This is the online home of David G. Schwartz, who Why it pays to under-promise and over-deliver
…rather than the opposite, as this incident–unfortunately caught live on camera–from CES shows:
Reporter Dan Simmons from the BBCs technology show Click managed to break a mobile phone marketed as “unbreakable”, during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
via BBC News – Reporter breaks an unbreakable mobile phone at CES.
Click through to see the video–you’ve got to feel bad for the CEO.
Is there a law that the more assiduously something is promoted as unbreakable, the more likely it is to break in a high-profile and often-embarrassing way?
Posted in haphazard world, life in vegason 01/12/2010 03:19 pm by Dave
01/12/2010 at 8:41 pm
That’s so funny. Especially the reporter’s laughter.
Murphy’s Law is alive and well.
01/14/2010 at 2:07 am
This post made me reminded me that CES is in town. So tonight I spent four hours trying to find websites which provided adequate coverage of all the new items coming out (Wired.com) etc.
Ever since I was fifteen I tried to follow the latest techno advances (thru Popular Science, etc.) And as a photographer I would read all about the Photokina Camera Trade show (from 1967 on).
For 44 years I’ve gotten “techo-neurosis”…a term I made-up for the ailment of wishing I had the latest gadgets…only to find out that newer items ALWAYS continue to come out…which make you feel like your current gadgets are basically obsolete.
A neighbor of mine has the best, state-of-the-art HD, wide screen home entertainment system (with Blu-Ray, etc)…yet now…with Wireless HD & 3-D TV just around the bend he too is getting “TN” and wondering if he bought too early (too many cables, etc).
2010 is bringing us Slate-Tablet Computers, Smart-Books, Transparent Monitors, 3D TV and other items way too numerous to try listing in one paragraph.
And it seems that Apple Corps (who is sitting out from displaying anything at CES) has a knock-out strategy they intend to launch January 26 with their unveiling of their new I-Slate (a larger screened I-Pod).
I have to give Steve Jobs credit for knowing how to play the ‘tech-marketing’ game so well. Even though I’ve never bought even one Apple product…that company has always fascinated me. I’ve probably spent 3,000 hours of my life reading their brochures or magazine articles and books about them (even reading a book last month called ‘Inside Steve’s Brain’).
This ‘techno-neurosis condition’ of mine has always bothered me. It’s a never-ending process, trying to keep up with things. Yet. If a person tries ‘giving up’ or attempting to ‘drop-out’ of the process…he definitely DOES get crushed by being ‘techno-ignorant’.
All my life I’ve been about 5 or 10 years behind being ’state-of-the-art’. Sometimes this has worked to my advantage…because I didn’t buy products too early like lots of my friends did.
In the eighties a friend of mine bought a computer with a 40 MB hard-drive (for $3,000 dollars!!). Yikes. Then…within a few years computers kept getting better (286, 386, 486, Pentium, 3.5 inch non-floppies, VGA, Super VGA, monochrome laptops, color laptops, built in CD players…then better CD players with speeds of 2x, then 4 x, 10x, 40x….etc, and on-and-on).
A person could never feel they had the latest or best version of anything.
When I researched American Ads and Advertising (thumbing thru EVERY page of nearly every major mag from 1780-1970) I saw how crazy this (trying to be) ’state-of-the-art’ process has been a never-ending thing since around around 1890-1910.
The guy who bought the ‘latest’ Gramaphone device was being offered (and often buying) all the best, new music on wax cylinders. Within a very short time his collection (and format-choice) became obsolete with the newer non-wax (shellac) cylinders. Then came flat records, making ALL the cylinder music collections become obsolete. (78rpm, 33rpm, 4 track, 8 track, CDs, downloads).
Even when I read the ads for new and improved (circa 1915) Ice-Boxes I saw that the advertisments created the same ‘techno-neurosis’ in buyers about every six months with newer and better advancements.
