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Oh, more must-read today! In which Joel Johnson discusses Wired editor Chris Anderson's thoughts on "atoms are the new bits." (I know, wot?) "To marvel that you can convince a Chinese company to make a small batch of electronics for you? In many cases, that's when conditions are worst. Try to get something that is more than a greenboard made and you're back to standard manufacturing issues like making dies for stamping parts. Why? Because real 3D printers don't exist yet."
Thanks, because that article was irritating and I needed a rebuttal I could read along and go "yeah" to.
Also – I subscribe (it was cheap!), and that magazine is scaaaaary thin these days. Like no heft to it at all. Like it felt weird when I got it out of the mailbox – remember when that thing was like a tome of advertising?
I think a big reason why Wired harbors such an exaggerated optimism, and why they they overuse the word "revolution" so much is because they come out of a culture that centers around pitching ideas to VC's and investors. There is an attitude to an optimistic pitch that a lot of people in the tech industry adopt, because it's important for them to cast themselves in the narrative of the companies they admire, many of which were made whole by people buying into the laughably bombastic statements of it's founders.
I moved to the bay area last year and it seems like this attitude is contagious, and a lot of folks can never, ever turn it off.
WELL SAID (excepting the fact that possessive "its" has NO apostrophe.) Damn, if I had a nickel for every time one of those megalomaniacal Sand Hill Road clowns drove me wild with rage over this very thing, back in the day.
I come for the articles, I stay for the proofreading.
"But the real revolution is that it only costs a few bucks to ship a part from Shenzen to Sunnyvale. You want to talk revolution? Thank FedEx."
I think this isn't recognized enough. And FedEx is my shipping option of last resort.