Layoffs (and Other Updates)

Thirty of the 60 most valuable guitars

Calamity Lyt
Two days ago we featured Amazon's "Deal of the Day," which was Lytro's Illum 40 Megaray [sic] Light Field camera for $399, when previously the asking price had been either $1,600 or $1,300 or $600, depending on when you mean and who's saying. I just thought that for $400 it's a cool toy that some people would be interested in playing around with.

In a classic case of "nice work if you can get it," Michael Perini points out that Lytro has recently raised another $50 million based on the failure of the Lytro camera to win acceptance or gain any sort of traction. (That's like Kevin Costner ever working again after Waterworld or pretty much the arc of the fake billionaire's entire career.) Resource magazine online says that Lytro is moving out of "the digital imaging space" and taking its technologies elsewhere, for instance, possibly, virtual reality. (Or, if I may be allowed to so term it, the virtual reality space. Words are so satisfying.) And that in the business world this is called a "pivot."

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Lytro founder, executive chairman, and former CEO Ren Ng accepted a job as assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley—and Lytro announced that it will cut 20 to 50 people from its 130-person workforce. Some of them the same people, resourcemagonline implies, who worked 80 to 100 hours a week and slept under their desks. Hey, so the Silicon Valley startup myth doth not a mortal lock on riches make.

Lord of the flies
You'll recall also that TOP scooped the whole world not long ago by securing an exclusive interview with the Devil after said Prince of Darkness purchased the soul of The National Geographic. So you probably won't be too surprised that massive layoffs are occurring at the National Geographic Society too. The 180 employees who are being let go are part of the largest layoffs in the Society's 127-year-history, according to The Washington Post, which noted that "the reduction also will affect people who work for the National Geographic Channel, the most profitable part of the organization," adding, with a very innocent look in its eye, that "several people in the channel’s fact-checking department, for example, were terminated on Tuesday." Italics mine. Ooh!—Ooh!—You just got burned, Lucifer. I love that "for example," like the Post wasn't intentionally poking Satan with a stick.

But let's face it, it only stings because it's true. We all know that The Devil considers facts to be pesky, annoying things, like flies.

'If your mother says she loves you, verify'*
I came across this policy in my surfing yesterday, in an article on gizmag about the sixty most valuable guitars ever sold:

The following list of the most valuable guitars sold at auction has been compiled in the same way we have compiled our other "most valuable" lists (such as the most valuable cars, most valuable motorcycles and most valuable movie cars), in that we only count those sold at auction which can hence be verified as sold at a certain price by a reputable source (the auction house). Private sales don't count because there is no publicly available record of the transaction (and word-of-mouth tends to exaggerate a price).

Of course what sprung to my mind was photographer Peter Lik, who claimed not long ago to have sold a scenic picture of a slot canyon for a preposterous price, only he wouldn't identify the buyer or provide any hard evidence that the sale was real. I didn't buy it, myself. (Ya see what I did there. Love words!)

gizmag's policy is the best one, I think. Where records for the most valuable photograph are concerned, private sales shouldn't count.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Perini and David Lobato)

*Old saying in journalism

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Chuck Albertson: "John Kay, an economist who writes in the Financial Times, once wrote that he was going to scream every time someone at a conference he was attending referred to so-and-so company doing business in a 'space' (when what they meant was a 'market'). Then he realized that if he did that, the conference venue would sound like the interrogation cells at Gitmo. So he stifled himself."

John Camp: "I have, unfortunately, a guitar habit, and the prices of true vintage guitars in good shape can be obscene, which is why I don't have one. A vintage '59 Gibson Les Paul in good shape will set you back in the high five-figures, or more. (There are rumors of a perfect '59 Les Paul for which the dealer is asking almost a half million dollars.)

"But the curious thing, to my mind, is why anyone would pay a million bucks for a vintage electric guitar or any mass-maket vintage guitar solely because it was played by a star. You could get (or even make on your kitchen table from pre-cut parts) a guitar that would be sonically indistinguishable from Clapton's guitars, for ~$300 (make it yourself) to $2,000 (high end Fender Strat.) The only additional value is the Clapton connection, and the Baby Boom is dying out. In thirty years, your $1 million guitar is going to be worth a few thousand dollars, much to the distress of your heirs, because nobody will remember who Clapton was. In the meantime, the million you're gong to piss away on a guitar could save several thousand lives in Africa, India or the Middle East...."

