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Category Archives: That’s Janky

Hey Apple, you get NEXT week!

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Did a quick scan on Techmeme this morning for interesting CES news. Guess what I see?

Apple on Techmeme

Apple decided to announce new servers today. I call this a lame move.

Last year, Apple dominated CES without even being there with their iPhone announcements. This, in my opinion, was fair game, since CEA scheduled the conference to overlap with MacWorld.

However this year there’s no schedule conflict. And the PR guys and marketing team there know this, and they also know that by issuing virtually ANY news (Mac servers? really? do they exist?) they are going to get prominent coverage. In other words, they did this intentionally to steal any limelight from the thousands (yes THOUSANDS) of companies spending HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars at CES.

This is a lame move akin to a bully stealing some lunch money. Lame, and unnecessary. And in case anyone’s forgotten, I actually like Apple now. Well, maybe just a little bit less.

UPDATE: okay, 20 comments later, I get it, you don’t agree.  that’s fine, and some of you raise some good points.  but no need for the personal attacks, that’s lamer than lame!

HP, please, just give me the darn drivers!

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My MacBook came along with an HP Photosmart C4280 printer/scanner/copier/hot water maker. Seems like a nice device, especially for free. Setup was fine, until I had to actually install software that accompanied the printer. Here’s the stuff that got installed:

hpinstall_screenshot.png
I understand that for 90% of the customers, this is desirable. The “HP Scan Pro” helps get you up and running with a scanner. HP Photosmart Edit is a nifty little tool for photo manipulation. Ink monitors help me… well, ok, they help HP sell more ink. But I get it, and again, for the majority of users, this is the absolute correct product decision.

However, it would take NO additional work for the company to include the drivers as a standalone file on the CD, or downloadable from the Web site.  This option is not available.  Granted, life is better than on Windows where I’d be scared to uninstall anything for fear of missing DLLs and whatnot.  I have a hunch the thinking went like this:

We are HP, we make a lot of money selling ink. We should, therefore, include tools to help sell ink. How about an ink monitor?  It’ll tell the user when they need ink.

Sounds good.  Ship it.  But wait, what if the user doesn’t want the application?

Doesn’t matter. Gotta sell the ink.

It’s the same kind of logic that had early-stage Internet portals debating whether or not they should link out.  Of course they should make it easy to get ink, but the more they empower me and give me overall product satisfaction, the longer they’ll have me as a customer.  When designing your product and experience, remember that short term wins are just that: short.

Verizon customers who care about privacy, read this.

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I’ve been a Verizon customer since they were GE Wireless in the late 90s. They have the best service and network as far as I can tell. I wish there were better CDMA phones out there, and I think they price gouge out the wazoo (sp?). But my plan allows my wife and I to make calls into Canada as well as make/receive calls while there with no additional fees. Also, a lot of my friends are VZ customers, so all our calls to each other are free. Fits my lifestyle just dandy, and frankly I’m not really trying to sell ya on them.

Every now and then a brand you know/trust/like does something that one might call… hmm, what’s the word for it… appalling?

Verizon is in the midst of launching a new program that basically lets them illegally sell ads on your mobile phone. Yes, one more time, it’s illegal (well, kinda, but doesn’t that just jump out at you when I put it that way?), and it’s on your phone. Now you might think this would be part of some new service that you have to sign up for or something. It’s not. And worse, you opt-in by default, and have to call them (1-800-333-9956) to opt-out. If you are a Verizon customer, take a pause and make the call – it’s all automated and takes about 45 seconds.

To call this vexing is a bit of an understatement. I recommend reading more here on how you can contact the FCC to complain yourself. Also (thanks to gethuman.com) here’s their customer service number: 1-800-922-0204.

8 reasons why most gadgets suck

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I was testing out a few new devices this weekend, and found myself just immensely frustrated with them. At first I chalked it off to the pitiful, yet unbelievably tolerated excuse of “that’s technology”. But that’s really a pathetic answer. Gadgets should not suck as much as they do. So here’s my little list of Why Gadgets Suck:

