The Marketing of Technology
The wheels of technological revolution turn much slower than they appear to, and it is nothing but consumerism.
I thought of writing about this many times, but the sheer meaninglessness of showing the truth, when everyone is simply happier pulling wool over their own eyes, is what never gave me enough impetus to actually going forward with it.
That is until yesterday morning, I find every self-identified geek/nerd, with or without the slightest of real interest in technology and/or science, go all “Man did you see Tesla launch? Omg. That was some dope shit!!!”
A very important explanation before we continue: I am not even 1/100000th the man Elon Musk is. I am neither criticizing him, nor yesterday’s events. Most importantly because I have no locus standi to do so. A cursory look over the internet would show you some pretty big journalists at some big publications have bashed Elon Musk’s actions of yesterday with reasons from ‘turning science into showbiz’ to ‘billionaire playing with expensive toys’. Well here’s the thing, Elon Musk is a billionaire and he knows enough science to turn it into showbiz, so yeah you’re just being sore losers commenting such things. What I am commenting on is the larger scheme of marketing technology to its consumers.
The 2GB RAM Phone that was capable of 16 exabytes
I was a naive sophomore undergrad pursuing Electronics and Electrical Engineering from Delhi Technological University. I felt I was smartest person in the room, whichever room you put me in. My batchmates were mugging up Laplace and Fourier transform equations. I was staying nights up modifying the kernel of my Android Xperia phone and posting it on phone modding forums, and thousands were downloading and using it. I knew more about how mobile radios and GSM/CDMA/LTE worked than any Communication Systems professor my college had. I knew more about how Snapdragon CPUs are manufactured than any of my seniors who got jobs at Qualcomm.
And since I was the only Indian involved with CyanogenMod project living in Delhi, the stars lined up for me, in my 2nd year of college, to be part of the core team of YU Televentures, a Micromax spinoff that brought the first Cyanogen OS phone to India — YU YUREKA.
4 months later, I was standing beside the stage in Banquet Hall 1 of Hyatt, New Delhi. Rahul Sharma , co-founder of Micromax and CEO of YU; one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the telecommunication market; was on stage, launching YUREKA. 64-bit phones, LTE phones, enhanced OS features — the Indian consumer hadn’t been sold these yet.
The night before, we were up till late night, in Sharma’s room at Micromax office, preparing the slides. Qualcomm was betting big on us, because we were entering into the premium midrange market with low-midrange price point, with the only Snapdragon variant, among a myriad of Mediatek processors. Qualcomm had an entire featurette in our deck. There was an entire section devoted to 64-bit. On a live stream, being consumed by 20 thousand viewers, and a couple of news channels on air, Rahul Sharma explains how 64-bit helps us support 16 exabytes of memory (37:40 in above video). On a phone that comes with 2GB of RAM: Phone’s RAM is burnt into the board. It isn’t even extendable.
Yes 64-bit address space means theoretically a CPU can use 16 EB of RAM. But in 2014, phones used to have 2GB of RAM, and 64-bit ARM wasn’t making a difference, because 32-bit can already support upto 4GB. We had two builds of the OS, and the 64-bit one was worse in the benchmarks than the 32-bit build, because arm64 was an immature platform, and optimizations hadn’t even hit the Clang or GCC toolchains. Which means other than some parts of the code taking use of 64 bit integers uint64_t, the rest of the code was being compiled simply the same was as for 32 bit ARMv7 targets. We had a deadline to match, a phone to release and millions of dollars were riding on it. So we sold 64-bit like bit-whores, and we cheated on benchmarks by overclocking when benchmark apps run (don’t look at me like that, every phone does that).
But none of that mattered. Look at the video again, but from 1:02:00 instead. That is what mattered. A phone people expected to launch at INR 20,000, was launched at INR 8,999. In a watershed moment for Indian mobile ecosystem, the counter with 29999 written in a fitting Impact font face, whirred down to 9999 and then was finally replaced with 8999. A price point no one in the top 6 involved at YU had an inkling, except Sharma himself.
