Re: [tlug] Amazon Kindle

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Curt Sampson writes:
>
>  > The Librie was a classic Sony failure:
>
> I *wish* it was "classic *SONY*", but unfortunately it's more like
> "classic nihon denshiya".  Remember the Zaurus?  The Toshiba 3.5"
> 1.2MB floppy?  How about "PC kyu hachi" with the PC98-only plugs for
> everything from the audio cards to the mouse?

> And it's almost hysterical the way the Japanese denshiya are repeating
> the Betamax fiasco with Bloo-Ray.[1]  Same time, same channel, same
> leading actors just about.

As long as we're exchanging horror stories, in 1983, I was hired by 
Dentsu as a copywriter and seconded back to my real employer which was 
having problems getting my visa approved (the government INSISTED that 
somewhere in Japan there was a host national with the right 
qualifications and I was taking his job away).  That meant that I had to 
come back to Tokyo and play AE / international copywriter a couple of 
times a month to keep my visa on the up-and-up.  This included the Sony 
audio account and, because I understood the early Wang Wapros and the 
Apple they had in the Creative Department, I also got stuck with the 
rollout of an MSX-powered pasukon called "Hit-Bit" (geddit?  I was 
afraid you would).

Thing was a box about the size of a rajikasse and used a standard TV for 
the monitor, although you could get a standalone monitor for about JPY 
200,000.  It was programmed with tapes, but they later came out with an 
accessory drive for 5-1/4" floppies.  We had to create a campaign for 
the box and then all of the programs, which they broke into as many 
small pieces as they possibly could -- like doc processing would require 
wapro + fonts + spell check + print driver + formatter + graphics 
drivers + paint.  The printer was a pin type and cost around JPY 
150,000.  So, you'd get the box for about JPY 380,000 and, if you wanted 
to do word processing, send faxes, and make your own nengajo (the 300 
baud modem was JPY 40,000 and I don't remember if you could get BBS 
access) you were already out over JPY 900,000 (JPY 1.2 million if you 
got dinged for the screen and drivers, too).  That was when you could 
import a 4Mhz 286 with a 640x48016-color monitor for about JPY 400,000 
but early English-language DOS compatible software was expensive, too.

The campaign featured Matsuda Seiko as the campaign gyaaru.  We had 
three days of photo shoots plus what was supposed to be 4~6 hours of 
action shooting in a studio for the television ads.  Seiko had just 
turned 18 and was trying to become "kokusai."  I think she thought 
"kokusai" mostly meant having a foreign man ride her girl parts and her 
behavior in later years seemed to bear that out.  The shoot took 20 
hours and we got something like 86 seconds of usable footage because she 
kept switching her lines to the third person, having a temper tantrum 
every time we wanted to re-shoot a scene from a different angle, and 
every time they stopped shooting she had to run over and try out her 
"engrish" on me which as the day wore on started including squeezing my 
thigh and working upward in small increments.  I have never been happier 
to make a getaway in my life.

Traditionally, the AE is supposed to take the entire crew, star, and 
entourage out to an expensive restaurant but, Seiko's crew was as pissed 
off at her as we were, so they dragged her away and the rest of us went 
to the yattai mura that used to be on the opposite side of the 
Yamanote-sen tracks from Tower Records (along Meiji-dori) and drank 
ourselves silly over oden and ramen.  The evening ended with the Sony 
product manager getting down on his knees and banging his head on the 
sidewalk while begging our forgiveness for insisting that the campaign 
gyaaru HAD to be Seiko-chan.

For all of the money Sony dumped into the ad campaign, I think they sold 
something like 4,000 of them over a three year period.  Seiko was such a 
pain to work with that they just reworked the ads to mostly show a pair 
of hands on a keyboard interspersed with 6~10 second shots of 
Seiko-chan's face saying something insipid.  All of the print cards just 
used photos and some line the Creative guy made up.

I saw one of the red MSX machines in a junk shop in Aki a couple of 
weeks back, still in the original wrapping, along with the "Deluxe 
Software Pack" for JPY 1,000.  I _almost_ bought it ... and then sanity 
came flooding back in.

--
CL