Author: Gil

Posted on

Alta Vista

Microsoft is trying to get PC designers to get some of that Apple feeling, by incorporating such exTREME! trends as the use of black! and white!

The PC world used to be divided into two camps: those who made lucrative software and the poor schlubs who built the low-margin hardware it ran on.

Apple has turned that model on its head. From the beginning it has managed to create a unified design for its products by building everything itself, first with the Mac and then later with the iPod. Although Apple sells one computer for every 20 PCs, the iPod’s success has proved how crucial it is to create a seamless experience for consumers, who are buying much of the gear these days. Says a top PC design executive: “You’re going to see more and more of this desire to integrate hardware and software.”

Even if it means borrowing from Apple. Microsoft denies doing that, saying it’s simply responding to demand for good design. Yet its approach has more than an echo of the Apple ethos.

“We’re decomposing the look and feel of Vista and bringing it into a language that hardware designers understand,” says Steve Kaneko, design director of Windows hardware innovation. And here’s another Apple-esque detail: The Zune player will work only with Microsoft’s planned music service, sources say. In other words, it will be part of a closed system, like iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

Decomposing? Anyway, given that a huge chunk of the Wintel PC market is based on churning out units as cheaply as possible for a customer base that wants to pay $499 for a computer, it’s unlikely that this initiative is going to yield anything half as elegant as the flatscreen iMac or the Mac Mini. But I give ’em credit for trying, even if it does put me in mind of that great “what if?” video about Microsoft designing the packaging for the iPod.

Posted on

Pee Wee Got a Raw Deal

Neat interview with Paul Reubens at the Onion’s AV Club. I first discovered Pee Wee Herman (I was going to write, “My first exposure to Pee Wee Herman”) when I was watching Cheech & Chong films with my dad at far too young an age (like 11). What’s great is that my father had no idea C&C movies were all about drugs. He just found them funny.

Anyway, I went from there to HBO’s showing of Pee Wee’s stage act, which was also transformatively weird. I’m glad he’s rebuilt his career, and I hope he can get funding for his Pee Wee movies.

AVC: The Internet Movie Database says you had “complete creative control over Pee-wee’s Playhouse, with three minor exceptions,” but it doesn’t give any details. Do you remember what the exceptions were?

PR: In the first episode, the network said “You can’t stick that pencil in that potato, because pencils are sharp, and you might encourage kids to stab things.” So we didn’t do that. Let’s see. There was an episode they got a letter about, where there was a fire in the playhouse, and a firefighter showed up and he and Miss Yvonne were flirting, and he said “You have to have a smoke detector,” and she said “I have one in my bedroom, above the bed.” They asked us to change that for subsequent airings of the show, so we went in and looped dialogue over it, so instead, she said “I have one in my kitchen.” I put it back to the original version for the DVD release. There was a shot of a bathroom door that we held for a really long time, and you could hear Pee-wee peeing. They asked us to tone the sound of the peeing down, and add a score so it was a little less graphic. All the changes they asked us to make seemed really reasonable to me, and we accommodated them. I think in 45 episodes, there were only maybe three other changes they ever asked for.

Enjoy.

And if you don’t enjoy that, here’s a piece from Foreign Policy about forgotten (but ongoing) territorial disputes. I can’t wait for Canada and Denmark to declare war.

Posted on

Hey, Raj, What’s Happ’nin’?

It’s long-ass essay day here at VM! Here’s a piece from the new ish of Foreign Affairs about the economic dynamo in India. I think India’s in a far better position to succeed than China in the long-term. If you read Mr. Das’ article, you’ll see that there are some major reforms India still needs to implement (in order to get itself out of the way), but I think the Indian version of entrepreneurialism trumps the totalitarianism that still lurks over the Chinese model.

I used to think that the main advantage of India was the bureaucracy installed by the British, but Das’ interpretation is that the bureaucracy is a major problem for the country. It’s possible that we’re both right, insofar as the bureaucracy and its focus on education were necessary for India’s development, but have now grown out of control:

Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance — the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system — but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.

