Results tagged “sony”

Early in my efforts to document the creative environment where great technology projects happen, I reached out to Ray Ozzie. Ray is of course a software industry legend, today the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, in addition to having been the father of Lotus Notes.

Ray very graciously answered some questions about both the physical space and (most important, to me), the soundtrack of a roomful of hackers in 1985:

We went to a used furniture store and bought the CHEAPEST crappiest (but strong) fold-out tables, with strong/comfortable chairs.

We spared no expense on massive whiteboards that covered the walls.

Tim [Halvorsen] & I are messy-desk people - listings and scrawlings everywhere.  Len [Kawell] if I remember was an organized-desk person.

If I remember correctly, soon after we opened the office Sony came out with this amazing new thing called the "CD Player" - the Sony D5.  We bought one, with some awesome speakers.

We bought everything that came out in those early CD days; Dire Straights was big.  Since we all knew each other from college, lots of our college favorites.

But if there were ANY "theme music" for me, it would have been Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Texas Flood, Couldn't Stand the Weather, Soul to Soul, all big big big.  Played over, and over, and over.  Blasting.

It's a terrific, evocative image of a bunch of creators doing what they love in a place that feels comfortable. Some links for background:

• A fond reminiscence of early Sony CD players, including the D5.
• A somewhat-sanitized official history of Lotus Notes from IBM.
• Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits signature album and one of the most popular albums of 1985.
• Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood, Couldn't Stand the Weather and Soul to Soul, the blues guitarist's career-defining releases from 1983, 1984 and 1985.

Put these in your browser, and shake well.

• Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook's platform, will there ever be another popular new application on Facebook again. Or is the era of hit F8 apps over already?
• Prince is Rolling Stone's most underrated guitarist. The article's got a great shot of Prince's most ridiculously entertaining affectation of recent years: His habit of throwing his guitar away in faux-disgust at the end of his solos. His poor guitar tech Takumi is gonna take one of these spiky symbol-shaped guitars to the head one of these days while trying to make the catch.
• I loved Ian Rogers' post about digital music, "Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses". Choice quote: "Back in 1999 ... We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, 'What’s MP3?' or 'Um, no.' Instead they commenced suing Napster." Working in music promo online back then, I got to see those reactions first hand, and I guess I was equally naive.
• Rafe points to Jeff Atwood's great post about copyright and YouTube. I have the opposite conclusion than these guys: If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people -- they're not carved on stone tablets.
• The PlayStation 3 is a complete failure for casual gaming. That's not news, but it's never been articulated as well. Especially damning is that even the fanboys can only dispute minor facts, not the fundamental conclusion.

Mike at Techdirt (that's the popular tech news blog which actually deserves its popularity) mentions that Sony is now rewriting history, trying to take credit for the success and popularity of the DVD format.

I almost admire the chutzpah -- when people ask what I do for a living, I sometimes say that I look for a parade of bloggers, and then try to get in front of the parade and pretend I was leading it. I keed! I keed!

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky was teliing the truth, too. His point may have been too subtle, buried as it was in plain English at the top of his post:

Mark Cuban doesn’t understand television. He holds a belief, common to connoisseurs the world over, that quality trumps everything else. The current object of his faith in Qualität Über Alles is HDTV.

Hmm, quality (in terms of resolution) isn't always that important. See also "I like the crappy videos" and, somewhat more broadly, Jay's long-running skepticism about freestyling being "superior" to written rhymes.