Vaclav Havel and the Superbowl

I make notes for articles using MarsEdit. Usually I make a few notes about what I intend to write about as a reminder.

Occasionally, I don't.

I have absolutely no clue what witty and clever comments I intended to make by combining the Superbowl and former Czech President and poet Vaclav Havel into the same post.

If anyone has any ideas I'd be happy to hear them!

Cancel, I Tell You!

I love OS X. I love Macs in general. I think Apple rock. I don't feel locked into anything with Apple, I feel free, creatively inspired, and happy to work at my MacBook every day. OS X is a brilliant example of an operating system that doesn't get in the way of what you want to do.

But one thing annoys me, and it has done so for years.

Canceling. Aborting. Stopping. Whatever you want to call it, whenever you want to do it, it should happen instantly.

But it doesn't. Take a wifi file tranfser. Click on the 'X' cancel button, and wait. And wait. And wait.

Try to cancel anything while the OS is doing something, and it more often than not takes minutes to get around to stopping. Cancel should mean stop. Right now. Immediately. Stop doing that thing.

And still the OS trundles on, thinking about it just a little longer.

Hopefully this will be addressed in Snow Leopard (along with proper caching of Safari sites, so clicking 'back' doesn't require a reload of the whole goddamned page!!!).

Bing

The audacity and greed of multi-million dollar corporations never ceases to amaze me.

Microsoft recently launched Bing - an attempt to regain control of the search engine marketplace from Google. Don't they realize that this simply isn't going to work? The web doesn't work like that.

Take Jaiku and Twitter, or Vimeo and YouTube. You can't compete with an already established behemoth. You can offer a better quality service (which Vimeo did, but Bing doesn't), but the major force in that area will simply adapt and include whatever new service you provide. Hence YouTube's rapid introduction of HD.

Bing touts itself as an alternative to Google. But 'Google' has entered the English Dictionaries as a verb! Bing is not going to achieve that. For a start, it looks too corporate (it is, after all, a Microsoft enterprise). It has that corporate/Microsoft mix of bad design and over use of blue. Plus, it has a dominant picture of a stingray. Why?

I can imagine the idea is to suggest that you are about to delve into the unknown waters, to reveal the mysteries of the internet's deepest chasms.

Well, sorry, it's a search engine. And Google does the job well enough, while at the same time integrating a zillion other services. I'm no proponent of global domination for Google (which sometimes seems to be their aim), but really - do we need another search engine? Even one with a picture of a stingray?

The Nokia Communicator

When will Nokia realise that making corny product placements in 'cool' films doesn't strengthen their image, it harms it.

In J.J. Abrams über cool reboot of Star Trek, for a brief but all-too-visible moment, young Kirk gets a call on his in-car Nokia communicator. This is an interesting product placement which seems to backfire.

The car in question is an antique. It's a 50's throwback, fitted with a few high-tech gizmos such as the Nokia device. But this is a film set in the future, and the car is from the past, we can only assume that the communicator is intended to appear somehow retro.

This appears to send out somewhat conflicting messages. It represents Nokia as a company which is unsure of it's position. It tries to establish Nokia as a brand that people will still rely upon in the future, but at the same time it represents itself as a thing of the past.

Ironically, in many ways this is an accurate representation of Nokia's present status. Only a few years ago, Nokia reigned supreme. But it's shocking complacency with its position as market-leader had led to it falling far, far behind the competition. How could a company as huge as Nokia allow Apple, the young upstart in mobile communications, to boldly go and leap light years ahead of them within two years?

Having worked for Nokia in the past, I'm sad to see this state of affairs, but at the same time I'm not in the least bit surprised. Nokia always followed a business plan that was startlingly out of touch with its customers, and relied heavily on a perceived brand loyalty--a brand loyalty that didn't exist.

Nokia's market complacency came at the same time as a design crisis hit the manufacturer. After Frank Nuovo--designer of some of Nokia's most iconic phones--left the company, Nokia released a stream--in fact, more a flood--of poorly designed, ugly, chunky, plastic phones. Phones so without character that artificial means had to be created to spice them up. More plastic could be attached to them which would, Nokia insisted, allow you to 'Xpress Yourself.'

Rather than innovate with the phones themselves, Nokia put millions into developing Club Nokia, a cynical attempt to increase after-market loyalty by selling add-ons, graphics, and ringtones. Wow. Exciting. Cool.

Club Nokia was an unmitigated disaster. It could never consolidate brand loyalty because at that point, there was no brand loyalty. Sony had entered the market, smartening Ericsson's designs. Motorola even innovated with the RAZR. And Nokia? You may find this hard to believe, but they were busy trying to get everyone in the world to make the Club Nokia their home page. Honestly--this was their strategy! Club Nokia would be so much fun, that nobody would want to go anywhere else on the internet except clubnokia.com.

At the time, I was the chief copywriter for Club Nokia. I was dumbfounded. This seemed to me to be the epitome of Nokia's arrogance, complacency, and ignorance. Did they really think people would do that? How could anyone be so out of touch with reality?

It came as no surprise to me that a few years later, Club Nokia was written off as a failure. By then, it was too late. Nokia's zeitgeist had passed. Their phones became unremarkable: too cheap, or too expensive with no innovative features. And then, out of the blue, came the iPhone. Suddenly, every phone Nokia had on the market looked like a relic from the past.

And this is the image we are left with--the marketing image from Star Trek. Nokia. Still around in the future, still behind the times.

[Update: Right on cue, this article from Electronista concerning Nokia's decline in popularity with teens.]