From Holland Cooke's fresh off the presses February Newsletter (always worth a read for both his facts and opinions, but also a lesson in high-voltage writing style):“We will always be Radio Shack.” -- Radio Shack executive I chatted-up at the Consumer Electronics Show. I told him how hurt I-a-lifelong-radio-guy felt when his company re-imaged as The Shack. It was just an ad campaign, and it worked, he explained, vowing that his company is true-to-its-roots. So I asked him if the Digital TV Transition renewed the market for TV antennas. And he smiled: “We never stopped selling TV antennas.”
“The radio craze will die out in time.” -- Thomas Edison, 1922
“Superficial press plus technology myopia cause us to see today's change as more important than it really is while simultaneously minimizing the significance of past technologies.” -- Bob Seidensticker, author, “Future Hype,” 2001
“Here in the first half of the twenty-first century how can we not be excited by the possibilities that lay just around the corner – the next innovation, the game-changer, the paradigm shift?” -- Brian David Johnson, author, “Screen Future,” 2010
“Give people what they want, otherwise they’ll take it anyway.” -- P.T. Barnum, predicting, nearly 200 years ago, that I’d plug one-end-of a cord into the cigarette lighter and the-other-end-into iPhone. Why: The FM receiver in the sporty ’99 VW Beetle is fine, but the signal-to-noise-ratio on the AM side is intolerable.