The worst period of TN came about around 1948. I was too young (and unborn then) to even realize the amount of TN the advertisers had caused people during that early-time of TV.
But I remember having a rich-uncle who still owned his nearly obsolete 1948 TV in 1958. He bought way too early and was stuck with an ugly, oval-shaped, green-screen TV for a decade…while other people (who waited awhile) had much better Combo-TV & Hi-Fi sets.
The advancements of TV features from 1948-65 were staggering…as far as making a person develop TN.
Even as an 8 year old kid I felt TN…when I saw my friend strap his new 1959 Six-Transistor radio to his newspaper-bike handle bars with big, rubber bands. I couldn’t afford one…but this guy was already envisioning buying a better Nine-transistor radio real soon.
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The same with every automobile ever produced from 1910 until now. The best car of 1918 was basically out-dated within three-years (even though it might have had 20 years worth of potential use left). And that 3 year “car obsolesence” never, ever seemed to ‘let-up’.
My dad’s (once futuristic) 1954 Studebaker became a ‘visual relic’ only to be replaced by his 1958 Old 88 (with an Ultra-Modern radio capable of also being Portable)…then 1964 Mustang…then 1968 T-Bird (infinity).
In 1988 I imagined my life would be complete if I could only buy a new IBM computer and a piece of software called ‘Word-Bench’ (which promised to almost automatically ‘cut and paste’ various notes into book-form, like “magic”).
Now-a-days that Word feature is built into every computer and few people even realize what an amazing power they have available. Even I don’t drool over that feature (which at one time I thought would be all a person would ever need).
In the early 1990s, information on CDs was set to be ‘the next big thing’ (encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc). Then along came the Internet…making all those CD collections obsolete.
I still haven’t figured out how to avoid having “Techno-Stress & Neurosis” over not having the latest devices…or salivating over the ‘next new thing’. I don’t have any answer to this problem other than to simply die and be done with all the ad & article reading.
A person can spend a bundle trying to stay current and remaining in ’state-of-the-art mode’and having the newest gadgets and gizmos.
I once read a good quote: “The future is here, if you can afford it”. It’s true.
The technology we have available today is mind-blowing.
A friend gave me his old 5 inch Panasonic DVD-TV (Hand Theater). It truly IS a theater-in-the-hand. If I could ‘time-travel’ back to 1940 (or even 1970)…people would faint at the mere sight of something which reduced 5 film reels and a movie projector into a palm sized device.
And my friend actually paid $700 for it in 2003.
Yet, today…while pawning it I could only get a $20 loan for this once un-dreamt of ‘techno-miracle machine’.
I have no idea what I’m trying to say here. Maybe just that ‘hi-tech’ equals ‘low-yield’ at the hockshop….or that Yesterday’s Magic Device becomes an unappreciated piece of junk in people’s head just a few years (or even a few month’s) later.
BTW: On my Old Vegas website I placed a 1984 video from CES. Gadgets from 25 years ago look amazingly dim-witted now.
Now CES is back in town along with trucks full of new technology. And I’m still getting ‘Techno-Neurosis’ trying to figure it all out.
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BTW: Every by-line I read carries the phrase ‘from Las Vegas’. It’s incredible how much that one Convention keeps the name Las Vegas alive as a world-famous ‘Capital of the Future’.
01/16/2010 at 11:05 am
I heard there were guides to twitters about CES special interest forums … and a twitter-lounge at CES.
Yipes. If it succeeds I’ll probably hear about it sometime. If it doesn’t … well, so be it. I had never heard of a theater in the hand. Now I guess I’m glad I didn’t. Twenty bucks at PawnStars, eh?
Unbreakable? Bulletproof is an advertizing term, not an engineering term. Rugged, perhaps but not unbreakable. Wear it on your hip and bunk into the edge of a display case … and there it goes. Yet you can go scuba diving with your cell phone if you want to. Just what is more likely to happen?