I know this ad is from last year, but really liked how they used current events at the time to work into their ad campaign. It makes sense with so many things going on in the world these days, that companies would want to keep their brand fresh by incorporating current trends and ideas into their ad campaigns. It’s not that this type of commercial is new by any stretch, as companies such as Levis have been using this technique for decades, but it’s kind of fun to see a major brand such as Microsoft try it for once. Especially since they have historically been seen as more of a stuffed shirt crowd than buck the trend types.

I remember when I first started this site, the bottom had just dropped out of the economy, and economists everywhere had declared the United States had been in a recession for more than several months already but that most people hadn’t really realized it yet. The rest of the world announced their recession shortly thereafter, and we found ourselves in what has essentially become, our first global recession since World War II.

Today’s stock drop, I’ve read, is predominantly due to the failure of the Greek economy, and how it affect on the European nations around it has brought Europe to the verge of an economic meltdown. A failure in one euro zone country, Greece, has caused the other nations and the European Central Bank to consider extending aid to the country, or risk damaging the European economy as a whole. This in turn has affected the United States, casting doubt on how this turn of events could damage our economic continued recovery as well.

It’s interesting to see the impact of such events in modern times, as the world has changed a great deal since World War II. The economy is much more globally dependent, with the influence of corporations in Japan, the United States, France, and others maintaining a global sphere of influence. A major caveat of this state of affairs is that a failure by one link of the chain has the propensity to affect so many other links in a very short period of time, and it’s a sign of the times that we’re seeing a lot of these global communities and corporations maneuvering to find better ground as the world economy becomes larger and more complex.

Companies are spreading out, resources are being developed, and people are looking at a larger slice of the world pie than they were fifty plus years ago.

Two things happen when you move into a larger segment from a smaller one:

First, resources begin to devalue.

Take for instance cars, once made almost exclusively in America, automobiles were expensive, with high margins, and people bought them because that’s what was available. Now we have cars coming from everywhere, imports, domestic builds, even cars made in Americas, by Americans. As the world gets smaller and resources become more diverse, a failure by any one party generally becomes less obvious.

Still, in a lot of industries, this diversity just isn’t present in our current way of doing things. A failure by one country for instance doesn’t necessarily allow for a lot of redundancies of shared resources or economic interactions, and the larger economy stumbles because of this. I see this changing in the future. The European Central Banks refusal to maintain an economic bailout of Greece is one indicator that this is already happening, since all involved parties will be forced to find new and better ways of doing things for themselves.

Greece will, in fact, survive. But it won’t look the same when it’s done.

Second, failures in far off places have greater affect on our smaller economy.

For instance a war in the middle east could affect oil prices in America or Europe. An oversupply of glass for LCD screens could cause a price drop and a glut on product for the production of world wide televisions. Or a failure to find adequate supply of certain rare minerals found only in China could force corporations to look elsewhere for new methods of creating electronic devices, driving up production costs, and maybe even sales prices.

It’s an interesting conundrum to be sure and something to be aware of as countries such as China and Brazil become less focused on basic manufacturing and take a greater role in new product development and services.

The reality is that economies of scale is a big 800 pound gorilla that we don’t quite fully understand at this point, and it’s going to be a while before things get fully worked out to anybodies satisfaction. Not to say that this recession won’t end, but after this one there will be another, and another and another until most of this gets ironed out.

Hopefully we’ll learn something.

This a good video by an older gentleman from Canada who has a pretty interesting perspective on the definition of culture as well as how it has been adopted by our society. It’s a good watch, and serves to broaden ones perspective on the subject matter while bringing to light a few facts about the topic that I hadn’t really considered before. All and all, well worth the time spent.

