Make Mine Mobile
Posted on June 24th, 2012
When I was in college, moving into the dorms was an arduous ritual.
First we’d set up our stereos. Of course they were enormous – mine was comprised of big JBL speakers, a separate Marantz amp and McIntosh pre-amp, a Pioneer turntable and Aiwa cassette deck. The system cost me an entire summer job’s pay and if I was paying by the pound it’s no wonder why it was so expensive.
I also had a couple of apple crates full of records (remember those?) and boxes of tapes.
Along with the stereo, I had a typewriter, an alarm clock, an SLR camera with lenses and a shoebox full of photos. I didn’t have a TV but my roommate did, and that took up even more room. My clothes — a few pair of jeans, some tee shirts, and a down jacket — probably took up the least amount of space.
Today’s college student has all those functions and data (music, photos, etc.) stuffed into their four-pound laptop. In fact, with a couple of duffel bags stuffed full of clothes and a laptop and cell phone tossed in a backpack, they’re ready for school.
Today I needed a storyboard drawn up for a commercial we just wrote. All the art directors in my office were busy so I went online, uploaded the rough sketches we’d drawn, and posted the assignment along with my budget, deadline, and specific requirements. Within hours I had estimates from artists in Georgia, Indonesia, Mumbai, and more places around the world.
The other day I wanted something changed on my blog site. I sent an email to Werner, my blog master in Germany, and showed him the change. It was 5 PM EST here at home so I figured I’d hear from Werner the next day, after all it was 11 PM there. Instead Werner responded right away and said he’d have the programmer make the change immediately. “Where’s the programmer?” I typed. I assumed he was somewhere in Eastern Europe or Asia. “Ohio,” Werner responded. “It’s only the afternoon there,” “he’ll do it right away.”
When I leave the office in the evening, sometimes I take my laptop, sometimes I take my iPad, and sometimes I don’t take anything at all. Of course we’ve got a computer at home and all of my company’s files are stored on the cloud so they’re accessible wherever I am. No more running back to the office in the middle of the night or on weekends to retrieve a document I need to work on. And even though I work most weekends, I can’t remember the last time I went into the office on a Saturday or Sunday even though that used to be a weekly occurrence. In fact, my wife and I just got back from a wonderful overseas vacation and you might have noticed that this blog went out on time just the same. Besides pre-scheduling the postings online, a Wi-Fi hookup was all I needed to keep everything running smoothly.
I just moved my enormous music collection from the hard drive in my office to ITunes Match, Apple’s cloud-based program. This way, no matter where I am, I have all my songs available. This comes in handy not just when I have a hankering to hear something specific but when we’re at band practice and someone wants to hear a particular version of a particular song. Of course, with most songs available on YouTube anyway, I can access them anywhere I can get a Wi-Fi or cellular signal. Needless to say, the stacks and stacks and stacks of CDs in my office and at home are just taking up space and collecting dust. If I knew someone who actually wanted a couple thousand rock, blues, and classical CDs, I’d burn them all and happily ship them off.
The more we interact with the mobile world, the less we need bricks and mortar. These days, BestBuy has become a showroom for Amazon and it’s not unusual to see customers in the aisle scanning SKU numbers into their smart phones to check for lower prices online. Online bill pay keeps us out of banks and post offices. Digital downloads to our iPads and Kindles keep us out of bookstores. NetFlix, iTunes, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Demonoid keep us out of movie theaters.
As I’ve asked here so many times before, WTF??!! (Where’s The Future?). Clearly, legions of old-school face-to-face (F2F) businesses are going to go the way of Borders, Circuit City, and more. But there’s another, less intuitive opportunity. The analog activities that can’t be replaced by digital experiences — gardening, sewing, participatory sports, acoustic music making, cooking, travel, and more — are going to see a startling resurgence. Sure, those activities will be enhanced by the online world — downloadable patterns for knitting or Web-enabled music lessons, for example. But as the world continues to move to a ubiquitous high-tech environment, high-touch will become all the more important and profitable.
16 thoughts on “Make Mine Mobile”
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By Bruce Turkel
Bruce: As always, a timely and insightful post. Here I sit in the lobby coffee bar of an office building in Chicago reconciling the deposits for my other online business (www.outdoorplay.com), while communicating with my business partner, currently living in Peru, before changing into my suit/tie to deliver my Focus Pocus presentation to one of the largest law firms in the world. Tomorrow, I’ll be back in my home office in our summer house in NW Montana preparing to headout for a fly fishing trip for the weekend, before continuing to work on my next Bite-Sized Booklet titled Working on the Move.
The opening interlude of Working on the Move likens our current world to the pre-industrial era in that life has once again become a true 24-hour proposition. Gone are the artificial physical and chronological barriars erected by the industrial era where we left “home” to go to “work.” I embrace the New World and there is nothing to be Brave about in so doing!
