The hunt for the perfect office chair

So as I begin to write this, I lean back in my Ikea office chair, and nearly fall flat on my back. This has been the case for months now. So, why haven't I already remedied the problem? The short answer:

Grad school.

The life of the student is rich, but the wallet of the student is slim. But, as has happened every year so far (though past performance is no guarantee of future success, or something like that), my birthday has come around giving me an excuse to splurge on a chair that doesn't consistently hurt my ass if I sit in it for more than ten minutes, and that doesn't attempt to dump me on the floor if I swivel too quickly or, God forbid, lean back (lean back.. yeah lean back...).

Which brings me, finally, to the real point here: the interweb is cool.

Now, you might ask, how exactly was I brought to this point? Well, before I go out to the local big box office retailer to blindly drop my birthday money on some crappy chair that will fall apart almost as quickly as my valiant though poorly constructed Swedish-made torture device, I navigated the aformentioned interweb to this wonderful search engine, Google. From there I branched off to several office chair buyer's guides and some reviews (though surprisingly few for office chairs) on epinions. My searches revealed several absolutely glowing reviews for the Herman Miller Aero chair. Unfortunately, it's like $600 bucks: too dear even on my birthday I'm afraid. But apparently you can adjust this thing to the point where it actually grasps your butt in a firm yet supple embrace every time you sit down.

So here's the thing: the internet makes me a better consumer. I now can walk into the big box office retailer (who I hear through the grapevine is currently having a big office furniture sale... Yes!!) having some idea what to look for. I want a chair that meets or exceeds ANSI/BIFMA standards; that has forward seat tilt, that has a cushion made of memory foam; and so on.

Aside: who the hell thinks of a name that gets you the acronym "BIFMA"? Sounds like the punchline to a bad joke.

I culled this information in the space of a bout half an hour, the results of hundreds or thousands of people's opinions and experiences. While any single piece of information may be misleading (there are some baaaad people out there), the ability to crosscheck across multiple sites leaves me with a good idea of which chairs are good and what to look for. I really never make a major purchase anymore without first having done some lookin' on the old interweb first.

And you know what?

I am rarely disappointed anymore with the things that I buy.

Branding (not cows, but products)

Wired Article about Branding
Comment by Trademarks and Technology Blog

One of my favorite topics. So, sorry if this drags out. There are two basic points I want to make about these two articles and here are the quotes that I wish to discuss: "Americans have become less loyal" (from wired) and "If consumers don't actually have 'goodwill' towards a brand, in the sense of driving consumer behavior towards brands, then perhaps we run the risk of overweighting goodwill in our legal analysis" from Mr. Goldman's blog.

I think it is generally true that Americans have become less loyal. I think that is a good thing. No longer are Americans wow-ed by a manufacturer's primateur. They demand the product sell itself rather than rely on the manufacturer's name alone in making a purchasing decision. As both articles point out, this is made possible by the plethora (cornucopia, if you will) of information about products on the web. The most well known, of course, being epinions.com but almost every retail site has consumer reviews of products in some form or another (see amazon.com, buy.com, mysimon.com, fatwallet.com, etc.) Mr. Goldman seems to think there is too much information available. In the land of retail consumerism I fail to see how this is possible. If you know what product you want it's pretty easy to go to Google or Amazon's A9 site and instantly retrieve information about any product you can dream of. This is not a bad thing. In the past consumers were afraid of new products because they were unknown quantities, if your friends/family had never heard of it, it was hard to compare against products that nobody had any complaints about. For this reason, it was difficult to break into oligopolistic markets; particular ones where the big names had been around for a long time and advertised heavily. This was true even if the product was superior - history is rife with superior products squeezed out of a market by bigger names with bigger ad budgets. A few factors have contributed to the general reversal of this problem: more cable channels (to sub-divide interests and provide more advertising time at a lower relative cost); the internet (low-cost advertising, low-cost customer service mechanisms, product reviews and ratings); increased competition in the delivery channels (there are more package carriers now, rates are lower, and it is generally easier to get product from point A to point B) These three factors alone have contributed to the large influx of individual producers who can distribute from their garage rather than try to get into a big-box retailer; in fact the individuals can be sold in the same channels (amazon.com, ebay, etc.) as the big-box retailers. All of these together have eroded the need by consumers to rely on brands as an indicator of quality.

