MacMillan; Subsidising the old with the new since 2010

I spent the earliest part of my life in a pastoral village with a single road and a population well below a hundred. Originally it was formed in the early 1880s when the railway was constructed. My father sometimes talks of the days when rail travel across the country was par for the course with what sounds to my ears something like a mix between nostalgia and mourning.

I never really understood why that is, the railroads were simply superceded by more efficient forms of passenger transporation which made the idea of supporting a commuter transport network to such a backwater as Ben Bullen completely irrational. There's still an urban rail network supporting the far more densely populated Sydney basin, however no operating commuter stations like Ben Bullen exist any longer, despite the nostalgia of older generations.

People tend to have difficulty making a full critical analysis of the thing that they value in a given experience, a long trip on a train to an exciting, distant destination may have a propensity to infuse in a person some of the emotion that came with the journey onto the form of transportation itself, despite the fact that under examination, the two are very clearly separate.

Even (especially?) businesspeople have a habit of misunderstanding the nature of the market that they find themselves in, illustrated well by the decline of the commuter rail network industry serving small ports of call like Ben Bullen. People didn't want to catch trains, they wanted to get somewhere. The more immersed a person is in the implementation and details of their craft, the easier it is to get distracted or confused about the utility of what they're providing.

It takes a special kind of self awareness to step back and disassemble the entire intricate edifice, critically analysing as one proceeds. The kinds of companies that can do this today we label disruptors, and the kinds of companies that can't are scared to death of them. Like the railway corporations of the previous generation who thought they were selling train fares when they were really selling transportation, today's big publishers think they're selling sheafs of bound paper containing the printed word when they're really selling media.

"I'm not the bad guy, you're the bad guy, so ner!"

It doesn't make good press to be seen as a Luddite standing in the way of progress, so rather than outright opposing the inevitable advance of technology, those whose best interests have been served by hindering it prefer to work sideways. They cast themselves as the knight errant valiantly stemming the tide of the money grubbing "other" so that they might support the human capital invested so heavily in their little version of the status quo. It is not relevant whether they are conscious of this and it is a cynical tactic or if they truly believe it. From a strategic perspective; the end result is the same.

Shall we iterate the battles, and the epitaphs?

Blacksmiths;
Trade lobbyists for farriers petitioned in support of laws mandating separate roads for horse drawn vehicles and automobiles, attempting to stifle the burgeoning auto industry and squeeze a little more gold out of their dying trade. In the meantime other parts of the trade adapted and started making tires.

Music & Movie Industry;
Lawsuits, price fixing, payola, lobbying, red scare style propaganda pushing on the perils of copyright infringement, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world by a dispruptor, you get the idea.

News Industry;
A little closer to the mark, instead of proceeding through excessively litigious channels, rattling the sabre constantly about walling off their precious content whilst actually doing very little. It might be a tiny little bit less obvious what they were doing if they just actually said "Make us an offer, please, we're lost.". Disruptor in question completely misses the point and tells them all about robots.txt, hilarity ensues.

Book Industry;
Seeking to subsidise the printing press with the commercial advantage of eBook publication by not acknowledging the enormous economic disparity between the two distribution methods in their pricing. Someone could potentially sue me if I just out and out call it price fixing and/or tying, so I won't do that.

Conclusion

Amazon is not my favourite company, they are somewhat ham-fisted, as both the MacMillan, and the previous episode shows, but at the end of the day, they do tend to figure out the right path or the closest thing that is available to them given a paucity of options from the real culprit in this particular instance.

The one silver lining to the entire affair is that the illustrious alumni discussed above looks to be exactly the kind of place for a company like MacMillan to end up.

I like the idea of that.

The iPad; Crazy like a fox.

A while ago now, I took the opportunity to go to a trade show and witness the way that end users interact with software. In this particular instance, I use the term "end user" quite loosely, as I am fairly sure the target audience in question has quite a bit of technical sophistry over the general end user populace. Nonetheless I found the experience extremely enlightening and I couldn't recommend doing so more heavily to anyone that has any pretensions toward designing and implementing software applications for other people.

I had been on the inside on this particular project and intimately familiar with the design and thinking through of the finished product, I had thoroughly absorbed all the questions that a first time user might ask so deeply that I forgot that they were not as obvious as the colour of the sky. But that is not the way people interact with new software at all, they do not experiment, they do not guess, when confronted with the unfamiliar they simply balk and adopt a puzzled facial expression.

