K&N - Masters of Deceptive Marketing
Published on 30 Jun 2007 at 2:21 pm by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, One Corporation Under God, Limited Lie-ability, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Health and Safety, Branding and Values, Humor.
K&N has been making "performance" air filters for many years. They’re of a different design than the one you have in your car. A K&N airfilter consists of multiple layers of gauze, soaked with oil. As air flows through it, the oily fibers catch the dust particles. When it’s dirty, you use a solvent to rinse away the dirty oil, they you re-coat it with fresh oil and put it back in.
The standard automotive airfilter is made from paper. It’s a simple design. Typically a very long strip is pleated and the sandwiched between two pieces of rubber. Dust and grit are trapped as the air flows through. When the filter is dirty, you put in a new one. The old one is thrown away.
Oooooh, horrible environmental nightmare!!! We’re throwing away… what? Well, paper, mostly. Nice biodegradable paper. The paper is full of dirt. Ordinary fine sand, grit, lint, etc. Very organic, this dirt. Endlessly recyclable.
But K&N has come to the rescue. They’re now promoting, on Car Talk and elsewhere, the idea that the K&N filter is re-usable, and therefore more environmentally friendly. Well, yes, the mechanics of the filter are reusable. But what about all that dirty oil? You’ve removed it from the filter with some sort of solvent. You now have a mess of hazardous waste. What are you gonna do? Pour it down the drain? Pay, in money, pollution, and CO2, to ship it to a recycling facility?
Shame on you, K&N. You are preying on the good intentions of ordinary folk who want to be green. You say that K&N filters are made from cotton, a "renewable resource". Indeed, cotton is grown as a crop. Then again, so is paper-pulp, the source of the paper used in OEM filters.
Your airfilters may improve performance, as you claim. Heck, I’ve used them on my old Brit-bikes routinely. But are they better for the car? No OEM anywhere in the world uses a K&N style filter. ALL of them, even Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, etc, use paper-element filters. Maybe because they work better? Consider this: companies who make heavyduty off-road equipment, such as Caterpillar, have tested many different types of filtering system, and they unequivocally recommend pleated-paper types for use in their equipment.
The idea that the K&N filter is better for you engine, and better for the environment, is bogus, and you know it, K&N. Shame on you!
The above is, of course, merely Oliver’s opinion.
Key IT Support Tool
Published on 29 Jun 2007 at 1:21 am by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Design, Interface, and Usability, Networking Technology, Pure Geek, Information Technology, Humor.
At last, an automatic IT excuse generate. Code this page into your online support stuff; generate automatic email responses. It’s the perfect tool!
http://www.strauss.za.com/sla/support.html
Marketing is the Crack Cocaine of Industry
Published on 12 Jun 2007 at 9:19 pm by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Brain Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Branding and Values, Public Relations and Marketing.
And I do mean fix. Too often I have seen companies under-invest in engineering and design, over-invest in marketing and "branding", and wind up the poorer for it. To be sure, they get a couple of quarters of great results, but on the average people aren’t stupid; they figure out that the value is gone and they switch brands, usually forever. Today, we buy Mercedes or Lexii, not Cadillacs.
The pet rock? Nice idea; wish I’d thought of it. But how big a company did it build? The pet rock is not a long-term model for a business. That kind of marketing is crack - it’s a great rush, but it doesn’t last; and it does more harm that good.
Get off the crack! Invest in good products. Invest in supporting them. And be patient, the money will come. And keep coming.
It ain’t just logos
Published on 8 Jun 2007 at 11:31 am by Ringo |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Virtu-Brand(tm).
I just saw this at Seth Godin’s blog.
In some ways he’s pointing out the obvious, but it’s amazing how many times I’ve seen it overlooked. A brand is an epitome, an embodiment, of a collection of experiences. Mr. Godin is, I think, warning us to avoid over investment in a symbol to the detriment of the underlying substance. In the very worst cases this is taken even further; to the point that investment in the symbol is seen as a substitute for investment in the substance.
A brand gives us a "handle" on a set of experiences, a kind of short hand for them. Perhaps in the short run a logo or other branding materials can recall our positive experiences with other brands, but in the long run the brand itself is neutral, neither good nor bad. If well supported, it will evoke the underlying set of experiences and speak to people in the context of their feelings about those experiences.