That is not to say that branding no longer serves a purpose as the Wired article suggests. Mr. Goldman is correct that branding provides an important product-distinction fuction - it is still necessary to brand so that consumers can differentiate product A from product B consistently. Moreover, Mr. Goldman suggests that "goodwill" may be out the door if consumers are willing to jump from product to product. He views "goodwill" as "brand loyalty" and I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I believe it's not entirely accurate because I disagree with the Mr. Goldman's assessment of the primary function of brands and trademarks. No doubt branding is changing, and companies are moving from a paradigm of product-quality to a paradigm of lifestyle-association. Now, instead of spreading one brand across multiple demographics we are starting to see the same (or very similar) products, with multiple brands (and perhaps with tweaked options) depending the targeted demographic. In trademark-law terms, I think it will begin to manifest itself in tradedress terms rather than strictly trademark terms. Niche marketing is beginning to take hold and I think we'll see more of it before we start to see less of it. To this end the brand becomes part of the product itself rather than a designation of the product. Consumers begin to see the product (which is virtually identical to competing products) differentiation as the brand and accept that across the product category quality will be approximately equal. In this way, the brands that pay more to advertise will be able to continue to charge a premium on the brand because there is a certain "cool" factor attached, rather than any assumption of quality. People are seeing off-brands not as of "inferior quality" but rather as "not as cool" and that is an important distinction because it allows competitors into the market if they brand themselves as a "stripped down" version of the product or if they market themselves as "uber-chic." So, producers are playing not with our perceptions of quality but rather our perceptions of ourselves and Americans' desires to differentiate themselves. So, people are no longer "Sony" people because they believe Sony has superior products, but rather because they like the consistent styling that Sony uses on their products and want to project that style to others. In this way, the brand now encompasses much more than the name "Sony" but it also encompasses the "brushed steel" look and the "steel and white" coloring. Look at Apple, they've virtually hypnotized an entire nation with the color white. So, while the brand as an indicator of quality is rapidly disappearing, it is being replaced by brand as an indicator of self; and this designation one could argue would engender even greater "goodwill" because people are more loyal to themselves than they have ever been to quality.

GTA: San-Andreas

The hub-hub seems to be about over. The basic problem is this: the makers of GTA had created a "sexually explicit" version of the game, but changed it to get from an "adult" rating to a "mature" rating by ESRB. However, instead of removing the content, they had merely "disabled" it. Some enterprising young fellows "enabled" it. Hilarity ensues as the ESRB revokes the "mature" rating. Anyway. Thought you might be interested what is so "sexually explicit" about this game.

A Few of My Favorite Things

I wanted to try to get back into this, but I don't really have the time today. So, to get things started, here are a few of my (currently) favorite things: (note this not an "all-time" list, just a list of stuff I'm currently digging)

Web-Comics:
http://www.boasas.com/
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/
http://www.indietits.com/
http://www.little-gamers.com/
http://www.wigu.com/overcompensating/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/
http://www.questionablecontent.net/
http://www.reallifecomics.com/
http://www.scarygoround.com/
http://www.whiteninjacomics.com/comics.shtml
http://www.wigu.com/
http://www.alpha-shade.com/www/pages/pages.htm

Books (by Title):
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Haddon, Mark
Rabbit is Rich; Updike, John
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; Chabon, Michael
Crime and Punishment; Doestoyevsky, Fyodor
Pale Fire; Nabakov, Vladimir
Darkness at Noon; Koestler, Arthur
Jitterbug Perfume; Robbins, Tom

Music:
Old 97's - Drag It Up;
Scott Biram - Dirty Ole One Man Band;
Th' Legendary Shack Shakers - Cockadoodledon't;
Nine Inch Nails - With Teeth;
The Kinks - Village Green Preservation Society;
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak;
The Arcade Fire - Funeral;
Wilco - A Ghost is Born;
Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks;
Talking Heads - 77