Mike replies: I was surprised that Roy Rogers' guitar made the list. Probably more people remember him than remember Tom Mix, but I don't think he's a household name any more. Except in a few cases, as you note, fame is fleeting. Although I'm guessing they'll still remember the Beatles in 100 years.

Keamu: "Not defending Rupert 'The Devil' Murdoch here, but having worked on the integration of a few acquired companies, one thing comes to mind: many functions that were necessary when the acquired company was independent (accounting, order management, possibly even post-production in this case) become redundant because the buying entity has its own, often larger-scale teams serving these functions. Indeed, these 'syngergies' are often part of the justification for acquiring a company. Left unsaid is whether The Devil already has a fact checking team.... The acquired company often ends up being the one which has to make the buying company's grand plan work...."

Comments

[Michael Perini]

I thought for sure the Miata 'Barchetta' pic would have made it up before the Guitars.
The week is not over yet..... ; -)))

[Kevin Purcell]

Lytro Immerge aimed at a professional VR market with "soup to nuts" product: camera, server, editor and player. Prototyping in Q1 2016 (and everying they're showing looks like a rendering but I presume they have non-product prototypes).

https://lytro.com/immerge

A simplified overview of what it can do is here.

http://uploadvr.com/lytro-immerge-vr-light-field-video-camera/

tl;dr? Gathering light volumes means you can reconstruct HD video with vertical and horizontal parallax with a viewpoint in a 1m sphere around the camera (that you can move).

It's a rather better idea than looking to consumers to try something new for taking photos.

[Joe Holmes]

The best guitar is the one you have with you. Wait, that sounds familiar.

[Robert Roaldi]

Many years ago I read a quote from some silicone valley entrepremillionaire, "Commitments starts at 100 hours per week." I can see why a CEO wants employees who think like that. Is that a little like writing software for the exposure?

Interesting that Satan laid off staff from a profitable division too. Interesting when people buy companies only to destroy them. What am I missing? It's not like buying a chain of underperforming hotels so you can sell the real estate. Luckily these things are way above my pay grade so I don't have to worry about them.

[Stan B.]

Well, at least there's one good piece of news for workers, B&H warehouse workers have been unionized!

[adamct]

"We all know that The Devil considers facts to be pesky, annoying things, like flies."

I imagine The Devil probably considers flies to be charming, useful creatures for annoying the rest of us (which is why you dubbed him "Lord of the flies", above), so technically you should have written "We all know that The Devil considers facts to be pesky, annoying things, like humans consider flies."**

[** The Devil made me write this annoying comment.]

[Joseph Brunjes]

Amazing guitars. I was surprised to see their prices. Stradivarius still has the record for most expensive instrument:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/stradivari-viola-become-worlds-most-expensive-musical-instrument-1442159

[chris]

A new thing from Lytro https://www.lytro.com/

[Peter Nigos]

Looking at the Wikipedia list of highest priced prints, I can linger over 16 out of 18 - the photo of Billy the Kid is historical only, and Medvedev's architecture is political not artistic. Lik's black and white "Phantom" is not worth a second glance, and I am delighted you have found a way to keep it off this list.
Overall the auction process seems to be not a bad way to rate photographs !

[Bill Tyler]

Googling Peter Lik yielded this interesting article. https://news.artnet.com/market/new-york-times-exposes-peter-lik-photography-scheme-264858 If both the article and Lik's claims are true, he must be referring to some kind of dollar other than a U.S. dollar - maybe Confederate dollars?

[Thomas Paul McCann]

There was a slight whiff of scandal in the equine world in Ireland some years back. A new bloodstock auction house was breaking lots of records with prices achieved. Allegedly the sales were puff pieces by those with a financial interest in said auction house.

[Michael Bearman]

1. As John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.

2. I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the selling price he states for his print - trust me on that, because I bought a Peter Lik from one of his galleries once. I bought it because I really, really liked it. But my bank manager most definitely, did not.

[Crabby Umbo]

I wouldn't foist Murdoch off on my worst enemy (well, maybe I would), but having lived in DC and having spent time trying to get into NGS in some capacity, and talking with people there from as far back at the mid-'80s, let's just say that they had a pretty relaxed work culture there, based on funding the magazine from a wide base of "members", not subscribers. I wouldn't say people there were breaking a sweat, like a lot of other media/image related places I knew, starting back in the '80s when the world began to change for most of us.

Was there slop in the system there? You bet. As for attitude, It always seemed to me like a dining club at Princeton, and I was F. Scott peeking in the window. But it's hard to believe an organization like that wouldn't be able to control it's world.