At that point, a bewildered sophomore student, who thought he knew a bit more of mobile phones than the rest of the world, did not know whom to share this fact with that he just discovered — the founder of India’s largest mobile manufacturer had no clue about CPU architectures.
Today I know, if I can ever even achieve 1% of the success story Rahul Sharma, Vikas Jain and Sumeet Arora had created by fighting against a China dominated electronics market in India to create a homegrown brand that at one point sold almost 50% of all smartphones in India, it would be an accomplishment in itself. Whether Rahul Sharma deliberately or inadvertently sold 16 EB of RAM inside a 2GB chip doesn’t matter. (For the record, my extensive interactions with him in due course, stand testimony that he isn’t unaware of CPU architectures, rather well aware of how to create presentations that sells million units of a phone).
The Batmobile comes in black, but does it come in HDR ?
There is a lot of horse dung peddled in the name of tech journalism, but this aptly titled piece on Popsci — ‘HDR’ is the most confusing term in consumer tech right now is an example of good consumer-education.
HDR — which stands for High Dynamic Range is one of those terms that have their origin in technology, but has since become to goto gimmick generator for marketing departments of multifarious product industries. And it is easy to see why. Any product that deals with ‘ranges’, be it cameras (range of exposures), TVs (range of colors), microphones (range of audio frequencies recorded) or speakers (range of audio frequencies played), can simply extend its range and start calling itself HDR.
Cameras with HDR can have low and high exposure points in the same photo.
HDR photos or video needs to be played on devices like PS4 Pro, or latest Apple TV to show those low and high exposure areas simultaneously.
And then you need to actually connect those to a monitor that has support for HDR to be able to really see the difference.
But then, don’t forget to check, when you buy a HDR TV, if they mean the TV has an HDR display or they mean the speaker in the TV is an HDR speaker. Because yes, speakers that support very high (treble) and very low frequencies (bass) together are now being called HDR speakers. Apparently the older term: ‘full range’ speakers isn’t all that catchy anymore.
Does it even matter to the marketing executives whether the TV they are selling has HDR audio or HDR screen? Probably now. When you throw your dollars at the nearest BestBuy or Amazon, and get your TV home and call over your friends to watch the next game, they’ll come and ask “Does it have HDR?”. Do they really know what HDR is? Do you really need to give the correct answer ? Do you need to ask them to clarify — you mean speaker or video ? Meh. No one cares. Your team is winning by now. Get those beers out. Even if the dynamic range is not high, you definitely can be.
You know what else is HDR ? If you create a practical shooting range high up in the mountains. (Never mind if you didn’t get the joke, it’ll need quite a bit of Googling).
The Machines are taking too long to learn
How many times have you been told lately that this is the age of Machine Learning, and AI is coming to eat your jobs away. How many recently headlines have screamed that automation is taking away jobs. Elon Musk has been crying hoarse about how we need basic minimum wages when the AI apocalypse lands on us.
Truth is, Artificial Intelligence, is third only to God and Blockchain in the list of things that have been overhyped as the answer to Life, Universe and Everything. While I am not pooh poohing AI away, but it is not Deep Neural Networks and Convolution Networks powered sentient bots learning to behave like humans after observing them that has been taking away jobs. The culprit is more likely Microsoft Office Suite or ATM / credit card machines
Even though Elon Musk is pushing updates after updates of auto-pilot patches into Teslas, akin to Microsoft updating their Windows 10 laptops, and endangering lives of hundreds of Tesla owners (which includes the death of one, who died because of autopilot), the fact is that self driving cars are not just past the horizon, but a long way out. And the tech media is running short on patience in that domain.
We are just past the overestimated two years of the AI revolution, and it’ll be well into 2020’s that the actual effects start hitting us.
