BMW's new ad campaign

An interesting thread from the BMW-SG forums:

http://www.bmw-sg.com/forums/bmw-singapore-motoring-life/9360-bmw-slams-competitors-new-ad-campaign.html

Courtesy of BMW AG
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NO. The ability to say no to compromise is a rare thing these days. Many companies would like to be able to say it, but so few have the autonomy to actually do it. As an independent company, BMW can say no. No, we will not compromise our ideas. No, we will not do it the way everyone else does it. No, we will not factor designs down to the lowest common denominator. No, we will not sell out to a parent company who will meddle in our affairs and ask us to subject our cars to mass market vanilla-ism. Because we can say no to compromise, we can say yes to other things - such as building our vehicles with 50/50 weight distribution for superior handling and control, despite the fact that it costs more to build them that way. It's thousands of little things like this that separate BMW from other car companies. By maintaining our autonomy and ability to say no, we can make sure great ideas live on to become ultimate driving machines.

My comments, and also mirroring comments from follow-up posts in the same thread:

1) Electric power steering - compromise steering feel in favour of petrol consumption

2) Active Steering (actually, invented by Toyota in Land Cruiser WAAAAY back before BMW's Active steering) - compromise is to make it easy to park at the expense of steering feel and predictability

3) Run-flat tyres - sacrifice ride and feel in favour of cost savings and to make a bigger boot?

I don't mind a company making rational compromises, in fact, all industry is based on compromises, but when a company makes compromises and then advertises that it is uncompromising, that's a little weird to me. And worse, if one claims that it resisted all compromises to make a car with 50-50 chassis balance, and yet this 50-50 chassis balance is of questionable value as supergreenhorn mentioned, then ... it's very very borderline vulgar marketing.

Here's more on 50-50 chassis balance:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/greglocock/5050.htm

clearly the best weight distribution for lateral acceleration is somewhere between 50 and 60%.

An interesting comment on the actual vote share of the Singapore Parliamentary Elections

Q4 is a poster I really don't know much about, but his insights (to somebody who doesn't really care - me) are pretty spot-on.

In a comment about the official vote-share of the PAP in the 2006 Singapore Elections - 66.6% - an interesting point to note is that the 66.6% of the popular vote was alread relatively low, but taking into consideration the Singapore Democratic Party putting weak candidates into the polls and losing terribly, he thinks it is not really the true percentage.

The percentage will even be lower if the votes cast in consitituencies which the SDP contested in were excluded. And this is pretty good insight.

More reasons on why Microsoft will lose to Google

Excellent article in the Inquirer, Microsoft will lose to Google, mostly about Microsoft's not having any friends to help it out.

I believe though, that WHY it will lose, is rather because as a corporation, it has no understanding of the new world centered around web applications and content. After decades of making operating systems, platforms, etc. and failing to make it work easily, the old technophobes, who always envied computer-wielding technophiles but never could hold a candle to them, have embraced a version of computer tech so insulated from the hardcore tech - it's called the Internet New Media. With the Internet New Media, the old technophobes have become the new net-savvy generation, along with some of the technophiles too.

The irony is that the Internet Media has little to do with Tech from the perspective of the user. It's all about content and the presentation and collation and distribution of the same. The ever overflowing babbling of all the inhabitants of cyberspace, the dribble from the forummers, the rapid fire posts of the demagogues ... coming to us all in emails, forum posts, XML/RSS feeds, mailing lists, blogsites, newsfeeds, Google search results, customized home pages, you name it.

And Microsoft has spent the last few decades making us tools to make this content. Nothing to do with the actual content - the closest its Office Suite has come to content presentation and manipulation is probably the Excel pivot-table - the irrelevance of which to the internet is beyond the scope of discussion here.

