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I never really understood why that is, the railroads were simply superceded by more efficient forms of passenger transporation which made the idea of supporting a commuter transport network to such a backwater as Ben Bullen completely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.

09:00am Call Dell for price for replacement RW331 card (NVidia 8700m GT SLI, ebay prices range from 300-500$)

09:10am transferred, disconnected with "Too busy to answer your call please call back later" from IVR system

09:20am Call back.

09:30am Repeat

09:30am Call back.

09:40am Repeat

09:40am Call back.

09:50am Repeat

09:50am Call back.

10:00am Repeat

10:00am Call back.

10:10am Repeat

10:10am Call back, ask for direct number to parts department, request denied, transferred, disconnected again, this happens another four times until I finally get a line that keeps me on hold for 22 minutes.

10:42am Explain that I'm looking for a part to replace failed component on XPS m1730 notebook technician fails comprehension and instantly transfers me to technical support.

10:53 Line failure.

10:53 Call back. explain massive amount of prior disconnects, explain problem in exacting detail, explain product is out of warranty, explain need for simple price on simple component which I am well aware of the part number for.

11:24 transferred to parts department again, repeat previous explanation, says someone will get back to me within (line disconnects)

11:24 calls back, resummarise situation, transferred again.

11:54 repeat explanation to parts department again, someone will get back to me within 24 hours about a price for the component. No it is not possible for him to simply look up the price in inventory, no it is not possible to have the answer any faster than this, no there is nothing that can be done.

16:10 contact from Dell, resummarise situation, line drops out three times during conversation, call backs are almost instant, consultant barely intelligible.

16:14 Price for RW331 from Dell not including GST = $926 AUD, Question posed as to why this is available at approximately half the price or less from various sources throughout the 'net. Answer; We don't know, but that is our price, if you want to use it from somewhere else you're welcome to do so. Enquiry as to price of XM888 module, also compatible with the notebook in question (Dell XPS m1730) answer $2135 AUD not including GST. Note total price of current generation XPS m1730 from the dell store is $3499 AUD which includes a better video card than either of the requested priced replacement modules.

16:20 Decide to never purchase, support or recommend products from Dell.

The notebook in question is an XPS M1730, although quite a powerful system it has provided me with no end of troubles through my period owning it, but the final break point was when I made the tragic mistake of attempting to connect an S-video cable from the S-Video out port on the notebook to the S-video in port of a television, I realise in hindsight that this is in fact just crazy behaviour on my part and I should have known beforehand it would inevitably result in the frying of the video card module but hey, I like to live dangerously.

Another ridiculous episode with this system has been the battery. Discharged fifteen times before being unable to hold a charge. Because of the very high size and weight of the system it was almost never taken anywhere and thus left on mains power, but Dell assures me that this is simply the way that batteries work and nothing can be done about it, numerous other stories were found without much digging of similiar behaviour of even shelved backup batteries failing immediately after opening. Never charged or discharged, but out of warranty now because they were in reserve for a year.

After this final conclusion to this ridiculous episode I just absolutely dread to think what the hell anyone who had no idea beyond "hey there's all of a sudden fuzzy red lines on my $4000 laptop, can't you guys get this fixed for something approaching a reasonable price and approaching a reasonable time" would have had to go through to get to this conclusion.

I'm going to disassemble the system and oven bake the video card for a minute or so as soon as I can find the appropriate tools to do so, it can't get any worse than it already is, and even if the card is baked as a result I'll be needing a replacement module anyway, but I certainly won't be buying it from Dell.

In other news, now back to using my old Acer Aspire 5630 which has lasted over three years without so much as a hiccup. I think I'll stick to custom built desktops for my performance computing from here on in.

GoGaRuCo Fist Shaking

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past few days this is a pretty good summation of the situation so far.

I must admit that I was initially confused as to what the fuss was even about, and none of the avalance of commentary I've read from the start till now had changed that position. I thought Martin's post on the issue raised a fair few interesting points though that at least warranted formal consideration.

The take away point here really needs to be that people are responsible for their own reactions to things like this.

The power dynamic does not change this relationship, how often is the paradigm of the put upon geek bandied about in similar contexts? Ask your high school football team what they think of the social power of geeks as a group. Once you get done explaining the big words in your question, the result should make my point well enough.

The funny thing is if you had asked me about this issue a year or two ago I would've just shrugged in a completely nonplussed fashion. I never cared if women were interested in becoming involved in technology, it isn't that I wanted them to avoid it, I've worked under female managers at various tech companies before and to be honest one of them was about the second best manager I've ever had, she was the first manager I'd ever had that actually had the technical skills necessary to elicit due respect for her position, and I was not satisfied with any other management thereafter for about three years.

