Category: Design

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Otto… parts?

(Oh, just go to the slideshow.)

I took the day off yesterday, so you know what that means, dear readers! Yup: I hustled around in traffic, walked all over the place, and sweated like Patrick Ewing! (I swear: I’m taking tomorrow off and have no plans on leaving the house. I might go all John & Yoko and not even get outta bed.)

I’d have written about it sooner, but I stupidly checked my work e-mail last night instead of waiting till this morning. I discovered that one of the eight speakers at our conference (7 weeks from tomorrow) has to cancel, which means I need to scramble to find a replacement. And, being a neurotic, I began to fear that every single speaker who hasn’t sent back his or her confirmation letter is going to cancel.

Which is to say, it should’ve been a Xanax night, but I stupidly decided to play it straight. So, I woke up at 4am this morning and began formulating backup plans. This should explain some of the following disjointedness.

Anyway, I spent yesterday in NYC and, while it wasn’t very humid, the 90-degree temps really sapped me. I probably started out on the wrong foot by heading over to the Strand Bookstore, which never has good air circulation. Roaming downstairs to look through review copies and the philosophy section, I thought I was going to pass out. Fortunately, I stayed conscious long enough to snap this pic:

it sure does

I’m lying about starting out at the Strand. I actually started at a parking lot on 17th St. and 5th Ave., around 11am. The attendant asked when I’d be back and I said, “Around 7 or 8,” figuring I’d take my wife out for dinner after she gets out of work. He proceeded to park the car, hand me the ticket, and then say to me, “We close at 7.” I stared for a moment, then just left for the bookstore.

Since I know you’re all dying to find out exactly what I bought at the bookstore, here’s the list:

From the Strand, I walked down to Otto, a restaurant just north of Washington Square and co-owned by Mario Batali, where I planned meet official VM buddy Elayne for lunch. Elayne was in charge of a pair of kids — early teenagers, I guess — who came down to NYC from Connecticut so they could see a concert at South Street Seaport by Korn. Elayne asked if I knew them. “Not really,” I said. “I think they did a cover of Word Up! by Cameo. And they spell their name with a K.”

“That would explain why I couldn’t find them online.”

On to lunch. It’s one of Elayne’s favorite places to eat. The menu had an amazing array of pizzas, and I felt bad about settling for the Quattro Formaggi, but I’m a boring man. With a camera:

They say quattro, they mean quattro

Elayne was more daring, ordering a pizza with potatoes and anchovies. At one point, she left for a smoke break, asking me to entertain the kids with a story about the time Dad handed me a shotgun “in case anything happens” during a business deal he was making.

When she returned, she said, “Mario Batali’s here! He’s in the other room and he’ll take a picture with the kids!” So the four of us got up and hurried to the front of the restaurant, even though the kids had no idea who Mario Batali is. We tried explaining the celebrity chef phenomenon, but they didn’t seem to know much beyond Rachael Ray. I, meanwhile, was holding out hope that Anthony Bourdain would be on hand, too.

Elayne made quick introductions, and I snapped a pic of Mario with the boys:

The camera does not add 10 lbs. in this case.

I wanted to take a second one, just to show that he really does walk around in bright orange Crocs, but thought it’d be rude.

Back at the table, I said to the kids, “You guys don’t like REM, right?” They made faces and shook their heads. I mentioned that Batali’s good friends with Michael Stipe, and they laughed.

Elayne proceeded to tell the story of her very first NYC celebrity sighting: Carrot Top. “Pre-steroids?” I asked.

There’s not much more to tell about the day. I meandered with Elayne & the kids for a bit, then headed out to my wife’s office. It was good to finally see it, since I find it so difficult to visualize other people’s spaces. Now that I have some idea of what her workplace is like, I think I’ll find it easier to send goofy e-mails and IMs.

Anyway, I headed back into the city till her workday ended. Having left my books at her office, I needed to pick up something else to read for a bit. I stopped in at Shakespeare & Co. on 23rd St., only to find that the main floor is gutted and there’s just a small store downstairs while renovations are done. I picked up a copy of Winter’s Tale (30% off everything in the store), read/sidewalk-gawked in an Au Bon Pain near Union Square, and then headed back to her office.

As it turned out, we were both too stuffed from our lunches to want any dinner, so the parking lot situation worked out. We grabbed the car, made a surprisingly quick dash to the Lincoln Tunnel, and got home with plenty of time for me to worry about the conference!

(The photoset has a bunch more pictures that I didn’t post.)

