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Cell Phone Sommeliers on the Way?
Japan is reportedly toying with the idea of educating and licensing "sommeliers" to help potential buyers wade through the vast sea of options available for a new cellphone purchase. "Japan's communication ministry is looking to the private sector to manage the potential nightmare exam and certification process, with children's online safety highlighted as an important part of the plan. Mobile sommelier sounds like a pretty sweet title, we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
Where's the article for this story?
If you need a professional to pick out the features you need on a phone, chances are you don't need all those features in the first place. If you really needed them, you'd know enough to ask for them in the first place. These guys are just overblown salesmen trying to talk you into something you don't need. As for me, all I ask out of a phone is that it gives me a dial tone when I pick up the receiver.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here I am, thinking that someone in Japan had come up with a cellphone that could recommend wine pairings.
I don't remember a cell phone that actually produced a dial tone; my memory is fuzzy but perhaps some of the older Motorola "brick" analog phones did.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
till a phone goes back to being just a phone? seems to me that if you need someone's help choosing cell phone features, then there are way too many features available.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
What the heck is a "sommelier"?
Though the original stock comes from Scandinavia the terroir of this particular batch came from Shanghai. You can smell the rich, earthy aroma of circuits left on the assembly line until they were perfectly ripe. Taste high-impact plastic exterior, make sure you taste it on the back of your tongue. As you can tell it's quite a balanced flavor. Quite correct sir, vintage 2002. It takes time to bring a phone to that level of complexity.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
Now that you have mentioned a consumer demand for it, it will be new cell phone feature soon!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I took French in high school, but I've always been confused by the term "Sommelier". I remember that "Sommeil" means "sleep", as in J'ai sommeil, maman! ("I'm sleepy, mama!"). So a "sommelier", it would seem, would be an expert in helping you go to sleep.
Of course, in the US, there would be no difference. Any discussion of cellphone features would be so boring, thanks to our provider-mandated crippled (but free) hardware, that it would put the most tragic insomniac into a deep slumber. "CallerTunes lets you subject inbound callers to your poor musical tastes!" "ZZZZzzzzzzzz"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
... the voice plans themselves can be confusing. If you just had a fixed rate per minute, or even a number of included minutes plus a fixed rate per minute thereafter, it wouldn't be that bad, but there are so many kinds of minutes: peak, off-peak, evening (and when does "evening" start?), weekend, same carrier, same account, "friends/family", rollover, etc.
That's in the U.S. I've never looked at a Japanese cell plan. For all I know, they might be even more complicated
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
It's far more likely that this will just result in more used car salesmen-types in the cell phone sales market. The sommelier analogy is almost offensive to real sommeliers. Certified or not. You are not going to get people who truly understand the intricacies of cell phone technology, features, software, services, plans to take a retail sales job. It just doesn't work that way. Sommeliers are a respected profession that requires years of apprenticeship. It is about culture and tradition.
Cell phones have always been about fads and over-hyped widgets. It's all about pushing out the current model and signing people up as fast as possible. The market is too cutthroat to allow for anything else. For this same reason, sommeliers don't stand around selling wine at your local grocery store.
I walked into a supposedly high-end cell phone store a few months back. They had towering signs that said things like "Ask our experts anything! They will help you figure everything out!". I walked up to one of the reps who wore a big badge saying "I'm a cell phone expert, ask me anything!". I asked a simple question: "Which devices do you have that run Symbian OS?". I received a blank stare and "What's a simmian?" in response. Followed by "We have lots of phones with cameras and MP3 players. Do you want one of those?"
I'm not holding my breath that this program will make any difference.
I had to look it up:
"sommelier
A restaurant employee who orders and maintains the wines sold in the restaurant and usually has extensive knowledge about wine and food pairings."
