cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp
Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry:
BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?”
That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford’s Locus Bayou office over the past two years, had the code name Old Yeller. That’s the Arkansas old time tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the skunk hunting trails and learn the world anew.
lifted and parodized from O’Reilley Radar and done so only in fun and respect from that Web 2.0 coiner
Ford Waves are available only by a secret invite down to the shed from your cousin Earl or his brother Earl.
Yes, I am mocking Google Wave, but I think Chris Lott went and Ruimated my sentiments exactly in his post today Google Wave Hype or Hope?
I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It’s probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools””including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don’t buy, Google’s positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it’s simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I’ve yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost.
[Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like “how can we use Google Wave in education?” It’s not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very “geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy” that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?]
Like Chris, I am trying to do some wave attempts but am not feeling any thing close to shine.
But then again, I lack the shrewd investigate prowess of our leading spotlight of technology
and I cant wait to be proven wrong. But you should see how fast a ride that Ford Wave really is!
