Prior Art…

 

 source

As Apple revels in its recent victory over Samsung, demanding that a range of Samsung’s “look-like-Apple’s” products be banned from sale in the U.S., let us ponder Apple’s own precedents…  in particular, its debt to the great Dieter Rams and his range of designs for Braun.

 

What’s Past is Prologue: The Future of the Book…

“Special Glasses for Reading in Bed” source: Nationaal Archief

Much breath is being spent by the Chattering Classes predicting, debating, and otherwise worrying over the fates of the book, journalism, and publishing at large– broadly speaking: the creation, dissemination, storage, and use of knowledge itself.  Lots of jargon, a wealth of acronyms, and liberal use of facile analogies and constructs– it’s all a little dizzying.

Happily, Tim Carmody has ridden to the rescue. While he has mooted his own manifesto for the future of the book (eminently worth a read), his most recent contribution to the Science and Technology section of The Atlantic blog, is just what one needs in a Babel-like time such as this– some context.  In “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” that’s precisely what he provides as he recounts, for example, the move from rolled scroll to folded codex, the replacement of papyrus by parchment (and then paper), the shift from vertical to horizontal writing/reading, back to vertical…

It’s fascinating; it’s illuminating… and it’s a terrifically useful reminder that writing, reading– communicating– and the forms in which they’re done have always been in flux: “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books.”



Some things change; some things stay the same…

A guest post from (Roughly) Daily…

xkcd

Today’s street prices on TI Graphing Calculators: $100-220.  One notes the irony that TI is widely credited with having pioneered the strategy of pricing to the learning curve.

As we lament the captive market created by the prevalence of the SAT and AP exams, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Nescafé instant coffee was introduced in Switzerland by the Nestlé company (inpart, motivated by the need to help the Brazilian government solve its coffee surplus problem.

Instant coffee was invented in 1901 by Satori Kato, a Japanese scientist working in Chicago. Kato introduced the powdered potion in Buffalo, New York, at the Pan-American Exposition. George Constant Louis Washington developed his own instant coffee process shortly thereafter, and first marketed it commercially (~1910).

But Nestlé improved the production process: they created their Instant coffee with a blend of beans, mixed in a drum, roasted and ground, then brewed in huge percolators, sprayed into a heated stainless steel dryer to remove all water, and finally packed as the small, dry granules now so well known.

Spray-Process Instant Coffee

The Devil You Know…

Felix Salmon shares a BrandIndex report on the relative reputations of three beleaguered brands:

The graph above charts responses to the question “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?”.

To get a score of -40, the level to which Goldman Sachs has fallen, you’d need 70 people saying they were hearing negative things about the bank for every 30 saying they’d heard something positive… which, given the success-to-date of Goldman and the rest of Big Finance in squelching meaningful financial services regulatory reform, leads one to marvel at the the obvious power of money over public opinion.

Notable too that BP’s not (yet anyway) sunk that low… leading one to wonder who’s hearing positive things about them.

I had this vision of the future…

It’s not this blog’s practice simply to reproduce other bloggers’ pieces; but a deserved exception is hereby made for this exceptional post from Fake Steve Jobs, on the subject of ATT’s recent lament that iPhone users are using their phones too much.

As FSJ observes, the issue is aggravating enough in its particulars; but its implications– the trends and tendencies it represents in the culture of America business today– are truly dispiriting…

A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T

So we set up a call with Randall this morning to discuss some of the profoundly stupid things his guy Ralph de la Vega said recently about creating incentives that would encourage people to stop using AT&T’s data network so much. Point of the talk was, when you’re lucky enough to create a smash hit product — when the stars align, and the hardware is great and the ecosystem is great and the apps are great and the whole experience is great, and everything you do just makes everything else better, and you’re totally on a roll and can do no wrong — when that happens, you do not go out and try to fuck it all up by discouraging people who love your product. What you do, instead, is you fix your fucking shitty ass network you fucking shit-eating-grin-wearing hillbilly ass clown!

First off, before we even start the call, we’ve got problems, because shithead won’t get on the phone unless I’m on the line first. Like, Ja’Red comes in and says we’re ready to go, and I go, You mean Randall is on the line, and Ja’Red says, No, his assistant is on the line and once you get on then they’re going to get Randall — so I reach down, hit the button then hit it again so the call gets terminated. I tell Ja’Red to explain to these motherfuckers that Steve Jobs does not get on the line first, ever. Ja’Red does this, but Randall’s assistant insists Randall always gets on last, and especially so in this case since AT&T is about three times the size of Apple, so this time I pick up the phone and tell the assistant that he should inform Randall that when he’s ready to get his pointy head out of his ass and call me, I’ll be here waiting for his call.

