Month: August 2004

Samsung DigitAll: Everyone’s buying

Three years ago, I was shopping around for a 17″ flatscreen monitor, and the dingy little PC shop in London I went to would only offer a Samsung. I was leery at first – after all, wasn’t Samsung that company that made those unremarkable OEM products that adorn the nation’s Walmarts? However, the price and featureset seemed reasonable, so I purchased it.

“Intellectual assets will determine a company’s value in the 21st century. The age when companies simply sell products is over. In the new era, enterprises have to sell their corporate philosophy and culture. An enterprise’s most vital assets lie in its design and other creative capacities.”

– Kook Hyun Chung, VP Samsung Corporate Design

Today, I’m typing out this blog entry with the same monitor. Silverlotus and her parents liked it so much, they each bought the same model too. (At night, sometimes Silverlotus’s and my monitor’s blinking lights sync up, like a binary electrical parade). We now also own Samsung cellphones.

Since then, Samsung products have vanished from Walmart. Morpheus’s kung fu-kicking rebels are seen pulling Samsung cellphones from their Prada suits in The Matrix Reloaded, replacing the Nokias they carried in The Matrix. Samsung is now in the #3 spot for cellphones, biting at the heels of Motorola. Samsung’s CEO is now bullishing gunning for #1, claiming they’ll beat Nokia in handset sales by 2010. Bell offers seven Samsungs. That’s 1/3 of their postpaid lineup.

You can see why if you look at the Samsung a680, a Bell Mobility exclusive phone to be released in the fall. Compare it with Mobility’s current Nokia flagship, the 6225:

Nokia 6225 Samsung a680
Still camera Video camera /w flash and exposure options
4,000 colour LCD screen 65,000 colour TFT screen
16-chord polyphonic sound 32-chord polyphonic sound
Programmable voice-dialing Intelligent voice and digit dialing that learns how you talk

The a680 is also lighter, smaller, and has a slightly bigger screen than the Nokia. When you squeeze or shake it, the Samsung phone doesn’t squeak or rattle. The GUI is colourful and animated. The Nokia’s GUI is unchanged from 1999.

As for the Moto, the founder of the “Six Sigma” quality movement, well: the last set of Motorola phones that Telus and Bell offered were so poorly made (their antennas would snap off) rumour has it this is the reason why Telus and Bell hasn’t offered a new Motorola phone in three years.

So what is their secret sauce? This is my assessment:

  1. Making their stuff not suck. They dropped their value-brand items and went upmarket. “They were no longer just another garden variety Asian electronics maker,” Arik Johnson reported. “Their overall quality went up.” In 2003, the Yankee Group found that an average Samsung phone’s selling price was $190 versus Motorola’s $146 and Nokia’s $154. They’ve focused on quality features at a higher (yet reasonable) price point, which translated to a handsome 18% gross profit margin. Nokia has a 20% margin.
  2. Building a unified brand identity. The Samsung DigitAll “Everyone’s invited” brand is present on all of their consumers products worldwide. They used to retain 55 ad agencies, but now they carry only one. Exclusive phone deals with phone carriers makes their phones even more unique. A vigorous focus on industrial design led them to offer 140 models last year, each one slightly different from the other.
  3. Vertical integrated structure. Samsung still makes RAM chips and LCDs. In fact, they are the #2 manufacturer of semiconductors, behind Intel. Making their parts in-house means they remain self-sufficient; Samsung was able to weather pandemic part shortages and keep production levels up.

Remembering the mechanical man

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry…Command and Conquer was the first CD-ROM computer game that I truly enjoyed. You could control an entire army, from securing resources to devising stratagems. The background story was incredibly complex, for a game: two sides, the noble GDI and the charismatic Brotherhood of Nod, waged a war on the ground and through Police2 copy.jpgpropaganda in a bid to be the first to control and understand an organism known as Tiberium that is slowly taking over the world. I used to play it so long, my contact lenses fell out of my head.

You could tell there was love put into this game. Playing as Nod, if you uncovered three crates spread over several campaign levels, you obtained a nuclear warhead in the final mission. As GDI, you received a different ending movie depending on how you destroyed the Nod Temple – if you used the orbital Ion Cannon, you would see the charismatic Nod leader, Kane, spread his arms like a cross-like figure as the beam pulverized him and his stronghold.

