If you’ve avoided it this long, you might as well buy one now. Yes, there are tweaked SKUs shipping soon with a couple of ok pack in games, but if the live stats are any indication, all you care about is Halo 3 online anyhow.
Here’s a quick list of crap to buy if you haven’t begun to Finish the Fight.
Xbox 360 Console Includes 20GB Hard Drive (with HDMI)
“Back to my mac”is one of those Leopard features that sounds damn cool; I’ve got an always on, broadband connection on my iMac at home, and it does sound compelling to grab random projects, or music, or whatever from any other mac connected to the internet. Almost worth paying the $99 a year for .mac- until I realized it only takes about 5 minutes and a slight knowledge of how your networking gear works to do it for free.
If you’ve opened up ports in your router to get optimum speeds on Bit Torrent transfers, you can do this fairly easily. Continue reading »
Yesterday, a fairly damning piece was published in Ad Age, no doubt ruffling some feathers in corner offices and cubicles alike (though really it shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone remotely observant). Rewind the clocks three weeks, and check out my response to a friend’s concern that Chicago was losing it’s luster and while he didn’t see the downfall coming anytime soon, it faced “a drought of potential….”
Well, no apologies necessary- and it is happening soon. it’s happening now. it’s been happening. I don’t know if “potential” is the right word though, I think chicago is held back by it’s legacy. The city is geared around (mundane) TV spots. The agencies are lead by people that made their careers in the TV age. it’s a 30 second spot town, period.
I don’t think TV is irrelevant, or even unimportant, but in the current landscape TV is only a piece of the brand puzzle. Yet it dominates 98% of these fuckers thinking. And at this point, i really don’t think there is any changing it, people are just set in their ways and they’re probably gonna need to get fired by their holding companies, or worse yet, just lose every account until the agency has to be reborn as something else. Hell, some have even taken the baby step of firing a ton of older guys who were sucking massive compensation packages to make room for young up and comers, but at the end of the day, they didn’t fire themselves- and i’ll leave that at that.
In light of Bob Scarpelli’s quote in the Ad Week piece- particularly the “The community has to make the commitment to reinvent itself and bring in talent” part, I’m revising my statement. The Scarpellis of Chicago don’t need to be fired. The need to (metaphorically) have their hearts ripped out on Bill Bernbach’s alter and unceremoniously be cast aside (that casting aside can and should be literal).
Harsh? Maybe, but not as harsh as watching ridiculously overpaid and under performing “Executive Leadership” steer the ship into an iceberg for 15 years and then turnaround and suggest hiring some outside talent should cure what ails us. You’re what ails us, dude.
Here’s a good story the sums up “The Chicago Way”. Chatting with some other industry folks, about a big pitch. The Client is introducing an essentially web-based product to a highly online market, and it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to envision a media plan that skews a wee bit digital. What’s the big Chicago shop take to the pitch? A TV spot, and some storyboards and scripts for more TV spots. Good job guys. Gaze into your crystal ball and take a rough guess how that pitch went.
Yet without fail, we all invariably find ourselves in some random Chicago theater once a year, while our respective agency CCO bitches at us for not being creative enough. Lately the speeches include a second, tacked on portion about the importance of “Integration”- which is usually far more ironic than insightful considering:
a) The guys still just want to cherry pick TV, and
b) Why in the hell are “full service” agencies so unable to present a cohesive integrated offering, anyway?
Isn’t that one of the whole advantages of the holding companies gobbling firms up, to present a comprehensive set of offerings to global brands? Yet, this constant dysfunction is a universal element throughout Chicago. Given where the agencies currently stand now on the integration thing, I starting to think the only thing “Full Service” meant in the 90s was “we have to get our scans and large format prints done by the Studio the company owns”- usually at fprices far inflated by what the open market would demand.
