Today has been a slow day, and I have been haunted by this idea: Some 20 years ago, the _Revenge_of_the_Nerds_ movies portrayed their nerdy characters as a group of young techies who used computers to do things like send messages, book hotel reservations, etc. and who played with microwave data links and other computer-related gadgets. The movies lampooned these activities and equipment as things that normal people don't do and wouldn't use.

Today, the Apple iPhone and Blackberry devices are considered by many to be very stylish; these products are even considered status symbols to some extent. Interestingly, these devices connect the Internet through microwave data links, and they are used to perform many of the same tasks that the _Revenge_of_the_Nerds_ nerds did on their computers and gadgets. I am amazed how public attitudes can take a 180 like that in a relatively short amount of time, and I would imagine that Apple's marketing has played a part in this. Of course, there could be other factors.

I like your posts on marketing. It's an interesting subject.

In this case, I believe the other primary factor is that WE grew up. Gen X 'ers and Gen Y 'ers are now in their 40's and 30's.

A significant percentage of us knew the personal computer when it was personal. 8 bit maybe 16 bit, Amiga, Atari, C64, APPLE ][. We read sci-fi books that told stories about personal communicators, knew people who hacked on the phone system, built electronic kits, played video games, and such.

We got to jump on the net before it was big, saw the first Sat TV, were there at the dawn of MTV, watched it die, could record VIDEO, saw the CD, heard radio at it's peak.

Heinlein wrote 'grok' and was ahead of his time. We say 'blog' today and are right in time.

Those people in the marketing departments were there, had waver friends, and are now expressing that. Engineers watched Star Trek, were moved by scotty, played with their kits and computers and built stuff when it was simple.

Today they use advanced materials and it's not so simple to build, but it's simple to use!

IMHO, a very interesting time to grow up. It's really similar to the boomers and maybe just before where they saw TV, Radio, and many core elements of modern life, just as we did.

In the end, I don't know if marketing is driving it so much as it is just selling it hard because it's a worthy jump in overall life.

Right now, it's kind of stale. But I get the sense another generation or two is about to do it's thing.

Biotech, holistic living, and design are on the rise. There is a move back toward elegant and simple and practical. It's slow, but I think it will happen, forcing the innovation elsewhere, just as the tech did for us back then.

Retro seems to be something that's poking it's head out too. Perhaps that's just an artifact of it being kind of a dry time where seriously new trends are concerned.

Just as we took many core things for granted and played with the new things, these generations coming up now take the cell, TV, microwave, DVD, computer, Internet for granted. They use them as we did the phone and the VCR.

They are connected every minute, while we were facinated with the idea of being connected every minute! That's gonna make for a profound change in 10 - 15 years.

We think things like twitter, instant or text messaging is a fun novelty. They take it for granted.

Not sure what the next jump is gonna be, but there is gonna be one, and it will be interesting to watch, and the marketing will be there to sell it to us!

Just hope I'm not too old then. I want to grok it, play with it, share it and benefit from it, just as I have the last one!

Thanks for the compliments. I think that I should have titled this thread, "How Did the Internet and Computers Become Cool?" I missed a very large factor in the mass social acceptance of computers and the Internet, which was not related directly to any company's marketing campaign: that factor was the almost universal adoption of computers with Internet access in white collar workplaces. During the 1990s, some basic level of computer literacy became a required skill for virtually all types of office work. Millions of people became exposed to the Internet at the office.

Nonetheless, Apple's recent marketing campaigns are very interesting. They go out of their way to make the statement that Apple makes state-of-the-art products that are not geeky. Their Macintosh ads stress that this is a computer made for non-technical users and that was intended to be used in the home to store music and photos. The iPhone commercials have an "acoustic-sounding" jingle that seems to lend itself very well to the message of the commercial that this was a device that was made to be easy to use.

My relationship with marketing is complicated and tortured. I am keenly aware that if it were not for marketing, I probably would not have a job as an engineer. My frustrations with marketing came out of my previous job in semiconductor applications engineering. Marketing in our department consisted of one marketing manager. He controlled what went on product datasheets and application notes as well as how the GUI for the programming software used with our ICs represented the internal workings of the device to the user. Although he had training as an engineer, his professional demeanor was that of a marketer. Thus, he tended to be fickle, with the concerns of recently-visited customers heavily determining what he wanted. Sometimes, he would ask for one thing and when that was delivered for him, he would say that was wrong because something different was needed. He would come up with ideas for supposedly clever applications circuits that looked cool in PowerPoint slides, but getting them to work as intended often required many more components. Often, it seemed like he was just coming from a different place in how he interpreted the innuendo behind design decisions in evaluation boards and in the writing of documents. For example, the other applications engineer once designed an evaluation board for an IC that had a low-power "standby" mode. To demonstrate this feature, he designed the board to be powered by a big lithium coin cell. The intended message was that the IC consumes so little current in the standby mode that the battery isn't drained. The marketing manager flipped out when he saw this, and he got into a big argument with my manager. He said that we couldn't use this design because it would send out the message that the IC was made for coin-cell powered applications.