  1. IMG_2775 alcohol tester mp3 playerThey are ill-conceived. I think the picture of the MP3 player slash breathalyzer I took at CES is the best example here. Too many people sitting in board rooms thinking up crazy ideas that apply to nobody. Also, convergence for the sake of convergence is a terrible idea. If you think consumers want keyboards in their living rooms, or more remote controls, or to carry around something that doesn’t fit in a pocket OR a backpack, you have the wrong consumer experts on your team.
  2. Too much jargon. If the average Joe can’t figure out how to add contacts using a Moto RAZR, forget putting in a network setup screen that asks them which type of wireless network security their SSID uses. If you can’t figure out how to make a setup screen have regular old English, then you’ve made your product too hard to figure out by regular people.  Think of it this way: the average person out there is uncomfortable with the concepts of “inputs and outputs” on their stereos – so if you are even minorly more sophisticated than that, you are confusing people.
  3. Unusable interfaces. A product should be usable without an instruction manual. Sending an SMS, synching MP3s or podcasts, and creating Season Passes should be as easy as making instant popcorn in the microwave. Granted there’s always room for “power user features” but the power users should be the 20%, not the 80%, of people who buy your product. If your “usability designer” (who probably has a Ph. D) shows you something and you don’t instantly understand it without explanation, it’s not good enough.
  4. Usability designers. I’m sure there are plenty of these folks who have built great products in reality. Unfortunately it sure seems like most of them just do it on paper. My biggest tip here is that a really good usability person (a) doesn’t need a degree in it and (b) can point out not just flaws, but ways to improve most products they use, be it a coffee maker or a cell phone.
  5. Lack of visionaries. Remember the old “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” phrase? In the devices world, this applies doubly. Visionaries keep products focused, whereas teams build according to “specs”. Three products built by visionaries: iPod, Slingbox, TiVo. Three products built by the rest: the Nomad Jukebox, Sony LocationFree TV, Comcast’s DVR. Need I say more?
  6. Poor timing. With a domestic market of over 50% of Internet-connected households having broadband, today would be an acceptable time to attempt to ship “Internet devices”. But when 3Com tried to ship the Audrey in the late 90s, that was poor timing. I recently played with two different gadgets that both used dialup networking to get online. ONLY. Not even a broadband option. Really?
  7. The buttons don’t match the screens. My Syntax Olevia 32″ LCD (which, by the way, is having issues and their tech support department has been excessively slow in responding to) has a very simple menuing system that’s extremely easy to navigate. However, the buttons on the remote were not laid out in a way to match the on-screen menus, and literally 1/2 the time I make a setting the button I push is the one that cancels the setting! You can certainly call this user error, but if someone as comfortable with devices as I am has a recurring issue like this, there’s probably a way the product could be made better.
  8. Shoddy workmanship. I’m really talking about poor product testing here, but I just like that phrase so much. It amazes me when I try out a product with a basic feature set, such as a media extender or a digital picture frame, and run into an actual bug within minutes of use. One product I tried had the on-screen fonts render at double their normal size during video playback and when I asked their engineers about it, they hadn’t seen it before. I was using a standard file format and wasn’t even trying to trip it up. Always review your test cases to make sure they line up with real-world scenarios, not the ones in the labs.

I could probably double this list up with other common annoyances out there, but this seems like a good spot to take a pause.

Note to Plaxo – hey, quit it!

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I started using Plaxo years ago as a mechanism to “safeguard” my contacts. In the marketing field, my network (“rolodex”) is one of my more important assets, so having an online service to help me migrate the database from computer to computer is wonderful. I think this is now my 5th or 6th laptop owned since originally signing up to Plaxo, and each migration has gone fairly smoothly. Even to my Sony Vaio SZ-VGN460N, the worst computer I have ever owned in my life.

Now there’s always been a little rivalry of sorts with LinkedIn, even though they both have distinct value propositions (Plaxo being slightly more useful in my eyes). But with rapid onslaught of Facebook in the post-collegiate world this year, it seems like everybody even tangentially related to the social networking space is either jumping on board with a Facebook App (shameless plug – rate Facebook applications here!!!) or trying to compete with a similar styled offering.

Unfortunately, from all outward appearances, Plaxo is taking the “slightly more evil” route of diong business. Plaxo seems to be going down the route of near-invasion of privacy combined with phishing-style email updates. Today I received an email entitled “What’s happening in your Pulse”:

plaxopulse_screenshot.jpg

As you can see from the screenshot, I have a few updates from some colleagues. Now first off, I never asked for said updates, which puts this into the spam category of email. Secondly, I am pretty sure nobody on the list has opted in to having Plaxo track and share this information with me, which is a privacy invasion (yes, I know that these are all publicly accessible things, but without the opt-in, it’s dubious).  Thirdly, it is absolutely ridiculous that these aren’t active links to the activity updates!  I’m supposed to go to Plaxo Pulse just to get the links I want.

In my eyes, this is a shameful betrayal of users on Plaxo’s part.  They have created a “service” designed without any consent on anyone’s behalf.  In doing so, they have most certainly lost me as an evangelist, and have opened the door for any competitor with a similar offering to rapidly snatch me up.  What a terrible business, product, and marketing decision they have made.  I wonder how many people it took to make it?

Vista selling poorly – as it should

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To be clear, I am not anti-Microsoft nor pro-Apple. I am anti-bad products, and pro-good ones.