A friend of mine used to say that "Intel Inside" wasn’t promotion, it was a warning label. Actually, it was both, the branding invoked the underlying set of experiences, good for some, bad for others…
Which, in a flagrant flirting with Godwin’s law, brings this to mind.
UPDATE: Another interesting post on the topic here.
Symantec Bites
Published on 4 Jun 2007 at 9:24 pm by Oliver |
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Symantec was once a fine company. Peter Norton’s Norton Utilities could claim to be the most trusted PC utility program ever written.
But over the years, the corporate idiots at Symantec have ruined oth, and more. They are at war with Microsoft, the programs are over-burdened with usefull bells and whistles, and they can drag the performance of a Windows PC to its knees. Systems that run fine with Symantec switched off spend 30 minutes or more scanning if Symantec is enabled.
Symantec seems to spend all its money promoting its product, and none in useful development.
A curse upon them, then. We’ve switched to Kaspersky - fast, safe, reasonably priced.
A Cure For Global Warming
Published on 1 Jun 2007 at 9:32 am by Ringo |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Health and Safety, Government: Federal, State and Local, Humor.
Reading this article at Coyote Blog got me to thinking…
I’ve been skeptical of man-made global warming in large part because of the convenient way the suggested responses match up with the usual solutions offered for whatever the ill of the day may be. (More regulation, less freedom, less affluence, less choice…) It looks like a solution in search of a problem.
Well, I should be able to play that game too.
Since, from this tiny piece of anecdotal evidence (as posted at Coyote Blog), it’s clear that global warming is indeed man made, and furthermore is a direct result of urban heat island effects, I propose we strike right at the source of the problem…
My solution:
Outlaw cities.
More specifically I suggest that we use whatever invasive global regulatory regimen is being constructed to limit carbon dioxide emissions, to instead limit population densities. No more high population densities, no more urban heat islands, no more global warming.
I think 2000 square feet per person should be a good number, that gives us 21 people per acre. It might sound like a lot if you imagine sharing a 2000 square foot house with a couple of friends or family members, but remember this number has to include each person’s share of lawn, street, sidewalk, power line right of way, etc. It should come out to about 14,000 people per square mile, or 5000 per square kilometer. (Somebody correct me if my math is wrong…) It would be mportant to maintain granularity in the measurements, down to the square mile or kilometer, or even smaller, to prevent some sweltering slum somewhere from annexing a portion of antarctica as an "offset". The problem being one of concentration after all.
Well, that’s what I think anyway… But I won’t be holding my (carbon dioxide containing) breath…
Here’s a link where, in the US at least, you can see how your neighborhood compares.
Danny Hillis, Get a Job!
Published on 11 May 2007 at 11:03 am by Oliver |
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Filed under Uncategorized, The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Design, Interface, and Usability, Business and Corporation Related, Pure Geek, Information Technology, Economics and the Economy, Public Relations and Marketing, Humor.
There’s no doubt that Danny Hillis is a bright guy. The fact that his Thinking Machines start-up was not the business success he hoped for is the way it goes, sometimes, and is certainly not a reflection on Danny. The failure of one’s startup can be a tragic emotional shock, like the loss of a loved one. Those of us who have gone through it know this. So, when TM went TU, it’s understandable that Danny would want some time off.
But it’s been eleven years, Danny. That clock you and the Long Now folks are building? Slowly? The schedule on that makes most software development projects seem speedy. There is what could be a nice museum about it, but it misses the mark. Danny, just up the street from your museum location is the Exploratorium. It’s hands-on science. Participation is encouraged. At the Long Now museum, it’s look, don’t touch.
The Long Now foundation has an impressive Board of Directors. I’d guess they’re an interesting bunch to hang out with. But we have a foundation, chaired by rich successful people, which is attempting to get us ordinary working folks to contribute money to support the hobby project of the rich successful people, a project with a completion date comfortably far into the future, to put it mildly.
You can do more, Danny. Much more.
They’ve killed James Lileks
Published on 8 May 2007 at 11:10 am by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Winners and Losers, One Corporation Under God, In Corporations We Trust, Technopolitical, Blogosphere, Business and Corporation Related, Economics and the Economy, Main Stream Media, Humor.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, suffering like many papers from revenue loss, has re-assigned one of its best opinion columnists to write "straight" news and features. James Lileks’ column, a feature for many years, is gone. With it goes the only reason to read the rage, when you get right down to it.
