One of the things I’ve always wanted, was a thin, light, laptop with a good keyboard and 8 hours of battery life.

The trend, however, seems to be to produce 12 pound laptops, with DVD+-*/ RW support, 512 megs of video RAM, 15.9 audio, retina scanner, RAID 5 storage, 2 2 cupholders.

Ok, ok – I exaggerated a little, but still, this picture of a Dell XPS M2010 comes to mind:

In other countries though, I know that thin and light laptops have been available for a while. At one point, I was interested in a Sharp laptop – seemed pretty neat. (Yes, Sharp does make laptops.) Check out this LG laptop:

Over the weekend, I read an interesting article that points to some of the reasons why these thin/light laptops don’t exist in our nation – here are the relevant snippets:

Tech Gadgets Banned in the USA – Yahoo! News
[snip]

Plus, according to a major player in this game, the U.S. tech market tends to take its cue from big business, not John Q. Public.

“In Japan, where a majority of the cutting-edge innovation occurs, they’re driven by consumer demand. In the U.S., we’re mainly driven by business needs. That’s why you see more of an emphasis on cheap laptops than on lightweight machines,” says Douglas Krone, chief executive of Dynamism.com, an online site that sells technology not found on the shelves of U.S. retail stores.

[snip]

Smaller, Faster, Better?

In addition to corporate strategies driven by the bottom line, there are cultural preferences to consider.

Japanese consumers do not flinch at spending the equivalent of $3,000 or more on a laptop as long as it has the most up-to-date technology and weighs less than 2 pounds, Krone says. Consumers in Japan, and many in Europe, will spend more to enjoy the fruits of innovation rather than use a laptop or gadget that is just “good enough” for their purposes.

American consumers, on the other hand, are more interested in lower prices than lighter weights, which makes top-of-the-line electronics a difficult sell in this country, Krone says.

Yuni Sucippo, vice president of I-Cube, another Web site offering products from beyond U.S. borders, agrees. “Americans, in general, tend to like big, powerful notebooks,” she says. “They want everything in there, as much storage as they can get, as fast as it can go, as big as possible. But they end up carrying around 10 pounds of computer.”

[snip]

Despite the possible sales to be gained from these niche customers, large retailers in the U.S. get their marching orders not only from consumers, but also from shareholders. That’s where the economics of mediocrity come into play.

High-end products command a high-end price. Most shoppers tend to make middle-of-the-road selections at middle-of-the-road prices. Catering to that mentality will produce the kind of returns stockholders demand. It’s an economic reality that further diminishes the chances certain top-of-the-line tech goodies will reach U.S. shores anytime soon.

It looks like the trifecta of consumer mentality (Hummer(R) laptops!), vendor market sizing (gotta sell to walmart!), and enterprise customer demands (ROI!) run against my preferences.

I hope the tide will change some day.

This was a fun weekend read:

ChangeThis :: Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?
Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?

Here’s a good quote from the piece:

My Stanford colleague, Tony Bryk, describes American educational policy as “The United States of Amnesia,” because the same bad ideas—like flunking lots kids (i.e., “ending social promotion”) and tying teachers’ pay to student scores—sweep through school systems every few years. There is a huge body of research that shows they are ineffective, yet no one seems to remember these policies have failed over and over in the past. And even when an idea, like “Hamel’s Law,” is supported by evidence, as I said, no progress can be made on ideas that are
constantly being rediscovered. That is why, after I read about Hamel’s “New Math,” I proposed Sutton’s Law: “If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong, Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.”

Classic.

Are we perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes? How can we avoid being sold new ideas which are just bad ideas (barely) repackaged? I think the first step is to identify them – this piece provides some clues as to how.
Another great quote:

Sure, some business thought sales people are outright lying, but psychological research suggests that many others have actually convinced themselves to believe their own lousy logic and arguments. Human beings see what they believe, and disregard the rest.

Ah… good ol’ confirmation bias.

This is a pretty cool story of how experimentation can quickly show whether something is a good idea, or a bad idea:

Geeking with Greg: Early Amazon: Shopping cart recommendations

I loved the idea of making recommendations based on the items in your Amazon shopping cart. Add a couple things, see what pops up. Add a couple more, see what changes.

The idea of recommending items at checkout is nothing new. Grocery stories put candy and other impulse buys in the checkout lanes. Hardware stores put small tools and gadgets near the register.

…

I hacked up a prototype. On a test site, I modified the Amazon.com shopping cart page to recommend other items you might enjoy adding to your cart. Looked pretty good to me. I started showing it around.

