Dylan Hunter

A very cute timeline / explanation of the buzz campaign for the way overhyped MS Origami Project. And while there’s definitely no question that Dustin Hubbard deserves some strong credit for pulling it off, (or, at least gets the credit for serendipity! ) it also shows a bit of the danger of overhyping a product that’s just not that extraordinary.

Had the UMPC been as impressive as folks were hoping from the buzz, MS would have done beautifully in kicking up its reputation a good, strong bit on the innovation front, even if they only sold 2 UMPC units, helping them to cover up some of the Vista black eyes, and, perhaps, if they could get a couple of whiz-bang doo-dads back in the product schedule before Vista, *1* might actually help them a bit on adoption there, as well, (and for that, if it pulls forward adoption curves even .001%, it would have more than paid for itself, Dustin and the entire Origami Team at least a hundred times over! ).

Unfortunately, since after all this hype, what eventually came out was effectively one very large Wet Noodle(tm), unfortunately, it serves the opposite purpose, serving to damage MS as wasting our time with another not fully baked product, (probably sticking to its classic “get it right by v. 3.0″ strategy) that doesn’t do what the Innovators want it to, and is much too expensive to generate any significant Early Adopter purchase.

Buzz is always a double-edged sword, and here, since the level wasn’t well-matched to the thing being hyped, it ended up scoring a net negative. But still, a good learning experience and, as importantly, a fine display of skill that will hopefully only become more impressive with further seasoning, and were it my call, (which it isn’t! ) Dustin and the rest of the Origami Buzz Team have proved themselves well enough to give them a shot at the Big Leagues - I’d definitely toss them on either the Vista or revamped MSN Search launch teams to see what they could do on those, and just ask them to try to do a tighter “buzz match,” (to external potential opinion, rather than oversipping the internal koolaid) on that one.

So, nicely done Dustin & Gang, on the level of buzz generated, and, as importantly, for having the courage to admit the strong role of serendipity in, rather than playing it as planned perfectly from the beginning, (and here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they would have done anyway, even if the phrase “overhyped” weren’t flying about from the moment the UMPC launched! ). Here’s hoping you keep moving on from here. And for the rest of us, a good thought exercise to keep in mind when planning our buzz campaigns, (knowing that any claim to actually “control buzz” is like handing someone a card with “cat herder” on it - immediately stamps a big, blaring “SMOKING CRACK” across the forehead of the speaker / giver! ).
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*1* Even if only on the version that would ship with UMPC’s, where they could control the hardware configs better for a first shot, and then for more GA on the desktop / laptop front later. In fact, if played right, could let MS use the UMPC for a nice semi-GA tech test bed for a little bit, to let them say that they’ve actually released some of the features that they’ve kept ripping out of Vista, even if they’re only available to the 14 people who would actually shell out the thousand bucks to be the first on their block to own their own Star Trek: Next Generation notepad doo-hickey!

So there’s finally a name for it, (other than “adult ADD” or “creeping schizophrenia”) - “frazzing”

“Think of all the digital gadgets we use to keep in touch — from cell phones and BlackBerrys to computers. When they summon us they all demand we stop, switch gears and respond — anytime, anywhere.

“Frazzing,” short for frantic multitasking, is the name given to the toll this mental channel switching takes on our productivity. The term was coined by Massachusetts psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, and the phenomenon it describes is costing us.”

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Retailers must quickly change the way they think about older consumers to better capture some of the $1.7 trillion people over 50 years of age spend on goods and services, consulting firm Deloitte & Touche USA said on Sunday.

One-third of consumers in the range of 55- to 61-years-old prefer to shop online, Conroy said, citing results of a survey that Deloitte plans to release in coming days. And survey respondents said they own an average of 5.9 high-tech gadgets such as iPod music players or digital cameras.

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Now this definitely is exciting - helping impoverished kids, and thus, impoverished nations, to help themselves in ways we take for granted with our own kids everyday. See? All truly great things start out with one simple thought that everyone else thinks is insane / stupid / foolish. “A $100 laptop?” Come on. “Man landing on the Moon.” A fool’s errand. “Ensuring that every car can travel @ 60 mph at any time of day.” Utter madness. Hey, DOT - hear that last one?!

“….[One Laptop per Child] Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, ‘Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away.’ Quanta has agreed to devote significant engineering resources from the Quanta Research Institute (QRI) in Q1 and Q2, 2006, with a target of bringing the product to market in Q4….”

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Now this is awesome news - not only in the functionality itself, (which is awesome enough by itself - can you tell that I’ve been salivating for a Tivo for several years now! ) but in that it’s the first sizeable / useful player*1* who’s writing software to use the iPod the way it should be, while concurrently sidestepping Apple’s currently restrictive role toward innovation in terms of what kinds of software, etc. can be used on / with the iPod. Though they did a truly beautiful job on the physical design of the player, there are many things I’d like to be able to differently with both the firmware*2* and iTunes, being specifically built to keep me from doing some of the things that I’d like to, (i.e. move files from the iPod back to the PC, even those files are legally mine) is, by definition, stunting.

Enough blathering, though. The rest of the release is here.

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*1* No disrespect to iPodder at all - I still use it to this day, as I find it much more powerful / useful than iTunes’ treatment of Podcasts, (with the exception of the “keep only the most recent option in iTunes, which I would love to have in iPodder, as well). Unfortunately, once iTunes sucked in Podcasts, iPodder, as an open source project, has effectively just rolled over into obscurity, putting the prime method of interfacing with the iPod back into Apple’s hands, which, even if I like Apple, allows their sole calls to limit what can and can’t be done with something that yes, they developed, but in its potential impact, really should have, (and hopefully still will) move well beyond them. TiVo, of course, has both the economic incentive and power to build, maintain and hopefully further excite more-than-Apple innovation on these kind of mobile devices.

*2* Most notably, modify the nature of how the directory structure functions as makes best sense to me. Though it’s definitely a very nice first shot, I hate not being able to modify to be easier for me. In addition, there is so much potential for the iPod to be used as an interface for a whole series of apps, but can’t do those, either, the way Apple has it set up.