This morning, on the way to the coffee shop where I write, I passed a young lady with headphones in her ears. A normal enough occurrence for a rainy Friday morning, but the feeling that something was terribly out of place plagued me until we finally passed at the walk light, when I saw that her headphones were attached to… a CD player. Also normal enough, right? Right? On paper, I think I could have taken that in without too much mental distress; why, then, should my brain subconsciously register a product (that still occupies a very valid amount of Target shelf space) as alien, or at the very least, unusual?
The success of the iPod is something we are all well aware of. However, how a product actually revolutionizes its category (or creates a completely new one), is something slightly less comprehensible. In today’s icky world of convergence vs. divergence, we are daily bombarded with poorly-contrived, “breakthrough” products that serve to complicate, not simplify, our lives. The ones that lose send us running back to our old standbys; the ones that win force us to move along.
Aside from the iPod, I can think of few products (in my lifetime, anyway) that have truly made their predecessors irrelevant. Excess is theme in the U.S. — no shock there — but what keeps the ball rolling is our pursuit of the next big thing. So, for today’s TSF, we’d like to know: is there any product at all, either currently in production or still undeveloped, that you see as potentially/realistically life-changing? Are you aching for a fridge/laptop combo? Hands-free Vespa? Are you sick of this crap?
Okay, let’s just put it out there; we could talk about the iPhone today, again. Over and over and over. Everyone else is doing it, and hundreds (or thousands, perhaps?) of people are hanging outside of Apple stores in all kinds of weather and in varying states of sanity just dying to get their twitchity little fingers on that scrumptious touchscreen. But, as it turns out, ABC, NBC, and every other media outlet in the world is already talking about the iPhone “phenomenon,” and we’re sort of…over it. A lot, actually. Besides, in the middle of a rather intense brainstorming session that took place after our obvious option for today’s TSF was viciously chucked out the window, Heather wisely said something along the lines of, “Well, I’m not waiting on line today. I’m picking the lint out of my bellybutton and de-worming [her new kitten] Ollie.” And that got us thinking, because if Heather’s managed to find such an interesting use of her time amidst her strenuous editorial and drinking obligations, Lord knows the rest of you have as well. So, dear readers, in an admittedly rebellious TSF, we just want to know what you’re up to today. Especially if it’s really, really unexciting. Of course, if you’re making out with Hillary Duff I guess we’d like to hear about it — but as far as we’re concerned, if 1,000 journalists are writing about waiting in line, pretty much anything you have to say will win our attention. Well, my attention, anyway; Heather’s seemingly occupied elsewhere.
Last night, a friend of mine excitedly passed me a business card. “Its for my new company,” he says (I lean in; start-ups, I love them, this could be good), “We make t-shirts!” (Oh no, oh no, oh no!) I say, “Oh great! I’ll check out the site, blah blah,” but what I’m really thinking is– oh, kill me now– because it seems like everywhere I turn there’s a new twenty-something with a new t-shirt company (see: two mediocre designs and an emo-sounding web address) and they all somehow all think that they’re a) SO FRESH and b) totally going to make it. I can’t take anymore. I love t-shirts, I write about how much I love them all the time, but I’ve just about had it with t-shirt craze and I think these “entrepreneurs” should seriously consider a change of focus. And yes, I realize this is a stupid thing to get all angsty about, but, hey, sometimes you’ve just got to bitch.