Red Alert and Red Alert 2 continued the tradition of background rock music, fancy install sequences, over the top FMVs and crazy weapons that were a hoot to use, but still remained firmly entrenched in a modern combat setting. Despite being prequels and spinoffs, they too offered teasing glimpses into the alternate universe that C&C created.

The true C&C storyline still yearned for its rightful sequels. Westwood planned it to be a trilogy: Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, and Tiberian Twilight.

However, Command & Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun, hyped for over four years, turned the C&C story into a sci-fi cliche with UFOs and mutants, and was a commercial flop. By then, Westwood was dead and assimilated into the EA monolith. Generals, while very pretty, was devoid of storyline or artistry. It was C&C in name only. The golden goose from Las Vegas was officially poached.

It’s hard to get excited by the possibility of Command and Conquer 3: Tiberian Twilight. Will it bring the old excitement back, or will it be the final insult?

For the game…oh yeah and the money

The Canadian Olympics Committee is pretty hardnosed about their brand. They’re even complaining about sports-themed advertisements run by companies that are not Olympic sponsors.

Bell Canada, as a bonafide Olympic sponsor itself, has one amusing rule governing the Olympic rings logo. The COC logo (Olympic rings with a red maple leaf) cannot be shown in any public advert that prominently features a The phones of Samsung_web.jpg cellular phone not manufactured by Samsung, who is also a registered Olympics sponsor. If the image of said non-Samsung phone is small and has its company logo removed, it’s okay.

As Boing Boing pointed out, “Companies sponsor your games because they’re important and lots of people watch them, not because they can be assured that Olympic venues will be swept clean of rival logos.”

Might be a moot point anyway. Apparently live Olympic attendance is very low at the moment. Maybe they had to refuse entry to too many folks carrying non-Dasani bottles of water. The problem is being solved by giving away free tickets, which is a common solution for any undersold public event.

The Samsung-Bell pact did bring about a really nice phone, though. Silverlotus got a “Samsung A660 Olympic Edition” flip phone (left), and it’s better than my A500 (in the centre) in almost every way – smaller, lighter, cheaper, better graphics, better sound, better voice recognition – but lacks an external LCD screen. It also makes a pretty tinkling noise when you open or close it.

She plans to get some acrylic paint and sandpaper to remove that COC logo in due course.

Sanitary engineers anyone?

Big surprise: CNET reports that 22% of all technology workers lack four-year degrees.

I remember my co-op job at the Systems & Technology division at a major national bank. My manager had taken Anthropology.

That’s why you should hire me. I’ve got my Bachelor’s of Engineering, I’m the real deal, all natural whole grain, unlike those other cheap knockoffs. Heck, I spent five years in engineering purgatory to get a Management co-degree, all the while the Arts and Commerce students sat in their 3pm classes on a Wednesday dressed to the nines, ready for another night at the clubs.

Which goes to show, once you leave school and get your first professional position, your education is irrelevant.

Perhaps video didn’t kill the radio star

John Dvorak doesn’t like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma very much. In fact, he calls it “the biggest crock of the new millennium“, which is pretty damning in a clairvoyant way, considering we still have 996 years to go, and in a temporal way, considering “Innovator’s Dilemma” was published in 1997. His curt behaviour toward disagreeing commentators doesn’t help his case.

James V. McGee suspects Dvorak hasn’t actually read the book, while Corante’s Renee Hopkins Callahan diplomatically suggests that perhaps it’s not the concept he’s against, merely the surrounding hype.

Both take Dvorak to task on his assertion that “there is no such thing as disruptive technology”, which is demonstrably false. Christensen defines disruptive innovations as follows:

  1. They initially appear as inferior alternatives to the current incumbent product or service. This inferiority may be a higher price or poorer performance.
  2. They establish some low-end niche market only slightly related to the disruptee.
  3. Technical or social change begins to negate their inferiority. Price gradually goes down, performance slowly improves.
  4. Suddenly said disruptive technology crosses over and becomes a worthy challenger in the incumbent’s market. At this point, the customer sees the disruptor and disruptee to have feature parity, with the disruptor having greater value.
  5. Disruptee customer demand drops, and the incumbent innovation is wiped out virtually overnight. The requisite companies that refuse to change usually meet the same fate.

Seth Godin sums up disruption as a point where “incremental band aid improvements cease to pay off and instead, wholesale replacement occurs“.

