The Tumblog of Matthew Delprado

But for a moment, today — and for the low price of $35 — I felt decades younger. Thank you, Amazon.

An early experiment involved the telephone cord.

In the postwar years, the copper used inside the cords remained scarce. Telephone company executives wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be shortened.

Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot.

From then on, phones came with shorter cords.

So why do we always Brainstorm to ideate? The standard answer is that we’re perennially time poor, but is that enough to use Brainstorms as a crutch? Are we allowed to ask someone if they’d like an idea right now or a better idea later?

Hey what’s the deal with everyone and these accessories? Enough with the adding on, already, it’s like admitting that we sold an incomplete product. Take the 55 million iPhone cases we sold this year. If you had told me back in the 80s that we’d be sitting around a table in Cupertino talking about the billion dollars we made just selling cases for cell phones, I’d probably be like, “Cell phone? Isn’t that when prisoners empty their toilets and whisper to each other through the plumbing? We’re going to make a case for that? And why the hell am I in Cupertino?