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November 30, 2005
The O.C.
[Recently we’ve got hooked on American TV shows. Starting last year it was Sex & the City. Of late we caught up with Desperate Housewives and Lost. And our latest arrival is the O.C., which I’ll be talking about here]
The O.C., on Fox, how nice to write while watching. We’re on Season 1 Episode 24. Yes, big DVDs with Season 1 and 2 on them from grandma. Unpacking... and onto the blue ray...
Newport Beach, the place where all the hot stuff happens, must be really small. There is no apparent way to hide your wrongdoings (and sins) as somebody is going to be watching you. Marissa’s mom, Julie, (Marissa is the heroin in the O.C.) dates the way-younger Luke while divorcing hubby in progress. Marissa and Ryan (the James-Dean-Ramble-Fish from Chino) and Ryan’s legal brother, Seth, plus Summer, Seth’s girlfriend, go to the movies. Marissa gets out in tears, movie’s depressing or she is, I vote that she is, and out there who do they meet? Mum and young heart-throbber Luke. More tears.
The same above bunch but this time Marissa is dating Luke (don’t laugh, this is a soap after all) heads to Tijuana. Luke is going downrange as well on his own. Ryan is upset as he usually is but the group holds together in the name of fun and heads to one of a gazillion bars in town (and Tijuana is not a small town). Marissa (and 3 witnesses) steps upstairs to the dance floor and who does she see? Luke with another girl, smooching each other all over. Tears (and break-up on-the-spot). Surprise, Tijuana is after all a small place too!
At this point it looks like Luke is being kicked out of the plot, which is a shame, may the Gods of Orange County have him under good shelter.
The O.C. is a well written nightmare, cool at times and where parents for once don’t exhibit a brain the size of a turtle's (unless sex is on the menu). Mostly everybody are borderline alcoholic, use drugs, drive SUVs and are either millionaires or on the verge of bankruptcy. But the leading couple, while the grinding engine throughout the whole plot, geez, what do we make of these guys?
Marissa is a master of “clueless”. To find anything remotely close to Melinda Clarke’s acting in the O.C. (Marissa Cooper) I’ll have to send you back to Shelley Duvall (the Wendy Torrance in “The Shining”). In Shining was raw terror, here is pure clumsiness. I agree, the producers probably agree too, that this mish-mash of clueless eye-hand-shoulder moves is the fascinating part of Marissa’s character. Slipping like an eel away from language not knowing why. The result is (and I have yet to go over Season 2) tiring. Very very so. (sorry girl, but you're cute)
Ryan is very different from Marissa. In a way, opposite. Grown up in Chino, no money, no college, sideline criminal and violent, adopetd by millionaires and with moral vectors to spare due to rebounding guilt. Now, one of the goods of the series is these kids are not being instructed every 10 minutes on what they are supposed to do and act like. But here comes Ryan with an advice, a statement, a moral line for each. Self-righteous 101, that is Ryan. The result is tiring. Very very so. (sorry man, you should get loose a bit) And, are you ever going to have sex with Marissa anyway? We are very concerned about that. I heard this is going to drag you guys all the way to Season 3. I’ll quit here if that is true.
I know many of you are or have been on this already and possibly the long-term developments of these observations are clear. I remind those who have never been on a soap ever that to be stoopid is your right, an hour a day, as is filing your nails by the pool (if you have one:)
For more on the O.C. visit fox.com
SPOILER for the not in the advanced: At end of Season 1 everybody is in tears. Ryan is leaving with Theresa, heading to Chino, to deliver her baby. (See, he has sex, just not with the one we expect). Don't you people cry, this is an easy fix. Theresa will lose the baby. Sorta. After three months and with Marissa and Ryan back together (why keep Theresa once she loses your child, duh!) we expected the leading couple to proceed further in their relationship, correct? Well, not quite. Marissa is ready to bounce off again. And this time it is not straight vodka or painkillers or another casual boyfriend. What is it? The stepfather? The hunchback? Midgets? Or a girlfriend?
A girlfriend?
More tears:-)
Posted by lck at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2005
Turn On. Tune In. Take Over.
From the November 21st, 2005 issue of New York Metro Magazine, by Adam Sternbergh, an entry on what is becoming a moving target: television. This little op-ed is compact, informed and brilliant in detailing where we are and we're we're going with this very specific and pervasive business model. Not much could I add that is not here already. I'm sure many will find themselves in it. Read on.