Why don't they use something that is related, in English, or at least a bit more understandable, do the Japanese speak French? Probably some English lit major justifying his/her degree/salary. These are probably the same people who make up all that management speak, like instead of chart or table they use 'matrix'
Any of these would have been much more understandable: specialist, expert, buff, genius, nerd, advocate, certified authority, professional.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The reason that individuals can offer credentialed expertise in wine as a restaurant service is because they can base it on a body of knowledge which goes back some 9000 years. Yes, wines are complex, tasting is subjective. To that extent, the analogy holds. But unlike the cell phone market, the characteristics of wine, and the particular requirements of fine wine, are stable and well understood. Therefore, both the somellier and the patron gain an enduring advantage through cultivating their wine expertise over time, and the dialogue between them can be efficient and meaningful.
Cell phone capabilities and services, on the other hand, are so extremely volatile that there can be no ground for consensus. It's still possible to go through the exercise of gathering requirements and outlining solutions, an activity which has already been given the name System Analysis. Let's call it what it is, because that tells us what we can reasonably expect from it.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I had issues looking for a cell phone with at least as long of talk time as what I currently have, specifically _without_ a camera, due to security requirements with places I occasionally travel to. Here are a couple that I found. (note -- I got different results with them, so they might not all know about all currently available phones):
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
What the fu-
What is this?
WHAT LANGUAGE IS THIS?
While the wine snobs might think this is all great, it is just wankery that does not help the average Joe enjoy their wine. In fact it often detracts from Joe's enjoyment because he's stressing as to whether that's blackberry or raspberry he's tasting.
Doing the same for phones will not help Joe public.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Am I missing something here, or is this just copied directly from Engadget? You'd think they could at least provide the link to the original story...
http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/21/japan-toying-with-idea-of-cellphone-sommeliers/
EOF
I know of a lot of upper-middle class (and up) people who want a nice phone (TV, stereo, car, toaster, etc) but have no idea what the features are or what they want. I'm talking about doctors, lawyers, successful business owners, politicians, etc. They want a nice, new, shiny phone, but have no idea what bluetooth is, or what SMS means, or why they should care that a certain phone is a quad-band. These are the the same sorts of people that pay thousands of dollars to have someone set up their Home Theater and program $1,500 touch-screen with icons for 'FOX', 'NBC', etc, on it. They want the best, they're not afraid to pay through the nose, but they want it to 'just work'. I would imagine that this class of people would gladly pay for a cell-phone 'sommelier'. Someone of who understands the difference between, say, how eMail works on a Blackberry vs. how it works on an iPhone and could set it up for them. Yes, yes, RTFM, but why do that if you can pay someone else to do it for them? I would imagine that in larger cities, one could probably earn a nice living if they were in the right 'circle'.
What we need is not used-car salesmen with delusions of grandeur. What we need is better truth-in-advertising regulation. Like this:
We have to remember a couple things:
1. Japan is very far ahead of us as far as cell-phone technology is concerned. They've had fully-functional video phones for at least a year or two, for example (as in, you can communicate via real-time video).
2. Japanese retail is much more about service than most US retail. We just want to get in and get the product, but the Japanese are all about greeting you at the door, pleasant smiles, and all of that.
Therefore, a sommelier isn't all that strange in the context of Japanese retail. It's strange to Americans, but to the Japanese, it must make sense, otherwise they wouldn't bother.
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I have Verizon. My options are crappy phone or less-crappy phone. In either case, I get a really crappy OS/UI.
I think more likely they're going to be like trained line wine stewards: trying to upsell customers to get them to to spend more than they would normally.
"Ah, I see sir has chosen the black briefcase, may I recommend the Nokia 7745 to go with that."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We don't even need one monopolistic company; we just need one set of standards. For example, how hard is it to tell if some brand of cereal is more nutritious than another? It's easy, 'cause we have a standard way of describing it, right on the side of the box.
In this case, forcing the various companies to adopt one standard is HELPFUL to the oh-so-holy Free Market. It does make things easier for us, the consumer (you all remember the consumers, the very people the Free Market is suppose to be all about?).
If peak, off-peak, evening, weekend, etc. were well-defined terms, so that every phone company had to use them the same way, there'd be no problem comparing them. The cell phone sales part of the industry is just crying out for a little more regulation, to help the Free Market get closer to nirvana.
