Asking REAL questions - the company line and journalist sycophancy

As with most of the creative technology addicts in the world, I have spent the past week pouring over the daily news and announcements from NAB.

As always it’s a mixed bag - the exciting mingled with the banal, the profound intermingled with the paltry. But one announcement in particular caught my eye and caused me to ponder whether developers work in a veil of ignorance, oblivious to what other developers are doing? Or whether they feel compelled to hawk their wares in a way that is intended to hoodwink potential customers into thinking their product is totally unique. It seems the overt intent in recent years is not just to convince users that their product is ‘better’ but that it is in fact Unique and ‘World First’ and the ‘only one of its kind’.

There was the infamous interview Charlie White conducted with head honchos from Apple back when the G5 was first released. In that interview the Apple folks spruked the G5 to Charlie and DMN readers as “the worlds first 64bit desktop”. Charlie, well informed journalist that he is, pointed out to the Apple guys that Boxx Technologies had been shipping an AMD64 cpu system for several months prior to the G5s release. The response from the Apple guys was a stammer and stutter. If I may be indulged to quote from the interview article.
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Rubinstein: (Jon Rubinstein - Senior Vice President of Apple Hardware Engineering) On the hardware side of things, our introduction of the world’s fastest personal computer — the first 64-bit desktop machine — it’s just an amazing machine, jointly developed between IBM and Apple, using IBM’s latest technologies, and using all the engineering prowess from both companies to make this thing happen.

Charlie White: Now, you’re saying it’s the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn’t there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.

Rubinstein: Uh…

Akrout: (Chekib Akrout - Microelectronics Division) It’s not a desktop.

Charlie White: That’s a desktop unit.

Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now. These… From a full desktop per se, this is the first one. I don’t know how you really distinguish the other one as a desktop.

Charlie White: Well, it’s a dual processor desktop machine, just like that one.

Akrout: It’s not 64, then.

Charlie White: Yes, it’s a 64-bit machine with two Opteron chips in it. It started shipping June 4th.

Akrout: That we’ll double check, but in my mind, it wasn’t.

You can read the full interview here
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Now this prompts the question; were Apple totally ignorant of the fact that AMD had not only been developing a 64bit cpu system but that they had been first in the market with it? Or was the imperative from Apple to declare the G5 a ‘world first’ at all costs, even when it was a lie and fallacy?

As Homer would say “a little from column A and a little from column B”

It was in this vein, though not quite as arrogantly ignorant, that I watched Adobe demonstrate their new software tool ‘Story’ at NAB.

The suitably verbose video presentation showed off a online enabled software tool for writing, annotating breaking down screenplays and for embedding the script itself as the hub of a pre and post workflow process. The way Adobe spoke about the product you’d think it was an earth-shattering announcement of un-precedented and never before seen ‘newness’. And yet there is truly nothing really new about Adobe Story and in what we’ve seen so far it delivers virtually nothing that isn’t already extant in the market in some way.

The key strengths of Story are touted as its online collaboration and its ability to embed and annotate a script with metadata, images, videos and sounds. Need I mention CELTX…? A tool which arguably has the most comprehensive online script and production collaboration tools on the market and supports all kinds of tagging, markup, rich media and report breakdowns? (not to mention being open source, cross platform and the base application is free)

Now its not that I’m not pleased that Adobe is continuing to take an holistic approach to media production - that’s good for everyone. Indeed the opportunities Adobe is in a position to exploit through integration with their other post-production tools have enormous potential. But please don’t try and sell me crap wrapped in pretty bow and attempt to convince me its brand new, never before seen, crap.

But, that said, I reserve my true ire for the Journalists who cover such releases. Rather than coming to such an interview or press release with a broad knowledge of the industry and a critical investigative demeanor, far too many such Journalists present little more than blithe sycophancy. Displaying starry eyed ignorance of wonder more fitted to a kid in a toy shop; oohing and aahhing over every tidbit as if it were the best thing since sliced bread.

I really shouldn’t be surprised when the corporations and developers continue to piss on our legs and tell us its raining because they are simply responding to the vacuous uncritical state of most tech jorunalism reporting their products.

When the Adobe representative started rabbiting on about ‘online script collaboration’ and ‘rich media’ the very first questions should have been “so how does Story differ from Celtx?”, “how does Story’s rich media markup compare with Final Draft?” “How does Story’s script editing offer in comparison to Movie Magic?” What workflow management does Story offer over Gridiron Flow?”. Certainly there would be answers, possibly good and compelling answers, to these questions. But where such critical and probing questions asked…?

No…

It seems we may pose to the journalists the same question I earlier posed to the developers - are they blindly ignorant of the current market products? Or are they simply sticking to the company line of “declare newness at all times”…?

What I desperately want to see is more Charlie White’s - more journos asking real questions…..