So Microsoft is in a different business, a dying business. The new webapps are easy to use, meaningful to use and, as in the case of my sudden blogging, INSPIRING TO USE. Does Microsoft know? Sure, some rocket scientists inside surely KNOW THIS, even better than me. But what of the thousands of employees it has, in the USA, in Singapore, in any of its offices in the world, who spend their days pushing papers, making presentations, forwarding emails, watching their stocks perform on http://finance.google.com and basically, doing all that is banal and less of what humans do best - think. It's not that they can't, but in any corporation not geared to think, any corporation which doesn't put Creativity on a pedestal to pray to, the default setting ensures a prohibition on independent thought.

Can Microsoft start to put Creativity on the prayer altar? After decades of making and refining decades old concepts like word processors and spreadsheets, I'll wager NO as the answer.

Microsoft will lose. But not to Google, just to itself.

Since technophobes have WAY outnumbered technophiles

Singapore Politics and the Internet's New Media

Posted here is a thread very lightly touching on the Singapore elections 2006. http://forum.carma.com.sg/showthread.php?p=17539474#post17539474

I felt that since everybody is in the throes of election fever, it is fitting that a bit of research on the legality of Internet content in old and new media focussing on politics appear here.

In the early days of the internet, I remember that it was stated by government that it was permitted that one makes a website on anything, but it must not include illegal content and political content, unless one were a political party and licensed to do so. When I say forbidden in the beginning, it refers to individuals, not licensed political parties.

References to the paragraph above:
http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2001/yax-244.htm

The SBA’s Class Licence Scheme defines a category called "Internet Content
Providers", and says, "Internet Content Providers (ICPs) do not need to register
with SBA unless their web pages are primarily set up to promote political or
religious causes. Registration does not mean the promotion of political and
religious causes is not allowed - it merely serves to emphasise the need for the
content providers to be responsible in what they say."

Interestingly, the paragraph continues,
"For non-political and
non-religious Content Providers, they are automatically licensed under the Class
Licence Scheme and need to abide by SBA's Internet Code of Practice…."

A short summary after clarifications:

The effect of all this is to divide our citizens into two categories: those
licensed to make political speeches and send political messages, and everybody
else who should only listen and not speak, lest they fall afoul of suitably
vague rules. Once again, politics is reserved for politicians (which of course
shall be of two kinds – those in the PAP and those who suffer the PAP).
The average citizen will get the message, loud clear, that he should not use
electronic means to tell his friends his party preference; he must never endorse
any candidate.

The case for licensed political parties is different:

In 2001, there were additional guidelines on internet use for political campaigning. Now in May 2006, with the anti-podcast BS by the elections department (which really does not include much justification) it has even become more `forbidden'.

Before the hoo-haa, here's a good link which foresees this issue of AV streaming:
Singapore: New Media, Politics & the Law http://singaporemedia.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_singaporemedia_archive.html

Note these parts about individuals:

An individual who receives a campaign message from a party and then forwards it
to a group list would be in violation of the PEA. In effect, these rules limit
the “viral” effect of the internet, slowing down the spread of campaign
messages.

All this being said, I must clearly state that all this is merely research I posted here. In no way is it stated here whether I agree or disagree (though my statement about the lack of objective justification holds as my personal opinion).

When I was young, I was part of a group which made a parliamentary representation for the Computer Misuse Act. It became law, I think, but that law was faulty. However much or little our group contributed to its passing being law, whether we were noticed or not, I regret not working harder to find the problems with CMA thing. Now on hindsight, it's a faulty law of no value.

Now that I'm no longer young, I know that unless I dedicate my life to politics, I should not make any rash judgments and regret the effect later. In a blog post or forum post, what I can do is to offer some rudimentary research, not a concrete proposal.

Creative - long overdue losses reported

I think this is long overdue:

Creative, which is facing an uphill battle against the Apple iPod, reported a
net loss of 114.33 million US dollars in the three months to March, reversing
the year-ago profit of 15.91 million dollars.

