Ged Carroll

Search results for: “middle class”

  • About renaissance chambara and Ged Carroll

    Much as I would like this to be a media megacorp of randomness, renaissance chambara is written by just one person me: Ged Carroll.

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    renaissance chambara started off as an experiment to find out about the capabilities of blogging by trying, originally it was postings on the AlwaysOn Network back in 2002 – 2004, which at the time was an innovation-orientated analogue of Medium. I then moved it to a Blogspot blog; though none of the posts on the AlwaysOn Network survived. Who said publishing on the internet is forever.  It then moved to a now dead blog that was hosted on Yahoo! Small Business Hosting with my own URL. Relatively early on I roped in a couple of journalist friends who contributed a couple of items.

    About Ged Carroll

    Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought. Hopefully, I take up my place among the sellers. – Bertolt Brecht

    I am a brand planner and sometime digital marketer, living in London (on and off for the past 20 years, living in between in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China) delivering programmes for a creative, communications and advertising agencies and their client base. More on that here.

    So back in 2002 it made sense to find out about blogs as a way of directly communicating with public audiences. This is back before social media marketing really became a thing like it is now. Instead we had chat rooms, forums, IRC (internet relay chat) and instant messaging.

    I have passed on digital skills as part of the Econsultancy training team, was a contributing author to The Social Media MBA and Share This Too, done public speaking and have been a business adviser to an architectural studio based in Shenzhen, China.

    I have freelanced for different agencies working on projects for clients like Mandarin Oriental, Sony and Unilever. You can find out more about my work, re professional stuff on this page.

    Prior to falling into agency life I worked in a number of roles, from McDonald’s prep rooms building racks of frozen chips for frying, to heading a shift team in an oil refinery and a brief spell in marketing for financial institutions.

    Probably the role that was closest to my heart was club DJ, because of my love of music. I still like to step behind the mixing desk and play new records with some classics and surprises thrown in just to keep people guessing. Vinyl is still king in my book.

    I guess this kind of gives you an idea of the lens through which I view the world when I write the posts:

    • An inquisitive nature
    • A love of reading instilled by my parents
    • An engineers view of quality from my Dad
    • Being a stranger-in-a-strange-land having come from an Irish household in the middle of the UK
    • A contrary outlook on life coming from being an only child
    • Being a counter-culture fanboy

    I found my way into technology mainly because I wasn’t afraid of it, rather than any real ability. I learned about technology in a very hands on way because there wasn’t any budget for an IT department in many of the early companies where I worked. I got experience on Macs, mainframes, DEC VAX mini-computers IBM and SGI UNIX boxes during five years or so in industry. I had my first email address early in 1994. In the tradition of the early net, I was a number rather than a name. I also managed to send my first spam email pretty soon after as I tried to offload some unwanted Marks and Spencers’ vouchers on my unsuspecting colleagues. Back then people were more concerned that I was creating and selling counterfeit vouchers (I wasn’t, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?) rather than the act of spamming itself.

    I took up technology that made a difference to my life: pagers, mobile phones, PDAs and Mac laptops. I still use Macs, though the pager, mobile phone and PDA has now been replaced by an iPhone.

    I am not very talented in the programming skills area, but was self-taught to write macros in Lotus 1-2-3 to automate optical fibre testing equipment. But that was a long time ago and I have forgotten more in that time than I’ll ever know again.

    Why renaissance chambara?

    The name is all in lower case because the web is built on the foundations of Unix. Linux is just a cheap knock-off, even Microsoft’s modern operating system borrowed much of its underpinnings from a Unix analogue called VMS. iOS and macOS are based on BSD, which stands for Berkeley Systems Distribution (of Unix). Unix only used lower case in its syntax, that’s the reason by email addresses and URLs are case insensitive.

    renaissance as in a wide range of interests – everything is inter-connected. chambara (チャンバラ) as in period samurai films (Ran, Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon, Hitokiri, Sword of Doom, Zatoichi series, the Lone Wolf & Cub series ) – because of my interest in East Asian culture. (chambara is also rendered into western script as chanbara – I made a choice, deal with it). renaissance wushu didn’t have the same ring and hallyu wasn’t really a thing until after I started writing back in 2004.

    If you need to ask more about the name you just won’t get it, just roll with it and we’ll be in like flynn.

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  • That was 2005

    January 2005

    Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, ten years after the peak of the Happy Mondays. London creative team Lee and Dan made an Al Qeada inspired calling card for Volkswagen that managed to leak out on to the web. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston won the monthly award for stating the bleeding obvious. We did a bit of homegrown analysis with the help of information from Popbitch to work out just how much News International made from the Prince Harry Nazi pictures. We also found that the Watchman character that the rc personality most resembled was The Comedian, more details on testing your Watchman Personality Inventory here.

