Ged Carroll

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  • Saab

    Saab has been a pioneer in the automotive sector and it is now facing imminent death in the car business. Saab made the first production cars with safety belts, the first headlight washer and wiper facilities, the first impact absorbing bumper, pioneered pollen filters in the air system of its cars and the first CFC-free climate control. Saab along with the Mercedes S-Class it has had a disproportionate impact on the modern car.

    I have a personal attachment to the Saab brand. I can still remember the smell of the interior of a family friend’s Saab 99, the brooding brow over the dashboard that the VDO instruments used to look out from, the heated seats and the ignition key that also locked the gear box.

    stig_blomqvist_rally99

    Motorsport, in particular rallying was the preferred sport of my Dad and my hero didn’t wear a polyester Liverpool shirt, but a set of fireproof overalls. His name is Stig Blomqvist, one of the most talented men ever to get behind the wheel of a car. He has competed successfully in circuit racing and rallying for the past 38 years.

    saab_rally_99T

    Blomqvist’s vehicle during the late 1970s was a Saab with a distinctive avant-garde paint job that caught my imagination as an 8-year old. With the rise of four-wheel drive, he then moved to Audi, and my team allegiance went with him – when Saab bowed out of top flight rallying. But that avant garde paint job still has a place in my heart.

    Saab is now staring oblivion in the face. A financial rescue has been scuppered and the car company is likely to be consigned to the annals of history. At this point Saab reminded me of Apple circa 1996, however one thing Apple had in its darkest hours were fans of the Macintosh platform. I can remember when having an Apple Mac wasn’t cool, but marked you out as a bit of weirdo.  I know, I was one of them weirdos; and thankfully the company is still around making insanely great products that shows my loyalty was not misplaced.

    If I was a potential saviour for Saab; not even a business plan by the best brains from Goldman Sachs would persuade me after reading feedback from the loyal members of the New York Saab Owner’s Club by Michael Corkery on the Deal Journal blog on the Wall Street Journal online.

    Some of the things that caught my eye:

    1. …there are some guys in the club who are going to say : ‘good riddance they haven’t made a good car in a long time.’
    2. There are some vintage guys in the club who say that Saab hasn’t made a good car since 1999…
    3. Over the last few years club members have started bringing their non-Saab cars to meetings. It speaks to the fact that Saab has gotten away from what made them a fun driving car.
    4. There are some people who work with me and will ask for car advice. But unless they are a car person, I won’t recommend Saab. I don’t want them to come back and yell at me.

    I wouldn’t even like to guess what the net promoter score is amongst some of Saab’s long-suffering fans. Saab has lost what it was to its customers. It was no longer authentic, this isn’t about globalisation; its about a company and its brand losing its soul. This happened whilst the company was a completely-owned subsiduary of GM. General Motors is ultimately responsible for management decisions that didn’t just destroy shareholder value and brand value, they nuked it.

    The only bit of Saab that remains is in the camaraderie of the club and vintage vehicles. Graham Brown frequently talks about authenticity being the keystone for successful youth marketing, its also true for marketing to the not-so-young. More on brand related posts here.

  • Who is your city? by Richard Florida

    Richard Florida is famous for his works on the rise of the creative classes. Who is your city? is an exploration into how clusters develop wrapped up under the guise of a self-help book. The book was recommended by a friend to mine who has been studying architecture and urban design. Florida looks at the characteristics of different cities (predominantly in North America) and explores factors that attract people at different life stages. You can see similar patterns in China around the rise of Shenzhen as a new city in the space of a few decades, or the way London draws talent from across the rest of the UK across various creative services.

    Flordia provides some of the starting points to the age-old regional planning question ‘How do we make another Silicon Valley in <insert region name here>?’ by listing some of the factors involved. There is an interplay between planning and organic effects. Korea is currently facing these challenges as it tried to have Sejong City meet its full potential

    Unlike many books he hasn’t fallen into the classic bad science trap that correlation and causality are the same thing. For instance: whilst no two neighbouring countries with a McDonald’s restaurant may have gone to war, that doesn’t make Ronald McDonald a prime candidate for the next United Nations secretary general.

    The book is interesting in the way that a Malcolm Gladwell book is interesting; I would prefer for Richard Florida to surface more of the modelling and research that went into Who is your city. The book is a serious academic piece of work that is devalued by reducing it to dinner party talking points. The section of questions at the back seem logical enough for someone thinking about relocating, there is no rocket science in them. At the end of it, I was left wondering how much utility did Who is your city? have for the average European or Asian reader? More book reviews here.

  • Nowism

    Trendwatching.com came up with an interesting concept of nowism. Nowism is a change in the state of mind of young consumers. It is a move away from certain product categories and rites of passage into adulthood.