Probably when it started getting into all the ventures like having a "channel" , it lost it's vision. It might have lasted for years with the magazine, and a few yearly self-produced specials, if it had been able back in the '70s to control its overhead and monitor its fiscal largesse. I mean, the insider stories of just throwing money at stuff on location, based on sheer laziness is appalling (someone told me once of a photographer on assignment for them, buying a car in a small foreign country, and charging it to the job, because he couldn't be bothered to check around for a "fixer" or driver, and then just leaving it at the car park at the airport; and I've heard plenty of others form the 'golden era').

Anyway, selling to Murdoch seems to be the last desperate move of people who haven't got a clue on how to get out of the hole they dug, and just want to get their money out and walk away. The crime of this is that you would never have thought a company that had a mission like NGS would have succumbed to this; lost the 'religion'.

[Gary Bill Duoir]

That list of guitars is fascinating mostly for the fact that it appears Eric Clapton has fooled quite a number of very wealthy individuals that he is an important guitar player. Of course, it could be one fanatical .01-percenter buying all of them. I just hope some of those guitars are still being, you know, played.

[Jimmy Reina]

B.B. King sang something like, "Nobody loves me like my mama, and sometimes I think she might be jivin' too".

[Dan Gorman]

In re "Calamity Lyt" and "Lord of the flies," I was just saying to my co-workers that it feels like the general thrust of public policy for the last 30 years or so has been to take away the few remaining rights and perquisites of working people, and to shift risk from shareholders to workers. This week's media reports on the skyrocketing death rates of middle-aged white people (largely by suicide & drug overdose) feel somehow like they're part of the same story. Or is life as a white 99%-er just becoming more similar to life as a member of a minority group?

The history student in me wants to believe that all trends eventually peter out, and in many cases reverse themselves. But when, Lord, when?

[Stephen Scharf]

The Lytro camera is a classic example of a technology failing to, according to writer Geoff Moore, "cross the chasm". The same thing happened with Segway. In some sense, the same thing is occurring for the Sigma Foveon sensor.

Failing to cross the chasm for any new technology or "quasi-innovation" is the principal reason so many fail to obtain market acceptance and success.

[JG]

@ John Camp:

Who's to say that a million bucks paid for a guitar isn't then used by the seller to "save several thousand lives in Africa, India or the Middle East...."?

A lot of otherwise very smart people assume money simply "disappears" once it's spent. But it doesn't disappear, it merely changes hands, so the next person who has it can spend it as well, essentially ad infinitum. This is known as the velocity of money and it means that when its effects are considered across the economy, even conspicuous consumption of Veblen goods isn't as wasteful as many people like to believe.

So go ahead, buy that guitar you want, and leave it to the seller to "save several thousand lives in Africa, India or the Middle East" with that same million dollars! You'll have played an important role by making it possible for them to do so with what was formerly your money.

;^)

[Tom Kwas]

I feel Dan Gorman's pain. I moved to Indianapolis for a job, and this cities culture (and I use the words "city" and "culture" ironically), has the knob turned up far past the red-line when it comes to the abuse of the working class and the transfer of money to the wealthy. They have no consumer protection laws here that protect people from landlords indiscriminately raising rents way over a reasonable rate every time you resign a lease; no mass transportation to speak of: no police presence to speak of; and the income of the poor and middle class is sub-standard and kept that way. It's the first place I've ever lived with no "civic ethos". No one cares that all this exists this way, even the poor have been cowed into believing they deserve it?! This is a soul-less place.

Every time they try and do something, it's too little, too late, and planned by people who've never seen it done correctly. They're trying to start a better mass transit system by running a bus from the rich suburbs of the north (people who will never get out of their cars), to the well-to-do blue collar suburbs of the south (people who will never get out of their cars), and past a bunch of colleges; and abandoning the plight of the east side poor trying to get to the northwest side warehouse jobs while not being able to afford a car. They just had a project die from non-support, where air-conditioned wi-fi buses went from the northern suburbs to downtown; they're now planning to run the first stage of the new mass trans system along the same route.

A very smart man once told me that the right wing in the U.S. has been working for 30 years to sway the white working class to vote against their economic self interests by using race and welfare baiting. Recently he told me there will be states in the U.S. where the middle-class, and working class, will be protected and states that will accelerate the process of making the working into slave labor. Workers need to move to places like California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and places in the north-east. If your state didn't embrace government solutions to the health-care system, and with it, additional medicare outlays, that's a pretty good sign of which side of this future you're going to be on!