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I used to work for a man named Larry Weiss at Citibank, who did a number of magical things (including creating the best ATMs in the world in the 1980s that still surpass anything I’ve seen other banks do yet!). One concept that he talked about a lot (I have no idea if it was original) was the 5 levels of Technophilia, which he described as a pyramid but probably is better described as a bell curve and in fact a quick Live-Search turns up many such images. Doesn’t matter; it was his labels, and more important his one sentence examples (which I’ve paraphrased and updated) that I cared about: I – First Buyers Technology for its own sake. Gotta’ have it. They’re the ones on line right now buying the new iPhone II Technology Lovers “Show me any any good reason, and I’ll buy it.” These folks already have FIOS and HDTV and don’t understand why anyone thinks that is odd. III Technology Comfortable “If there is a good reason, I’ll buy it, but show me the reason. After all, there is some cost to learning, some hassle to maintaining, but if you overcome my hesitation then I’m happy to buy.” These folks are buying DVRs now and considering a GPS for their car. IV. Technology Resistant “I don’t like it, I don’t want it, but if you can really convince me that I have to have it, I’ll complain a lot, but I’ll buy it.” This is my mom. Has a VCR, won’t take a DVD player as a present. V. Go Ahead, Pull The Trigger, I’m Not Using It. Forget it, they don’t even have answering machines. So? I’ve found these quintiles to be totally arbitrary and inconsistent, and yet a guiding principle for the past 20+ years. The fact is, I’m a Quintile I, my wife is a Quintile III and most folks fit pretty easily into one of these descriptions. Here’s how I know I’m a Quintile I. I leave my GPS on all the time, even when I know just where I’m going. Why? Because I am totally gassed by what it is. The fact that this tiny little box is sitting in my car is just too fantastic. Think for a moment about how it works (which I only know to a first approximation: Satellites in the Global Navigation Satellite System continually transmits messages to the tiny box in my car. Each of these messages encodes the time the message was sent, as well as the satellite’s precise orbit and the almanac of the orbits of all the other satellites. Given signals from four satellites, that tiny box not only computes its position in 3 dimensional space, but also the...
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