So fine. We wait a bit, and he calls. He doesn’t say anything about the standoff, but I can tell he’s pissed, which is fine by me. He launches into a mumbling spiel about how Ralph de la Vega didn’t really say what all the papers are saying he said, and he was misquoted, and it was taken out of context, but I’m like, Bitch, please, guys at our level don’t get taken out of context, we write the shit out in advance and we know exactly what we’re saying when we say it and every goddamn word has been vetted and gone over by a team of flacks. So please don’t sit there like a zoo monkey throwing your own feces at me through the bars of your cage, bokay?

Then I go, Look, Randall, you’re how old — about 50? He says he’s 49. I go, Okay, so you were born in 1960, so maybe you don’t remember Meet the Beatles. Or do you? Do you remember that album? Did they have record players out there in Arkansas?

He goes, I’m from Oklahoma, and I’m like, Yeah, same thing, so anyway did you know that album? Were you aware of it? Came out in the beginning of 1964. The one with the four guys in black and white, half their faces white, half in shadow? Just four faces against a black backdrop? He says he’s familiar with the album but he thought we were getting on the phone to talk about incentivizing heavy users in order to optimize the network resources blah blah and I’m like, Dude, if you ever use the word incentivize around me again I swear I will get in my Gulfstream and fly to wherever you are and I will smash you in the face with a rock.

He sighs and says, Okay. I’m like, I’m sorry, what did you say? He says, Okay. I go, I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you. What did you say? He goes, YES! and I go, That’s better. But back to the Beatles. Now, the thing about that album was, on the day it hit the U.S. the whole world changed. Like, before that day, the world was one way, music was one way, culture was one way — and then after that day the world was never the same ever again, and as soon as you heard that album you knew that, and even if you were only nine years old, which I was, you just knew. You knew. Sales were crazy. I mean nuts. The thing was a huge smash hit. By April, twelve weeks after that album came out, the Beatles had the top five spots on the Billboard chart.

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted.

Randall is like, Okay, I get your point. I’m like, You know what, I don’t think you do, because if you did, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation, would we? I mean if you did understand how to do things, your guys wouldn’t be standing up at Wall Street conferences and complaining about how much traffic you’re getting. Instead, you would be running around like a fucking maniac trying to build out your fucking network and make it the best network in the world — and the only reason you would ever need to talk to me would be to thank me for creating a phone that’s so amazing that it draws people to your shit network in the first place.

Randall, baby. we’ve got a hit on our hands. We’ve got the smartphone equivalent of Meet the Beatles. It’s not like that album was the first rock album ever. It’s not like nobody ever made a band with some guitars and drums before. But it was radical. It was new. They took old forms and made them new. Same with us. We didn’t invent the smartphone or the PDA or the music player or the Web browser. We just made them better. We made them new. We changed the fucking world, Randall.

And when I say that “we” have a hit on our hands, I’m really giving you way too much credit, because let’s be honest, the success of iPhone has nothing to do with you. In fact, iPhone is a smash hit in spite of your network, not because of it. That’s how good we are here at Apple — we’re so good that even you and your team of Bell System frigtards can’t stop us. You know what it’s like being your business partner? It’s like trying to swim the English Channel with a boat anchor tied to my legs. And yes, in case you’re not following me, in that analogy, you, my friend, are the fucking boat anchor.

So let’s talk traffic. We’ve got people who love this goddamn phone so much that they’re living on it. Yes, that’s crushing your network. Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a blessing. It’s an indication that people love what we’re doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you. You’re in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you’re right in the sweet spot.

While I’m ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. — what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would  mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom — everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.

Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

“Okay,” I said. “Nice talking to you.” Then I hung up.

The romance of retailing…

A guest post from (Roughly Daily):

source

But then, Zippy can console himself that, as recent honoree H.L. Mencken observed, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

As we revisit our plans to open that book store, we might recall that this is the anniversary of the premiere (in 1954) of Walt Disney’s first prime-time television program (Disneyland, on ABC; later re-titled The Wonderful World of Disney), the second longest running television franchise in the country (as measured in seasons aired), and arguably the nation’s first major full-length infomercial (…though Bonomo, The Magic Clown, which ran on NBC from 1949 to 1954– and which was essentially an advertisement for Bonomo Turkish Taffy– has a defensible rival claim to that honor).

source

Your correspondent is headed for points antipodal, where, as it happens, the drains do not spiral in a different direction, but where connectivity promises to be uncertain…  consequently, for the next week or so, these missives are likely to be more roughly than daily.