Television
Turn On. Tune In. Take Over.
Viewers, light your torches! The television revolution is at the gates.
By Adam Sternbergh
Copyright © 2005 , New York Metro, Llc. All rights reserved.
Before we discuss how everything we know about television has changed forever, let’s start with three recent, apparently unrelated, and essentially mundane anecdotes:
(1) Last month, Apple unveiled yet another new iPod, this one capable of playing video. At the time, it seemed underwhelming—little more than another Bravo, Steve Jobs! moment and a chance to watch U2 videos on a screen three inches high. As an ancillary benefit, however, Apple started selling commercial-free episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives on its iTunes Website, along with select music videos, for $1.99 each. Three weeks later, iTunes had sold its 1 millionth such video.
(2) This summer, Universal did something kind of weird: It released Serenity, a sci-fi movie based on a poorly rated TV show, Firefly, that had been canceled after eleven episodes. Making movies of hit TV shows has a self-explanatory logic, but there aren’t too many movies based on TV flops. But I saw Serenity and liked it a lot, so I went out and bought the entire run of the Firefly TV series on DVD, watched it, and liked it a lot as well.
(3) Last week, Fox announced that, owing to scheduling conflicts, it planned to put its new series Prison Break—which spends the whole season following one man’s compelling, if slightly absurd, effort to break himself and his brother out of prison—on hiatus until late May. The show’s fan base howled all over the Internet, and for good reason: Prison Break is premised on a puzzle that takes all season to solve, with each episode a mini-cliff-hanger. One fan-generated suggestion to Fox was, why not move the show to a less-competitive time slot, such as Friday, where die-hard fans can still find it? I’ve been recording the show on my DVR (TiVoing it, you might say, except the folks at TiVo don’t like you to use that word unless you own, you know, a TiVo) and enjoying each episode at my leisure. So naturally, my first reaction to this debate was, Wait a minute. Prison Break airs on Monday nights?!
What do we know about TV? Here’s the basic model: Networks air particular shows at particular times on particular nights; say, Commander in Chief on ABC, every Tuesday at nine. These shows are available to viewers for free, subsidized by intrusive blocks of ads—a leftover from the days when TV was magically plucked from the air by your rooftop antennae, like radio with pictures. A TV show’s ratings determines both its sustainability (on the network schedule) and its profitability (in terms of how much its advertisers can be charged). These ratings are calculated by following the habits of a small number of representative viewers, tracked by the Nielsen company, whose preferences are then extrapolated for the entire audience. The prime economic directive of TV, therefore, has always been, TV doesn’t sell shows to viewers: It sells viewers to advertisers.
It’s an interesting business model, one that came about by accident, and one that is now entirely obsolete. If you have a DVR—and in New York city, 20 percent of Time Warner’s digital customers do—you can watch shows whenever you like; the shows are, in effect, untethered from their time slots. (Exhibit A: the recently redesigned TV Guide, retooled around the assumption that no one uses a TV Guide anymore.) So she watches Prison Break on Monday at nine, he watches it Monday at midnight, and I watch it Wednesday morning at eight, before work, over a bowl of oatmeal.
But what if she, he, and I aren’t enough viewers to keep a show alive on the network? No problem: We’ll just buy the DVD. Fox’s critically praised 24 was nearly canceled after a disappointing first season in 2002—its low ratings owing, in part, to the difficulty for the audience of jumping into the high-concept show midstream. So, Fox released the first season on DVD just before the second one premiered (the first time anyone had released a DVD of a show that early on), and it sold so well that it renewed Fox’s commitment to the show, which went on to become a hit. Fox’s Family Guy actually was canceled, then the DVD came out and sold about 2 million copies, and Fox did something no network had done before: It revived the canceled show. Of course, networks are quick to point out that DVD sales still pale next to ad revenue (which, in turn, pale next to syndication, TV’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow), but the precedent’s been established: People are paying directly for shows. And the popularity of DVDs, both culturally and as a source of found money for studios, is not only rescuing faltering shows but altering the content of new ones: It’s one reason we’re seeing so many new “arc” shows that follow a single storyline over a whole season, à la Lost, Prison Break, or the recently ordered NBC show Kidnapped, about a single abduction.
