Status-Q

Sol Trujillo, the CEO of Telstra, gave the opening talk at FiRe tonight. He made several interesting points, including a complaint about his newly-installed HDTV system and the 50-button remote that came with it, which he found completely bewildering. Somebody had installed it for him, and he knew that he had HDTV service, but when he arrived home, he couldn't work out how to get to it. Why are so many consumer devices so hard to use? And that's when you're only using one of them at once. Just wait until you get your HDTV hooked up to your DVD and your Tivo and your XBox and your PC and....

My most poignant experience of this recently is the Motorola RAZR, perhaps the most beautiful cellphone hardware ever created, combined with the worst ever software user interface.

Whenever I talk about this in public, people who know Motorola phones laugh in agreement. Now, I can't believe that everyone at Motorola is an idiot - far from it - so they must know that they've created a monstrosity - beauty on the outside, beast on the inside. I can therefore only deduce that they don't care. Why not, and how can we, the users, make manufacturers care, so that they fix it?

The problem, I think, is the disconnect between the buying process and the using process. Motorola knows that when you're in the shop, you must make your purchasing decision based on external appearances and feature checklists. If you do get the chance to try the product out you're only going to be able to give it a few minutes' testing and you're unlikely to discover, for example, that using the contacts list is like wading through molasses as soon as you load it up with a few hundred numbers. So they make it look nice on the outside and hope that you get it out of the store before you find out the limitations.

In the software world, especially on the Mac, we're moving towards 'try before you buy' downloadable demos, which give you a chance to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a product before you splash out serious amounts of money on it. And as we move further towards software in the form of web-based services, we have a greater opportunity to abandon it when it stops meeting our needs or we find something better. This, I'm sure, will lead to better products.

But what can we do about hardware?

• It would be great if stores offered some way to try the product for a longer period, beyond the typical 'returns within 14 days' arrangement. I'd happily pay 10% extra on the purchase price for the right to return a device for any reason within 6 months, for example. I suspect this model wouldn't appeal to the stores, though.
• If I had access, while in the store, to trustworthy consumer reviews and reports about the four phone models I was considering, I could make a much more informed decision based on the longer-term experiences of those who had gone before. I guess I could try this using the browser on my phone at present if it weren't so hard to use...
• If more hardware devices had an open, or at least customisable, software platform, then many user interface issues could be solved after purchase. I could download an improved operating system for my RAZR from some third party, for example. If I knew that were possible, I might even consider buying a Motorola phone in future.

In the meantime, the real problem is that of the emperor's new clothes. When stuff is confusing or doesn't work, users assume that it's because they don't understand it. I've met more than one person who thinks that when Windows pops up some message about an 'illegal operation', that they've done some operation that they shouldn't have, rather than Microsoft. As Sol said in his talk tonight, if you can't use it, don't assume it's your fault. It's much more likely to be the manufacturer's. If we can get people to start thinking on those lines, then we're taking the first steps towards getting it fixed.

MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: ""{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com."" The number in question, 7427466391, is a sequence that starts at the 101st digit of e, a constant that is the base of the natural logarithm. The select few who worked this out and made it to the right website then encountered a ""harder"" riddle. Solving it led to another web page where they were finally invited to submit their curriculum vitae.

From an an Economist article about Google.

This may be the end of an era. Silicon Graphics has filed for Chapter 11. It's been a long time since those purple SGI machines have been commonplace, even in research labs, but they made some good and innovative (if expensive) stuff in their time and the tech world will be poorer for their demise.

Got a cool projector? Perhaps a MobMov would be a good way to show it off...

Brett Arends offers some golden rules of management. For example:

4. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Except in Alaska, where you should also fear grizzly bears.

Cambridge is blossoming. And I can’t stop taking photos…

Any readers in the Cambridge area will appreciate this useful page put together by Samuel Lipoff.

Thanks, Samuel - your efforts much appreciated!

This is from John's blog, but it's well worth requoting. Note the date.

“It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith.”

U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882.

Beautiful!

I keep some of my notes in electronic form, and some on paper. This is a pain. I'd prefer to have everything electronic, but there are three situations where paper wins out:

• When I'm on a phone call, at least without a headset. I need one hand to hold the phone, and writing is much more effective than typing single-handed!
• When I'm in a meeting, if it's a small group or a one-on-one chat. I think it's most uncivilised to be typing and looking at a screen while someone's talking to you.
• When I want to draw anything. Keyboards are good for text. Mice are awful for sketching.

So I think I'm going to be using my Moleskine notebook for a while, but I'd love to be able to keep an archive of it on my laptop, even if only as a sequence of images. However, I really don't want to have to scan one page at a time. I could use an Anoto digital pen, but I'd be bound to lose the pen, and anyway it doesn't work with a Mac. It does now work with a Blackberry but only via a paid subscription service. Not for me. "Aha!", I thought recently, "I could go back to my old Filofax." It's loose-leaf and so I could take the pages out every couple of weeks and put them through the sheet feeder on my scanner. But it turns out that they're too small, and the feeder doesn't really like them. Surely there's a market here? There's no shortage of Filoxfaxes and similar 'personal organiser' systems in the world. Does anybody make a scanner that can cope with them? Or, come to that, with index cards? That would be invaluable for many academics, as well as for devotees of the Hipster PDA. If nobody else makes one, watch this space, and I'll let you know when mine goes into production.... :-)