darryl ramm's blog

I was looking at the Apple Macbook Pro updates announced at the recent 2009 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. The MacBook Pro reduction in I/O connectivity is getting depressing. The 15″ and 13″ models get an SD card slot but they do so at the expense of an ExpressCard/34 slot. I reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 “your chocolate ration has been increased”.

At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.

The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful.  FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.

I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader  in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro)  than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.

I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.

Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear.  I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.

Shoe Circus, the first Seinfeld-Gates Microsoft advertisement is just awful.  Crispin Porter + Bogusky the agency responsible for this, should be running for cover. Microsoft is trying to spin it as an attention getter and buzz creator. The only buzz this ad is going to create is of the bad kind, like WTF were they thinking? Are they that out of touch? Is that there best response to Apple and its hip Get a Mac campaign from agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, or to concerns about the perception of Vista? Could this be a deliberate bumbling looking first advertisement in a series that will turn around and be hip and creative? Yea sure, pigs fly.

In contast the Apple Get a Mac campaign uses humor and a minimalistic, hip style the helps focus attention on a simple product related message.  They are little vignettes that tell a simple story about how some feature of the Mac is better than a PC. You know, simple,  clearly explained, benefit focused, and many built on existing stereotypes or impressions (often unfair ones) of competing market dominant products. All good basic advertising stuff. (more…)

I love it when companies do creative “in your face” marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the following move by Alexander Schleicher against DG Flugzeugbau, two of the leading German sailplane manufactures, pretty funny.

Schleicher make the ASH-26E motorglider I fly, DG make the nice DG-1000S two seat glider I’ve enjoyed flying as a member of BASA (Bay Area Soaring Associates) and they designed the DG-303 sailplane I used to own. Hugh Milne a fellow Californian ASH-26E pilot returns from visiting friends in Germany and forwarded the photos here and this story.

In Spring 2007 DG delivered a new DG-1000S sailplane to HVL (Hamburger Verein für Luftfahrt), one of the largest Hamburg soaring clubs. With new sailplanes this normally involves a long wait, eager anticipation and exchange of lots of money. But the club members do not like the brown trim stripes on this glider. I’m not sure who specified brown, it’s a pretty unusual color for glider trim, anyhow the club members did not like the color. Since the club really wants their sailplane, they accept it, but have contacts at Alexander Schleicher and so drive it across Germany to the Schleicher factory in Poppenhausen so they can replace the trim on their competitor’s brand new sailplane.

Schleicher replaced the standard DG trim stripes with the latest style of their own distinctive “swoosh” underneath the canopies and added a little sign on the tail, which I am told means “With the best friendly greetings from Poppenhausen”. I think the Schleicher swoosh looks a lot better and more modern than the usual plain DG trim strips. Schleicher apparently charged about 300 Euros to cover the cost of materials. I bet the Schleicher factory had fun doing this.

I have heard from a HVL club member who flies the DG-1000S in contests etc. that it often takes other pilots quite a while to realize what is different with this glider.

There are photos of this DG-1000S online on the HVL club website.

The DG-1000S is a good glider, and by the way if you are a glider pilot and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, BASA have both a DG-1000S and DG-505 in their club fleet.

[This post has been corrected, only the trim was repainted, the base white paint on the DG-1000S was fine, and there was only one DG-1000S delivered. Photo credits. Copyright Hugh Milne, DG-1000S with new paint trim. Eckbert Andresen DG-1000S with brown trim. Used with Permission.]

The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple “companion” for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will be the start of a whole new product family. Good luck trying to convince anybody of that. And I know that “the market” often does not recognize the need for new products until they have established themselves—but the Palm Foleo does not pass even the simplest sniff test for a reasonable product.

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Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really slow menu system they work great.

I just refuse to play TiVO games and give TiVO my viewing information and since I don’t purchase any pay for view events there is just no need to connect. And especially post Rupert Murdoch’s aquisiton of DirecTV there is no way I see the TiVO hating DirecTV folks ever following up on pursing requirements to connect the TiVO units to a land line so they can do their daily calls. Sure they’d love to have the pay per view business but if you are no using that anyhow…

Besides being painfilly slow at times the TiVO user interface on these boxes is better than any other DVR/set top box I’ve used. So I’m not looking forward to what happens if one of these boxes dies.

TiVO was an impressive company with great products and technology but suffered the same problem as companies like Healthion that come into established (and technology backwards) marketplaces and try to shake things up against entenched players. You just know with ad skipping fears and copyright concerns and the past laggard behavior of media companies they were going to have a tough ride. Then companies like DirecTV did not want TiVO in the middle of their food chain. I’d like to see TiVO survive and they are clearly playing around with business models trying to work but since the little TV watched in our house is all DirecTV there is no TiVO in my future.

I was cleaning out stuff and found an old cookie from the VMware third birthday party. I certainly was not going to eat it and so as a social experiment I have put it up for auction on EBay. Is there a market for edible promotional and marketing items?

Interestingly this was from the VMware “brown period” where the logo featured the words VMware in brown and brown and blue were used thoughout collateral and other marketing material. This was planned independent of UPS starting to promote their brown color but that did lead to questions of wether VMware was trying to copy UPS with their promotion of their brown color including the “What can BROWN do for you?” advertisments. We were definitely not trying to copy UPS.

Brown is a difficult color to reproduce well so it looks good and not just a muddy mess, and so that it has consistent color across different media. I think the color brown fairly quickly proved a bad idea but the thought and design effort that went into all the marketing collateral look and feel was a step in the right direction.

I try to prune back on how much junk mail I get and what I do get goes into a shredder (Fellowes OD1500C, great shredder) without a second glance. Exceeeeept this one which caught my attention, for well marketing reasons . Now while I’m thinking about whether I need to spend $12 on a years for a subscription to Playboy I’m more curious where Playboy got my address from and which lists would Playboy correlate with high marketing responses. I don’t think Lexus or Porsche would sell my address. Maybe from my Flying, Fine Woodworking, Stereophile, Widescreen Review, Car & Driver, Road & Track , Excellence (Porsche) magazine subscriptions? Maybe Playboy trolls the FAA pilots database? My Health club/gym membership? Mmmm.

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.

Naviter has released improved resolution Landsat imaging for for their SeeYou soaring planning and analysis software. A nice improvement in resolution as you can see from the screen shots on the left. These screen shots show part of a flight I made last year from Minden Douglas Airport (KMEV) in Nevada. The 38th north parallel runs through KEMV. In these screen shots you see the new higher resolution imaging south of the 38th parallel and the previous resolution imaging to the north.

The release of improved resolution terrain imagery for SeeYou is likely a slow (there is no reason to hurry) response to Sierra SkyWare releasing WinPilot 3D to compete with SeeYou. One of the leading benefit claims Sierra SkyWare was making for Winpilot 3D was its 3D visualization and imaging resolution. 3D visualization is one of the sexier features of SeeYou so this was pretty much a frontal assault on SeeYou.

A frontal assault on the dominant market leader, including where when there are already other vendors (StrePla) in a market segment just does not sound like good strategy for me. You can run up to the castle and pound on the gates and not many people will care. But if you manage to annoy the owner of the castle enough they pour a little boiling oil over you, and you either die or you leave, a lot worse for wear…