Here’s the actual text of an email I got from one of my most challenging clients yesterday at 6:17pm:
please swap out the 1st [article] with the attached
then make it live!
pls ping me too!
than
rb
My thoughts: if you can’t be bothered to fucking finish typing out the word “thanks,” which is already a less sincere form of the phrase “thank you,” then my guess is you really don’t mean it anymore, and probably never did.
The truth of the matter is, when I bought my phone for $600 (yeah), I believed it was worth it. Still do, in fact. I haven’t talked with a single person who thought they over-paid for their iPhone. It’s just that good.
However, when the company drops the price by 30% two months later, it’s not the greatest feeling. Truth be told, I can’t imagine how else Apple would have done it. From a business standpoint, it’s probably the smartest thing they could have done. Ballsy and brash. “Hey, we’re already outselling all other smartphones on the market…how’s about this? How’s about we cut two hundred fucking dollars off the price of our phone? Like seriously…how much emptier can we make that Helio store right across the street?”
I still think my phone is awesome as hell, and I use it way more than any PDA I’ve ever owned. I paid a fair price. But people all over are gonna get it cheaper now, and more power to ‘em. The one thing I will say is, I think it’s unprecedented to have a 30% price cut on a very successful, “revolutionary” flagship product two months after its release. Let alone, the discontinuation of its 4gb sibling. My guess is, less than 5% of iPhone sales have been of the 4gb variety. I know my local store wasn’t selling many of ‘em.
I think I’m gonna have to hold one of the new iPod Nanos in my hand before I can actually label it “cool.” I mean, it looks like it’s thin as hell. It’s just a weird form-factor. I’ll never own one (I’m pretty well covered in the ipod department), but perhaps it’d make a good gift for someone.
The new “iPod Classic” is kind of an odd beast. I think hard-disk-driven iPods are pretty much a thing of the past. Dinosaurs. I’m surprised they bothered to develop a new one. But sweet christ, if this is the swan song of the iPod as we knew it, it’s one hell of a last hurrah. One hundred sixty freakin’ gigs? Jesus. Goodbye Zune. You just became more worthless than you already were.
The “iPod Touch” is pretty much just what I was expecting…it’s nice to see it’s a little thinner and smaller than the iPhone. And it’s nice to see they’ll be doing the iTunes Mobile Store. Too bad I’m not a Starbucks fanatic…I don’t think that deal will make an impact on my life at all, unless they somehow strike a deal with T-Mobile to give iPhone users free wi-fi access.
I’m really not a fan of the new ringtones thing, where you have to pay an extra buck to make an iTS song into a ringtone…but then again, I have a feeling Apple won’t be aggressively shutting down the hackers who are already building installer programs that do ringtones. I think the ringtones industry (and Apple’s new little slice of it) is just fine for folks who want to throw their money into the abyss…but I also think Apple has their hands tied behind their backs when it comes to ringtones.
I guarantee you, Apple would have much preferred to let you make your own ringtones with GarageBand, tweak your own songs for free, etc. Sure, they stand to make some money through iTS ringtones, but if they made ringtones free, don’t you think they’d make a boatload more on phone sales? But they’re in bed with AT&T. Come on. There’s no way they’d allow Apple to get away with shooting them in the foot. They make too much money off of ringtones. And if Apple is aiming to take the rest of the global cellular market by storm (and it’s clear that they are), it would be very difficult to find partners if they were stealing the ringtone thunder. I just think it’s crappy that the market is dysfunctional enough to bear it. I can’t believe the phone-hacking community isn’t bigger. Paying for ringtones is like paying for the spit that’s already in your mouth.
Occasionally, Fake Steve Jobs has something insightful to say. And it’s not too surprising, since there are (I’m sure) millions of us out here who think the same way…but FSJ is pretty articulate, whereas many of us aren’t so much. Today, it was about the dinosaurs who run the entertainment industry, a topic that’s come up a lot in the last few years. And sweet mother of christ, I hope the frequency of the topic means change is in the wind.