Read more here: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/07/0507/050707.html
And if you don’t know who James Lileks is, start here: http://www.lileks.com.
Among other things, he _gets_ what the Internet is, and what needs to happen to local papers in the new world.
His management sure doesn’t, though.
Memo to Management
Published on 30 Apr 2007 at 4:56 pm by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Thanks for Playing, Pathetic Success, Brain Trust, One Corporation Under God, Limited Lie-ability, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Humor.
There are ten items in the following list. Grab a pencil and rank them according to the ones most important to you in your job.
• Challenge
• Empathy
• Fair Discipline
• Full Appreciation
• Good Working Conditions
• In On Things
• Know That Management Cares
• Opportunity for Growth
• Pay & Benefits
• Security of Employment
Done? Okay. Now if you’re a manager, rank them according to how you think your employees would rank them.
Now let’s see how Amercian workers rank them, on average, and how their bosses think employees will rank them.
Employees:
• In On Things
• Full Appreciation
• Know That Management Cares
• Challenge
• Fair Discipline
• Security of Employment
• Pay & Benefits
• Opportunity for Growth
• Good Working Conditions
• Empathy
Managers’ Estimate of How Employees Feel:
• Pay & Benefits
• Security of Employment
• Good Working Conditions
• Fair Discipline
• Opportunity for Growth
• Empathy
• Know That Management Cares
• Full Appreciation
• In On Things
• Challenge
Memo to Management: It ain’t about pay. It’s about not being a dick.
VoIP - Threat or Menace?
Published on 25 Apr 2007 at 11:14 am by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Design, Interface, and Usability, Networking Technology, Pure Geek, Information Technology, Open Source Software.
My esteemed colleage Paul has written at length in this space on VoIP, and as always he brings tremendous insight. And yet the point is missed.
I’m not challenging the benefits of the many technical improvements that have been made to the PSTN since Alexander Graham Bell’s day. Dedicated engineers have worked long and hard to make it an unremarked marvel of the world, and the idea that perhaps variable-length packets might be more efficient that fixed-length ones is entirely reasonable. And I have no doubt that converging the wiring plant (over time) will save money.
Paul cites unified messaging. Octel introduced this in the 90s; Paul knows one of the senior product managers on the project, he can ask her for details. UM doesn’t care about packet length. After all, a .WAV file consists of fixed-length 8-bit "packets".
The advent of VoIP is an opportunity to re-define the user experience. Once, not so many years ago, I was a happy knowledge worker with a computer on my desk. One day corporate management awarded me a "Messaging Terminal", a dedicated box that did what amounts to email. You typed, it stored-and-forwarded. Others’ messages appeared on the screen. Wow, what a cool idea! I wonder if it will catch on? 
Mind you, Unix email was well-established at this time. (Sidebar: we built a gateway between our Unix email and the corporate system. Management found out and demanded that it be unhooked. We complied, then shipped it overseas and reconnected it between to far-flung points, and kept it more secret. It ran for years….) I didn’t want a separate email terminal; why do I want a separate voice terminal?
Skype has shown us what VoIP could be. Skype works well, is free, is even easier to deploy than VoIP, and, wonder of wonders, does not compel the use of strange incomprehensible numeric endpoint addresses.
It’s not perfect. I wish it were open. As Paul suggests, an open system would allow a faster rate of innovation. OTOH, the open VoIP systems still haven’t move past !~@@#$^&!@$%! phone numbers, so maybe it’s a purely theoretical advantage.
As for the opne-ness of standards-based VoIP, yes, it could happen, but…. I suspect that the mind-set of the telephony world will keep it from evolving very quickly. Their unwillingness to let go of the station instrument model is telling in this regard. Innovation under the sheets to save money? Sure. Helping the user? Get real - this is the phone company we’re talking about. Oh, and Ernestine is holding for you on line two.
The bigger issue with Skype is one which applies to all VoIP systems, namely that the government will bugger them to death with regulations and taxes. Vonage is in critical condition; E-Bay has bigger fish to fry than Skype and is unlikely to mount a to-the-death defense of it virtues.
Hello coders! Anyone out there wat to create the next, truly distributed and open peer-to-peer VoIP system? Skype has shown the way. Screw SIP and all that, just code something that works!