As long as shows were reliant on ads for their revenue, the total number of viewers mattered. Now, not so much. In fact, whereas broadly popular shows prospered under the old model, niche shows with hard-core fan bases prosper under the new one. Shows like 24 and Firefly sell a lot of DVDs. Shows like Yes, Dear and Two and Half Men do not. Studios (which make the shows) and networks (which buy and air them) are still fond of traditional, mass-appeal programs such as Two and a Half Men because of their high ad rates and lucrative afterlife in syndication. But both of those markets seem in jeopardy. Once you’ve got an overflow of your favorite shows stored up on your DVR (and your iPod and your DVD shelf), why watch reruns of Home Improvement on TBS?
Okay, so maybe you don’t have to watch a show at a particular time anymore. And maybe a show doesn’t need a huge audience to be financially viable. It’s still TV, right? It’s still half-hour- and hour-long shows that came through a box in your living room? Sure—for now. That’s assuming you don’t download the latest episode through the BitTorrent Website or buy it from iTunes to watch on the subway to work. For years, networks have trembled at the idea of selling individual episodes because it fundamentally undermines the way TV works—or used to work. But after the success of ABC’s bold toe-in-the-pool partnership with iTunes, NBC and CBS last week announced plans to sell their own shows through video-on-demand services for 99 cents an episode. And suddenly it’s not so hard to envision a future (by which I mean two years, not twenty) in which you buy most of your TV shows the way you do, say, magazines—subscribing to some, picking and choosing others. At which point there’s no more need to stick to the half-hour/hour-long model on TV than there is for magazines to publish each issue at precisely 100 or 200 pages.
Before we venture further, this might be a good time to point out that, when it comes to technology, I’m not an early adopter. I fit more comfortably in the category known as “late majority” (iPod, yes; BlackBerry, no). So the fact that I can now DVR my way to my own private TV schedule and download ad-free episodes to my computer (a machine I barely understand) says something about the future of TV. Specifically, that pretty soon I, and he, and she, and you, won’t need one. Sure, there will be a big screen on your wall and sometimes you will watch shows on that. There will be a little screen in your pocket and sometimes you will watch shows on that. And there may be a medium-size screen you carry in a handbag, and sometimes you will watch shows on that. (And maybe, someday, there will be a holo-chip in your head, beaming shows right into your brain.) Connected to them all will be a small box into which you download, and store, the shows you’ve decided to buy.
TV came to us like a kind of visual cookie dough, dull but pleasant. We could take it or leave it, but we’ve had very little control over the recipe.
Of course, tech evangelists love to trumpet brave new futures—Buy all your dog food at pets.com! Purchase clothes worn by your favorite stars while you watch them on TV!—assuming that, just because we’re able to do something, we will. (This argument is proved fallacious by that unused ab exerciser you once bought because “you can use it while watching TV.”) Each new technology takes a while to find its use, as we, the actual users, pick it up, consider it, and figure out what it’s really good for. The Internet has proved great for uniting geographically disparate people with common interests (eBay collectors, MacGyver fanatics, balloon fetishists) and not so good as, say, an Alpo clearinghouse.
We’re living in just such a murky moment—stepping into the future, even as we try to find our footing. And while this has led to all sorts of tedious arguments about how TV producers will make their money—a question of interest primarily to TV producers—the matter of how it affects you and me is one of more pressing relevance. This is especially true given that, in the old model, the viewer was little more than the last stop in an assembly line: the “end user,” in the jargon of the suits. TV came to us like a kind of visual cookie dough, dull but pleasing, and extruded into our living rooms. We could take it or leave it, but we’ve had very little control over the recipe.
In the new model, the audience is right there in the kitchen. The Internet already provides gathering places for fans to praise or rant about their favorite shows—sites far more influential than, say, the letter-writing campaign to save Cagney & Lacey, because they happen in real time, interactively, often with TV producers responding or lurking all the while. (Why not, given that the sites are, in essence, the world’s largest focus groups?)
All of which leads to an enticing possibility: Let’s say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though “back to air” is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as “switching the dial.”) Let’s say he found a million Firefly fans online—and, trust me, they’re not hiding—who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon’s got roughly $40 million to play with—and he doesn’t need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to. There’s even a mini-precedent for this: The online phenomenon of “ransom games,” in which a board-game developer sets a price (usually something minuscule, like $1,000), then, once he’s received that amount in pledges from strangers, creates the game and releases it for free.
