I know it’s all about a lack of context…so let me give you some.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I had launched a trend forecasting business (she’d been a trend merchandiser for Target Stores so this was a natural) and we created a newsletter called The Trend Curve (its backstory is here). Launching this newsletter was due, in no small part, to the amazing power at the time of the Macintosh SE30, a LaserWriter printer, and a software program called Aldus Pagemaker. Together, the Mac/Laserwriter/Pagemaker trio is what kickstarted the desktop publishing trend and ended up completely disrupting and overhauling the prepress and printing industries, and allowed a young couple to create a business, now over 21 years old, and put a woman named Michelle Lamb at the forefront of international trends in the home furnishings industry.

Less than three years later in the fall of 1990, we were publishing The Trend Curve four times per year and creating flyers, postcards and lots of other promotional products by using a page layout program on a tiny, 9-inch screen. While the Mac SE/30 had a huge 80MB hard drive and a fast 68030 processor, using it was a frustrating exercise as was waiting to proof output in color since that little screen was black and white and I had to scroll all over the place to go to various parts of a page. Knowing I had to upgrade to a computer with color and a bigger monitor — but not having the nearly $6,000 to spend on a Macintosh IIci with a color display — I fortunately knew an Apple business employee who was kind enough to use his once-per-year “first discount” (60% off) and buy exactly what I needed.

Going through some papers this weekend I came across the invoice above and the memories came flooding back. Not only the glee I felt having a state-of-the-art Mac but one that sported a HUGE 13″ color display with 640×480 resolution! You can see the technical specifications here and I know that any of you reading this will look at this IIci today and have the same reaction my 15 year old son did (”….and you actually used that thing every day?”) but at the time this was one amazing and powerful machine.

The retail price of this setup was nearly $6,000 and the Apple employee discounted price was $4,193.00. To give you a sense of the buying power of that $4,193.00 vs. today, the inflation rate average from 1990-2009 has been 2.73% so $1 in 1990 would require spending $1.67 in 2009 dollars to get the same value. Therefore the “dollar worth” of that IIci today would’ve meant a retail price of $10,020.00 and that Apple employee discounted price would be $7002.31 in 2009 dollars.

Yikes. Today that $7,000 could easily buy three powerful desktop machines plus one laptop.

So the next time you go in to an Apple Store and see a 27-inch 2.66ghz iMac with 2560×1440 resolution, 4GB memory and a 1TB hard drive for $1,999.00, I sincerely hope you appreciate the sheer power at your fingertips, how you can use a machine like this to start your own business, and resist the temptation to whine.

One of the dangers in being a “thought leader” or “influencer” in blogs or social media is this: others might actually believe you’re an expert and take what you say on faith, as gospel, or as their duty. On the flip side, those of us who follow so-called thought leaders make some assumptions that they’re experts or at least more plugged in than we are so they must know something we don’t (and too many people are influenced by them automatically). I’ve been seeing this happen too often in the group-think that occurs in the blogosphere and this sort of mass persuasion (or “mass meme’ing” as my friend Bill calls it) is now moving even faster with the real-time internet (e.g., Twitter).

In my several decades on this earth I’ve learned the power of propaganda, seen the unfortunate downsides to “spin” and group-think, and have been made well aware of the persuasion, motivation and psychological manipulation techniques most people with an agenda employ.

Having an agenda and trying to persuade or motivate is not inherently evil or good, it just is-what-it-is. Humans are driven by all sorts of intrinsic motivations that go well beyond Maslow’s baseline on his hierarchy of needs. In my view, Maslow was stating a pyramid of needs that was far too happy-assed and missed many human motivators like a hunger for celebrity, power or control by an individual or organization, the continual nation-based struggle for resources, or a need to be dominant.

Think about all of this the next time you read something (especially a blog post or tweet), listen to a political speech, are asked to do something by your boss, or watch a TV show or movie about a big topic. What are the writer/tweeter/producers motivations? Who is funding it and/or what is their agenda? What are the creators of it trying to get you to do, to think and what action do they want you to take?

Apparently this Digitimes article is all the buzz over on Techmeme supposedly saying the rumored Apple tablet is delayed.

Posted via email from SteveNet

Posted via email from SteveNet

From the Economist:

A Developing Thirst

GLOBAL demand for oil is set to rise from 84.7m barrels per day (bpd) in 2008 to 105m bpd in 2030, says the International Energy Agency in its latest annual energy report. Transport will account for 97% of this increase as rising numbers of cars hit the roads of the developing world. Demand from these countries will overtake that of the industrialised OECD nations by 2030. By then, America, Japan and Europe will be using less oil than in 1980. But the thirst for oil will balloon in Asia—and in India and China in particular—where demand is predicted to rise by as much as 400% compared with 2008.

Posted via email from SteveNet

Posted via email from SteveNet

Posted via email from SteveNet

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