Lost Worlds

The Day TV Died

Performative TV. It does what it says on the tin.

Make $$$ With Your Pen

Macworld reports that:

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in a widely quoted report that “we believe the iPhone is likely to be largely cannibalistic to iPod sales, rather than entirely incremental to Apple, limiting upside.”

How did Toni Sacconaghi learn to write like that? And why? I think what it means is: "People won't buy a new iPhone as well as a new iPod. They'll buy an iPhone instead. So Apple won't make as much money as they think they will."

The odd thing is, it's really hard to write that badly. To write that badly, you have to learn to think that badly, too: pompous, dehumanised and convoluted. Who is it meant to persuade? Who is it meant to impress? Who, at the cheque-signing end of the money-chain, is genuinely impressed by it? And why? Or are they all bullshitting each other with an inept and teeth-stripping rhetorical schema which none of them believe in really?

And that's why I'd have failed in business. I don't mind, as an astute businessman friend once said, that "most of business consists of sitting in expensive restaurants over expensive breakfasts while people tell you lies". Lies are fine. It's the language they're couched in which I can't take.