But the idea of TV funded by the audience conjures another, less sunny scenario. After all, there’s already an entertainment-delivery system that funds itself through mini-contributions from millions of viewers: It’s called the movies, which aren’t exactly undergoing an artistic golden age. Furthermore, wherever democracy blooms, mob violence is only one step behind: How happy will Joss Whedon be when the $39.99-paying legions, assembled at wesavedfirefly.com, demand that a killed character be resurrected or that an irritating plotline be written out of the show?
Either way, TV’s days as a benign dictatorship—a little bread, a lot of circuses—are over, and the revolution is nigh. TV studios may still milk the old sources of revenue, but the fundamental economic law has been abolished—TV is selling shows to viewers—which, in TV terms, is like saying that the law of gravity is null and void. Everything’s up in the air. Including you, O Viewer, finally freed from your easy chair, ready to march into the streets and maybe—just maybe—drag your TV along with you.
Find this article here
Copyright © 2005 , New York Metro, Llc. All rights reserved.
Posted by lck at 07:36 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2005
Mia & Jem make invitations
Mia & Jem make designs for invitations of the wedding kind.
I have made invitations in the past and never for a wedding.
We are getting more and more customized.
Check the site (banner-click) for more and some radical poster designs.
Posted by lck at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2005
Schoeller
Stern has the best gallery (click banner) for Martin Schoeller's recent "Big Heads" series. Martin insists that these photo have not gone thru digital color correction. I don'y think so, sometimes lying is for good. However, it is all very remarkable and outstanding material. More abut Martin can be found within Life Magazine.
Posted by lck at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2005
3
Where are we / What the hell / Is going on / The dust has only just began to form / (Hide & Seek)
See updated mp3 playlist on the player to the (lower) right.
If Imogen Heap with her crop circles positions herself in the middle between loving extremities like Anastasia and Avril Lavigne a comparative mapping of respective lyrics within a three-columns view could work to speak for how narrow in reality the offer is. Not wanting to work a strategy that could prevents mass suicide in Tokio, car crashes here and “splodeys” in Baghdad and London, not shooting far-away.
The receptive and sensible girl distances herself from the all-out-ego Romanian as well as the post-post-grunge "gimme-anyone" nymph. Is Imo smarter or just better equipped? Honestly? Avoiding the iconic status is consequence. To competition icon is the name of the game, therefore, possible is she's looking to detour early. (note: obviously kids learn by "iconic", a ravenous army of fans is salivating on the web reminding the elders that resistance is futile)
It's so beautiful up here now / Oh I think I might just stay / All alone and by myself / So free and far away / (Airplane)
I'm torturing my nano which is quite an impressive mini-machine. Since the daughter got a permanent hold on the 20Gigs iPod it has been my dream to find a replacement to the bulky Sony 1010 for my mp3 business. The nano definitively is a better choice. I'm wearing the monolith on the lanyard.
Planning on having snails with my kid, she'd love the break. One of her private perversions that must be satisfied in public. Do you chew or suck? Wait, trying to find the words for that.
So ya gonna chase me now boy / Yeah ya gonna corner me now boy / You think ya gonna threaten me now boy / Somehow I dont think so / (Getting Scared)
It's good time to go roaming around for airports and subterraneans, now, ice creams and lose a suitcase and the roots in it with no concerns for, in the exact following order, identity, design and usability.
In my experience I've found few women who like female voices. How is this related to sexual attraction/repulsion is unclear. Anybody has more data on this?
Sampling Imogen Heap (Hide and Seek), Anastasia (Sick and Tired) and Avril Lavigne (I'm with you). You are advised that what we're trying to sneak into here is a metalanguage that is part of a commercial offer (to young consumers in the mainstream) in a very straight, direct way. Here we go:
IMO: circles --- ANA: truth --- AVR: nothing
IMO: sinking --- ANA: torn --- AVR: standing
IMO: around --- ANA: place --- AVR: footsteps
IMO: eyes --- ANA: heart --- AVR: hand
IMO: streets --- ANA: world --- AVR: bridge
IMO: hide --- ANA: sick --- AVR: rain
IMO: years --- ANA: floating --- AVR: life
IMO: pleasure --- ANA: love --- AVR: somebody
IMO: heavy --- ANA: tired --- AVR: lost
The next bullet in our work schedule is now to associate a color to each of the singers. A set of the 3 primaries in the RGB space is banner to this post. You de(i)cide
Posted by lck at 05:17 AM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2005
It's Enterteinment
Very noticeable Imogen Heap's Speak for Yourself. At times possibly the best Lounge around, cornering Sade and confused about strawberries. She found the way in. But I have to ask myself if this is a girl (Getting Scared) or just a mild hybridized version of one of Marylin Manson's vocoders & Dido. Respectfully, listen to the fake gospel in "Hide & Seek" making now inroads into major commercials, who said the days of Cher on wah-wah were over? Eno, in his long toupe', is super-envious at how easily these tracks fit on both the top of Middle Of the Road bill and bottom of Innovation. Good job and Imogen(e) and nice, English touch, which is, ironic.