They definitely don't buy it.

In the early days of my experiences with computers I had interacted primarily with them through the command line, when graphical user interfaces became the common interaction paradigm I had thought;

"Surely nothing could be easier than this"

I know a lot better now.

It's no secret that end users do not understand, but what the builders who target these people fail to realise is that they have no desire to understand. We have progressively trained our audience to expect that the market will conform to their inadequacies and cater to their handicaps;

Can't remember the command line switches?

We'll create a bunch of fields for you to enter in all the variables.

Can't remember what to put in the fields?

We'll give you all the possible options in a dropdown.

Don't want to scroll through all those options?

We'll give you an autocompleting text field.

Can't even spell a part of the word right?

We'll make it autocorrecting.

It's too bland and you can't focus?

We'll polish it so hard everything will be drop shadowed and glossed and replete with rollovers.

Can't remember how it works?

We'll tooltip every square pixel.

Can't be bothered to read the tooltips?

We'll research redoing the entire interface just so you don't have to think. Then write books telling other people how to do the same kind of thing, blatantly naming these books with titles like "Don't make me think"

Builders exist at the whim of people who, like Alexander's Bucephalus simply fear their shadow. A vanishingly small percentage of people are aware of this fundamental fact of the nature of our target audience, but the only way to tame this audience is to be aware of their pain points. They don't care about your spec, they care about getting done what the spec is aimed at getting done.

The ultimate user interface is a big, obvious, easy to press button that says "Do what I mean".

Apple thinks different.

Apple focuses on the destination, not the journey. It is not relevant in the design of an apple product such as the iPad how much memory the system has, or what frequency the processor runs at, it is only relevant that it can do what it is designed to do. In the case of the iPad, this means that it will play movies, read books, listen to music, and run applications that Apple has either expressly designed for the device, or had the advantage of explicitly approving beforehand as fit for purpose.

They don't "Fight Fair".

The evolution of musket warfare follows an illustrative trail; originally devised as an upgrade for massed pike wielding infantry formations, the tactics adopted for musket warfare were designed to maximise the benefits and minimise the drawbacks of the new technology. Massed formations slowly advancing toward one another toward the end of the era firing volley shots rather than targeting the enemy directly with the intent to break the line. A rate of approximately three shots per minute was the height of the technological mastery of the smoothbore musket.

Problem was, while some armies were building their skills in this narrow field, others were working on alternatives like rifling, breech loading, etc. Not very sportsmanlike when your side is only able to fire three volleys in exchange for your enemies twelve due to the enormously increased range of rifled over smoothbore muskets, but sportsmanlike doesn't win wars.

You think learning to use a mouse is no big deal? That guy in the suit who picks it up and tries to talk to it, that's your target audience. One would do well to remember that in this game. I may listen to the iPad's press video and roll my eyes at the "You can just reach out and *touch* it" marketing speak, but if my experience is anything to go by, that will speak to the target audience and they'll like what they hear. They won't mount an elegant defense about why it's a step forward in the evolution of human computer interfaces and anyone who says different is wrong; they'll just hand their money over, and from there, it's just a matter of time till the market figures it out.

They might win.

The iPhone has proven to be a tremendous success, there is a propensity amongst the technological priesthood to believe that this is in spite of it's flaws, but I have come to believe that it is largely because of them.

Is there a virus for the iPhone? Indeed, there is a virus for the iPhone, but it only affects jailbroken devices, the closest thing to an absolute dealbreaker in the device for the technological priesthood is the very thing that stops it afflicting the target audience with that which they fear the most in all other areas of computing.

Are there problems with disparate hardware or operating system versions / libraries within the iPhone ecosystem? Once again, the answer is no; precisely because of what is perceived to be it's achilles heel amongst it's competitors.

How about that piracy epidemic? Are App Store vendors feeling the heat? You get the idea.

Conclusion

Yes Comic Book Guy; I know you don't want an iPad and you think it's lame. Frankly, I don't want one either and I hope in spite of all of the above, it's a miserable failure. But I believe that the only way that this will happen is if the target audience has a genuinely better option from their perspective, not ours. If there is a choice between having to think about technology or having everything handed to them on a platter, I can think of no feature list comparison that is going to overcome the basic propensity for the target audience to discard the alternatives that require it to think.

Apple is offering decision free computing, and it's the only game in town for this purpose.