    February 2005

    Words of the month were Mum Truck and KAGOY (kids get older, younger). Hunter S Thompson killed himself and half the media world pretended that they were avid readers of his work. The books of the month were Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (another pioneer of the gonzo school of journalism). The US Army released details around its successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign to attract recruits. America’s Army a realistic 3D game garnered interest in soldiering as a career and was far more fruitful than their television advertising campaigns. Bob Cringely highlighted how 25 billion USD needed to be invested by VC funds in the next 18 months or else they would lose their management fees. This of course wouldn’t have anything to do with the bubbling up of Web 2.0 would it? Carly Fiorina was finally ousted from H-P much to the relief of its employees. Sci-Fi London hosted a fantastic all-nighter of Shaw Brothers classics including Super Infra Man and Monkey Goes West.

    March 2005

    renaissance chambara turned 1 years-old. Forrester mapped out trends in consumer electronics for 2005. March’s word was Search Arbitrage. Seymour Hersh highlighted the Pentagon’s plans for axis-of-evil club member Iran. Hersh’s pioneering journalistic approach contrasted with general media malaise. The Sony PSP picked up a lot of interest on the web with some hailing it as the new iPod, I don’t think so…. And most importantly the rc towers local pub got recognised as Pub of the Year by the Evening Standard.

    April 2005

    PR gossip blog Spin Bunny was shut down for the first time as an unnamed PR agency called in the lawyers. Red Bull’s Art of Can exhibition brought a bit of culture to the Truman brewery. Word of the month is Kronenbourg. H-P manages to launch survey results that make them look foolish. There was less content overall as we were burning the midnight candle at work.

    May 2005

    Flying Records, one of the UK’s foremost dance record shops finally closed its shutters after ten years at the forefront of the scene, however its spirit lives on as Andrew Baker now champions new tracks online working for distributor Goya Music. Palm launched the LifeDrive and it didn’t look that impressive compared to an iPod, retail therapy was thus avoided. Michelle Delio was found to have made up some of her stories that she contributed to Wired News. The word of the month was Sachet Marketing.

    June 2005

    Country Music Television appoints a vice president of Dukes of Hazzard in a brilliantly executed PR campaign to promotes its re-runs of the original series. Omega releases its Planet Ocean watch – the watch that the Seamaster should be. WTF Apple goes Intel! Web 2.0 starts looking bubblicious. It was a few months since the Miami Winter Music festival and the Ibiza season was just starting to kick-off so a bumper month was had in the vinyl stakes. Michael Jackson is found not guilty, but the court of public opinion isn’t so sure. The word of the month is Mommy Consultant, Burson-Marsteller’s phrase e-fluential missed out because it was too close to effluent and we wouldn’t want you to be under the opinion that we thought all bloggers were full of sh!t now would we?

    July 2005

    Cracks start to show in the eBay edifice. Fatigue for consumerism starts to set in. Coke rolls out their Love poster campaign, arguably the best piece of creative this year. The ongoing rising price of oil gives Hubbert’s Peak a mainstream audience as consumers wake up to the fact that oil isn’t going to get any cheaper or more plentiful. The New York Times celebrated the tenth birthday of e-commerce.

    August 2005

    Wired issues its ten-year netrospective ‘celebrating’ the original of the bubble with the Netscape IPO. Citizen journalism sees its first cynical cash in with the launch of Scoopt, a picture agency for the general public and their camera phone. Paparazzi sleep easy though. Music industry bodies blame everybody but themselves for the continued under-performance of their industry. Bob Cringely launches his NerdTV series of interviews and Stussy’s 25th (XXV) anniversary collection is full swing. Towards the end of the month I managed to survive Silicon Valley. In Utah, the heavy mob is used to deal with kids listening to repetitive beats in an incident rather like the infamous police raid in Nelson near Blackburn back in the day. I am sure American’s everywhere feel safer already. The harvest of quality dance music on an acid house tip.

    September 2005

    Chigger is the word. Nick Love’s film The Business reminds us why the 1980s were so good and so crap at the same time. Palm previews a Windows device, Dell stumbles and I try hard not to snigger, its especially hard when some bright spark calls Dell’s answer to the iPod Shuffle the Dell Ditty and styles it like a Ronson lighter. Apple launches the iPod Nano and gadgeteers recoil in horror from the Motorola ROKR. Nestle re-releases the Texan bar. Geek-in-chief at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, appeals to the troops to stop leaking confidential news via their blogs; via a blog!

    October 2005

    Designers Burro shut up shop, while Criminal opens a Covent Garden boutique and Matmos see sense and re-release the Telstar lamp. Disgraced analyst Harry Blodgett starts his own blog. Super Southerner is the phrase of the moment. Spin Bunny gets shut down for the second time, this time it looks like its permanent as the entire site is removed from Typepad, speculation is that a South Bank based agency was responsible for letting loose the dogs of law. The tune of the moment is Tiger Stripes – Spirited Away. In a pre-Halloween push Burger King’s clumsy viral marketing efforts get unmasked by Slate.

