Tag Archives: Sony

Cameras are above all else about sharing

February 5, 2016 By in business, Culture, photos Tags: , , , Leave a comment

In “Sony’s latest camera and some disappointing sensor sales results,” Phillip Greenspun writes that the reward for Sony’s technically innovative sensors has been flat or declining sales. That’s because Sony misses the point: The number one thing camera companies need to do is integrate with Facebook. Camera companies have no one but themselves to blame for their decline. Way back in 2011 Flip Video had a plan for Wi-Fi enabled video cameras that had a Vine- or YouTube-like social system and interface. Every Flip camera was going to have Wi-Fi as a first-class feature. Cisco unfortunately killed Flip right before the launch, but Flip was at least a company that understood what was happening. In the intervening year zero camera companies have attempted to do what Flip was ready to launch.

Olympus_OMD-1351Which is an amazing story in the annals of corporate stupidity. For the vast majority of people images are ways of signaling: signaling their character, their sense of fun, their sexuality, their lives. Image quality is not terribly important for that purpose, and image quality became “good enough” for most people with the iPhone 4 (which, not coincidentally, Instagram was founded). In 2010. Six years ago. Normal people don’t do detailed technical comparisons of their phone cameras. At most they ask, “Is yours good?” and the reply is usually “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

The camera companies are technical geniuses and social morons. They ignore the absolute most important use case for 95 – 98% of their market. By now it may be too late to attract users accustomed to high-quality smartphone interfaces. But the camera companies are still barely even fine. The interface for getting photos from the modern cameras I have to my phone is horrific.

Apart from a relative handful of nerds like me, no one gives a shit about image quality once it reaches some acceptable level that it reached long ago. No one wants to recharge batteries or stick the SD card in the computer. For the last five or so years every camera iteration has gotten better autofocus and better low-light performance and a host of other handy but marginal features that no one cares about except professionals and Internet gear wankers.

I wrote about this dynamic in “Photography and Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over.” Others have written about it elsewhere. In that post I also observed that photography companies are also marketing morons. They still are. Greenspun is excited by the release of the Sony A6300. That camera is technically incredible. It also has a terrible name that likely means nothing to 99% of readers of this blog. Except for people who follow cameras with the passion normal people reserve for sports or celebrities, “A6300” means nothing. Sony is missing the main point with its sensors and its cameras. They need more anthropologists / sociologists and fewer outright engineers.

And how does this apply to writers? Steve Jobs and the idea of “Ma”

January 28, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From “How Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:”

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” . . .

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

I think of the various things I have that might have “ma:” a pretentious Moleskine notebook, a Go board, certain books. But where do objects end and the internalization of an idea begin?

And how does this apply to writers? Steve Jobs and the idea of "Ma"

January 28, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From “How Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:”

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” . . .

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

I think of the various things I have that might have “ma:” a pretentious Moleskine notebook, a Go board, certain books. But where do objects end and the internalization of an idea begin?

EBook Monday: Steven Berlin Johnson, Google Books, and more

April 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

* Steven Berlin Johnson speculates on “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write: […] a future with more books, more distractions — and the end of reading alone.”

* I keep being tempted by the Amazon Kindle, despite my many posts on the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and other problems with the device. Then I see a post like “Amazon has banned my account – my Kindle is now a (partial) brick” and all those bad feelings return. The poster in question apparently returned too many items to Amazon, causing them to suspend his account and causing his Kindle to stop working.

* In other electronic news, a warning: Google Book Search settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over literature. What am, random joe, supposed to do about it besides joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation? I have no idea. Still, the headline might be more sensationalistic than it should be, as this paragraph shows:

But the real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.

(Emphasis added.)

I added a comment pointing out that the real response to this should lie with Congress and copyright law: at the moment, virtually everything published after 1923 is effectively under copyright. The solution is to start rolling the copyright year forward, so that 86 years (2008 – 1923) after a work is published, it automatically enters the public domain. Actually, 70 years would be nice, but the various Senators from Disney passed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, making it seem unlikely to happen, so I stick to the (sightly) more pragmatic hope for 86 years as a possible reasonable length for copyright.

If the material in question isn’t in copyright, Google has no special power over it. Two problems solved at once.

* Speaking of all things Google, Nick Carr’s post “Google in the middle” has some brilliant parts and some absolutely wrong parts. Being the kind of person I am, I like to start with the wrong parts:

For much of the first decade of the Web’s existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.

We were misinformed. The Web didn’t kill mediators. It made them stronger.

But Carr misses the fact that a) mediators are easier to replace than ever, since I only have to click on another one, and b) fact a has made other mediators ever-easier to find: Hacker News has become my chief aggregator, for example, and Google has nothing to do with them. Furthermore, if I want to use a different search engine, it’s only a click away.

The web still is a friction removing machine even if Google has an unusual amount of (probably temporary) power.

On the other hand, this bit is brilliant:

As I’ve written before, the essential problem facing the online news business is oversupply. The cure isn’t pretty. It requires, first, a massive reduction of production capacity – ie, the consolidation or disappearance of lots of news outlets. Second, and dependent on that reduction of production capacity, it requires news organizations to begin to impose controls on their content. By that, I don’t mean preventing bloggers from posting fair-use snippets of articles. I mean curbing the rampant syndication, authorized or not, of full-text articles. Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn’t make sense when articles float freely across the global web. (Take note, AP.)

Once the news business reduces supply, it can begin to consolidate traffic, which in turn consolidates ad revenues and, not least, opens opportunities to charge subscription fees of one sort or another – opportunities that today, given the structure of the industry, seem impossible. With less supply, the supplier gains market power at the expense of the middleman.

Newspapers are engaged in an almost Marxian race to the bottom in terms of production, and the more efficient the Internet makes news gathering and dissemination, the worse this race will become. It was obvious to me in 2002 (which I wrote about in Media myopia and the New Yorker), when I graduated from high school, that newspapers were bound to contract enormously (and catastrophically for those employed by newspapers); I was tempted to go to a big-time journalism school and try to make it as a journalist, but a rare bout of good sense stopped me. This is why.

(Incidentally, the New York Times has also noticed that J-Schools are Playing Catchup because of changes in journalism. Strangely enough, the Times seems to imply that journalism might become more like something akin to Grant Writing Confidential: people who find niches and then write the hell out of their subject.)

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