CIO — DEAR VENDORS, Like most CIOs, I’m a simple person with simple needs. Give me a house on the ocean with a view of Nicole Kidman’s swimming pool and a dangerously fast car with diplomatic plates, and I’m happy. And, of course, give me the things that money can’t buy, like a computer that works like the ones on TV.
Have you all watched any of your commercials on the morning cable news channels lately? You know, the ones flogging technology? What the hell are you guys thinking? Now, I freely admit that what I know about advertising and marketing could fit on the back of a matchbook. And I suppose that there might be some value in selling technology that doesn’t exist yet (after all, what’s the harm in pumping a little sunshine up our collective skirts now and then). But what in the world is the point of marketing technologies that will, for technical reasons or general lack of interest, never exist? (Please note that when I say never exist, I mean in my lifetime?the only horizon I happen to care about.)
I first noticed this particular bit of silliness a few years back when Oracle began running an ad for an Internet access device?a low-cost keyboard and modem hooked to a television set that would bring the Internet to poor children. The ad opened in an inner city apartment building and zoomed through a window where we saw a kid, keyboard on lap, accessing an educational website. On the television in front of him a whale breached and fell back in the water in colorful, full screen, flawlessly fluid motion. What Oracle failed to explain in the ad, besides where one could go to buy one of these things, was how this kid’s family was able to afford a T1 circuit and the associated hardware to support 30 frames per second full-motion video. This, we were left to assume, must be the best wired tenement building in New York City.
My current favorites are a couple from my friends at IBM, part of their "E-Business Innovation Campaign" series. In one, a woman points her cell phone at a soda machine, hits a button, and a can of mildly corrosive, carbonated sugar water rolls out to the tag line "Wireless E-Business Coming from IBM."
Hey, I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that this is not the future of e-business?not because it can’t be done, but because it won’t be done (and while you guys will never admit it, I think you know that). This happens to be an area I know something about, so believe me when I tell you that an outdoor, graffiti-covered pop machine being serviced by a minimum wage delivery person, appropriately outfitted and networked (wireless or otherwise) to accept payment from a cell phone would make the cost of a can of Pepsi about, oh, five bucks.
