Leaving Las Vegas... or at least leaving Belgium for a couple of months to work in the US. Thank god for wireless, allowing blogging at the Brussels Airport. :-)
Off now to check in . Follow the progress here or on my PhotoBlog.

Conference call fun! Have you ever been in a conference call, and doing all sorts of things except paying attention? Well, good news: you're not alone.

Some company (RoperASW/Tandberg) has actally done a survey about when people do durig conference calls... well, there's one thing half of them are NOT doing: paying attention. What they are doing varies from doodling over surfing to ... putting on make-up. Time for videoconferencing. ;-)

They surveyed people the US of A, the UK, Germany, Norway and Hong Kong. Good thing they didn’t survey Belgians. More results can be found here.

Check out this article from the Photo Marketing: November 2003 issue. So some people have read "The Innovator's Dilemma".. but does that entitle them to call the cameraphone a disruptive technology? I don't think so. Quoting from what a DT (Disruptive Technology) is: "This is a technology that changes the industry in such a way that previous competitive and business rules do not apply." I don't think this is the case (yet). Cameraphones and MMS for that matter are things which are being pushed a lot by the traditional GSM operators to get their money back out of their investments in GPRS and 3G networks. As such, cameraphones are not that disruptive; I'm siding with Gamez here. The thing worth noting is that some of us here do believe some of the powers in the market are shifting towards the Asian providers of handsets, but that's market dynamics. So, digital cameras: disruptive for sure. Cameraphones: sustaining technology, building on two "older" disruptive ones like the digital camera and to a lesser extend the mobile phone. (and for those who disagree: re-read "The Innovator's Dilemma".

There is one other thing I'd like to add. When seeing this article about disruptive technologies, I had to think of another book by Andy Grove: Only the paranoid Survive ... It was a book on how to exploit the crisis points that challenge every company. In the book he talks about 10X changes, and strategic inflection points. To me, disruptive technologies are just another fancy name for strategic inflection points, or a symptom of them.

"An inflection point occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new, allowing the business to ascend to new heights. However, if you don't navigate your way through an inflection point, you go through a peak and after the peak the business declines." ... Often, these points are hard to miss, but once they're passed, we get into what Grove calls the "10X" Force, which is "When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off. There's wind and then there's a typhoon, there are waves and then there's a tsunami. There are competitive forces and then there are supercompetitive forces." These are often dramatic and enormous changes businesses are going through, and once it's all over and the dust settles, there's a whole new landscape... some will be stronger, others will have lost control and are sliding into oblivion... again, some of us think this what happening now to the mobile phone industry. I certainly do think there's some big 10X tsunima going on.

Today, I am unhappy with the record companies. More specific, I am very unhappy with EMI and Virgin. And here is why: they effectively rendered my CDs nearly useless for me personally.

Here is the story: I got some nice CDs from Belgian artists.Yes, I'm one of those people that still buy CDs from time to time. I like to listen to those CDs too, and the time I can listen to them most is when I'm driving in my car. Now I have had to buy a new car, and those of you that know about the copy control protection on some CDs will already know where this one is heading. My brand new spiffy car CD player cannot play those CDs. It tries to, makes some weird noises and spits them out again. So I am in effect stuck with a couple of useless CDs now (I rarely get the occasion to listen them anywhere else but the car). I can't be the only one who's got a problem with that. So who is responisble for this customer being unhappy? I don't think it is my car manufacturer, because I can play all my other CDs fine, so according to me it's not their fault.

So I blame the record company, and the resellers that sold it to me. After all, it clearly says on the CD: "this disk incorporates copy control technology" ... it doesn't say "this CD will not work in your nice new car CD player" (oh, for those who are interested, it does state that the Copy Control logo is a trademark of IFPI).

I tried contacting the record companies over the Internet: EMI/Virgin Belgium (seems to be the same company now?) ... I could only subscribe to their newsletter and leave a comment there. Good job guys ... They probably got so many complaints already about this and other issues that they removed all ways to get their e-mail address. So I tried the vendors... after all, they sold me those CDs, without telling me I could run into problems. Free Record shop at least can be contacted ... they promised me a reply in three days max. On the subject of Media Markt... well, that's another story. I cannot find any contact on their site, so no good job there! I wonder when some companies are actually going to start listening to their customers, and giving those customers the chance to actually get in contact with them.

I'm not going to give my opinion on whether it is good that they want to protect their artists from having their CDs ripped onto MP3s and shared over the Internet. That's a discussion/battle I don't want to get involved in for the purpose of this post. What I do have a huge problem with is the impact this has on their brand and their customer satisfaction ratings. I am wondering if they are so short-sighted that they rather have unhappy customers unable to play the CDs of artists that they bought, instead of looking into a solution that just plain works. I now have some money that I threw away at them because they did not do their jobs properly in my opinion. And I am not alone, judging from this article:
"What we've seen so far is troublesome and cumbersome," said Gerry Wirtz, general manager of the Philips copyright office that governs the CD trademark. "We worry (the labels) don't know what they're doing."
And another, even more worrying quote: "Even when the protection technology works as intended, Wirtz said that normal wear and tear could eventually overwhelm the error correction for the altered discs, causing them to become unreadable within a few years."

To find out more about copy control, go to the "Campaign for Digital Rights" site. All in all, this is a worrying evolution. To what extent can a company alienate its customers to protect its assets? And what will be the backlash?

We're having an interesting discussion about the future of Nokia on Toink. Feel free to join in and share your views! Is Nokia dying, being overrun by the Asians, or will it rise from its ashes?