Graeme Revell has spent 10 years at the forefront of Industrial in the eighties with a now defunkt germanische-australian band collective called SPK. Now his ambient noise is constellation to a third of all Hollywood titles. The man behind Sin City's score and many others stands as one of the best Soundtracks composer of our times. Follow him for a good night out.
Vector Lovers, Kraftwerk minus the ideology and mild pop intervention. Nice try. Martin Wheeler, a self-confessed manga mad computer nerd and eighties obsessed knob-twiddler who has produced one of this years most irresistible albums with his eponymous Soma debut, 2005.
Nostalgic of the now-gone Crash Test Dummies (Uhmmmmmm) I give you 40 Foot Echo. Enough deja vous for a nearly identical product. Tears always taste the same, "Brand New Day" is enough trying, so cry baby.
Everybody is adopting Herbie Hancock's drum sessions. Big Tricky Mistery. Madonna's latest. And, for Italy, fresh and good, Jovanotti. Complete with chorus and whispers, we're close to Michael Jackson and reborn. Come on, do we REALLY want to go there, it almost makes me cry Nickleback, please. All the shaking just to get here?
LOST, the ABC's serial rip-off of Castaway, now on sale every Thursday online (it runs on Weds in the USA), sells no surprises and illustrates the psycho-social development of a group of marooned (civilized) passengers stranded on an island due to plane crash, off reach and off routes. The carcass of a jet lying on the beach for the longest time, bodies can be burned. Journey is typical, inner and outer. However, this time, the "outer" is not as quiet as in Robinson's. The island is haunted by boars (they make good steaks), polar bears (ich!), and what seems to be some other much much bigger wild creature and more mysteries. A good amount of anxiety. If you've gone thru Desperate Housewives already, you may look into Lost just watch your steps. After all what's to do when you're lost and under pressure but still hands on a bunch of good iron? Golf, right?
Posted by lck at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2005
Growth
Do you believe growth can be indiscriminate and never stop?
As companies that have been on dominant positions within specific markets can say, growth is not forever. Grow undisturbed if your product is the only viable and visible offer. Competition in the steamer and your salespeople will cry for strategy, support, change, more advertisement, planning. Smart vendors and companies know this without help from an Agency. Eye firm on the market, good products to play, room to reposition, re-invent, integrate with new brands and sometimes create brands that dig into own target space but have better long-term potential. Good companies are about their past, future, what their image is to their clients and what specific needs this image fulfills. Selling a product in a competitive market is a never-ending play, a discover, reshaping and get better. Like organisms, these companies believe that getting down is suicidal, giving up the very reason they are in game, deadly.
Many firms, after a long period of market dominance and a sudden dip in sales, may call in wondering what they are doing wrong and what they can do to perform better. These companies have plenty of cash and sometimes believe markets are "theirs". More superstition can be found and it does not matter what you'll tell and do for these companies, little chances are that they will change. They'll follow advice, schemes, policy and strategy and if they're diligent will do so until the next bump in the road.
There are companies that have such strong dominant position it seems impossible they will, one day, vanish. Microsoft is such a company and its demise will keep observers busy for at least two more decades. Dell will vanish much faster due to its extremely simple core business management (look at what Lenovo is doing to the same core). The key here is that Lenovo does it better and (incredibly) for less.
Some call Microsoft a mafia. It has to be if it is true that Microsoft has introduced zero innovation in the last 10 years. If you can survive without ideas for that long time you must have some deep roots. Rotten but deep. Whoever may want to restart Microsoft will have to restart from scratch, without Gates. Conceivable? Probably not.