HoHoHo.com…

source: eHow

As Columbus Day heaves onto the horizon, it’s time to steel ourselves for the appearance of Christmas decorations– and displays and promotions– in retail establishments of every stripe.  For each of the last several seasons, the tinsel has come out earlier.  Last year, it was interspersed in some emporia with Halloween frights; this year, we’d best be prepared to see it even earlier…

A Christmas Peril

Even before the Downturn, retailers were working harder and harder to squeeze growth out of the Christmas Season (famously, the period during which many see up to 40% and their sales and as much as 75% of their profits); competition and online-enhanced transparency were taking their tolls.  But with the added pressures of a recession– one in which there’s been a tremendous contraction of the credit that funded both merchants’ stocks and shoppers’ purchases– the game has gotten much tougher still.

Factor in the prospect that the current stock market recovery (and accompanying lift in confidence) is a “suckers’ rally,” and/or that swine flu will take a heavy toll (on the economy, if not lives), and/or that the weather won’t cooperate…  it’s not a pretty picture.  Indeed, Grant Thornton’s Reviving Retail (PDF) report suggests that as many as 10,000 (more) retail stores could close across the U.S. by the end of 2009.

But even assuming that these dangerous dynamics don’t break bad, there’s another challenge to navigate, one that’s already baked into the Christmas Season as a kind of dilemma:

On the one hand… Retailers have, understandably, been reducing their inventory levels.  While there are some signs that confidence may be returning, and thus, that orders may pick up for/in the Dec quarter, the base on which those additions would be made is quite low.  And the conventional wisdom in the investment community (c.f., e.g., here) remains adamant that low inventories are the way to go.

On the other hand… We consumers have been “trained,” over the last 15 years or so, to wait later and later to make our Christmas purchases.  Repeated assurances from retailers that we can “order as late as December 23 for guaranteed Christmas delivery!”, coupled with the sense that, in a growing number of categories, that waiting means lower prices (as retailers begin discounting before Christmas to make their December quarter targets) adds up to an environment in which the cagey shopper waits until the last minute to fill Santa’s sack.

Those cagey shoppers already suffered a fair amount a frantic substitution, as “last minute” meant “out of stock.”  But this year, when it’s likely that there’ll be more shoppers trying to be cagey (or, under financial strain, sacrificing their commitments to frugality only late in the season), that seems likely to be a much bigger issue.

Exactly what all this will mean, of course, remains to be seen; we’ll only know how well inventories match up to demand, and how consumers react to the experience, after the fact…  And that “fact” is likely to emerge very, very late in the season.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come…

But beyond observing that the wise shopper might get his/her purchasing out of the way rather earlier this year , there is perhaps one confident conclusion we can draw:  this should be a good Christmas for online retailing (at least relatively).  Shopping for bargains in an environment of scarcity requires just the sort of ubiquitous access and transparency that on-line provides.

And if either H1N1 or horrible weather do materialize, shoppers are even likelier to retreat to their keyboards.

Which is all just to say that, while e-tailing (and what we might call “web-enabled shopping” from more traditional retailers) was already on the rise, the economic crisis and its manifestation in the retail environment seem likely to accelerate the shift.  I can’t imagine a retail landscape without stores– lots of stores– in my lifetime or in my daughter’s; but it seems sure that the center of gravity in retail will shift to the web (and to what the web becomes)… and, thanks to painful realities of post-Bubble life, that it will shift sooner than later.

The Mattress King is Dead!  Long Live TheMattressKing.com!

It’s a challenging prospect, and, I believe, an exciting one…  if only because (barring too much consolidation in the industry) the same dynamics that are creating the pressure on retail– competition and transparency– are likely to make, ironically, for a return to an important old-fashioned principle.  They promise thoroughly to dilute the effectiveness of the merchandising and advertising that is devoted to selling “differences” that don’t exist…  leaving manufacturers, merchants, and marketers only one viable option, selling real value.

And if so, then, as Tiny Tim proclaimed, “God bless us, every one!”

Textbook stuff, revised edition…

source: Lee LeBlanc

The story recounted in “Textbook stuff…“– “United Breaks Guitars,” now sitting at over 2 million views, up from 250,000 two days ago– continues to unfold.  United has responded, offering belatedly to pay for the damages.  Dave Carroll, leader of Sons of Maxwell and composer of the song, has responded (see it here on Youtube), proposing that, after all this time, United should just give the money to charity.

United has also suggested (for instance, to the Chicago Tribune, in an interview featured in this coverage of the incident) that the carrier could use the video internally to help change its culture– a prospect that Carroll applauds: “It could be used to improve the way passengers are treated around the world.”