While the reaction was positive, there was some concern. In particular, a marketing senior vice-president was dead set against it. His main objection was that it might distract people away from checking out — it is true that it is much easier and more common to see customers abandon their cart at the register in online retail — and he rallied others to his cause.

At this point, I was told I was forbidden to work on this any further. I was told Amazon was not ready to launch this feature. It should have stopped there.

Instead, I prepared the feature for an online test. I believed in shopping cart recommendations. I wanted to measure the sales impact.

I heard the SVP was angry when he discovered I was pushing out a test. But, even for top executives, it was hard to block a test. Measurement is good. The only good argument against testing would be that the negative impact might be so severe that Amazon couldn’t afford it, a difficult claim to make. The test rolled out.

The results were clear. Not only did it win, but the feature won by such a wide margin that not having it live was costing Amazon a noticeable chunk of change. With new urgency, shopping cart recommendations launched.

When in doubt, try it out. Get some data. Avoid confirmation bias!

Recently, PC World had a list of the Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. I noticed this entry:

PCWorld.com – The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)

Click for enlarged view. Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.

Alright… the Click of Death problem was bad. It was really bad. But from what I recalled, it wasn’t until later in the life span of the product that this started to happen. What I do remember was that Zip disks became enormously poular because of how much content it could hold, and the convenience it offered. Suddenly, multimedia was transportable in a rewritable fashion!

I’m sure there could have been a better entry in the Top 25 Worst Tech Product of All Time.

Phew, what a crazy day at work. After I got home, I relaxed by watching Frontline on PBS (in HD). The episode I watched was on retiring in America – wow, it’s a pretty scary story. I never knew that 401k was a small invention created specifically to help xerox’s executives.

Here’s an interesting thought on what you need to retire:

FRONTLINE: can you afford to retire?: what you need to know | PBS

What do experts say should be the combined employee/employer amount put into a 401(k) each year?

Fifteen to 18 percent of salary, every year, for 30 years is the recommendation from most experts. Most advise having roughly ten times annual pay accumulated in a 401(k)-style plan by retirement time.

Wow that’s a lot of money. Be sure to watch the video, or see it on broadcast. As is typical of Frontline, there are definitely some interesting stories. It was pretty eye-openning. The last sentence of the show is shocking, but not very surprising.

JungleDisk – Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

What is Jungle Disk?

Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com’s S3™ Storage Service.

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15? per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux

This looks pretty interesting. Personally I use FolderShare to mirror the 3 machines I use daily, with a machine in New York to geographically distribute the data, perform backups 4 times a day, and to ensure that files are still accessible if my 3 computers are all off. The best part is that I don’t have to do anything – everytime I make a change to a file that is FolderShared, it is automatically replicated across CheungNet(TM). Jungle Disk, on the other hand, looks like it is more manual.

Still, I might give this a try for fun.

I saw this interesting post linked off of techmeme today:

Redeye VC: 53,651

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been on several phone pitches from west-coast companies that are looking to be the “flickr of XXXX” or “like del.icio.us but YYYY” or “the Digg killer”. It got me thinking – how many people outside of the valley have ever heard of these companies? I asked a bunch of local (Philly-area) acquaintances and the answer came back loud and clear: none – nada – zip. People here have barely heard of Myspace and Craigslist – let alone any of the “hot” Web 2.0 companies.

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

It’s an interesting observation – but I’m wondering if its more of a age segmentation than a geographic segmentation. Heck, my sister’s heard of myspace and she’s hardly tech saavy. In fact, it seems to me a lot of people outside of the Valley have heard of MySpace (not as much for flickr.)

In the end though, wasn’t Google just for geeks? Wasn’t the iPod just for geeks? Heck, it was only for Mac geeks at that since the first iPods were only Mac compatible for a while.

Besides time and a super compelling user experience, what else does it take to make a product successful in the mainstream?

So recently I brought my car in for the 60k mile service.

Sure it set me back a bundle. Sure it discovered other problems that will set me back a bundle.

But the worst part was what had to be the least reassuring comment of the year: “You should expect to be stranded in the desert in the next 30k miles. You won’t know when it will happen. It will happen suddenly.”

Ok, so the fine folks at German Motor Specialists didn’t quite say that. But basically they told me that the coolant expansion tank in my car is known to crack after many thousands of miles, and that when it does it will be sudden, without warning. And then I’ll have to be towed.

I appreciate that they didn’t sell me on a new coolant expansion tank, and I appreciate their honesty, but this type of honesty sure doesn’t make you feel better. Guess I need to up my AAA membership level for safety.

In their display case of random parts, they actually had a coolant expansion tank, with the part that usually cracks highlighted in yellow:

I bet if these guys had a blog, their customer load would shoot up dramatically.