Mark my words, Vista will go down in history as a bigger debaucle than Windows Millenium Edition – not because it’s technically worse, but because it’s 7 years later and they should have known better. Details to substantiate the title of this post are here. Microsoft has handed market opportunity to Apple on a silver platter. I was absolutely fine with XP, and still consider it my favorite OS to-date, but if you are forced with a new computer buying decision, either find a PC that can get XP support, or pick up a Mac.

Don’t forget – don’t buy the Sony Vaio SZ-460N (now, 3 months later, the Sony Vaio SZ-470N), as it is a terrible laptop with terrible support from Sony.

ps – I am sorry to my friends at Microsoft, I’m sure this is a rough time for many of you. Hopefully messages like these make their way up the food chain to enough people to make sure you don’t ship anything else like this in the future.

pps – for those of you at Microsoft who were responsible for this mess, I hope you are paying a lot of attention, and not writing off these complaints as from some minority population. You’ve made a huge mistake. My wife doesn’t like Vista on my laptop (that Vaio SZ-460N, you remember, the $2500 piece of junk that gets outperformed by my $1100 MacBook?), nor does my mother like Vista on her new Dell laptop. It’s a big stinking mess, and you should be out with brooms and mops cleaning it up, whatever it takes.

My Email vs Spam Dilemma

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For the past few years I’ve used the @livedigitally domain as my primary email.  One method of attempting to curb some spam was by using the site name as the target email address, so I have things like flickr@, sonos@, evite@, etc.  Lots of people do this as a simple way of  (1) auto-sorting incoming emails, and more importantly (2) tracking who is selling our information to mailing lists.  It works well for both needs.  I’ve done this so much that I can’t even track the number of emails like these I use…

Unfortunately, some type of spam/zombie system occasionally uses the livedigitally domain to send out thousands of spams to people.  The emails cover the typical range of mortgate rates, university diplomas, increasing the size of a body part (or two), or my personal favorite, helping men get over the painful humiliation of not pleasing her good (bad grammar is de rigeur here).  The spams come from literally hundreds of different phony addresses such as LizasalonStovall@, DarcypitchstoneCaron@, and others like that.

When the emails go out, lots of people get harassed, and I get a smaller amount of bouncebacks, typically 1500-2500 at a time.  I’ve done a bit of Googling on it, can’t find much of an answer as a method to prevent it from happening.  So what I want to do is at least stop getting all the bouncebacks.  The problem is, I can’t figure out any way to do that, other than turning off the catchall email address I use.  Which brings me back to the opening issue, as it requires my use of the catchall account.

Anyone have any recommendations here? I’m open to all sorts of things, including hunting down spammers and hurting them.  A lot.  But I doubt that’ll happen, so anything a bit more realistic for my pacifist self would be nice.

Google Blog Search helps make spam blogs earn money

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I was writing a new blog post for Bug Labs this morning, and wanted to take a quick scan for any new links to the company.  The first page of results is basically a-ok, until I sorted by date.  On this page, here is a summary of the results I saw:

RSS Watch

Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details

links for 2007-08-29

Bug Labs BUGbase & BUGmodules

Open Source: Bug Labs Website BUGbase and Module Hardware Details

Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details

Bug Labs: Products

Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details

MAKE: Blog: Bug labs – hardware, first look

Quite a Punch

Of the above list, only three are original sources of content (shown italicized). The three references to the “fleshes out..” article all stem from an Engadget post, which did not make the page.  The other repurposed story links either reference MAKE magazine or Gizmodo.

Google may have improved search and found a killer revenue model with AdSense.  But my hunch is they have singlehandedly enabled more spammers than any other company.  The part that bothers me the most is I have no doubt that they could kill off all the spam blogs from their search results (they are fairly smart people over there).  So why do they choose not to do it? My guess is it would affect their bottom line.

I guess I’m starting to feel like the Potter Stewart on this.  I don’t exactly know how to define evil, but I know it when I see it.

Banning drivetexting is costly and pointless

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Read a few articles (well, mostly reprints of a Reuters piece which seems to be sponsored by a startup – but thats the news these days, right?) this week on the topic of 89% of Americans say texting while driving should be banned, despite the fact that 57% of them admit to doing it. Sounds to me like about 50% of the people feel guilty about the fact that they text while driving, but don’t really want to change anything.

Let me do a brief disclaimer before the anonymous commenters go nuts on me: I agree that texting while driving is not just dangerous, but downright stupid.

Here’s the deal: doing any brain-intensive activity while driving is problematic. It turns out that humans simply aren’t good at having a “complex, intense conversation” (scroll down to the end) and usng the steering wheel and brake pads at the same time. This actually doesn’t surprise me when I think about it, since I’ve found I can’t really do anything at the same time as having a serious conversation (other than pace or chew my nails). As an interesting aside here, the reports similarly show that intense conversation with a passenger can be just as problematic (the important difference being, a passenger is more likely to notice traffic than the person on the other end of the call).