This is overdue. Creative speakers are never recommended on any forum. Their X-Fi cards create incompatibilites with the nVidia nForce4 chipset by refusing to share resources. Whether it's the motherboard manufacturer's fault or Creative's fault, Creative was later, they should have worked around the problem. Well it's their loss - the people who bought motherboards with nForce4 chipsets, who are actually the main target segment of the X-Fi enthusiast sound cards, didn't bother much with the X-Fi.

With the entire enthusiast community not bothering much with good sound cards anymore, instead relying on the SPDIF digital audio bypassing the analog audio circuits and leaving the external amplifier to handle the digital to analog conversion. Why bother with a good sound card, actually? If you want good sound, the external amplifier's digital audio receiver circuit would be better than any, or at least at par.

The flash memory market is a huge casino, with odds of price drops far higher than price stability or price increases. And Creative actually builds MP3 players, though in form a `build to order' model, yet offers their channel price protection. Distributors are not fools. It's a crazy decision to stock flash-based MP3 players without price protection.

To compound the problem, Creative makes MP3 players in all the colors of the rainbow - and that's a recipe for a huge inventory problem. This is however, an insidious problem, and is difficult to trace from normal performance metrics.

What next for Creative? Man, I don't know. They don't pay me to consult! But it has to be this: they have to get better people into management. People with really current market and web feel. Multidisciplinary people, and people who are proof of the politics. Outspoken fearless people. And Creative gotta do it really quickly.

But for a company with still so many millions in the bank (est. US$250M ???) it's not difficult to reinvent itself IF IT WANTS TO. So many current opportunities now, including new netphones, web engines which Google left out, a platform for mobile audio, A2DP speakers, etc. Why bother to fight the brutal MP3 war if the result is already settled years ago - Apple won.

Ego has a lot to do with it. Ego is good, but in this sense, suicidal.

Google is full!

Check out this statement by Eric Schmidt in http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/google_bigdaddy_chaos/:

Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt has hinted at another reason for the
recent chaos. In Google's earnings conference call last month, Schmidt was frank
about the extent of the problem. "Those machines are full," he said. "We have a huge machine crisis."

And here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/21/business/GOOGLE.php

Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt has hinted at another reason for the recent chaos. In Google's earnings conference call last month, Schmidt was frank about the extent of the problem. "Those machines are full," he said. "We have a huge machine crisis."

Like the rest of the Google cheerleaders around the world, I always assumed Google to just have to add new cheap machines to their borg network and voila, a few terabytes cheap new storage, without a worry of the machines failing or data loss. This is a huge surprise to me, that they can actually be full. So it's back to earth now for a company invaded by Aliens and enhanced using Alien technology.

Now that we're back on earth, I wonder - CAN GOOGLE EVER KEEP UP WITH THE WEB? CAN ONE COMPANY HAVE ENOUGH MACHINES TO INDEX THE ENTIRE WORLD?

Way back in Altavista, they planned to keep the entire web in one machine's silicon memory. Now that this is clearly rubbish, let's wait on the future to tell us whether google is rubbish.

How the heck can the US car industry respond so quickly to these rule changes?

Lately, the US was pretty much slow on emissions control while Europe and parts of Asia based on Euro X emissions regulations were tightening emissions regulations rapidly. Then now the US Attorney General himself whacks the Administration for tighter regulations.

This is pretty dire news for the American manufacturers, whose engines are antique - they got away with it for years by bypassing tight emissions regs by using the SUV=TRUCKS loophole - while the Japanese and European with their ultra-high-tech engines borne of Euro and Japanese regulations will probably rule the roost for years to come if Eliot Spitzer pulls this off.

In the light of my previous post about the horrendous sales showing of the American auto manufacturers, a further whammy courtesy of Spitzer may well do the Americans a favour by forcing them into what I see as inevitable - don't do the dirty manufacturing work, just design and market the stuff. Leave the manufacturing to the slittly eyed yellow skinned people.

Japanese Auto Manufacturers vs the World

After seeing these two articles:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/206241/1/.html
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/206272/1/.html

Not surprising, but that a long overdue final confirmation of the decline of auto manufacturing in the US.