Apple is not making mistakes and full steam ahead to becoming the next monopoly. How awful a monopoly it will be is hard to imagine today. In the meantime every single product they release is a joy to use, consider, analyze. Take Front Row, released with the latest iMacs. Re-evaluating experiencing media seriously is not everyday business. Experience DVDs with your family and friends from the couch, hence a software layer that sits on top of the Mac OS X Finder that allows you to operate the computer screen as you were a big fat old TV's ON SCREEN DISPLAY, remote included. And unsurprisingly Apple's remote has just 6 buttons (Apple understands only your kids can operate Sony's and Pioneer's and Microsoft's 42-keys remotes). Nobody before had the balls to launch media files on a computer, leave the desk and go sit on the couch with us, the customers, and wonder out loud with us "how the hell am I suppose to manage the show now that I am not at the console?". Geniuses, or quite honestly, "designers". Apple, Front Row. Taking the risk nobody even thought was worth taking.
Apple can do it because is small and can take risks nobody else feel they should. Customers say growth. Insane growth.
If Sony had the iPod mini would they kill it after 12 months to replace it with the "nano", a candy-bar sized player that only comes in white and black so thin you may want to swallow it? Of course Sony could not. For the same reason Sony can not make an iPod killer. They believe they have to include a phone! The iPod, a very focused product that does one thing only extremely well, in a wise and clever way, we agree that is what the iPod is all about. You want to stick a phone, maybe even a 1 Mpixels camera in it? Maybe speakers?
Creative has so far lost huge amount of money in advertising for their mp3 players and the only choice they have now is retreat or die. They thought "cool" can be beaten by raw advertising power. They did not have a product. Creative's ZEN website, their fore-runner MP3 player is so obsessed with making every page look like an album cover they forget to say basic things. Customer is asking if he can plug "this thing" in a computer or how is he supposed to manage his music. No, no, he is asking if we can make a website for people that all they know is how to press the PLAY button. Can you do it? Customers say, no growth.
Napster is close to give up their iTunes-like but subscription-only service as they are losing millions. Why? Their service gives you close to unlimited downloads as long as you pay a fee every month. Stop paying and you lose everything, thousands of files if you are an mp3 hungry customer. Do they have a product? No, hence no growth. Napster's website is designed for doom. One thing: they require visitors to click a tab to start searching for a tune. The search tab is very prominent, second from left, top nav. But their focus and the whole deal is on downloading a software client iTunes-style. So why you offer to search via the website when the whole (or)deal is about downloading a software client? Just follow the logic of the website and search for "Madonna", you'll get this: "We are still working on getting music by madonna. We get new artists and music everyday. Check back soon". Customers say, no growth.
Selling music is not about making money. Apple makes few cents a song, not even enough to keep the software infrastructure going. Music money goes to copyright owners and RIAA. Money comes from the players and players come from a tight, well-designed retail experience that integrates in full a host of otherwise conflicting interests. Customers put 99 cents on just the track they wish to get, fast and securely and legally, good quality that can be (legally) played on a limited number of devices. They don't feel constrained in the process and RIAA gets the rest. What Apple gets is in the hardware which is marketed under a cult brand because music is a religious experience. Customers complain about iPods getting scratched as if they were supposed not to, everything gets scratched, come on, it's an MP3 player. No, no, don't say it like that, customers say, my iPod, not an mp3 player, it holds MY MUSIC, it is my music, I love it. Do you understand? And they look at you with watery eyes, grabbing their tiny white devices, enjoying their isolation, in empathy and "one" with their "communion wafer". Apple made.
Get it? Just if you were wondering why iPods are white. iBelieve, do you?
Intel is betting, first time ever, the PC is over and shifting focus on cool, low-power processors that are going into portables and other lightweight, cheap and widespread appliances. Losers, for now AMD is topping Intel in retail sales. Sony is buying into IBM's Cell for their incoming PS3, Microsoft is buying into IBM for the XBox 360 and even Nintendo is going IBM with Revolution. These processors are fast, fast and hot. Is Intel wrong for the first time or just waiting for Apple to really start kicking the market with OS-X powered supercool and well thought media appliances (this time Intel-based)?
Growth is not forever and is not for-ever granted. Companies that can change, people that can change and switch to the customer's chair frequently and listen are taking the burden, honestly and naturally, and court growth in a very much alike fashion as growing fruit trees, passion and strategy and talent.
Those that are not of this bunch can be helped but rarely change. What can not change, as you can tell, has only one way to go.
Posted by lck at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
London Fair 2005
London Design Festival 2005, a must see with digging potential.
And what's better than running a brand design for Phillip Morris and actually finishing it? Having them request a redesign of one of their existing major brands. Right? Crunching.
Posted by lck at 01:11 AM | Comments (0)
