Regular readers will notice a new design theme here at Sleepinginmyhead. There's not much difference in content, but the old layout was looking a little tired. I'm thinking of bringing back etymology wednesdays, and I'll be using the sleeptweets twitter account on the right for random links, so please subscribe. Onwards.
horses for courses
I was watching this Greg Lynn video today, and I scrolled down to the comments. I guess that's as polarising as you can get.
pocketable? Come on....
I left sony nearly a year ago, and it's astonishing how quiet things have been. There were some interesting things in the pipeline when I was there, but I've not seen any of them break the light of day. Think about it, how many big sony products have there been in the last 12 months? The only really active arm of the business has been in gaming, with the launch of a slimmed down PS3 and a new PSP, but the rest of the company has been slowly drifting into the shadows. When was the last time anyone was in awe of a Cybershot or Bravia product, oh and SonyEricsson anyone? Anyone?
I'm not sure why this is, but I have my hunches.I think that sony has a problem with its product planning team. The designers I worked with in Sony were smart people, some of them were very smart, but the product planning team left a lot to be desired. For the uninitiated, a product planning team (often called a portfolio team) are tasked with bringing together R&D, market and competitor analysis to plan what products to design over the next 12 to 24 months. In my experience the sony product planners are a panicked bunch. Rather than planning a long-term vision based on clear insights and emerging technologies, they panic and worry too much about the current market and competitor shifts. I recall a project I worked on in 2007 which changed direction so many times, and had so many features added in response to competitor products, that by the time of launch it was a confused mess. Another trait of product planners is to grab onto spurious features and promote them to the USP of any new launch. This was brought into clarity once again by the launch of the Vaio Type P, designed by an ex-colleague of mine. Whilst I'm not really up to speed with the netbook design world, I know a dodgy bit of positioning when I see it. It's a nice enough product, and I'm sure it has it's niche, but the headline attached to it is 'pocketable'. The press launch below is intended to make that point.
I don't think I need to point out the flaws in this. It really smacks of the product planning and marketing teams missing the point. The form factor is interesting, and the design looks OK from what I've seen, but by trying to call it 'pocketable', the product is greeted with derision. Sony need to have strength in their convictions if they are to succeed. A clear brief from the beginning of a programme, based on real needs means that a coherent product is developed, and the core benefit is clearly communicated. Shame sony, such a shame.
New, Improved!
I'm a better person than I was yesterday, thanks Microsoft!
how high?
The Burj Dubai is a tall building, as this blog explains very eloquently. Hijacked from the post are the following images via Google Earth. The pic on the left is the view from the top of the Rockerfeller centre, the view on the right is the view you would get if the Burj was built in Manhattan. Hells teeth.
not so smart
I'm getting a little tired of software providers trying to second guess where I am by my server location. As centralised computing becomes more prevalent, the chances of me being located in the same building or even the same country as my servers is decreasing, as it makes sense to seat server centres in places with low electricity and rental costs. My servers are (so it seems) in Holland and Finland. As a result, google often shifts to Suomi or Dutch, and all of the advertising I hear on Spotify is in Finnish. This isn't smart, although it is entertaining, after all anything to reduce the penetration of ads is good. What is pretty poor is when legal stuff is shown to me in my assumed language, and there is no opportunity to change my location preferences, as happened this morning with an ipod update. Not smart, not helpful, probably not legal.
dixons - the last place you want to go
new ads by M&C saatchi for Dixons. Typographically not great, but thematically brilliant.
USB -what happened there?
Years ago I remember, bemoaning the number of cables I had kicking around the studio, yet I never seemed to have quite the cable I needed. My reasoning seemed sound, why couldn't we have a single cable for everything, after all, it's just lengths of copper joining two things together. Then along came USB, the UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS!!! Everything seemed great, the future was here, everything could connect by USB, it was the answer! But not so. I still have a whole host of cables kicking around, and never seem to have the one I need. The problem is I viewed USB as a design solution "one cable for all", but developers viewed USB as a standardised transfer protocol, resulting in a whole host of different shaped plugs which ALL DO THE SAME THING, there's at least six main sizes to date, with countless 'specialised USB' variants. It all looked so rosy back in the nineties....
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