Dwight’s Fragrant Crap

Squatter setup his office in Starbucks. Image from gizmodo.com

I’m pretty sure if you owned a restaurant and saw this guy setup his PC on your table while there’s a large waiting line of people willing to shower you with cash, you’d immediately ask your waiters to kindly escort him out of your store’s premises for taking up space, abusing his privileges and draining your establishment of valuable electricity. Of course, as you see, Starbucks won’t do that.

If you haven’t heard of it, the concept of a third space is one of Starbucks’ primary marketing strategies. A third space is basically where you go to or hang-out after home (first space) or school/work (second space.) Starbucks actually wants their stores to be your home away from home; and because of this, they allow people (not sources of profit, but people) to practically turn Starbucks into their own offices and living rooms. Because of this setup, Starbucks may have lost some profit in the short-run for some people who wanted to abuse their privileges in Starbucks; but in the years that came, their general visitors became consistently and extremely happy with the whole Starbucks experience that they were willing to shell out exorbitant amounts of their hard-earned cash for a venti latte, daily!

People will try to cheat you and you’ll lose money today; but they’ll be happy that they can get one over you that they’ll bring it back tomorrow at ten times the amount through bringing friends, being a loyal customer, and spreading the word for you.

Maybe it’s time to look at our lives and see where we can actually be “cheated” for much larger returns five, ten, or twenty years from now.

The old Linksys WRT54GL—part of Rambo's arsenal

After an overload of Dota for years, our old router, a Linksys WRT54GL finally conked out for good. Of course, it was time to explore and shop for a new one; and after looking through the typical boring lines of broadband routers (TP-Link and D-Link have horrendously uninteresting products) I was quite surprised to see a new redesign for the mainstream home router of Linksys. I present to you the WRT54G2, the successor to the GL.

The new Linksys WRT54G2—sexy like Nomad's nanosuit

This sleek, black, alien warship-like design sans the antennae was completely unexpected for an extremely boring product like a router. The industrial designers who created this new model made the word, “SpeedBooster” a hell lot more believable with a design like this. The old clunky, chunky and bulky design was hardly anywhere near giving an impression of motion, efficiency and speed.

In an instant, excellent design can actually influence the way consumers buy. Especially for people like me who are not in the geek level of understanding technical specifications in products like these, the quickest and most immediate way to touch the customer is when they first lay their eyes on what’s being sold. Through design, the function of the router was actually enhanced in the perception of the consumer even if they didn’t actually tinker with anything inside.

In addition to function, the way we feel about products are also affected heavily. Well-designed products are taken care of like babies, while badly designed ones are left to gather dust in the attic. I’m pretty sure you have a friend with the new Apple Iphone who’d go berserk if the LCD gets smudged. We feel a myriad of emotions when we hold brands that we want to associate ourselves with—status, confidence, intellect and even love.

In fact, I’m actually feeling an increase in my connection’s speed after the installation. I’m not kidding. Or maybe my judgment has been clouded by the product’s design. Well, if it did, then congratulations again to the router designers.

Here you go—the best 30 seconds of 2009. It’s also gonna be released this July!
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen Trailer