Being ‘marketed to’ is a dehumanizing experience, and it hurts
There was a time when the normies, the late bloomers, the wave surfers, the ‘crowd’ weren’t into smartphones. The geeks, the technical intelligentsia, the wave creators, the early adopters had just gotten their hands on this device that put a full-blown computer into their palms/pockets.
Discussions revolved around CPU clock speeds and features and OS upgrades. It was fun the modify the OS and add hacky and nifty features to it.
And then it got mainstream. The marketing department took over from the technical guys. The PR guys, the Chief Product Officers, and not Chief Technical Officers, were at new launches. The discussions are around number of cores now (who cares even if all 8 cores cannot run simultaneously, as long as you get to call it octa-core). What good is your phone if it doesn’t have two camera lenses, who cares what sensor it packs inside.
It isn’t even an enjoyable experience to read about smartphones and buy one. You are not part of the cool elite anymore. You are part of the crowd. The crowd that buys the cheapest phone with most megapixels on the selfie camera. It doesn’t matter if you’re smarter than the crowd. The phones will be marketed to the entire crowd. No one cares you know how phones are manufactured. Your Dad, the cab driver, the balding neighbour, strangers at coffee shop, random trolls on Internet — they all have advice on buying smartphones for you now. And it is straightforward — You need to buy an ARM128 phone, because it supports 274877906944 yottabytes of memory. Doesn’t that just make perfect sense ?
(Your head might be exploding with thoughts like — Darn yottabytes, think of YotaPhone, it can show information even when off, without battery)
It is a layer cake of marketing and consumerism
Consumers believe Self Driving Cars and Bitcoin driven economy is around the corner, because the Developers believe the next big thing in NLP, AI and Blockchain is around the corner.
The believe so, because the Engineers are convinced that the second coming in Deep Learning, ANN and Cryptography is just beyond the horizon.
Machine Learning isn’t 2016’s gift to mankind. Arthur Samuel was telling the world how computers will learn to create new logic in early 1960’s. Yet, more than 50 years later, we have achieved nothing more than an army of Twitter trolls turning Microsoft’s bot into a racist asshole, who had to be killed off
And while Google and Apple are busy peddling the idea that VR is the latest gold mine, I cannot comprehend how people conveniently forget that VR exists since 1950’s
Quantum computation is an idea floated around in 1980: 40 years ago. Fuzzy logic has been tinkered around with for equally as long. And we’re chasing a solution for P = NP since time immemorial.
Truth is, everything has been screwing around with you. In 1950’s we could send cars in rockets to space, but such billionaire dick waving contests weren’t in vogue back then.
What was in vogue was USA-vs-USSR dick waving. And thus in March and June of 1965 respectively, USSR and USA did their first spacewalks. REAL HUMAN BEINGS. Not a dummy in a Tesla Roadster.
(At least we know that space exploration is only taken forward by dick waving contests by alpha male billionaires or nuclear stockpiling superpowers)
We went from 8-bit to 64-bit computing from 1950’s to 1980’s. And yet we have seen a wave of 64-bit marketing in the PC market in early 2000’s and an exact same story for mobiles in mid 2010’s. The core-wars died out at 8 cores. The megapixel wars died out at 20 MP and the bit-war will fizzle out at 64, because you can only push so hard with marketing, until you are so far away from actual practical considerations, that nothing makes sense anymore. It only takes a 128-bit 16 core CPU to flop or a 40 MP camera to bomb in the market for the marketing razzmatazz to stop. But till the crowd can be fed higher numbers, you have to keep up with the collective dumbing down of humanity in front of your eyes.
The next big thing is always about to happen tomorrow. Or maybe not. The hype machine is easy to get oneself immersed into. But the great technical marketing machine will continue to fire salvos after salvos of glitzy acronyms and re-hashed 30 year old products at you with little regard for your cognitive abilities. You’ll be sold 16 EB of memory on a 2GB chip, as long as the masses consume it.
