Quote Originally Posted by E-Stat
Just curious, how many hours a month do you view movies and shows on the micro screen? rw
If you include the time we spend video conferencing, probably 2-3 hours per day, and on some days much more. We do a considerable amount of text-to-speech and back processing, and we also pod/videocast content; most of this is higher quality than your typical YouTube fare, so we can synch it up to TVs, projectors, and the other computers screens in our company and in our homes (I consciously don't bring my work home, but that's me). Anyhow, we certainly use video more than most, so I really don't want to use myself as an example nor do I want to presuppose that this is the norm. On the other hand I work with many people who do the same: scientists, businessmen, academics, engineers, etc. and so I won't completely negate it's applicability, either. Perhaps this is not as mainstream yet, but for us it's very much part of our daily work, and we tend to agree that this is where the future is headed.

I also want to emphasize that their perspective is entirely too US-centric and does not at all apply to a more world-wide perspective. It's actually ironic that when I caught them making ridiculous claims about techies in general, and I then mentioned that my contacts in Japan did not at all agree with their model, they quickly backtracked with the fantasy that somehow Japanese techies should be considered separately. This ongoing segmentation and compartementalization in their debating style is typical, but has a deeper basis, I think.

When needed, they confuse and mix up references from different economic / market sectors, geographic regions, cultures, and technological fields to prove a point that just happens to coincide with a self-serving goal. After all, they both work in the industry that they are reporting on and cannot see the world outside of it. Granted, I work with digital video quite a bit and have for years, but I would hope that I am not letting that comprise my entire perspective. For them, anything too gray, vague, unmeasurable, is immediately dismissed as not fitting the black & white mold. But in my field, computers, it is is actually by looking at these less tangible areas that we find answers that often give us the competitive edge over our competitors. I suppose our field lives in the gray and the uncertain, and this is rather unsettling for them and is likely the source for so much resentment and criticism.

Perhaps being or pointing out what is the biggest, the best, the largest, or the most popular isn't everything we should be paying attention to. And that's been my point all along.