Crazy Or Feisty?

It’s internship time! Given that the UBC Commerce Career Centre has a grand total of seven jobs listed for the Lower Mainland, I’m taking matters into my own hands these days. But where to work?

On an impulse, I remembered my old friend Mark Hanson, VP of Sony VAIO Marketing. Given the amount of work I’ve done to solve Sony laptop problems for Sony customers, I figured I’d be a shoo-in for an internship position there. After all, I’d pretty much been working for them for over the past year anyway, right?

I fired off the following quick email to Mark Hanson last night:

Hey Mark,

Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m willing to bet you remember this website:

    www.brendonwilson.com/ideas/sony/getangry.shtml

I’m still getting email on a weekly basis regarding the Sony thermal shutdown problem, not just on old Sony models but on new ones as well. That got me thinking:

I should work for Sony.

What I’m going to suggest might be classified as either ballsy or just downright crazy, but I think it makes sense: I’m currently in the middle of my MBA at the University of British Columbia, and it’s coming around to internship time (June – August). I’m already helping Sony to solve its customers’ problems when Sony’s own customer service seems incapable of recognizing and addressing customer issues, or addressing them in anything but the most ham-fisted manner (ie: replacing whole motherboards for $800).

The failure of their laptops is costing people more than money or lost work: it’s costing Sony the loss of a lot of street credibility. I talk to people and see just how disappointed they are with their laptops, especially given that they bought a Sony specifically because of the dependability they’d come to expect from Sony. Now they’re swearing they’ll never buy a Sony again. Not just a Sony laptop. Any Sony product.

So, here’s what I propose: you hire me for my MBA internship and I track down your customer service and your quality assurance issues.

You already know my attributes: I’m smart. I’m technologically savvy. I’m an evangelist. I take service seriously. And I get the job done. It’s all there on the resume on my web site.

I look forward to hearing from you soon,

Brendon

I just can’t decide: would this be considered “crazy” or “feisty”?

Atomic Shredder

I’ve been trying to think a lot about the Next Big Thing, the kind of technology that will usher in widespread change making lives better around the world. Yeah, I don’t like to think small. The technology that most people think will change the world, nanotechnology, is probably decades away; however, I’d like to propose a more important milestone we should strive for before we attempt to build physical products on an atomic scale.

In his classic lecture of December 1959, titled “There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom”, Richard Feynman proposed creating smaller manipulators which in turn would be used to build even smaller manipulators, eventually enabling atomic-scale manipulation . It’s a neat idea, but one that has yet to come to fruition. What I wonder is if what we really need is the capability to assemble on an atomic scale; it would seem a more practical goal to be able to disassemble materials, if not on an atomic scale, then at least a near-atomic scale.

In the case of nanotechnology, I wonder how we will be able to assemble solid materials at an atomic scale without having repulsive forces blow apart a work in progress before reaching a stable crystalline state. Historically, it’s always been easier to destroy that to create, so why not use that to our advantage? Given humanity’s appetite for throwing tons of away perfectly good resources into landfills every day, a far more useful technology would be some kind of atomic shredder. Such a device would be capable of breaking down large items, such as consumer electronics, into piles of relatively homogeneous and pure raw materials. Given the failure of recycling to reclaim significant amounts of resources due to the difficulty of easily separating constituent components, this would be a perfect solution.

If only we had such a technology we would be in the midst of a new resource Gold Rush, except this time the prospectors wouldn’t be looking for gold. They’d be looking for garbage.