Where I am from, we call them "sales staff." Imagine: the staff on the sales floor actually helping you buy instead of just regurgitating the price sticker or sending you to the right aisle.
Do they speak English in WHAT motherfucker?
1. No link to the article 2. No explanation of the term "sommelier" 3. Obscure reference to wine snobbery 4. Wine-flavour metaphor that the author no doubt thought was awfully clever but is actually trite
It always pays to bring an expert along when you are an unskilled customer. If I'm buying a used car not backed by a factory warranty, I'm going to have my mechanic look the thing over first. If I'm buying a new car, I'm going to talk to people who know cars and see what they like, I'll talk to people who own the model and see if they have complaints. I like computer stuff but there's no way I can keep up with all of the hardware advances. If I were building a desktop, I'd go directly to the geek boards and find out if they have a recommended build for the month or else ask the question myself. If we're talking prebuilts, I'm usually the person people I know ask and there I am again, trying to find out which manufacturer is turning out the stinkers this month.
Ideally, the sales rep at the store should be doing this for the customer. Since retailers put a premium on fucking the customer out of as much money as possible, the real title of the story should be "Customers are now going to have to pay people to do what a sales rep is supposed to get a commission for." Circuit City had the brilliant idea of firing everyone on the sales floor with an IQ above room temperature; they should call up CompUSELESS and see how boneheaded strategies like that worked out for 'em.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I guess, that most of them go well with the fish.
The guy at Best Buy is going to get a haircut, and a suit.
He will clench his teeth together as he tells you what phone you need.
Sounds great.
"we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
/.
The writer of that schpiel is
A) Gay
B) Trying too hard to impress
C) Egomaniac
D) Kleptomaniac
New words humble me.
-FL
isn't this exactly what CarToys does already?
Part of the problem with the world's economy these days (at least in fully developed countries) is that there are far too many people making money 'consulting'; IE not producing anything.
Sure, there is a need for SOME consultants, but at some point, something has to be manufactured, put to market and sold for the economy to carry on.
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It's 'merican!
Damn furiners.
I know those specialists. Like the "specialists" in shops like BicCamera, Kojima or Yodobashi - you name it. Please spare me.
Ask them anything (in Japanese of course) beyond "could you please tell me what the price tag on this product says?", and they'll start reading the brochure for the product aloud or go and ask a guy who will then call the maker's hotline and have you wait for 10 minutes. Hopeless. There's no such thing as an informed opinion or critical analysis of the products weak points with any kind of salesmen in tech in Japan. Every time I actually did hear anything critical about a product it was mostly because they were pushing a different brand in that store. It's so obvious.
They will tell you about some new features which are funny for the first 20 minutes. That's your sommelier. They shouldn't call them sommeliers, that's an insult for the whole trade.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
we are not afflicted with confusing choices among an abundance of features and a range of competing prices here in the US. you go to Verizon or you go to ATT and they say "bend over and show me your wallet" Then they say "here is your phone, have a nice day"
...they routinely say their bottom-of-the-line phones are really worth about $300 and you have to sign up for 2 years of their spotty service with a bunch of hidden surcharges to to get the crappy phone for $50. The crappy phones never have over a 1-year guarantee. Mine always quit working about 16 or 18 months into the contract. so before the 2 years is up you are replacing the #&%^^# phone and...to get the discount on the inflated price...extending your service contract another 2 years. Its the communications equivalent of living like a poor coal miner who does not own the house he lives in and owes two years pay to the company store.
Thats all there is to it here in the US so who needs advice? Just bend over.
seriously
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
And there's a reason that every mall in America now has a cell-phone store or kiosk every 100 feet.
BTW, this is one of those "McJobs" that dominate the future prospects of a post-outsourced world.
The free market must do one thing: benefit the consumers, in general. If things are just becoming tougher on the consumers, something's wrong. A perfectly free market requires perfect information about all the choices available, so that consumers can make their most informed choice. Confusion doesn't help with that. In fact, it's a way to remove some of the "free" from the market.