My brother has a Bachelor's degree in sales and marketing. He has never worked in a marketing job, although his training came in handy when he opened up an online auto parts and accessories store. I once described the friction between engineering and marketing at my previous job, and he laughed. He then said, that this fits perfectly because marketing people are taught to "feel out" the desires and fears of the customers. This "touchy-feely" attitude pisses off engineers because we see it as being asked to hit a moving target, and if the requirements are not well-defined, we get beaten up for "not getting it right."

Yeah, interesting comments on Apple.

They DO make geeky products. They just also incorporate really great industrial design, and the other part of their secret sauce is they design as holistically as they can.

The iPhone without iTunes wouldn't be quite the splash it currently is, for example. On OS X, they built their stuff off of BSD, thus having control there too. No clones means they can factor in all the hardware cases, giving serious support to, "it just works!". IMHO, nicely done and often worth the money.

(if you burden your own time at, say $50, the price difference between an Apple computer and a PC evaporates over just the first coupla months!)


I've had trouble with marketing too. My favorite is it being on the power point, but not technically in the final product I end up delivering. It's in the next point release and those bastards will just put next version in their presentation, ignoring the word "minor" as being just that!

Schlubs

So, we have to either gamble or freaking run test cases on fairly complex stuff. Both expensive, it being just a matter of what kind of expensive.

Ugh...

Your frustrations are very similar to those I know in development! I'm somewhat in a difficult spot as we are a partner firm, not always privy to the internal discussions.

(gotta buy lunch and beer for those, and I often do!)

Love your demo comments too! All true. That's one thing I get to seriously bend the rules on. As a partner, we don't have marketing controlling how we show and tell stuff!

There was a moment in the mid-90s when I realized, after years of thinking I was "weird" for using email and spending so much time on the internet, that those had become mainstream activities. I started hearing people casually mention email in public. At some point the internet hit a tipping point and all those things became mainstream, just like when cars were invented, it seemed odd at first to drive this mechanical contraption around instead of taking a horse-buggy or a streetcar. And then soon enough, everyone had cars.

I remember another funny movie tech moment, from a favorite movie of mine, Woody Allen's "Take the Money and Run," a mock documentary about a bumbling bank robber and con man. At one point, Woody's character is interviewing for an office job, trying to fake his way through, and the interviewer asks him, "Have you ever used a high speed digital computer?" And Woody casually answers, "Yes, I have...My aunt has one." In the late 1960s, that was funny, because computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and your aunt wouldn't know how to use one, because they were programmed in Fortran via stacks of punched cards...

Andrew

I think computers became cool when the 486 machine surfaced. For the first time one didn't have to wait so much to get stuff you HAD to do to get done, so one found extra time to do "other things" with it (like play Sim City and write viruses).

Pffft!

They died for me about that time. I could see where things were going to go, and that vision sucked.

We had a bunch of very differentiated and capable computers in the market before that time. Some personal Amiga type ones, and great UNIX ones.

SGI, at that time, made the 486 look like a trainer by comparison.

Really, we lost a lot of ground during that time, much of which we have yet to recover from.

Finally let go of the SGI machines. Major bummer, but I had my run and they were great.

Now, it's Linux, or OS X (which has some serious potential, if you like watching where computing could go), and Vista / XP.

These days it's no where near as fun. On the good boxes, and that does not include an x86 variant, nobody really waited all that long to do stuff, and many of us were gladly doing lots of things at a time on boxes all over the world, if we wanted to. And we did it with few worries too.

> In the late 1960s, that was funny, because computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and
> your aunt wouldn't know how to use one, because they were programmed in Fortran via stacks of
> punched cards...

Interestingly, in 1969, Honeywell attempted to build the first home computer. This was a Honeywell 316 built into a pedestal housing that looked like a table with a cutting board on one side. The computer cost slightly over $10,000, which at that time was about four times the cost of a new car. I have never seen any reference stating that even a single Kitchen Computer was sold.