All is not rosy for the Japanese though. After trying to understand the Japanese for years, and still learning, my take on the Japanese auto industry is this: while cars are still customized bespoke products without a generic cross-industry platform and industry standard mechanical specification for building cars, yes, the Japanese are KING and will not be toppled by the Koreans or the Chinese. The Japanese actually do these things cheaper than anybody in the world - bespoke customized platformless things.

Once a industry platform arises (much like Windows is a platform for all computers) Japan will fall faster than a falling brick, replaced by China. The traditional understanding that the Japanese cannot innovate and do best in a standards based industry - eg. manufacturing fax machines - is to a large degree false. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the Japanese do innovate, and their edge over the rest of the world is their attention to detail. They do best in an industry of manufacturing products of bespoke design, without standards links to many other things outside the parameters of the product, and innovate within the rules of the game.

However, I'm fully convinced that nobody can make a platform besides the Americans, other nations' language capabilities, human resources, and most importantly, sales capability, are insufficiently well developed anywhere else in the world.

In short, ONLY the Americans can create GLOBAL platforms.

But GM, Ford and Daimlerchrysler will not make the platforms. They are too old school. A new force will have to arise, but it will be very unlikely looking at the state of the industry and the current American business attitude of short-term gain at the expense of long term planning.

So possibly Japan will forever be the world's best and most cost effective car manufacturer.

More discussion here:
http://forum.carma.com.sg/showthread.php?p=17539415#post17539415

This is pretty much an archive of my forum posts

Earlier, I was wondering how one who spends so much time and effort at the forums make a blog. Just blogging in my own style for a few days, I realised even more clearly that a blog can be a purified distillation of one's forum posts.

With that, I also realised that this blog would be pretty much an archive of my forum posts. I forum so much and most of my energy is spent towards creating forum posts, and ends up that this blog will have quite a lot of content :)

A little bit more neutral commentary here though. And of course, one can't beat the permanency of your own blog compared to a forum where your posts can just be deleted at someone else's whim.

Showboating in Forums

There was a thought provoking post in the Carma forums last week by weng, who mentioned that the English used was so flowery that if he read through the entire thread, his english would have improved substantially. Well, things are not so easy, my post reproduced here: (Non Singlish readers may want to email me at michaeltanyk@gmail.com for a translation :) )

http://forum.carma.com.sg/showpost.php?p=17539201&postcount=71

Sometimes, conflict forces one to stretch the capabilities of their english lah... sometimes stretch to distortion liao.... But the honest thing is this: Sometimes people use bombastic and chim words, and cliches and bromides and banal phrases, to sound impressive and to hide the low quality content of the message. They depend on this kind of language to stop the other party from responding.

For people whose native language is not english, they usually do not comment, and the people who use this kind of chim words try to sound impressive to the non-native english readers, and depend on these readers not to realise the content of the message at all, so even if one is losing the real argument, most readers will not think so.

This does not work in USA and UK forums though, so if one posts this way in those forums, they get SCREWED so bad they so pai seh. They can only do it in SG forums, at least for the next 10 years.

I may also be guilty of this. After a life of forumming, perhaps since 1988, this kind of thing become instinctive liao.

Testing the post by email feature

OK it works! I can post by email now! Seems that it would only send to blogger as a draft, not realtime publish, and I need to manually publish it. Cool, though! Thanks to punisher86@gmail.com for helping me out here.

This is bold. This is Italics. This is normal.

And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture.

And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture. And this is a test of inline picture.

A BMW marketing-engineering-legislation quandary - Pedestrian Protection

This is the bugger which got me banned at BMW-SG. Since my ban, so many well wishers have emailed and PM'ed to me saying that they liked some of my posts, and wanted to post a note of appreciation for a nice evening of forumming. I thanked them all (sincerely!) but asked them to post their opinions on the forum, and I thought that this quote was pretty true in the present context: The only condition necessary for evil to thrive, is when good men do nothing.

