It’s been over three years since Mikes article was written. Apparently the laptop manufacturers have not taken this blog seriously. I would hope that they have seen it, but maybe they haven’t. So, if anyone knows the best addresses for them (either email or regular mail) please post. I for one will do my part.

You don’t bring a salesman into the game until you have a scalable business where you can put in one dollar of marketing and get a positive ROI on your ad spend.

A good marketer can make something valuable out of thin air just like a great developer creates value out of lines of code. The marketer and the developer are climbing up opposite sides of the same mountain. A good marketer can reposition an entire industry. A good marketer can make an entirely new economic ecosystem. Marketing is the engine that drives commerce. Just like there are hundreds of different coding languages there are hundreds of subsets of marketing disciplines. Marketing strategies like SEO, PCC, SEM, copy and direct sales etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep. At some point you have to stop reading all of the books and blogs on 10 ways to do X and actually make something happen in the world.

Mike you have some really great insight and experience and I appreciate your openness and honesty. The openness from those with experience is what makes the startup community online so awesome.

Will, above is the URL. All of our podcast transcripts are located on the main podcast website. Just find the episode and then click on “Read More”. We dont offer them in anything other than HTML from. The site, but you could copy/paste it into a document if you wanted.

Kind regards, Will Rayer

Then along came consumerism and the age-old numbers game and sound-bites to woo a technically-inept public. Processors had to be faster, despite everything else on their systems being slow and imbalanced, so gamers could preen their feathers based on how many big numbers they could quote. Along comes a new processor and you have to buy one to maintain respect amongst your peers. Same thing with hard-drive capacity, irrespective of speed, cache, or seek times for given applications, and so on.

Now we have the “Widescreen” must-haves, marketed to Joe Public sold on being able to watch widescreen movies on his/her PC – irrespective of the fact he could watch them anyway. But it does reduce real-estate for the manufacturers and therefore reduces cost, EVEN THOUGH the old 4:3 aspect ratio was originally chosen as the optimal format for motion viewing! But heh, ” I can watch wide-screen films just like the cinema, on my PC” (LOL).

This kind of marketing crap to the ignorants is going on everywhere now, to the point that suppliers and service providers can easily dictate terms, for their own advantage, to the overwhelmingly Ignorant, dumbed-down masses. It’s not about what WE really want any more, it’s whether it can maximise profit and sales by differentiation and sound-bites.

This would be a prime opportunity for a small manufacturer to start building them again. Wouldn’t have to have many options, but they could charge a premium. The issue I think is that the LCD manufacturers simply don’t make them anymore.