Dvorak uses Linux vs. Microsoft to prove how disruptive technology is hooey; despite Linux’s disruptiveness, he argues, MS is richer and bigger than ever. Which is true, if a bit disengenious; as we all know, the fat lady has yet to sing in that opera.

In hindsight, we can all think of disruptive technologies. Cellphones are killing off landlines, satellite phones and airplane phones. Digital photography made Polaroid extinct overnight. Discount airlines are taking the air travel market by storm.

The innovator’s dilemma is that seldomly do companies see the danger and react before they’re about to be T-boned.

Naturally, disruption truly works when all things are equal. If a product or its management just plain sucks, it will fail no matter what. Ergo, incumbents have used tactics such as aggressive litigation and marketing to kill off smaller disruptive hopefuls.

One thing I do agree, however, is that disruptive innovation is not a cure-all. Business, like dieting, is full of faddish theories. The term will be exploited by marketers to be trendy, by executives to defer accountability for their failures, and by IT pundits like Dvorak and I trying to fill up the Internet.

Mixed clouds of the creative mind

“Acquire steelier knives and/or less resolute beast”

– John Moe’s Changes to the Hotel California, Made in Response to Mr. Henley’s Recent Complaint

“Still, trusting Microsoft to handle your money seems a little like hiring Oprah to guard the Oreos. One day you’ll wake up to find nothing but crumbs.”

– Robert X. Cringely on the how online Passport glitches prevent people from even loading Microsoft Money 2004, Posted on Categories everything1 Comment on Mixed clouds of the creative mind

Critical Thinking: How to talk like a politician

Take a gander at Conversational Terrorism, a selection of bon-mot assaults and oratory tricks to siderail a topic. And then don’t do them.

“I would like to answer your question directly, but considering your past reactions / ability to cope with the truth / emotional instability, I feel that to do so would be a disservice to you at this time.” [Other person gets (justifiably) upset.] “See, what did I tell you. You are flying off the handle already!”

Higher, faster, stronger advertising

“I don’t see why, after all the money that Greek taxpayers will end up paying to host the games, McDonald’s should dictate what I can eat in my own city.”

Spectators that try to bring in non-Coca Cola and non-McDonald’s food and beverages into the Athens 2004 Olympics will be turned away at the gate. Staff have also been instructed to make people take off clothing or apparel with competitor’s logos on them. All US athletes at the winner’s podium must wear Adidas outfits.

It’s all part of the IOC’s “clean venue policy”, designed to stop competitors that haven’t paid sponsorship fees from waging “ambush marketing”.

I can understand their reasoning, but it seems quite extreme to me. Then again, these are probably the same sort of people that think telemarketing and popup windows are good ideas.

Please call me back, puleeeze

We finally replaced Silverlotus’s Harmony phone (complete with malfunctioning Hold button) and answering machine with a shiny new Panasonic 2.4GHz (damn, it’s faster than my PC! :D) cordless phone set. It was a bit more expensive than I would have been totally comfortable with (it was $135), but we had a Bell World gift card so there you go. I’ll consider it an investment against future dropped calls and missed messages.

Hopefully people who call us by mistake looking for York University will stop leaving retarded messages on our digital answering system.

Our old answering machine used a microcassette, and the microcassette was deteriorating to the point all the voice recordings came out warbly. It sounded like everyone that left a message was crying or at the brink of tears.

I’m going to miss that answering machine.

Phone bashing is my calling

Kyocera 7135: I had to laugh at this photo collage of some frustrated user busting a few caps in his Kyocera 7135’s ass. I have two coworkers with the 7135 Palm phone, and besides the fact you look like a geek toting around this monstrous phone, its problems are legion. One coworker had his crash several times a week, and even considered asking Bell Mobility to let him just keep the cheapo loaner Nokia 3865.

My other colleague seems to have a patched version, although he doesn’t like the interface. It seems like the Palm UI was grafted onto the phone’s UI, so sometimes you can use the touchscreen and sometimes you can only use the numeric keypad. Dialing numbers while driving is impossible, since you’d have to whip out your stylus, press “Main”, click “Address Book”….

Motorola MPx220: PocketPC phones are not immune to the same problems, it seems. My sister had a prototype of the MPx220; some wag at Windows Mobile gave her one. She thought it was great; she could check her mail and MSN and Outlook calendar and take pictures and everything.

So I asked her how was the RF quality? “Actually, it keeps dropping my calls,” she said sheepishly.

But hey, who needs a phone for talking when it’s got a mean game of Solitaire?