Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Rolex service centre

    Rolex service centre

    Friday, and my Palm PDA bleeped in that nagging sort of way that it does. I looked down and saw that it was time to get my watch serviced again at the Rolex service centre. I have the good fortune to have got a Rolex Submariner at a knockdown price off my old man some years ago before their prices went stupid. The watch is as old as I am and has weathered the adventures we have shared (including scuba diving, flyposting in sink hole estates, dj’ing in abandoned mills and dot.com client meetings) considerably better. Every three years it goes in for a service.

    The Rolex service centre in London had changed their location since last time, so after getting off at the wrong tube and then heading halfway across W1, I arrived at their new offices in St James’ Sq in a bit of a fluster. Talk about brand experience, their foyer is all sea green wavy patterned glass, dark green marble (all in the same colours as much of their packaging and website) and high quality woodwork, with a couple of lovely looking blonde receptionists; it looks every inch like the sitting room of a Bond villain’s hideaway.

    A reassuringly old man in a spotless white coat took my watch away. I will be interested to see how much work it needs in the next week or so. Seriously tempted to get it a companion with a 50th anniversary edition Submariner or a Seadweller, but that would be a bit materialistic… More related content here.

    Firefox up

    For some reason Safari, the zippy default browser on my Mac does not like the format buttons in Blogger, the online tool I use to write these musings. I have loaded up the latest iteration of Mozilla called Firefox as a back up. I am very impressed with its speed and relative lack of bugs. It beats seven bells out of Microsoft Explorer and Microsoft was withdrawn from the Mac marketplace for Internet browsers so a fast reliable alternative was required.

    Cufflinks & ‘The Game of Death’

    Cufflinks are men’s equivalents to alice bands (except for David Beckham) frivolous items of attire, there is no rhyme or reason for them but shirt makers insist that you use them so that they can skimp on buttons. I can find using them to be a right pain in backside. My one set of cufflinks were bought at a shop in the West End and feature a black and white hand and shoulders portrait of Bruce Lee (from The Game of Death publicity stills apparently). This struck me as a bit of an oddity unless that practicing kung fu is as time consuming and trying as doing up a set of cufflinks in a hurry. They are bit of a conversation piece and my friend Ian and I were talking about them. I complained that using cufflinks were a ‘challenge’ and he pointed out that cufflinks in his view were a way of preparing for the day. You cant do them efficiently unless you are at ease, rather than having your mind going in 20 directions at once. There you go, one man’s frivolous clothing item, another man’s zen pillar – you decide….

  • Dasani’s UK problems

    Coca-Cola’s Dasani have had a rough couple of weeks with their entry into the UK bottled water market.

    Dasani is a respected brands in the US, China and across the developing world. Its manufactured approach to mineral water is at odds with the bottled at source manufacturers that dominate in Europe.

    A few weeks ago the UK tabloid press ‘exposed’ Dasani as tap water from Sidcup. To be fair Dasani does use some interesting NASA developed purification technology and then re-adds minerals in a carefully controlled amount to provide consistent taste. Then the water mains burst in Sidcup, and now Dasani have bromate contamination. This contamination forced parent company Coca-Cola to initiate a complete product recall, pulling Dasani off supermarket shelves around Britain.

    Of course this did not stop me pouring petrol on the fire by bending over backwards to help a CNBC Europe researcher who phoned up looking for expert comment on how this may affect the Coca-Cola and Dasani brands, I managed to place Mark North, creative director of Henrion Ludlow Schmidt’s London office on the European Closing Bell programme as an expert commentator. The product recall means that it will be very hard for Coca-Cola to relaunch the brand in the UK – at least in the near term. Their main concern will be protecting the reputation of Dasani in markets were it is currently established and successful.  Coca-Cola’s misfortune wouldn’t stop me drinking Dasani whilst travelling as it provides safer drinking water in places like China.

    What really astonished me was that in less two hours after the story broke in the late editions of London’s Evening Standard it had appeared on 89 different news sites listed by Google News including the San Jose Mercury and Straits Times. There is no longer such a thing as a local brand. News truly is 24 hours and global in nature….

    More on Coca-Cola here.

  • Are we too complex?

    Are we too complex is a post that I originally wrote on the now defunct Alwayson Network regarding the thoughts of Dan Geer on complexity in technology.

    Dan’s ideas are interesting because they make sense to the man in the street. For instance the more complex you make something, the more likely it is to go wrong. This makes sense whether it is a sophisticated mechanical device or a piece of software. I looped his thinking into my own because I believe there is a ‘sweet spot’ for technology sophistication and usability. Classic examples of that sweet spot would be Videoplus remote controls, pre-Symbian Nokia phones, Palm Vx and the original iPod. They’re largely intuitive, they do one thing really well and they just work. By comparison, most PC software and operating systems probably don’t.

    Geer considers this primarily from an information security point of view. But he also realises that computer experience is an important part of security.

    Dan points out that our ability to use computers as individuals is not increasing as the same rate as computing power and storage. For the past seven years I surfed the web. listened to music and churned out documents on behalf of my clients. The only difference is now that I use a more powerful Unix based workstation laptop (my Apple iBook) to do the same thing. What’s the point? I am not more efficient or effective.