aircraft - perhaps my favourite widebody still flying - but is definitely showing its age. Even BA's inclusion - finally! - of inflight WiFi on the outbound flight (notably missing on the return trip…) and a refresh of the seats doesn’t mask the fact that other airlines are streets ahead in bringing new planes into their fleets. But even where BA has introduced new aircraft, there are mixed results.

Picture: British Airways

A while ago I flew to Newark in New Jersey from Heathrow in one of BA’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliners, an aircraft much vaunted for innovations to enhance passenger comfort. The reality was that, flying in economy, it was probably the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever experienced. Similar complaints can be found online of BA’s Dreamliner service between London and San Jose (a return journey on such planes I’ll be taking at the end of October...). Rather than being a sumptuous experience, BA has, it would appear, crammed as many revenue-bearing seats and rows into the 787 as possible. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it, to the extent that when I repeat the trip to California in December I’ll be booking myself back onto the ageing 747, flying to San Francisco and putting up with a long hour on the 101 freeway to get down to San Jose.

Of course, I have options. Even with corporate travel, there are probably better options with other airlines, but these will almost certainly involve either American carriers (to avoid at all costs) or time- and patience-sapping stopovers where, inevitably, luggage will go missing, to be retrieved usually after the trip is complete. And now I think of it, BA’s history of losing luggage is not one to be proud of.

Whether they admit it or not (and I’m still prepared to defend it), BA has lost its sheen. Middle-eastern airlines like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, have long eclipsed BA for service, comfort and innovations. Likewise one or two of the Asian carriers, like Singapore and Cathay Pacific. In Europe, I’ve had better experience with Air France, KLM and Lufthansa, carriers of similar or equal historical standing to BA. CNN’s business and travel reporter Richard Quest recently blogged that BA-bashing is “a national pastime”, saying that its status as a national institution put it on a similar par to the BBC or the Church of England for sniping. But having travelled almost exclusively with BA for many, many years, its decline - while not necessarily acute - has been palpable. A spoon fewer here, a more basic meal there - it all adds up. Quest points out that BA is, at least, refreshing its fleet with newer, more efficient planes like the Airbus A380, the Dreamliner and the A350 (which, in the example of the Finnair examples I’ve been on, is extremely comfortable), but if it is just going to squeeze in the maximum number of economy seats as possible, as my experience already of a BA 787 has found, all they are doing is putting Ryanair-standard cabins in the air on premium routes.

Picture: British Airways

Not everyone can fly in business class, and yet those of us flying economy on corporate tickets have often forked out business class pricing, as business travel agents tend to book expensive, fully flexible tickets, rather than the cheap-and-cheerful prices we see as consumers when booking our holidays. I have no problem with budget airlines: easyJet and BA’s own stablemate, Vueling, are perfectly fine for travelling down to the Mediterranean, for work or pleasure. But for long distances, the sort of flights that made BA the national flag carrier to begin with, there’s a sense of non-premium passengers being treated like commodities. I recognise the argument that we, as travellers, want to fly for the least amount of money possible, but I also think that if you want no-frills, you fly with a no-frills carrier (like Norwegian). For what British Airways charges for its longer flights, you’d have thought that passenger comfort - for those of us who ‘turn right’, would be given more attention.

As Quest points out in his post, BA will be 100 years old next year, “a perfect chance to turbo charge the necessary changes”. It was, once, a pioneer, introducing things like premium economy, in which you can ‘almost’ experience business class without paying the high price. Perhaps with a little premium thinking BA could do something about overhauling its currently bruised reputation, both on the ground and in the air.

Into the Valley

I seem to have made something of a habit of visiting Silicon Valley at the same time as its wealthiest resident makes a splash. Four years ago this week I was in Santa Clara with a group of French journalists on the day Apple staged its "Wish we could say more" 'special event' a couple of miles down the road in Cupertino. It was during this that Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, as well as gifting 500 million iTunes subscribers an unsolicited copy of U2’s brand new album, Songs Of Innocence, which no one, it turned out, really wanted at all.

So to be sitting in an office, last Wednesday, just 15 minutes' drive from Apple's latest launch had a feeling of déjà vu about it. But, then, so often these Apple events do. Even without paying direct attention to the event, occasionally glancing at the video stream on Twitter, I could see it was exactly the usual format: big black screens, Tim Cook opening with the latest numbers of how many gazillion iOS products have been sold, a slick film with design chief Sir Jony Ive intoning his philosophy on the look, shape and feel of things, followed by marketing chief Phil Schiller’s sales pitch.

Picture: Apple

As impressive - and as eye-wateringly expensive - as the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, they are - along with the fourth generation Apple Watch also announced - merely incremental. A new 'Bionic' chip, better OLED displays and a few more wizzy gizmos under the skin might be enough to send frenzied fanboys out to queue in front of their local Apple stores with a deckchair and a flask of tea, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just this year's new model. If, like me, you’re considering replacing an older model, then, also like me, money will be burning a hole in your pocket. But it’s nothing essential, no matter how Apple pitches it. Wall Street takes a similar view. The new iPhones will, no doubt, trouser Apple another huge pile of cash to add to their existing $260 billion stash, but gone are the days when the company can announce something irresistibly must-have, and see its stock price rocket. In fact, Apple shares have a habit of dropping if financial analysts give a "meh" reaction to another slew of nice but relatively uninteresting new toys.

