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The Critical Path #126: Making the world go round

Oct 12, ’14 1:29 AM
Author Categories Podcast

Horace and Anders on the irrelevance of shareholders. Anticipating an Apple October 2014 event they discuss how the iPad and tablet designs could evolve. Diving into how brands can manage disruption through a whirlwind tour of products from cameras to watches to cars.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #126: Making the world go round.

  • Bruce_Mc

    There is a 4 part BBC series called “The Century of the Self.” It gives a history of marketing, with emphasis on the first Public Relations Counselor in New York City, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. The psychological underpinnings of marketing and advertising are discussed a lot.

  • def4

    No matter how irrelevant shareholders may be, they’re not irrelevant enough.
    It seems to me that some of the fundamental laws governing corporations are unfair and make no sense.
    I believe the lowliest programmer, tester or graphical designer has a more significant impact on the success of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook than the largest shareholder, but the law forces companies to listen to the greedy mob that are the shareholders.

    This seems rooted in an industrial era when capital was scarce and labor was plentiful.
    The quality of labor depended on the strenght of muscles and precision of movements. More importantly, labor of higher quality yielded only marginally more output.
    That world is nothing like a world where a handful of people working for a few years develop from scratch a service worth more than $20 billion.

  • Arcadio Martinez

    I really like when Horace talked about the tv industry gs apple/technology industry.
    I just have a comment, Horace defines entertainment content coming from Film industry and that only older generations are consuming TV, i think he is partly right now sports – TV – advertising is a huge cooperation and I understand that they do not allow anybody to get in. If you think, if you add software to TV you can consume what you want when you want, but sports are special, we like to watch them “live” and they bring a broad audience (mostly men, but I think that women are also getting more attention). Footbal, soccer, Formula 1, Nascar and the olympic games are great examples of people gathering together in front of the tv, how technology can change it?

    • Bruce_Mc

      I think it’s important to remember with network TV that the viewer is not the consumer. The viewer is the product, and the advertiser is the consumer.

  • stefnagel

    Maybe a century ago, a local dairy farm began improving its herd, to the point that thirty years ago the family began selling embryos internationally at $20,000 each. Other farmers in the area also feed and breed and butcher cows. These are the Icahns of business. But just one family had the imagination to breed the best, to see breeding as a business opportunity. That’s Apple.

    Breeders vs. bleeders.

  • HM

    Zeiss licensing to Sony is not the same as Prada licensing it’s name to LG.

    In the case of the Sony manufactured lenses carrying the Zeiss badge, there is more to it that simply licensing the name. The T* designation in those lenses means that the they uses a special lens coating developed by Zeiss known a T Coating.

    When Zeiss entered the market, most companies were optical
    workshops and what set Zeiss apart is that he saw the need to hire scientists,
    notably Dr Ernst Abbe to address key issues. One of their first breakthrough
    was to work with glasswork manufacturers to develop new types of glass that
    would allow the elimination of astigmatism in microscopes. That was the
    establishment of the “Jena” glass named after the town in Germany where both
    companies were located. This legacy continued after the death of Carl Zeiss and
    led to the coating.

    When light enters or leaves a glass element, a part of the
    light is reflected which impacts on the amount of light transmitted as will as
    on the clarity of the image transmitted. I believe that Zeiss was the first to
    discover that applying chemicals to the sides of the lens could substantially
    reduce the glass to air losses and they patented this process in 1935. It was
    designed to improve light transmission and was given the “T” designation as a
    result later on the designation was changed to T* to refer to the process of
    applying up to 8 layers to each side of each glass element.

    While a lot of companies use such coatings, including on eyewear the Zeiss T* does have a know “signature” to it with less flare, increased contrast and great colors which generally translates into a textured, three dimensional image.

    I did not think much of this until I was on the market for a new lens in 2008 and a vendor was telling me this story. I was not buying it so he told me to go download 18 daylight pictures from the lens that I was thinking of and 2 from the Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* and he would be able to pick them out. He got one right and was hesitating between two ones for the second one.

    I bought the lens. In terms of fabrication it’s not even close to a Zeiss made one and probably subpar to other Sony non-zeiss lenses, it’s also slower and has an old screw drive focus but the optical qualities are still amazing to me.