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The future ain’t what it used to be

A few months ago, I wrote about the Chrysler 300C, which appealed to me because it resembled the Batmobile. Over at 2Blowhards, Donald Pettinger writes about the 1950s’ dream cars, with a fantastic gallery of Cars of the Future:

With no place to go trend-wise, stylists thrashed around in search a new trends or themes. One such theme was aviation or space, already successfully tested by Harley Earl at General Motors. I’m thinking of a series of futuristic scale models that yielded the famous 1948 Cadillac tail fins. The success of Cadillac led stylists to go pretty wild exploring that theme — wild to the point where dream cars (and to a lesser degree some production models) looked less and less like cars.

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Style and not

Over the weekend, I read a neat article about the differences between Apple stores and Sony Style stores. One of the funniest comments came after the writer noticed the huge disparity in foot traffic (a lot more people were in the Apple store) in the two stores in a Palo Alto mall:

Last week, I shared these impressions with Dennis Syracuse, senior vice president for Sony Retail, who assured me that Sony’s stores drew an average of 350,000 visitors annually per store. Mr. Syracuse rejected the idea that his store concept could be compared to Apple’s. His stores were conceived, he said, as a “fashion boutique for women and children” that incidentally happened to carry electronics instead of clothing.

We happen to have both stores (it’s actually a mini Apple store, a narrower version of the full-sized stores) in a nearby megamegamall, so I stopped in on both of them while running an errand after work (I took a half-day today; no need to dive right back into the pool, after a stressful couple of weeks and a nice long weekend). At 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, what did I find?

(Undersized) Apple store: 19 customers, and 7 or 8 floor staff

Sony Style store: 5 customers (3 of whom were under the age of 12), and 5 floor staff

Now, the Sony store is located among high-end stores, while the Apple store is flanked by Banana Republic and a Nine West, but it was difficult to understand Mr. Syracuse’s vision of a “fashion boutique”. This Sony store was just as overloaded with products and “stuff” as the one Mr. Stross describes in his article: laptops, ebooks, Playstation gear, TVs, stereos, home theaters, and more. According to its own site:

The stores feature several hands-on demonstration areas, including HDTV display walls equipped with high-definition TV sets and DVD players, and a digital imaging gallery with a selection of camcorders, photo printers and digital still cameras as well as VAIO PCs to exhibit connectivity.

As product mix goes, it was a mess: a very well-organized mess, but still a mess insofar as there was nothing linking the products but a Sony logo. Or, as Mr. Stross writes:

But Sony’s offerings have not impressed retail consultants with whom I spoke. Willard Ander, a senior partner at McMillan Doolittle in Chicago, was unsparing in his assessment: “Sony doesn’t get retail. The stores are not energized and not shop-able.” Apple stores extend an “emotional connection” to their customers that Sony’s do not, Mr. Ander said. The absence of such a connection, he said, was a common failing of manufacturers who venture into retail on their own.

In addition to this baffling array of electronics, I think another big problem with the Sony Style setup is that, while the Mac store sells hardware (and accessories), the Sony store splits its focus between hardware and software. That is, it featured numerous product displays and posters for Sony’s music and movies. So the Sony store shows off CDs and DVDs of Sony artists, but I don’t believe there’s brand/label/studio awareness when it comes to most music and movies (Pixar notwithstanding).

In contrast, the Apple store treats content (software) as something the user can go pursue: a poster for the iTunes movie store shows many different properties, but doesn’t limit itself to, say, Disney videos. The store is selling its users the opportunity to pick from a universe of movies and music, not those of one label/studio.

On top of that, there’s plenty to be said for the airy brightness of an Apple store. The floor design, even in a mini-version, is open and easy to navigate. It isn’t selling as much as a Sony store, and it doesn’t have to.

This afternoon, I came across another Apple retail article: this one’s about Dell’s attempts at recapturing market share, including a stab at retail, despite its roots in direct sales. Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like Catherine Keener’s character’s store, We Sell Your Stuff On Ebay, in The 40-Year-Old Virgin:

Earlier this year, Dell opened its first retail store in the NorthPark Center in Dallas, right across the mall from an Apple store. Inexplicably, the Dell store carries no inventory. Customers can check out the goods, but can’t actually buy them in the store. This is the main reason cited for the failure of Gateway’s chain of stores, which shuttered in 2004.

The article also explains that, since design is now important in the PC biz, Dell’s gonna get some designin’ on! It felt a lot like a “let’s buy some innovation!” initiative, and that trick (just about) never works. Usually, it involves overpaying for people who had One Good Idea, and telling them to “be creative.” I’ve seen it.

I don’t mean to blow sunshine up Steve Jobs’ ass, but it is pretty amazing that Apple has managed to make retail work in a field where a lot of other companies have tanked.