In my opinion (read: not based on some stat/fact), what it comes down to is the issue that most drivers refuse to change their behaviors while using a phone (or at least the ones I see). I see people cruising the 101 at 80mph, phone in hand. I see drivers on busy streets during rush hour glancing down at their phone to make a call.

I’ll now address the other issue: legislation. How on Earth do you “ban texting”? Picture being pulled over for it. In that much time, anyone “good” at texting has erased their phone’s outbox, so the only proof a cop would have is accessible by subpoenaing your cell phone records (yup, one more invasion of privacy). So logistically, every attempt to penalize would require cops to spend more time dealing with paperwork and lawyers, and less time protecting me from bad people. Wonderful.

In my opinion, the only possible solution is to ban drivers from holding cell phones, period. This would be (1) safer, and (2) enforceable (and hey, the Irish do it!). Cop sees a driver with a phone, no questions asked, $50 (or whatever) fine and a point on the record. Anything else is, for lack of a better word, silly.

Those Poor, Poor Millionaires

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Ever read an article that makes you a bit nauseated, but mostly just angry? Here’s a gem on the millionaires of Silicon Valley. Dave Winer sums this one up pretty damn well:

You might as well live somewhere else and create, the network effect of being in the valley is negative. At least it was when I left, in 2003. It seems from the Times article that it’s getting worse. It’s great to see people on the east coast getting the message. Don’t live in the shadow of this place. There’s nothing there but people trying to make money, without a good idea why.

I’m no millionaire. I have no qualms against those who have made their money, be it by luck or by skill. But I have no patience – read NONE – for people who live not only better than 99.5 percent of Americans, but better than the top 99.999% of ALL HUMANS (oh, and better than 99.99999% of all humans who have ever lived), and have the audacity to complain about anything (and in public!).

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

It’s these same people that are setting these terrible role models for recent college grads who think they can come out of school, go start some company with a friend or two, and make a few quick million. Nobody seems to want to work anymore, just instantly be rich. And then to complain about it? No thanks.

/rant

note: I’ve really edited and re-edited this piece a few dozen times, it’s gotten me that riled up. I can’t tell if this is the best version or not, but it’s probably the most to-the-point.

updated: after a few hours sleep (two red-eyes in three days, nuff said) and reading Mark’s thoughts I decided to add one more comment:  It is disappointing that the NYT article is so one-sided in its decision to portray rich SV folks in such a shallow light.  Not that what they wrote isn’t true, and not that I feel any differently.  I just have a hunch there are at least a few people reading that piece, feeling frustrated that their charitable efforts, good work ethics, family values, etc are being ignored.  Unfortunately, I think the article was all-too-easy to write and the story they tell was all-too-easy to substantiate.

Maybe that piece (and mine, Winer’s, etc) can encourage someone else to go dig in to find if the bad really does outweigh the good?  That’d be the ultimate “win” from all this.  Until that happens however, I think the rant stands.

Cable companies find new excuse to raise rates (again)

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To the best of my knowledge, deregulation of utilities and services in the USA have generally led to price gouging. The cable industry in particular raised rates over 50% in the first six years since being deregulated in 1996 (source). Even with competition from satellite and phone companies, your living room TV is about the biggest cash cow companies like Comcast, Charter, Cox, Time Warner, and others have ever seen. Sure we’re seeing money flow to new services (see my buyshifting articles for more thoughts on that topic), and Joost (and others) are enabling free, or virtually free TV services. But that’s not stopping the cable companies.

The AP reported today that cable companies intend to increase rates by $2-3/month in 2009, blaming the FCC-mandated digital transition for the hike.

Time Warner Cable Inc. spokesman Alex Dudley said the company agrees with the cable industry’s stance that the FCC cable card rule is a “tax” on consumers.

This is a bad thing. Not just because they want to increase prices, which they are entitled to do, despite being either a network of monopolies or oligopolies, depending on how you look at it. Not just because despite deregulation over 90% of Americans only have a single cable service provider option. And not just because the cable companies have seen fit to exploit their entrenched position to impose rate hikes at a rate of over three times inflation.

Chris Murray, senior counsel at Consumers Union in Washington, said it’s convenient for cable companies to blame regulators when they’ve stalled about complying with the FCC rule for years. Cable operators also have had no problem raising rates regularly for various reasons.

“They raise rates three times faster than inflation every year, for more than a decade,” he said. “Cable companies want to have absolute control. We don’t think they should have it.”

Cable companies have known about the digital transition for years. It’s been delayed time and time again. They’ve had ample opportunities to build infrastructure and save the necessary funds to make the transition painless. Instead, they wait to the 11th hour, and then attempt to pass the buck.

Here’s an easy way to do something about it.  Click here to send a simple email to your legislator on the topic.  Note that this is focused on A La Carte cable, but joining into this campaign will most certainly be the best possible first step down a very important road.  Take 5 minutes, it’s worth it.