Saturday 12 January 2008

Just The Watches

I visited this place first back in September and at the time it struck me how extraordinary the sheer range of watches were on sale. I took this QIK video earlier at the Silk Street Market which is kind of like MBK in Bangkok. Its depressing isn't it, how much effort goes into pumping out enough timepieces to keep our insatiable 'consumer' appetites fulfilled? Each of those watches has so many hundreds of component parts and must be at least days, weeks if not months of time from drawing board to supply side distribution and retail all around the world.


5 comments:

  1. Investigative reporter Charles Frith was last seen leaving this market pursued by irate women. Who knew that it would be his ethnography rather than his philandering that would be his downfall?

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  2. Dude... this is like that opening shot in that Burtynski (sp?) film of the chinese factory floor that goes on for like 10 minutes. wow!

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  3. Bang on Doddsy. That was pure ethnography. Funny how the ladies were yelling at me for invading their IP yet when I pointed the camera at them it was all smiles.

    Hey Sean. I thought it was more Sokurov's Russian Arc after I had done it!

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark

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  4. Look at those sideburns! Good God

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  5. competition creates spurious innovation. and this is the argument for opensource software....sure people will copy us, but we invented the product and we know it better than anyone else, we innovate better than anyone else and we know what people need better than anyone else. I paraphrase this from the new red hat CEO. http://www.redhat.com/opensourcenow/

    I think the fact that the average consumer in the UK is presented with a choice of 100 different pasta sauces is equivalent to this market. The difference being that one is a oligopoly and one is a completely competitive market.

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