    November 2005

    Lynx launches a bespoke perfume in conjunction with Oki-Ni, research shows that music downloads have plateaued proving the proving the point that you can only buy so much crap. Talking of crap, Hypercolour looks like it may be making a come back. AOL makes its first interesting move in years by taking TV to the web and my even have a good business model. The word is Shorty (at least according to DJ Tim Westwood).

    December 2005

    Christmas comes in with a whimper and Sony messes up a street marketing campaign for the PSP. rc floats the concept of a media bond and futures market to capitalise on the digitisation of content, the long tail and too much sloshing around waiting to be invested. Bootlegs mixes of Aretha Franklin and Pink Floyd move the feet so that the mind will follow. The word of the month is Uncanny Valley. Designers Terratag have some awesome gear in their latest fashion collection. Amazon take a Hermann Goring approach to email marketing in the final run-up to Christmas. A brief trip to Ireland left me with a number of contradictory observations about the state of the Celtic Tiger.

    Image courtesy of Sanrio. More related content here.

  • Microsoft employee revolt?

    Last week Microsoft Corp. announced that it was cutting medical benefits, stock discounts and parent leave for employees. The medical benefits cut amounted to a measure to encourage them to use generic drugs rather than prescription drugs in order to the help the company conserve its 50 billion USD cash pile.

    The chosen few, are not happy according to results of an internal poll obtained by Reuters.

    This follows on from changing the stock options structure, allegedly to improve corporate governance and had the effect of making it less likely that their hard work would be converted into the status of a burnt out millionaire. In addition, Bill Gates has become one of the largest investors in the pharmaceutical sector.

    I must admit I don’t feel that sorry for them:

    – In the case of the prescription drugs cut, why pay more for a brand that only does the same or is worse than a non-label product? Agreed, oh but wait a moment, that disrespects investments made by companies in intellectual property and building a brand, rather like the arguments that Microsoft employs against the open source LAMP cabal? (LAMP is geek marketer speak for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

    – It shows that Microsoft is becoming a middle aged and mature business. Therefore there is less likely to be a Windows 95 type cancer spreading through technology. The new new thing is likely to happen elsewhere

    – Microserfs are likely to be less committed and work less hours, they will no longer feel that they have everything to play for. That means less products launched, products taking a longer time to get to market and less commitment in marketing the products. This provides other companies and start-ups with a better chance of bringing truly innovative products to market, with less chance of suffering a Netscape-like death

    – Nothing loosens tongues like dissatisfaction. It is noticeable that that benefits cuts have been brought in after the company made its peace with the US government, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and AOL. However there is still some outstanding court cases like Microsoft v Burst.com, the EU and South Korea that could benefit from some prime time whistle blowing a la Deep Throat’s role in the Watergate Scandal

    – It is a bit of a leveller in the Microsoft class structure. Vested staff (full-time employees) were known to lord it over contract employees wearing pin badges with the message “Fuc* You – I’m Vested”. This message kind of rings hollow now. In addition, it lows the still huge challenge facing those workers who would like union recognition. (Microsoft historically has been an anti-union shop, but treated its serfs well)

    – Anybody who has seen the blue screen of death, been stymied by a wizard, irritated by a paper clip, or had a corrupt file with two weeks of work in it would be sitting there wondering why the hell Microserfs deserve more than a McDonalds Happy Meal(TM) and sharp kick in the backside. Guys many of your products lack quality, when they’re good they’re cool (Microsoft Word and Excel on the Mac) but the vast majority of time they are like a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands (marketing and candy coloured graphics) used to hide a manure heap. To paraphase Martin Luther – it doesn’t matter what you cover it with a manure heap is still a manure heap

    OK before I get pro-Microsoft hate mail, I have enough respect for some of the decent products they’ve made to give the disgruntled Microserfs some words of wisdom:

    – Don’t complete another survey on an internal web site, they can trace you from your IP address or other internal network identifiers. They know who you ‘troublemakers’ are. In fact wait until a colleague leaves their PC and do it on theirs instead, now your job is likely to be more secure because guess whose job is more likely to be offshored now? BOGU (a quaint Microsoft phrase that means ‘bend over and grease up’)

    – Read Dilbert and Machiavelli’s The Prince diligently to learn how to survive in the Microserf culture

    – Get a life, you aren’t going to make dent in the universe, get out meet people, make someone happy and through that hopefully find your own happiness, volunteer at The Samaritans and try to make more of a difference than just screwing over the same poor saps with a new winkle in the licensing agreement

    More on Microsoft here.

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