But for all the hits on Youtube, has there actually been a meaningful hit to United?

Kevin May, writing at Travolution, suggests not: “…the reality is that the ‘complaint’ has probably done more to boost the profile of Canadian rockers Sons of Maxwell than it has impacted on the ticket sales of United Airlines.”

In the short-run, I suspect that’s right: Carroll and crew have certainly gotten a lift, and United ticket sales are likely holding.  But then, ticket sales these days are largely made via constraints–  corporate travel deals that result in policies restricting employees to a single carrier; dominant/sole carriers offering the only option on many routes, etc.– or as a product of cut-to-the-bone promotional pricing.  And as bad as United’s service is, the universe of choice on most routes in the U.S. offers very few real service alternatives.  I typically fly 100,000-150,000 miles domestically per year and would suggest that, with the exception of a few relatively small carriers like Virgin America, the level of service is pretty uniformly terrible and continuing to deteriorate.  So, United breaks guitars…  but where are you going to go?  (I’ve written before about this “race to the bottom” and why, I believe, it is happening.)

But does this kind of “default impunity” mean that United and the other underdelivering members of their competitive class breeze through episodes like this with no damage at all?  I think not.  There seem to me at least three ways in which being called out in this way will take its toll:

• While much/most of United’s traffic is prescribed, a good bit of it’s most profitable traffic is on more competitive international routes.  “United Breaks Guitars” has suggested to millions that, given the choice, it’s better to fly Virgin or Singapore or BA or Lufthansa…  And when these travelers do take foreign flag carriers (if their experience is anything like mine over the last several years) they will realize that there are airlines with decent service… they’re just not the big U.S. carriers.  And so more and more of these travelers will make their future decisions for travel on those more lucrative routes accordingly.

• It’s no fun working for a company that is the butt of jokes (or worse, as in the case of Northwest in Detroit for example, the target of focused customer hostility).  Employees can feel defeated, can become cynical, or both… and when they do, service tends to deteriorate further.  But more immediately painful to United, it aggravates relations with their employees.  In my experience, United’s line employees are neither stupid nor evil; they are, in their own ways, prisoners of the same broken system that victimizes travelers.  Indeed, increasingly as I travel I’ve seen defensiveness about “the way things are” give way to defeated embarrassment…  and when one’s job is an embarrassment, one tends to take it out on the company.  In the past, that’s taken the form of asking for more money, “battle pay.”  In this economy, it appears to be accruing as a general “uncooperativeness.”  In either case, it severely impacts United’s ability– the ability of any company in this kind of situation– to act effectively.

• In the longer run, United (and all of the hub-and-spokes legacy carriers) are vulnerable to a different approach to delivering air travel (see here and here). That threat will become a reality when both the emergent alternatives and consumer demand for them reach critical mass.  Episodes like “United Breaks Guitars” move consumers toward that critical mass, toward affirmative willingness to make the switch.  (And, as the experience of ATT through “deregulation” and break-up suggests, it also contributes to a political climate in which incumbents are vulnerable…)  When a shift like this happens it can feel surprisingly fast and complete– and thus likely feel to the legacy carriers in the U.S like an implosion. But in fact, it’s been steadily building, via incidents like this.  In the end, it is the festering of disappointed demand, finally enabled by new solutions, that creates “catastrophe” for incumbents like United–c.f., e.g., the “inevitable surpirse” of newspapers in the U.S.

So in the short run, “United Breaks Guitars” may just be another flash across the web, with little or no immediate effect on United’s bottom line.  But more fundamentally it– and the systemic issues the episode illustrates– could prove deadly.

Textbook stuff…

…  in the next generation of marketing textbooks, anyway:

Sons of Maxwell on being “serviced” by United Airlines. (Read the details of the episode in the sidebar on the right, or here.)

Up for under two days as I write this, and  already seen by well over 250,000 (growing rapidly), with a solid five-star rating…

Which is more than we can say for United.

Just a(nother) a reminder to those marketers aggressively  promising service they’re not prepared to deliver that the implicit protections of the “old” broadcast communications world are gone; the web will out their failures, and fast.  So more money invested in empty messaging– however elegant, as in United’s animated spots– is worse than wasted:  it concretely confirms consumers’ suspicions of hypocrisy.

Increasingly, when it comes to advertising in all its forms, you can (still) run, but you cannot hide.

So, the good news first, or the bad?…

Let’s end on an upbeat note, so start with…

The bad news…

source: Hadley Centre for Climate Change (via Global Warming Art)

A recent MIT study suggests that the problems associated with global warming will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that.