The $400 foam core mounted color laser prints might sound rather small in the grand scheme of things, but they symbolize the gross inefficiencies of these lumbering mega-agencies. The Ad Week piece rightly laments the lack of “indie” shops in Chicago, and rightly so. How much better would creative be if we could take all the money wasted and spent it on creative development instead?
At the end of the day, I suppose we shouldn’t be mad at the Scarpellis of Chicago. We should be mad at ourselves.
Day in and day out we all watch decisions get made around us- decisions that ignore the realities of the marketplace and where it’s headed- and we don’t say a word. Much like the lumbering shops that are grateful for their stale clients as long as they are paying the bills, we too are apparently grateful to take their paychecks and avoid rocking the boat. We don’t have the balls to say “You know what, that’s a dumb, out of touch idea” when we hear one, and we don’t have the courage to tell Bob Scarpelli that what he said in Ad Week left a foul taste in our mouth when we see him in the elevator.
Chicago has to change- everyone can see that, from commentators in the media to agency staffers, all the way up to the Bob Scarpellis. Chicago simply has to do something radical to get relevant again. What doesn’t make sense, at least none that I can see- is how anyone expects that to happen when we have the same handful of mega-agencies being run by the same guys that got us into this mess in the first place. Massive disruptive seismic shifts don’t happen in neat little meetings- they take a fucking asteroid obliterating something.
Digg is pretty interesting tool for an author, and a well ranked story can literally pay dividends in Ad Sense revenue. And like most tools that can add traffic (and revenue), it’s ripe for abuse.
I know a guy who has his employees digg his articles. Pretty shameless, but knowing him and his personality, it’s to be expected. He’s had his hand slapped before for spamming public message boards begging for diggs, but legally I suppose there is nothing stopping him make his employees do his bidding, ethics and integrity be damned.
What will stop him, at least from bugging me over AIM is the “block user” function. He is a nice enough guy, and we occasionally talk, but mainly I just get IMs from him with links to Digg. Ironically, he usually doesn’t reply, or digg things, when i send messages back with links to my own content.
At any rate, the point I am getting at is this- don’t be a whore begging your peers for diggs on AIM. You’re going to end up losing access to those peers, and for what- a dozen diggs? That’s nothing. A statistical fart. Having been dugg before in a big way, I can say that getting to the front page is out of your hands. The nerd herd will take to it and light it on fire, or it will sit there and sink. Your 40 buddies have dick all to do with this process, so why get a reputation for being annoying, or worse, a spammer?
My advice, if you want a good digg rate, is to worry more about just writing good stuff. It will circulate if it’s good. Don’t worry about the immediate digging from your crew- it’s worse than when Ad agencies set out to make lame “viral” campaigns. Focus on the content, and if the internet likes it, the internet likes it. Oh, wildly speculative apple rumors go over well too.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go AIM everyone I know to digg this.
I’ve got two HD TVs in my house, and honestly I could give two shits about the HD format war thats waging strong. My intial hunch was the HD-DVD would trump Blu-Ray for 2 reasons: First, the combo disk sounds like a great idea; secondly, Sony pretty much sucks at inventing formats.
At any rate, the previaling logic was studio support would decide this in a timely fashion and we can carry on rebuying all the movies we just bought on DVD again and call it a day; this has not really been the case, with many studios supporting both, some flip flopping and changing their minds, and so on. Ultimately the studios are going to follow the units/money, not dictate a standard.
So who is going to nip this war in the bud? Walmart. Continue reading »
My prediction is you’re a retarded jackass, and you’re next game won’t sell half as many as Carmack’s.
Seriously though, console wars are bad enough, but there are still people that like fanning the PC vs console flame war? They are different experiences, good at different things. Done.
In 5 years, yes, it probably will be time for MS and Sony to “rethink” some stuff and release a new console. Hell, they will probably even use those fancy multicore chips Romero is screaming about. Christ, I feel more retarded for even thinking about this more than 2 minutes. Next.