Anyway, here's the URL:

http://www.bmw-sg.com/forums/bmw-singapore-motoring-life/9190-another-bmw-marketing-engineering-legislation-quandary-pedestrian-protection.html

Just a copy of my post over there in case it gets deleted, here's for posterity:

I mentioned a quandary before, that BMW marketing for its inline-6 I suspect is compromising the packaging of their cars, where a V6 would have given them much more room and engine toughness (no need so long crankshaft) .... let's take a look at their overhangs now. As you probably already know, the 3- (E90) 5- (E60) series have cored VERY badly in terms of pedestrian protection in event of collision.

3-series: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=3&id2=225
Quote:

pedestrian protection was very poor

5-series: http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=4&id2=208
Quote:

the car’s ability to protect pedestrians was dire

So, many manufacturers, including Toyota (GS, Camry, IS), Honda (civic, Legend), Nissan, Renault, Alfa (new 159) have designed their new cars to improve on the pedestrian safety perspective, by:

1) increasing the length of their front overhangs to create a buffer zone for pedestrian protection in front of the car, and

2) by using a 4-cylinder or a low profile V6, they have created some space between their engine bonnet and the engine itself to create a buffer there also. (see footnote also, below).

But both these features are opposite to BMW's `virtues'.

1) They boast a short front overhang saying that it promotes handling, but it kills pedestrians since the pedestrian will hit the hard engine without the luxury of a buffer zone of a longer overhang.

2) they market their I6 engine as the greatest form of engine,
but it kills pedestrians as a I6 engine is fundamentally taller, and it is impossible to create that buffer zone (eg. the M3 E46 actually had to tilt the I6 to fit their engine bay!)

How can they overcome the quandary? Or, will they continue to compromise pedestrian safety if they decide that their customer demographics do not care too much about pedestrian safety in relation to driving enjoyment? Or, hopefully, is there a link anywhere which will show us a preview of BMW's engineering principles they will employ to solve the problem?

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footnote:Toyota's engine designed with
pedestrian protection in mind:http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.toyota.co.jp%2Fjp%2Ftech%2Fnew_cars%2Fmarkx%2Fability%2Fpower_train%2F&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
Quote:

Furthermore, new it adjusts to the hood which is designed, new designs also the surge tank, and the like by the fact that it makes the structure which guarantees clearance between the hood and the engine, the case of personal accident of 10001 it contributes to the shocking relief to the pedestrian

Launch!!!

I've resisted making a blog for so long. I thought blogs were for people who didn't use forums. And I've got my hands full with forums:

http://forums.hardwarezone.com The biggest tech forum in Singapore, perhaps Asia, perhaps the world
http://forum.carma.com.sg A fledgling car forum with some smart brains in there and some car virgins
http://www.bmw-sg.com/forums An established BMW forum in Singapore now overrun by brand fanatics (I just got banned for raising and arguing the issue of NCAP Pedestrian Safety ratings and BMW's difficulty in rasing their rating from `dire')

Forums are so fast, so interactive, so easy to use, so why the heck should I make a blog?

Well in time, I realised these points:

1. I don't own the forums. Bums can erase my stuff at whim. I could sue, but it's questionable.
2. I find it beneficial to camp at some blogs to gain some insight. Some of these blogs are crap but still after reading them something connects
3. A blog would be ideal to amalgamate some of my thoughts in one place, since most people don't usually dig through so many forums and thousands of threads just to find out what I think and stand for, whether they be fans or enemies.
4. It has occured to me that blogspot may survive a nuclear war which may wipe out my usual forum servers. Which is relevant today, since Iran now has a centrifuge can refine small amounts of almost pure Uranium 235, uranium being something they have in quantity. Thank god it's still gonna be fission until we see a LiD plant to boost that.

Anyway, here goes. I don't know how to update this fast, but I'll work it out!