The Wiki Man: In with the old

I have noticed Britons in France or Italy cringe with embarrassment, and mutter apologies to waiters when ordering a cappuccino after dinner — or at any time after noon. ‘Look, you needn’t apologise,’ I say. ‘The reason foreigners drink their coffee black isn’t because they’re sophisticated: it’s because their milk tastes like crap.’

It has always surprised me that two countries which take great pride in food can produce such dismal milk. One theory is that many Mediterranean people have not evolved the ability to digest milk after childhood. So Brits should not feel ashamed at any lack of savoir-faire; if anything, our hosts should feel uncomfortable about their failure to make any genetic headway over the past 20,000 years.

In a country which can’t digest it, there’s no point in producing good milk. And even in a globalised world, it helps to have a home market receptive to what you make. One of the great advantages enjoyed by American technology companies is not only the size of their home market but also its appetite for change. What could be better than a few hundred million people all born (or indoctrinated) with the dream (or delusion) that every aspect of life is capable of continual incremental improvement?

The only problem this causes is a kind of insane restlessness. A new iPhone seems to appear annually. The Kindle is forever taking new forms. A new iPad is due any month now. And each one will make you look at your old one (old, in this case, meaning a year or more) as if it is somehow past its best. Soon you wonder whether you can fob it off on your wife as a birthday present and go and buy the new one — even though it is superior in only trivial ways.