Now I think about it, gone are the days when Silicon Valley produced anything that made the world sit up and take notice. Google Glass, anyone? No, me neither. When I first professionally entered the technology world in 1995 it was still possible to create something totally new. These were the heady days of the dot com boom, where ideas born in bedrooms and garages could attract the largesse of venture capitalists and, consequently, the attention of Porsche salesmen. Silicon Valley had, when I made my first business visit in the late 90s, taken over from Hollywood, 400 miles further south, as the world's dream factory. Just as I’d marvelled at the sight of studios like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Paramount when I first visited Southern California, I was equally as slack-jawed several years later driving through San Francisco Bay Area cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale and seeing the logos of Intel, HP and the-then Internet giant Yahoo! emblazoned on corporate real estate.

Then, tech hardware was the thing. Today the Valley is a sea of code as software, data and algorithms churn through its myriad campuses. Whereas once we bought TVs, HiFis, PCs and cameras separately, today all that functionality. can be crammed into a single iPhone, with its monster screen and (as promoted this week as a virtue), high quality speakers with extra wide output (the sort of thing passengers on the London Underground are just going to love...). Those who glue it all together, store it in the cloud and making the networks that deliver all this data and content more efficiently are the burghers of today’s Silicon Valley. Don’t get me wrong, the behemoths are still there - you can’t miss the household brand names who all, to a company, have an R&D presence in the Bay Area (no cheap affair, either, given that the Valley is one of the most expensive places on the planet in which to employ people). But the novelty that exploded in the 90s has worn off. The Dream Factory has given way to a corporate beige.

In the 26 years since I first set foot in Santa Clara County it has cycled through different phases. Dot com excitement and digital tech gave way to health start-ups, who in turn gave way to the green revolution. The dot coms still exist, of course, nestling in and amongst all the other consumer electronics, health tech, IT and telecoms businesses in the Valley. And there is still some sense of innovation. But not a lot of 'new'. Uber and Tesla might be toddlers by comparison to Google or PayPal, and Facebook famously has evolved so far that it is part of two-sevenths of the world's population. Rather than being the startup it once was, with Mark Zuckerburg and a team of coders hunched over their laptops, Facebook is now part of the establishment, as much Valley founding fathers as Intel and HP. Just three years ago Facebook moved into its 430,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Menlo Park. Now it is planning an even bigger "mixed-use village" on the same site that will include a supermarket, 1,500 apartments, a 125,000 square feet retail space and 1.75 million square feet of office space. Google can claim a similar expansion with its vast corporate town in Mountain View (when I lived in the Valley between 2001 and 2003 I’d not even heard of Google - Yahoo! was, to all intents and purposes, "The Internet".

Picture: Google

What hasn’t changed over the last couple of decades is the wealth. Some Valley veterans claim that it's less ostentatious now than it was in the boom years, while others maintain that it is actually more obvious. It's hard to tell, really. Cars, a touchstone of disposable wealth, appear to a little more German in the Bay Area than other places in America, probably to the annoyance of the current keeper of the White House (who is descended from German imports, anyway). And property...well let’s just say that property in the region is even more ludicrously expensive than when I rented a two-bedroom 'condo' for $2400 a month, part of which was subsidised by my employer.

The can-do culture, however, is still there. The sight of basketball hoops nailed to notice boards and dudes in surf shorts skateboarding along corridors may be a tad worn these days, but the culture prevails, even in those giants who've long-since seen the days of being pioneers on the frontier of technology. Campuses across the South Bay are casual environments, where employees are worked hard but are also allowed some fun in laid-back offices. California's weather provides some of that relief, with many corporate HQs providing outdoor spaces for lunchtime barbecues and team picnics. Many companies, too, have followed Google's cultural lead by offering employees free food and snacks throughout the day, an investment that keeps them engaged - and enclosed - at the same time.

When I first arrived in the Valley I was given a lot of sage advice from more established ex-pats. First, I would soon grow bored of the permanent sunshine (I didn't). The second, was never to wear a suit, lest I be viewed with suspicion and, subsequently, likely to close down a business in times of trouble. I completely forgot this maxim this week when I entered the offices of my new employer wearing the jacket-and-chinos combo uniform in London. Instantly I was marked out by people's gazes as an outsider, given that even senior executives here wear T-shirts and jeans. It's an environment I'm very at home amongst - I've never been much of a suit wearer.

Picture: Google

Workplace attire not withstanding, these last few days have brought me to a conclusion. Well, perhaps more of a realisation. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I lived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It's what makes the Valley tick. In the 15 years since I returned to Europe, I've been immersed in a European corporate culture, working for Dutch, French-American and then Finnish companies. Such companies are often national incumbents, more like civil service organisations than enterprises, nurturing careers from cradle-to-grave. Employees are well rewarded with pensions and holiday allowances, statutory sick leave and other social provisions. And thus they work their way steadily towards retirement, when they cash in their pensions or go off to play a lot of golf. Valley companies, however, run on different view. Even those that have been in business many years still feel like they're on some imaginary frontier, where it is impossible to sit still - dangerous, even - less they leave themselves vulnerable. Life is fast, work is hard, but the work-hard, play-hard spirit is tangible. Even in one of the most expensive regions on the planet to buy or even rent property, people seem engaged and self-purposed. It's an age-old cliche, I know, but here the attitude is 'can do', not 'let's give it some thought'. And I like it.