The work is based on MIT’s Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the university since the early 1990s.  And its results add to the chorus of researchers suggesting that earlier estimates– like the assessment of the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)– materially understate the threat.

(As Larry Smarr of Cal IT2 explained to me recently, a good bit of the difference was likely methodological: the scientists involved in that earlier work, concerned to be rigorous, excluded from consideration forces/dynamics that couldn’t be measured and projected as precisely as the forces/dynamics that were included– even if those “rejected” forces/dynamics were suspected, even known, to have an impact.  In the intervening time, measurement capability has improved…  and thus, the picture has deteriorated.)

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees…  To put that in perspective, consider this piece (from the Times of London), reporting on models built by the UK Government’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change:

Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.

The western United States once again could suffer perennial droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand.

What’s bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. The Hadley Centre calculates that a one-degree increase would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100…

But of course, MIT is worried that the increase will be much higher than just 1 degree.  What do those extra increments of heat portend?  Nothing good.  Further from the Hadley Centre report:

Here is a degree-by-degree guide:

1c Increase- Ice-free sea absorbs ?more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh water lost from a third of the world’s surface; low-lying coastlines flooded

2c Increase- Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of all species face extinction

3c Increase- Carbon release from vegetation and soils; speeds global warming; death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities; starvation in Africa

4c Increase- Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region abandoned

5c Increase- Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live like animals off the land

6c Increase- Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive

Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out of control

Now these are projections, the products of models; the reality will be surely be different.  But if there’s anything to the MIT study and the Hadley projection of consequences– anything at all– then we’ve got lots of work to do in reducing emissions– and fast.

UPDATE:  a link to the recent report of the U.S. Government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program: more evidence (as if we needed it) that this threat is real, and another take– slightly less dramatic; still deeply troubling– on its potential impacts.

The good news…

Selling nano refrigerators in Osmanabad

One of the obstacles to executing an effective global strategy to combat global warming– and of course it does have to be a global strategy– is that, while it’s painful for developed nations to make the necessary adjustments, it’s even harder for developing nations. Their emerging middle classes aspire to the same sorts of luxuries that their predecessors in the West have enjoyed.  Suggesting to, say, a hardworking Chinese family that it should not get a car after all, or to an Indian family that it should forgo the refrigeration for which it has saved, is a tough sale– one that smacks of entitled Westerners pulling the ladder up behind themselves.

The climate data sketched above suggests that the resolution to this dilemma can’t be simple comprise– a chicken in every other pot, as it were– that only yields an outcome slightly less catastrophic.  Rather, the answer has to come from a leap, a transcending of the old trade-offs.  Innovation must be yoked to the creation of new kinds of products and services, delivered in new kinds of ways– products, services, and systems that radically reduce the amount of carbon consumed;  products, services, and systems that are genuinely sustainable.

Happily, that innovation is underway.  And it’s happening as quickly and impactfully in the developing world as in the West.

By way of encouraging example, Outlook Business (India) reports on a new “nano-fridge,” the ChotuKool:

ChotuKool is like no other fridge. It does not have a compressor. It runs on a battery. Utensils and bottles need to be loaded into this 43-litre cool box from the top. It weighs only 7.8 kg and costs only Rs 3,200 [under $70].

The ChotuKool was co-designed with village women to assure its acceptability, and is distributed by members of a micro-finance group.  It’s a triumph of applying creative economic development thinking to the satisfaction of emergent consumer demand– in this case, demand for a product, a refrigerator, that is an avatar of emergence into the middle class.

And critically importantly, it is a step toward sustainability.  In order to make the fridges viable for rural distribution and use, the manufacturer (consumer durables firm Godrej & Boyce) shrank the standard size– reducing materials use– and replaced the usual compressor with a battery-powered heat exchanger. The upshot of which is a fridge that is less carbon (and other resource) intensive– and at the same time, cheaper– than usual.

And this is the good news:  necessity being the mother that it is, innovators all over the world– but critically importantly, in developing economies– are coming up with answers to consumer demand that redefine products as we’ve known them, making them cheaper and more sustainable at the same time.

C. K. Prahalad argued in Bottom of the Pyramid (c.f., e.g., here), that serving the poorest of the world can and should be good for business:  it’s a gargantuan market in its own right, and what’s learned there can be applied in the developed world. Examples like the nano-fridge suggest that connecting the ingenuity and the enormous potential there can be critically important to managing global climate change as well.  Prahad once said,

I am continually humbled by the inventiveness of the people who want to serve this population.

I too am humbled– and with an eye to the encroaching waterline of San Francisco Bay, I’m very, very grateful.