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Archives for 2000

OK, before I get going

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to work this morning, I just came across the strangest thing on the Macwarehouse Canada site. A little deconstruction is in order.

  • Apple Canada’s current e-commerce regulations prohibit any Apple authorized reseller to sell Apple product on-line through the Internet. As a strategic partner of Apple Canada, we support that position and will continue to follow their strategy.
    This might as well read, “OK, Apple just fucked us, but we’re gonna suck up anyhow cause we’re getting rich off catalog sales.”
  • Micro Warehouse has decided that this restriction should not be a factor in collecting important information from our customers.
    “We still want to invade your privacy though kids, so we’re going to datamine you for all you’re worth, which frankly might not be much but hey, this is e-commerce, baby!”
  • We have developed the following program that supports Apple Canada’s e-commerce strategy and benefits the customer.
    “We have developed the following BS so we can nominally support their screwed-up policy while selling you, dear customer, down the river.”
  • A value add feature has been added to all Apple product on our website.
    “Look at how great we are at using pass buzzwords like ‘value add’! Boy are we ever smart! We can suck up to Apple AND trash their policies in one fell swoop!”

Followup

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on the IAM.com/Razorfish saga: “Our Work’s Fine, Just Pay the Bills“

I may be naive, but I think it’s ridiculous for a dot-com company to farm out their web design work. I can understand a bricks-and-mortar company hiring a company to do pure design work that will be overlaid on a structure they build themselves, or that they have partnered with someone else to do. I can even relate to a strategic partnership with a web company with the latter providing the actual site. But to hire someone straight up like that? I think it invites failure. It’s like a recipe. The knowledge of designers or programmers has to be deeply accounted for by management of a dot-com – it’s an essential piece of the puzzle. Their familiarity with the business model, the history of the project, but from their own unique perspective, is critical. And – the key challenge of a dot-com is just that – to integrate the technical knowledge of designers and programmers and others with the “product” as defined by a deep knowledge of the market, the business proposition, the value to users and to investors/clients. That’s not a casual thing – it’s a mission. I have some understanding of that – it’s a grandiose way of describing a big part of my job.

I think it’s pretty ironic

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that the DeCSS Trial began by showing a clip of The Matrix. The matrix, in the movie, is an artificial world over which practically no one has any control – a seamless environment. Which seems pretty similar, in a way (though I know it’s more than a little disingenuous to say so), to what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would propose. A world in which no one but the owners have any access to any media product (aka song, story, book, creative thought).

I was away

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in Ottawa again, this time for the whole weekend. I must say the city I saw this weekend was much more familiar to me than I’d seen in recent visits, which is a very good thing. I saw a certain Aunt from Alta Vista who I don’t see very often, who mentioned exactly how much older my cousin is than I am, which in turn confirmed to about 95% certainty that my cousin was in a specific person’s grade 8 class, which is really funny news. No embarrassing link, but there might be one person chuckling while they read this. Oh – said cousin now teaches at that very same school.

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