I always read your blog and enjoy it. This one made me sad. I was just in Key West and Fast Buck Freddy is closed due to exactly what you are speaking about. People scanning the beautiful things that their buyers chose, picked out and displayed so great. And then buy it on line cheaper. But they would never have thought about the product or knew how to display it correctly unless they had been to the store. Losing stores like this is a huge lost not only to shoppers who like to touch and feel things but to the community. I hope this generation someday will apprecaite the value of the art of display.
I just had to say something
thanks
I’m sorry to hear that too, Cathy, I really liked that store (I don’t think I ever bought anything there but I did like looking around — maybe I hastened their demise).
Remember to breathe, Paul.
You just know, whenever anyone posts a thread like this, that many people our age will reminisce about old this and old that. You know what, I don’t miss any of it. I, too, had all the “stuff” you describe and, except for my DSLR’s, I am very glad I can cram all of the other stuff, music, photos, videos, etc., into my table and phone; I’m immensely glad for Facebook and its ability to connect instantly with my thousand friends and acquaintances… I’m really glad we are living when we are living.
But I do agree with you, I love not going into the office, my phone, iPad and lap top are perfect freedom!!!!
I don’t think it has to be one or the other, Marcelo. Both situations were right for the times. But marketing-wise, the “reminiscence” you refer to will help fuel consumer demand for more analog activities.
Didn’t say one or another… but I am absolutely glad I live in an era where I can have instant access to everything I like. I still have 30 binders of slides, 30 pages each, in my closet. Haven’t looked at them in over 10 years. I still have boxes of pix. Haven’t looked at them in 10 years. At some point I scanned a bunch of pix I like and just have them in my computer. I absolutely and utterly love it.
I remember peach crates (a relic of another B&M that’s no longer with us – though no fault of digitization).
The cloud is a beautiful thing. So many people use it – email programs, Pandora, remote log-in for work – and don’t even realize it. And some of us cannot live without it. And some, as referenced in your comments, live their lives seamlessly in both camps.
Therein lies the issue: We must realize it in order to maximize on it. You have, and you share your experiences. We’re all living in the cloud – if vicariously – though the good Mr. Turkel.
PS – Man, don’t I (kinda) wish I’d kept my three peach crates. I recently debated ditching my 200 or so CDs (they’ve all been transferred to iTunes, after all). My Gen Z daughter rolled her eyes that I would even consider such an idea. I’d swear she was from an older generation…
The answer to your question is… Convergence. That’s where the future will be. Today, we can gain access to almost anything from any device or platform. However, the entrenched interests still restrict access. If you want HBO on your iPad, you need a subscription through your cable or satellite provider. Once, that paradigm breaks down, everything will be in the cloud and we will subscribe only to the content we want and to nothing else. The winner of the contest will be the one who can aggregate the most content into one subscription. I would love to get the NY Times, HBO and my favorite YouTube channel all through the same subscriptioon instead of the three I am paying for now.
No doubt everything you point out is true. However, I sometimes wonder if we sacrifice the quality of our craft in favor of techno efficiency. For example, I remember when Art Directors could actually draw. Writers could write more than a headline and sentence of body copy before getting bored. Production managers would angst over myriad details and nuances. Photographers spent more time composing their shots since they didn’t want to waste film and money to “air brush.” We spent time testing ads and getting them right rather than casting out creative and monitoring click-through rates. There are many great benefits technology has brought the communications industry. I just hope the craftmanship to our trade isn’t lost.
Ha! I knew it! @Brian… consider the following:
1. Art Directors (and I tend to agree on the drawing) did not have, as a primary need, to draw, their task was (and is) to tie down the design of the ad so that it flows.
2. There is a lot of copy being written today… just not on ads, but try blogs.
3. Speaking as a photographer, I spend as much time focusing my photo today as I did 20 years ago. 20 years ago most of us would take 30 rolls in a shoot anyway; we would then waste dozens of hours anyway (between the development, darkroom, etc). What has changed is the ability to make a fast decision about what is working or not. But we had polaroid backs even then.
As a practicing professional, the only craftmanship we should care about is whether nor not we can make advertising that is persuasive and moves our client’s bottom line in the right direction. So, craftmanship today is not about pencils and typewriters, it is about understanding 20 different target groups and a grid of another 20 media outlets going down. The craftmanship is not lost, it evolved.
“If I knew someone who actually wanted a couple thousand rock, blues, and classical CDs, I’d burn them all and happily ship them off.” Id LOVE THEM, seriously, I havent joined the download music scene yet and dont plan too for quite awhile.., LOVE HARD COPIES, ie CD’s and even Albumns!!! Seriiously, Im interested
Sorry, Sandee, they’ve already been promised — a few requests came in almost as quickly as the email went out.
I’m with Sandee on the music part of the discussion. I started collecting records when they had a big hole in the middle. I’m not ready to give up the hard copy.
Now, as for books, I can’t read the paper ones anymore.
I’m so behind. I just got my first smart phone yesterday after my 3-1/2 dummy phone died. I listen to your CD in my car all the time.