Re: Talking vs Doing

[P3D John W Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 04:56:57 -0500
>From: P3D Larry Berlin  <lberlin@xxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: Talking vs Doing

>>[For those who haven't seen them, the commercials feature disco music,
>>flashing colored lights, and dancers in stylized clean-room attire.]

>****  Are you implying that an engineer designed those commercials? :-) 

It's possible - and that engineer may have later said, "No! Wait! I was just
kidding!" :-)

I don't think the television viewers *really* think that the chip makers
spend their time disco dancing, and it does make for entertaining commercials,
so in that sense the advertising campaign is a success. On the other hand,
the heavy emphasis on the "multimedia" features in the advertising has caused
some people I know to deliberately avoid these chips in their office
computers, not realizing that some of the features of the chip should also
improve performance of office applications. The addition of artistic content
to "technical presentations" has both benefits and risks.

Another classic example: a decade or so back, a company started advertising
voice recognition technology, in which the system correctly interpreted
the spoken statement "Please write Mrs. Wright right now." Voice and context
recognition back then was far more primitive than it is now - I suspect that
some technical person described that statement to a marketing person as
"a worst-case scenario", and the marketing person said "Hey - that's catchy -
we'll use it in all our commercials!". 

>I was thinking of certain CD products I've encountered off of retail store
>shelves. When I read the credits on one in particular, it explained a lot
>about why the product was the way it was...

Interesting phenomenon - one of the more recent fashions in computer graphics
seems to be to do things that are very human-oriented and very hard for
computers - perhaps the viewpoint is that anyone can make a straight line
or a metallic surface using computer graphics, but it's *really* something
if you can make an impressionistic painting.

>Fully distrust your friend's judgment because it's not made with
>full information and is biased against the unknown. I would question why
>your friend has such a bias. 

I don't *know* that it was unknown to him. Perhaps he knew all about it,
and wisely concluded that 3D was a dead end for what he was trying to do.
But I didn't agree with the conclusion.

There was a discussion on P3D several months back on why some people seem
hostile to 3D.

[My opinions]
John R


------------------------------