    Definition

    Trendwatching describes it as:

    “Consumers’ ingrained* lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.”

    Perversely nowism comes out of the age of abundance that we live in (even in the recession). Young people do struggle with certain aspects of adult life like putting down roots and getting on the property ladder. Otherwise this relative economic abundance has a flip side: possessions are no longer status symbols. Instead they can viewed as a gilded cage – restricting consumers from having experiences. We can see this is in the developed world with some interesting changes on consumer patterns:

    Just 40 years ago, the pony cars of the Ford Motor Company and others blew open the young US car market with the Ford Mustang sports cars and the Ford Bronco off road vehicles that were the forerunner of today’s sports utility vehicles (SUVs). Comparing the Mustang design to Toyota’s Scion and you can see this move away from status and freedom through motoring to pure utility. Nowism gets into the industrial design form and function are unadorned. More information here. More posts about the latest trends here.

  • Google Wave

    The office that I work in has been abuzz about Google Wave and Becky has been gently badgering me to air my thoughts on it. I have been reluctant to give a definitive judgement on it, as I believe that like Twitter; it’s true utility may not become apparent until there are a critical amount of users on it.

    It used to be that device manufacturers created a gizmo but the software on the device was the killer application (for instance the Apple II and VisiCalc, the Macintosh and Aldus PageMaker or the iPhone and 60,000+ applications), with the web the utility and the killer application is the network of people on there.

    Google Wave001

    Google Wave does herald some changes in the web which may require consumers to alter their behaviour.

    But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves, what is Google Wave anyway?

    Wave is a personal communications and collaboration tool. Say what? Google has looked trying to innovate by bringing together elements of different tools which are currently used by the members of the public to varying degrees: e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networks.

    When you use it, the bits that are immediately obvious are the instant messaging platform and the ability to share video clips.  The interface isn’t as easy to use as other Google products like GMail so its questionable whether it will eventually find widespread consumer adoption in its present form. It is interesting in that it shows Google’s thinking about web communications.

    The biggest aspect from my perspective is the move from the real-time web to what I term the ‘thought-time web’. When you are typing via instant messenger you don’t display your message until you press return on a conversation. With Wave people can see your message as you type, if you’re like me you work out the structure of what you’re going to say in the dialogue box, editing as you go with cut and past. So having this transparency on your message creation may not be that good an idea.

    With Wave you would have to use another editing programme and cut-and-paste into the Wave dialogue box in order to get the same functionality in message writing. this means that they can jump in at any point in the conversation and it also means message trails will become less meaningful as you can’t see the order in which responses happen against each other in the same way as IM.

    A secondary aspect to this is what I think of as transient data. Think about it in terms of these two hypothetical scenarios:

    • A vulnerable 12-year old is taunted by members of her class who write in a message of hateful language about their weight or colour and then cut-and-paste homework-related dialogue in over the top and hit the return key. The abuse happens in real-time with no apparent evidence that the child can point to in order to get aid from parent or school
    • A consumer is looking for information about a camera, the customer services representative types in the specification of the model that the consumer wants at a too-good-to-be-true price and then cuts and pastes and presses return on a completely different, less favourable offer for the same price. The consumer doesn’t have a leg to stand on

    Contrast this with the current culture of email and Facebook where is there is an evidence or document trail that the victim can use for recourse. The social aspects of thought-time communications a la Google Wave haven’t been fully understood yet and society’s way of dealing with the challenges are likely to take years to iron out.

  • The Playful World by Mark Pesce

    The Playful World was written by Mark Pesce. Pesce was an early pioneer of the web. He was instrumental in bringing a 3d interface to the web through a standard called VRML. This was an early attempt to provide the kind of immersive ‘matrix’ experience envisaged by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson in cyberpunk literature. Were a digital double of the real world (or more likely a more attenuated digital version) provides for interactions in the virtual realm.

    Since then he has been applying his ingenuity and enterprise to academia  and futurism for the past decade and a half.

    The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today’s cutting-edge web and related technology trends:

    • Augmented web – the web provided a data overlay of the real world with applications like locative digital art and turn by turn directions for navigation. Putting this inside glasses rather than on a screen would mirror some of the human computer interaction work done since the 1960s for fighter pilots.
    • The web of things – items become intrinsically linked to the web with all the security risks that entails as well.
    • Custom manufacturing – smaller production runs, intellectual property becomes more important than manufacturing scale. Globalisation gets transformed. Waste could be reduced, though that would be affected by the kind of prototyping one goes through printing items in 3D printing from an existing file.
    • Gaming – lean forward entertainment becomes more immersive, though a lot of the growth in gaming has already happened

    Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce’s book. You can find more book reviews here. More related content here.