At the same time, we got saddled in that department with a woman who really did not seem to know anything about the job she found herself in. I don't know what possessed that woman to pursue this career path but I heard enough under the breath cursing from the aforementioned female manager that I didn't think it was just my sexism shining through with regards to my evaluations of her performance.

Now, though, I hack from home, meaning a large amount of the time I sit directly next to my significant other, and in a lot of cases the input of a feminine psyche is greatly desirable. Many times I've had to choose between two equally meaningless things to me and she took one look at them and made a strong choice in one direction and then explained the reasoning in a way that I'd not at all considered. Estrogen can be totally useful when you're attempting to write software that deals with humans because it gives you a nice perspective on 50% of them that over 90% of hackers don't have.

So yes, I care that female coders as a group might be offended by the content of the presentation, but I feel that that conclusion alone isn't sufficient enough to automatically condemn the presentation itself. It really is possible for otherwise decent and rational people to overreact to a perceived slight when in all fact that was absolutely never the original intention of the communication.

I understand that there is an inclination to then single out the communication as ineffective, but actually if it were not for this entire debacle of the various presentations I've viewed this week that would definitely be the one that would stick the most firmly in my mind. This is the very essence of what an effective communication is all about. This is exactly why the scourge of corporate blandness must be wiped from the face of the earth, because the nth time you've heard about synergising values for b2b return on investments, the first *syllable* of the line makes your eyes glaze over and your tongue hang slack from your jaw.

In light of this fact, and with the observance that noone seems to be actually of the opinion that any offense was *intended*, merely that it was perceived, is it not reasonable to give a little latitude to speakers in order to encourage experimentation designed to keep us awake during their talks? Even if it isn't perfectly executed?

Here's a thought experiment for you; What if the group taking unintended offense were entirely different, if there was a martyrdom slant in the talk with a picture of Jesus Christ with his crown of thorns focused on the face looking morose (This guy used to program in ColdFusion) and then the next slide he was running along the top of a couple of sand dunes with two legionaires in hot pursuit jumping for joy and clicking his heels with the thorny crown long since discarded (But then Rails set him free).

Was offense intended toward Christians? In the event that they were offended, would they be told to harden up a bit and take it in the obviously humorous fashion it was meant? Would we be asking if it mattered that they were offended or mattered that the intent was not to offend, but entertain and communicate effectively? Would their contributions simply be dismissed out of hand? Matz is a mormon, Larry Wall is an evangelical, these are things that would actually have some kind of bearing upon the community.

Why Apple actually does *not* suck.

This puzzled me for the longest time before I finally figured it out. My position basically ignores windows and puts it in the "you use it because the company who bought you a computer and subsidises your environment bought it for you" but maybe I could imagine some permutation of the same kind of argument for windows users, also.

I call it the Segway argument. ;)

Marathon runners, the type that train obsessively for days at a time, fly to exotic high altitude locales to starve their bodies of oxygen, etc, and are at the absolute peak of human conditioning, are quite capable of running very long distances without much effort, in fact a case could reasonably made to say that they actually enjoy doing so.

Try sell one of those people a Segway.

It will have no tangible benefit aside from getting in the way of that person, and in fact just the idea of trying to sell one to that market shows the entire thing for the charade it is. It is not designed to service people like that.

The thing is that you can fairly make an argument that Marathon Runners like that are probably wasting their lives / time developing that degree of ability simply to do something like get from A to B with a reasonable level of rapidity. Thus something like a Segway can actually make sense because it isn't targeted at marathon runners, but a completely different type of person.

Now I don't want to be overly bragging, but I am only comfortable speaking for myself in this debate so that is what I am going to do. Once you've been using Linux since 1994, keeping well abreast of all the changes and benefits that have been added to the platform between then and now. Once you've mastered that environment so thoroughly that the regex flows from your fingertips as easily as a normal user's expectation of a tooltip hover on a pretty OS X widget. Once you've become accustomed to the almost limitless flexibility and control of the platform, and all the niggling problems and voodoo that one must occasionally confront when dealing with such a fluid platform slips so silently into the unconscious competence basket that you cannot personally even define the fact that it actually requires any competence at all without thinking about it really really hard.

Once you've got all that, the idea of someone making a cut down variant based on the BSD code base and making everything "just work" instantly, providing a contiguous user experience, doing a ton of things that basically all group up under the heading of "eliminating the need to acquire any indepth computer literacy at all", the idea of switching to a mac is as puzzling to you as the idea of the marathon runner picking up a Segway.