The February press release by the Real Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Music, was a nice, big, wide-open “open your fucking eyes” message to the entertainment industry, written in pretty much the best scathing-yet-not-over-the-top diplomatic tone I would imagine possible. In the intervening time, I’ve also seen posts from Roughly Drafted, Fake Steve Jobs, John Gruber, and several others I can’t recall now. And, of course, Apple Inc. sent a big “fuck you” out to NBC just last week, because of disputes over pricing and “anti-piracy” bullshit. It’s clear that key players are calling for a widespread paradigm shift, across several huge industries.
True, I’m living in Silicon Valley, and it’s likely that I’m just witnessing a bit more elightened, connected and forward-thinking discourse than the rest of the country is seeing…but I’m hearing it, and I’d like to spread the word.
Something FSJ touched upon today stood out from all the rest. The concept of content producers and artists gradually switching over to new media distribution channels and cutting out the middle-men (the big networks). The ways in which network TV does business are completely outmoded. None of it makes any sense anymore, but it’s just the way it’s been done for SO LONG, that people just aren’t willing or able to move away from it. And, of course, who has the money? Where would the producers of Heroes get the money to produce their show, if not from NBC itself?
And here’s where I step into unfamiliar territory. I don’t know much about this shit. But…I live within about ten miles of some of the richest Venture Capital firms in the world. I went to the opening ceremonies for a recent venture capital summit in the valley, and I work on a website in the valley that discusses VC issues very frequently. Why is it that the entertainment industry can’t begin a mass-exodus to a new mode, one which relies on venture capital? Maybe I don’t fully understand the current funding market in the entertainment industry, nor the VC market in general…but doesn’t it seem like there should be an answer in there somewhere? Large-scale funding is available for things people care about.
Get funding for your project by pitching it to potential financiers, set up your own collaborative network among all the industries that are necessary for producing your project, and figure out a way to distribute your shit in the new media channels that are being fast-adopted all over the world.
I know I sound pie-in-the-sky, and that I’m dreaming of grassroots uprisings against Goliaths that may be too big to topple…but man, it’s just no good the way it is. News has been ruined, entertainment has been ruined, edu-tainment has been ruined, pretty much every media outlet has been ruined, and there are SO many people in the world who are mad as hell, and not gonna take it anymore. So, why are they taking it?
In other news, I’m gonna strike up my Livejournal account again. I’ve been blogging all along, but for some reason I had brought it over to myspace. Not the best move, although I don’t think I’m entirely convinced that LiveJournal’s any better. We’ll see how it goes… I just like being able to post via email, or from a desktop app. I just spent a little time porting all my blog entries from myspace, so y’all can enjoy ‘em. Feel free to drop me a line, subscribe via rss, or
whatever.
When I was in college, email was still relatively new to the mainstream. Writing term papers still happened on Brother “word processing machines,” those huge typewriter variants that had built-in 3-line LCD screens on which to review your work. I never owned one, since I knew they’d be obsolete soon (if they weren’t already).
I had a computer I’d bought specifically for college, and it was awesome. However, getting internet access in my dorm room was pretty effing frustrating. We had to dial in to a modem pool, and hope there was a line still open. Of course, it was only a telnet dialup connection, so there was no graphical web. Until, of course, we figured out that you could run telnet to dial up, make the connection, run a script on the server to start a PPP tunnel, force-quit the telnet app (yes, this was an actual step in the process), and start up a proprietary PPP control panel to complete the “tunnel,” and then fire up Netscape or Mosaic. Yep. Mosaic. And I think they were also putting 1/2-hour limits on connection times, so all this had to be repeated often.
Before the PPP solution came about, I had to trudge my way up to Snygg Hall to visit “the dungeon.” There was a big basement computer lab in Snygg, which was completely unlit except for the glow of the screens shining on the coffee-saturated students. The PCs were always filled, but you could pretty much always get a seat at one of the old and decrepit Mac Classic II’s, or Sun SparcStations. I don’t know why, but that dungeon always held a lot of appeal for me. The other labs on campus were just too well-organized and well-lit.
I was just reminded of all this while I was walking the dog, checking my email and posting to facebook from my iPhone. I don’t miss the old days…but I do.
I’m very, very curious about what obstacles today’s college students have to overcome. I don’t want to be that grumpy old man who says “in my day, things were harder than you’ll ever know.” They probably weren’t. But it’s hard to imagine.