In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’re probably aware that the much-ballyhooed i-Phone will go on sale this Friday.
What’s the big deal? Well, the thing does a heckuva lot more than just make calls. The fancified term for it is “integrated media device.” It’s a phone, PDA and i-Pod music player all wrapped up in one.
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This concept – even though pricey at $600 – has a certain appeal to those of us with teenagers who are routinely losing phones and/or i-Pods. Toting around one expensive device instead of three might reduce the number of times parents have to go through the angst of “I dropped my phone in the pool!” or “I left my i-Pod on the bus.”
Even though only a handful of people have even held this digital Swiss army knife, there’s near hysteria about it’s release. I just saw an interview on CNN with a couple of Dutch weirdos who’d have flown to the U.S. to be among the first to buy one. I can just imagine the two of them sitting in one of those very special bars in Amsterdam, smoking a lot of that stuff that’s only sold legally there and deciding that it would be cool to hop a plane to the States to get an i-Phone ... and a couple of packages of Oreos.
Anyway, the whole craze got me thinking about how our industry could do the same thing by creating multifunction tools.
I envision a GPS-enabled reel mower with various arms and attachments that will automatically mow, edge bunkers, cut cups, shoo away geese (with the Browning 12-gauge option) and taser any golfers who violate cart path rules. It could also randomly spew phrases in golf-Spanish like, “Pedro, please go pull the Cushman out of the pond on 16.”
Yes, the i-Mower could do it all ... except maybe sit in on green committee meetings for you. But, I’m sure the folks at Deere, Toro and Jake are working on that right now.
Pat Jones is president of Flagstick, LLC.