Famous last words

The title is not a conundrum. I am listening to all the albums of Supertramp, Famous last words is one of their albums. I cannot say if the album pushed for the events coming, or the events that I am planning to take gave me the idea to listen to all the Supertramp albums. You tell me. But over the next month I will do something I never expected to do and as such I will not tell you this now. It would be like the butterfingered man telling the crowd ‘Watch this’ and there he drops the mine that he was going to use to give a presentation. The results were ugly to begin with and the man did not survive it. I have nothing this weird planned, but it could lead to social suicide. You see the actor John Barrowman (most likely) and his lack of understanding nuance (as well as basic knowledge of Game of Thrones)  gave me the idea, or at least the insight that at times being intelligent will not matter, people will think what they think no matter hoe the clear facts are pressed into their faces. We can argue that Jack Dorsey and his Twitter are the second part in this act. But about that more later (decently later). 

It all came to blows (within my mind) when I was contemplating ‘famous last words’, the album, not the act. One of their songs is C’est Le Bon, a song I loved for the longest times. In the song you get:

I’m watching the movie go down
Around, about me
I’m watching the merry-go-round
Go down about me. 

You see, when is enough enough? This is a question with a larger stage attached to it. This thought came to me as I was considering the sense of a GoPro Hero 11. Yes it will have some additions, new modes and new resolutions, but it is so stepwise. It matters even more as the GoPro Hero 10 is as close as perfect as anything any competitor could hope to offer. A merry-go-round of products to appease a consumer that does not know what it wants. To appease a consumer that uses 10% of what this product offers (at best) and whilst they all want to make the video’s like GoPro releases with themselves in the starring role. The truth of the matter is that these films are made and enhanced by people with close to a decade of film school experience. It feels like it is it own version of ‘Watch this’ without any dread, a presentation hammered and perfected over 4-7 years with all the previous models in the mind-cast of the consumers. Now, let be clear GoPro did nothing wrong, they are not deceiving you and they are not making you shell out your money, you are doing that yourself. Why go for the new model when the current one is so close to perfect? Why get another version of more modes and more resolutions? The current model gives you 5.3K at 60fps and 4K up to 120fps for slow-motion. A rumoured ‘improvement’ is 480fps 1080p slo-mo capture. And that is also the problem, we still see all these rumours of a camera that is released this month, it would be shipping at present, so the rumours are optionally correct, but why is the whole range of new stuff not out in the open at present? The edge of seat marketing is over, or so I believe it is and this implies that the Hero 11 has little new to offer, and that is OK. The Hero 10 is as close to perfect as a camera this size could ever hope to be. So, why not release the Hero 11 in 2023? It is a fair enough question. Only the Hero fetish people want something like this now. I would support it to some degree if the additions were released by GoPro ahead of schedule, is it? 

The consumer merry-go-round is a dangerous toy to rely on, consumers are fickle and the stronger anti Hero YouTubers could hammer down sales quickly enough and they reach hundreds of thousands close to free of charge. As such the ‘Watch this’ marketing approach should be dead, but it is not, and it is not for all the wrong reasons. 

As I personally see it there are two waves. The “Watch This” marketing and its anti group doing the opposite and the second team has a field day when the first team does not have enough innovations to show and at present GoPro has close to none. I do not mean this negatively, over the last few years GoPro showed so much more and such a large bundle of innovative action filming that it boggles the mind, it really does. And now? Now we see all these elements melt together and in the end the consumer loses, or it merely loses its mind. I am not sure which of the two is worse.

So whilst GoPro is about to release a new flavour of the same, I am about to launch a stage that has never been done before, a stage that hopefully changes everything, but to be honest I have no idea how it plays out, but I do know that plenty of wannabe’s and power-players will not like what I am about to do. But it has become essential to change the game-play so that some are flushed into the limelight. It to some degree reflects Know who you are another song from that very same album. There we hear:

Know who you are…
There’s a world deep inside you,
Trust if you can…
There’s a friend the to guide you.

I reckon I will learn who my friends are soon enough, I know the two I have, I have known that for decades, it is the wannabe’s who will make an interesting jump, they are about to put into the limelight and they will not be able to answer any critical questions. What a lovely day that day will be.