Tuesday March 19, 2024

Limits of Planning

Disney, hotel operators and everyone connected to its amusement parks thought the new Star Wars attraction would be a smash hit.  So far, they are wrong.  The 14-acre section of Disneyland has been an early flop.  What happened?  And, if Disney, the entertainment giant, can’t get planning right, who else can do better?  Disney, after […]

Testing Limits

Hong Kong’s protesters are testing the limits of China’s patience.  They might yet find themselves in a police state without any freedoms they are striking for.  It would be terrible PR for Beijing to order troops into the city, but it might not stop them.  One can’t forget Tienanmen Square where activists were mowed down by […]

Limits

PR and publicity can go only so far.  At some point recipients of messages accept or ignore them.  One can persuade but not compel. Consider this example.  Railroad authorities have repeated ad nauseum a warning to respect gates at crossings and to never, never go around them when they are down.  Yet, a driver did.  […]

Limits Of Publicity

Bump stocks, devices that turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, gained a horrid name in the Las Vegas massacre a year ago.  There is no excuse for them and they should have been federally banned.  A year later, they are still being sold in 40 states and there doesn’t appear to be a movement to […]

The Limits of PR

After 50 years and billions spent to wean Americans from tobacco, a recent study shows that 1 in 4 citizens still use some form of the plant.  Cigarette smoking has declined but the use of e-cigarettes has skyrocketed.  This shows the limits of PR.  People can be persuaded to go only so far before they […]

Limits Of Tolerance

Airlines are cramming seats on planes through shrinking space and seats themselves.  Passengers are becoming surly as a result.  The airlines’ excuse is that the public wants low fares and to keep them low, they have to pack more people into each plane.  It’s public relations.  Not really.  It’s cash flow optimization. One can appreciate […]

The Limits Of Spin

Authorities are investigating Samsung for paying students to write negative reviews about rival phones from HTC.  Samsung is not the only company that has done this.  The difference is that it got caught.  Such underhanded spin tactics are part of the landscape of modern communications.   It is easier now to be exposed for pursuing […]

The Limits To Social Media

This is an amusing tale from an individual at the heart of modern technology.  After a quip on Twitter that went viral, Vic Gundotra, Senior VP of Engineering at Google, was asked to stop using the medium by his boss, CEO Larry Page.  There was nothing wrong with the witticism.  In fact, it was brilliant […]

Limits of Persuasion

Here is an example of the limits of persuasion.  The country won’t get moving again until the housing market stabilizes and construction returns, but the housing market isn’t stabilizing — not yet, anyway.  That means millions of homeowners are still underwater and millions more of home buyers are waiting rather than buying.  What is it […]

Limits of PR

I wrote about the end of IPv4 and the need to move to IPv6 more than two years ago, and engineers have been predicting the need to make the move for 20 years.  Now it is here.  There are no IPv4 addresses available in reserve.  Meanwhile, the number of internet devices — computers, phones, tablets, etc. […]