The critical thing to take away though, is that this is all value neutral, the marathon runner is not a hero, he probably wasted a ton of his life and time that could be spent better elsewhere acquiring the conditioning and abilities allowing him to accomplish the feats that he can. The same could be said of people in my situation with regards to computers, I am prepared to accept that if something like OS X had existed back when I wanted a "real computer" in 1994, it would indeed have been a waste of my time to develop all these skills. Further fair arguments could be made that I've wasted a ton of time developing all those skills now when you can get it "almost" as good just by paying a little premium on top of your average computer's cost. I get all that, I want to be as absolutely non-elitist about this as I can be. Taking all the above information into account I can totally see how it makes sense for normal people, and even up to a threshold some pretty extraordinary people even in this particular sphere to choose OS X as a platform.

That is definitely something that was in my blind spot not long ago, just as surely as Segways were an utterly bewildering concept to a marathon runner, but I'm aware of it now. The fact is of course that your average person is generally a lot more interested in stuff like walking around and fitness than advanced computer science, thus the relative success rates of Segway and Apple Computer.

But just because that market exists, is real, and has genuine value propositions for a large swathe of humankind, should not be taken as a reflection of it's value for everyone regardless of experience or situation. People like me will probably always prefer what we've developed this intensely powerful unconscious competence in, and everyone else will look at us and say it was a waste to do that, and although I don't agree with that position, I can at least see how the conclusion would be reached and accept it.

"Big Content" desperately in need of a wake up call.

Just sent to office@last.fm due to recent shenanigans.

Hey guys,

I assume you're probably doing the discrimination against non us uk de users due to the idiocy of the record industry's international licensing.

I'm not going to close my account, mostly because it has great statistical information on it that I wouldn't like to lose, but there's no way I'll be actually using it anymore unless one of two things happen.

1. The charges for international only listeners get dropped
2. The same charges apply to everyone.

The discrimination, even though I realise why you're probably doing it, is so utterly ridiculous considering the realities of the landscape of internet music that it's simply intolerable.

Good luck with trying to get those coked out record executives to pull their heads from their nether regions. If I were trying to push that angle I'd be trying to present statistics of people that are dropping the service due to this issue, please add one to that list, despite the fact that I haven't actually dropped my account.

Regards
Eric

Hulu, Pandora, and now Last.fm, man it must suck to be these guys and have to deal with the idiots convinced that the CD is still advanced technology, the separation from online reality is mind boggling. Don't try to bend customers over a barrel when they have effective means of utterly destroying your revenue streams, it's pure idiocy.

Why Apple Sucks pt 2

An interesting pattern in the responses I received in my last post was a consistent accusation of iconoclasm. The anti hipster sentiment really was not the point, though it's interesting to see that it's being taken that way by people. This would indicate I need to be clearer in my explanations, in pursuit of that goal I'd like to go into a little more detail about why I think it's important to actually explore *why* Apple does what it does, rather than just looking at it's actions in a vacuum without recourse to motivation or philosophy.

Apple tends to behave in ways that are driven by their positioning their products as fashion centerpieces. It's not the sentiment that makes me dismissive of them, it's the actual follow up actions that they take because of that underlying philosophy, such as forcing a pricing tier specifically to squeeze the maximum margins out of the marketplace (more money for a black MacBook? Really?) whilst still being able to claim price parity in the narrow band of sections which they do compete. And of course all the issues I raised in the previous post on this subject.

Graphical session based remote access to Macs is a nightmare compared to Linux, I know it has a VNC clone / work-alike, but that compared NoMachine NX or Windows RDP is a pale imitation of proper remote access at best. In all the research I'd done into Macs before when I was considering actually buying one, this didn't even come up. Why not? Because most people that use Macs don't even care about it and for those that do simple VNC is "good enough", even when they're charged extra for it like they were when it was first released. At this point NX and RDP on Linux and Windows respectively were ancient news in the industry, but this was somehow acceptable "because it's Apple".

This attitude permeates the entire environment, instead of the reverse in a Linux environment;

Linux Environment;

A pixel or two is out of place? Who cares, it crunches numbers, pretty pictures are for designers. If you really care fix it yourself

Apple Environment;

It's not technically better than the competition, lacks feature parity, is dramatically overpriced? Who cares, it's so pretty. If you really care you're out of luck until we take the 2-3 years it typically takes us to catch up with the competition in the areas where we don't focus the vast majority of our energy.

This is why the philosophy is important, you can see where the underlying philosophies come out in the real world. When I attack the underlying philosophy, I do so not for the sake of iconoclasm but because I think the results are unacceptably bad. Just like the people complaining about font / colour / UI inconsistency / insert related issues here within Linux think those results are unacceptably bad.

Apple constructs it's game plan based on the underlying philosophy that it is a luxury products company that is designed to inspire a cult-like following amongst people who share this underlying philosophy. This is it's primary driving force in just about all of it's decisions, and this is the reason that I went over that philosophy when laying out my problems with Apple.