I’ve been watching DIY network marathon all weekend and I’ve come up with a couple of new show ideas that I thought might be fun:

The first is a show where the host helps a small business such as a restaurant or bar use money saving tips to update or remodel their establishment. I’ve seen a similarly themed idea utilized on the Gordon Ramsey show Kitchen Nightmares on FOX, which takes a restaurant and attempts to turn the business around in hopes of making it profitable. Kitchen Nightmares, however, doesn’t delve into the nuts and bolts of the makeover like this show would though.

Kitchen Nightmares has featured a number of “dining room makeovers,” and the idea of taking an established business and remodeling it to bring in customers just sounds neat. I’ve also seen this concept done once on Renovation Realities, and it was a good episode to watch, so it seems like an idea that would work well in this recovering economy.

The second show is about renovating haunted houses, where the host gives the viewers a brief history of the house as well as the haunting as the owners talk about their remodeling project. Not sure if there are enough haunted houses to go around, but it sounds like a fun idea just the same.

With Sony ending production of the 3.5″ floppy disk next year, I wanted to put together this retrospective. Of specific note is that the iMac debuted commercially before the USB thumb drive did, so the release of the USB drive could be indirectly attributed to Apples design decisions; kind of neat. So without further ado:

1972- IBM makes commercially available the 8″ floppy they had invented the year before. The floppy becomes popular for the first time as a storage device.

1976-The 5.25″ floppy disk was invented by Shugart Associates as a replacement for the 8″ floppy. The format was so successful, that the 8″ quickly disappeared, with over 10 manufacturers producing floppy drives by 1978, and the 5.25″ floppy became a common fixture in personal computers and workstations around the world.

1984-Public Software Library (PsL) begins mail order distribution of shareware and freeware on floppy disk. Nelson Ford started the company when readers of his column, Public Software Library, wrote in asking for samples of many of the applications he discussed in his column. The shareware phenomenon was in full swing by the late 80’s over bulletin boards and catalog disk sales, solidifying a business model where computer users could try software before buying the full version.

1986-The 3.5″ HD was released containing a whopping 1.44 MB of memory. Though roughly having the same amount of storage space as its 5.25″ cousin, the format became an instant hit because of it’s smaller size and no doubt its similarity to the data disks used on Star Trek. The disks hard plastic housing and sliding metal guard also afforded the media more physical protection than previous disk formats, making them a favorite toss around media for college and high students in the late 80’s through the beginning of the 2000’s.

1987-The save to disk option on an Apple Macintosh computer is introduced to look like a floppy disk with the shutter on backwards.

1988-Superdisk debuts for the Apple Macintosh. The drive was touted as being able to read most of the common formats of floppy disks at the time, this included disks formatted with the Microsoft DOS operating system. The Superdisk as well as the Macintosh proved popular with schools for their versatility and ease of use.

Late 80’s, Early 90’s-Computer City starts giving away free floppy disks with every purchase.

1994-IOMEGA debuts their Zip drive, which is just a big floppy drive in disguise. Though it never caught on like it’s 3.5″ counterpart, the original 100 MB version had a short lived popularity throughout the late 90’s and into the 2000’s, eventually being replaced by USB flash drives and alternative storage products such as CDs and DVDs. The Zip drive proved especially popular for use by college students and graphics professionals, who preferred the greater storage space and the Zip drives reputation for reliability.

1997-SuperDisk is debuted by 3M as a Zip drive killer. The format itself was supposed to combine the best qualities of a floptical drive (like a Zip drive) and a 3.5″ floppy drive just as the Superdrive had done nine years earlier, allowing both formats to be used with the device. Though the device looked good on paper, in practice it never lived up to the hype, and was quietly discontinued by 2006.

1998-iMac debuts, becoming the first commercially successful computer to completely remove the floppy drive from the personal computer.

2000-IBM and Trek Technology are the first companies to commercially market the USB drive to consumers. The USB drive, also popularly called the jumb drive, flash drive, or thumb drive, eventually replaces floppy drives as the removable storage media of choice.

April 2010-Sony, the last major manufacturer of floppy disks, announces they will halt production of new disks by March 2011.