While both CEOs insist they have a cordial relationship, Apple’s continued growth- as well as their recent jabs at Vista, has got to be something of a thorn in the Windows group side of late. Anti-Redmond propaganda is frequently seen in Cupertino, and the assault is rumored to get even more relentless as the launch of Leopard approaches.
In what many see as a jab back, Microsoft recently altered liscense terms, requiring Mac users looking to run Vista in Paralells to purchase more expensive flavors, such as business or Ultimate editions. No technical reasons for this exist; my personal opinion is MS simply wants to discourage the practice. With a virtualized copy of windows, MS’s dominant OS goes from being the magical software that makes the box work to merely a runtime environment required for some specific software applications. Not exactly the strongest foundation to build an empire upon.
In any event, look for both camps to beat their chest louder and louder once Leopard gets here. And if Microsoft somehow decides to fire a nastier shot back- which I am fairly certain they will if Leopard shoots out of the gate to glowing reviews, and the switch numbers keep growing, look for Apple to quit making witty banners for a second and fire back a gut shot of their own- iTunes for Ubuntu. Continue reading »
In any discussion of piracy, you’re going to encounter two camps of people: those that staunchly refuse to condone the practice, and either go without or find open source alternatives to pakcages they cannot afford; or the guy who thinks “information deserves to be free” and refuses to pay for jack shit. Like most things though, the vast majority of normal folks fall somewhere in the vast middle ground inbetween the extremes.
Casual copying takes many forms- maybe a student wants to learn an app, or a designer wants to work on his work projects at home when he calls in “sick”. It could be even more innocent, perhaps someone has switched platforms and doesnt want to have to reinvest thousands of dollars into digital goods he’s already purchased just because he got sick of dealing with a particular OS. Whatever the particulars, we all know there are hundreds of thousands of unliscensed applications floating around out in the wild, to the detriment of everyone- publishers can’t get paid, users can’t get support, it’s no good.
My suspicion is that many- if not most users- would jump at the opprotunity to “go legit”, but then they see the CEO of Adobe justify the $1700-$2500 price of admission to the latest creative suite by stating “Our customer is not typically price sensitive”. At which point desire to be a legit customer gets replaced with a desire to tell adobe to kiss their ass as they trek off to piratebay to grab it for free.
Is there a quick fix to this? I think so. Continue reading »
While making the rounds today (thanks Jeff Croft, via John Gruber), I saw Chuck Davis of Letterhead Font’s “Open letter” regarding Font DRM”. Where to begin on this one…
I have no interest in “pulling a corey” and spending every waking hour crying like a little girl about the dangers of DRM. Nor am I naive enough to believe that no independent creative would steal from another indie creative. But on the overall topic of font theft and disrespect, I’ll say this: No warez kid you stop from stealing your typefaces would ever pay for any of your typefaces anyway, regardless of how you deliver it. Period. Once you accept that, it makes the rest of these obvious points all the more painful to watch unfold. Continue reading »
My first stop in Austin last week was Casino El Camino, where I grabbed a bite with a local friend whose name I will omit to avoid any awkward moments for him.
When we first sat down to eat, he had a text message; he explained to me some dudes he knows made this service called Dodgeball and told me a little about thier offering. Cool.
Fast forward 3 hours later at the bar, he’s still putzing about with his phone, only now grumbling about “that damn dodgeball” and how it is usually dormant- except during SXSW, when it kicks into overdrive (for obvious reasons- thousands of nerds in one place, blah blah).
Anyhow, now that we are all back home, the internet is abuzz about those Twitter growth charts, with SXSW frequently popping up as the likely culprit for the explosive bloom. Well, I was there and it was certainly blowing up- litterally; I can’t recall how many times that first day I’d hear people grab their phones and exclaim “My twitter’s blowing up!”. No shit sherlock, that’s what it does.
By day two, the enthusiam was peaked; by the third day it sounded to me like most people were tired of the damn thing.
