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Re: [tlug] Amazon Kindle



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


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