The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy’s perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.

Anyway, Das makes some neat points about India’s development, most notably the fact that it jumped from essentially an agrarian society to a service-based one, without spending much time as a manufacturing/industrial power.

Just another example of stuff I find fascinating, but probably bore the crap out of you.

So here’s Tom Spurgeon’s writeup about the just-concluded San Diego Comic-Con. Enjoy.

Posted on

Today’s post is brought to you by the letters R and D

BusinessWeek has an essay about the lack of innovation at the major telephone companies (yet another installment in the “I care about this stuff; no reason for you to” series). Mind-blowing quote:

One way in which these companies are very different from the old phone monopoly is that while the original AT&T had a world-class research operation, its successors don’t. One of the signal facts of the communications revolution is that virtually all the new technologies that made it possible were developed outside the phone world. Last year, Verizon’s revenue came in at nearly $80 billion. AT&T (without BellSouth or Cingular) had revenue of $44 billion. And yet while Intel Corp. spent $5.1 billion last year on research and development, AT&T spent just $130 million. The word “research” doesn’t even appear in Verizon’s annual report.

Now, in the pharma industry, there’s a lot of talk about “rethinking R&D,” as major companies learned that simply pumping more dollars into the process doesn’t necessarily yield results. When I compiled this year’s Top Pharma Companies report, I noticed that plenty of big guns have reduced their R&D budgets — not drastically, but it was certainly a change from past double-digit increases. And these annual R&D figures were at least $1 billion for the top 17 companies on the list.

Obviously, the drug industry is keyed by development of new products; patent terms dictate that every product has a brief lifespan. When the R&D pipeline falls short, companies turn to in-licensing new drugs. In my many Yankees = Pfizer comments, this equates to buying free agents when the farm system isn’t producing good players.

Turns out that this is the main model for the telcos.

There is something to be said for “buying it elsewhere.” If the big telcos built everything themselves, there would be no Cisco and no Motorola. But years of buying it elsewhere has yielded a culture distrustful of technology — and of progress: It’s impossible to imagine Microsoft developing a big new product and having the lead engineer shift from foot to foot in the corner pretending to be just another customer. It has meant, as with AT&T’s Lightspeed, that telcos are likely to offer services that only match, but not surpass, those available from others. And increasingly their approach has put the telcos on the wrong side of technological innovation, leaving them in the position of protecting their investments in their networks from the encroachments of new ideas.

Anyway, I’m fascinated by the ways major industries function, and this essay provides some neat insights into what it’s like to be an $80 billion player with razr-thin (ha-ha) profit margins. So give it a read.

Posted on

Family album

Despite some dreary weather, we had a lovely day up in Connecticut with my cousins, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 10 years. That span (coinciding with both daughters’ weddings in the summer of 1996) has yielded 5 children, plus a bunch of retrievers:

Amy was pretty happy to discover that

a) I have relatives in the United States

b) I have relatives who aren’t crazy

There was a third dog who couldn’t get into the picture. He has a big “elizabethan” collar on to keep him from chewing on his foreleg. It looked pretty sad, and I opined that they should paint a big sunflower pattern on the inside of the collar, so at least they could be cheered when the dog looked up at the them.

We had to get a pic of Amy with the youngest kid, for obvious reasons:

Posted on

Between the lines

In case you’re sitting around bored this weekend, here’s an interview with a book designer who isn’t Chip Kidd.

Here’s a blog post by Dylan Horrocks (a.k.a. one of the finest cartoonists alive and an all-around swell guy who let me crash at his home in New Zealand a few years ago) on science and art.

And here’s the introduction to a new book on Leo Strauss. I found it pretty interesting, especially when it went into the east coast vs. west coast Straussians’ rivalry. It really heated up when they popped Biggie, that’s for sure.

I hope your weekend is exciting enough that you don’t read all this stuff.