I Read the News Yesterday, Oh Boy
The party conference season is not something I find terribly compelling these days. The tight control exercised by the Conservatives of old, stage-managing the conference and making it a back-slappng exercise for the most part, has been extended by the Labour party over the past 10 years. Controversial motions aren't even debated; the troops are rallied, drinks are taken. Fringe meetings are where it's at, but their very existence speaks of their non-relevance to the corporate politics going on in the main hall.
If I were a politician, I don't think I'd been too keen on conferences, in much the same way as I'm averse to trade shows and conferences, training days, and product launches.
Some of our vendors are still in the habit of launching products with a big fanfare, hiring a boat, or a marquee at Silverstone on qualifying days, and they reveal their new printers/cameras/whatevers as if expecting collective gasps of astonishment. It's time warp behaviour really, because we've all read about said products, long in advance, on this thing called the internet.
We had the slightly bizarre experience the other day of phoning a vendor to ask about a new flagship product that was all the buzz on the 'net - and it was the "first they knew" about it. Apparently. Which I don't really believe, any more than we believed the other vendor, who said, abruptly, "Never head of it mate," in similar circumstances.
The control of the flow of information, the timing of product launches, the general buzz of news and politics - all changed by the web.
I said a while ago that there are some thing you just can't, or shouldn't buy on-line. Shoes being one. I'm twice bitten thrice shy on internet shoe buying. If you can afford Ocado/Waitrose, maybe you can get your groceries from them (but with the Ocado brochure suggesting bottles of wine at £19.95 a pop, I hardly think so.
I'm pretty sure I'll rarely buy clothes from a shop again, or CDs, or DVDs, or books. And magazines are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The fortnightly MacUser is getting skimpier and skimpier, and all the news is old news. Same is true of Macworld, but being monthly, they have more chance to be analytical.
Steve Jobs recently cancelled his European keynote address at the Paris Expo. I don't think for any other reason than that he'd already launched iPod Nano. In the past, he's given keynotes in Paris that basically reproduced recent American ones. And for why? Now we get the news about new products as it happens, usually before, so these staged events are pointless.
As are party conferences, really. Why bother? It's all thrashed out in the media for weeks before. Sometimes things happen. Year before last, when Duncan-Smith (yet another Smith taking on airs by double-barreling his name) gave his "quiet man" speech, the media had spent so much time trailing it in advance that they completely missed the fact that his delivery was utterly inept, signing his death warrant before he sat down. Instead, they went into the scheduled "post-analysis" of the speech content, and it was only, what, with long hindsight that the speech was seen as the abject failure it was.
But such events are increasingly rare, the single track on the album that you actually like. And these days, instead of buying the whole record, you'd just download the one song, wouldn't you?
If I were a politician, I don't think I'd been too keen on conferences, in much the same way as I'm averse to trade shows and conferences, training days, and product launches.
Some of our vendors are still in the habit of launching products with a big fanfare, hiring a boat, or a marquee at Silverstone on qualifying days, and they reveal their new printers/cameras/whatevers as if expecting collective gasps of astonishment. It's time warp behaviour really, because we've all read about said products, long in advance, on this thing called the internet.
We had the slightly bizarre experience the other day of phoning a vendor to ask about a new flagship product that was all the buzz on the 'net - and it was the "first they knew" about it. Apparently. Which I don't really believe, any more than we believed the other vendor, who said, abruptly, "Never head of it mate," in similar circumstances.
The control of the flow of information, the timing of product launches, the general buzz of news and politics - all changed by the web.
I said a while ago that there are some thing you just can't, or shouldn't buy on-line. Shoes being one. I'm twice bitten thrice shy on internet shoe buying. If you can afford Ocado/Waitrose, maybe you can get your groceries from them (but with the Ocado brochure suggesting bottles of wine at £19.95 a pop, I hardly think so.
I'm pretty sure I'll rarely buy clothes from a shop again, or CDs, or DVDs, or books. And magazines are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The fortnightly MacUser is getting skimpier and skimpier, and all the news is old news. Same is true of Macworld, but being monthly, they have more chance to be analytical.
Steve Jobs recently cancelled his European keynote address at the Paris Expo. I don't think for any other reason than that he'd already launched iPod Nano. In the past, he's given keynotes in Paris that basically reproduced recent American ones. And for why? Now we get the news about new products as it happens, usually before, so these staged events are pointless.
As are party conferences, really. Why bother? It's all thrashed out in the media for weeks before. Sometimes things happen. Year before last, when Duncan-Smith (yet another Smith taking on airs by double-barreling his name) gave his "quiet man" speech, the media had spent so much time trailing it in advance that they completely missed the fact that his delivery was utterly inept, signing his death warrant before he sat down. Instead, they went into the scheduled "post-analysis" of the speech content, and it was only, what, with long hindsight that the speech was seen as the abject failure it was.
But such events are increasingly rare, the single track on the album that you actually like. And these days, instead of buying the whole record, you'd just download the one song, wouldn't you?
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, September 26, 2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home