Handmade computers and Steve Jobs

Well, sadly Steve Jobs has died. The expected nature of the news doesn't do much to diminish its impact. Life will go on, but not without a number of newly formulated questions. One of them is what will be the impact of the loss of Jobs for Apple as a company and for the evolution of Apple products. This question is not without fundament as we all know what happened to the only period in the company's history when Steve was not in charge. Even if this time there seemed to be a throughly planned handover process, specially as compared to how matters evolved in 1985.

But like they use to say, to understand the future we have to understand the past first. What was the value that Jobs was giving Apple? In my view, there are two main aspects:

The first and more obvious is product development. It is said (even it is difficult to know for sure, given the secretive nature of Apple) that Steve was involved in all the steps of product development, from the initial brainstormings to the final details, including "minor" things like the packaging. Here the key words are "attention to detail" and they way they map to real world products is a reduced line of products, with a limited number of features but where all efforts are taken to make sure the "right" ones are include none of the "wrong" ones are. This is an approach that relates more to what you usually see in Art than in many commercial products that try to get you itemized lists.

And this brings me to the second aspect. Precisely because Apple products were so uniquely Jobs', users tend to maintain a higher emotional connection with them than they have with other brands. That's because these products provide some kind of direct link to their author's personality, to put it in simple words it goes "from him to you". Directly. In contrast, from whom are coming Sony products? From a large corporation? From a group of designers? It is a lot more difficult to connect. Many technical commentators scoff at these attitudes as if Apple had "brainwashed" their users, because other brands would provide them with "more" for "less", but what they show is a lack of understanding of basic human behaviour.

Why would people, for example, prefer an expensive hand-made piece of furniture over a mass produced one? The mass produced one will be cheaper, and the "quality" can be as high in these days of computer directed production and quality control. However, the hand-made piece relates you to the Work of the Artisan, who is not an abstract entity but another human being and, fundamentally, tells a story. In my view these were precisely the strengths of Jobs' Apple, with Steve as the Head Artisan. Now they would need another person to take its place or perhaps even to have a new story as the old one may not be credible anymore with another starring character.

I always thought that Jonathan Ive could have been a replacement, being as he is the responsible for the design of most products. On the other hand he may be seen as too "arty" and far from the technological side to fully relate with Apple's customer base. But hey, we will see how it goes with Tim Cook.

ps: It appears that the first Apple computer, the Apple I, was actually handmade.

Communicating techology, corporate cultures and why Google should hire my wife

Some weeks ago I had a shopping experience that I would be tempted to define as a disaster. I had to recharge my mostly non working 3G internet card (there isn't a very good reception for Orange in my intended area, which of course I hadn't checked before buying it) and one of the few places where I could do it was in a small shop located within a large shopping mall. Pretty bad idea to go to a shopping mall just for the one thing (in/out/park/pay time overheads tend to be terrible) but my wife had to do some additional shopping so we though about going parallel. There was a longish queue in the shop, but as didn't have anything better to do, |I decided to stay and wait. To fast-forward till the end of the story, I will tell you that after half an hour wait the top-up couldn't be performed because some relevant computer system wasn't working. Half and hour wasted?

Well, not really. One of the things that kept me from leaving the shop or being discouraged by the slow moving queue was the chance to observe the shop clerk work. The first thing that struck me was the clarity and ease with which she was delivering her sales pitches. They actually didn't feel, understated as they were, as sales pitches at all, but rather the way somebody could advice a friend when explicitly asked. And most importantly, it felt like she actually cared about what she was telling her potential customers. This is specially striking when compared to the attitude one tends to find in large sales surfaces, where either the sales persons are overexcited (if the get a commission from the sales) or they don't care at all (if they are on a fixed salary). To be completely fair the information delivered by her (details, numbers, phone features) wasn't always complete or fully exact, but this brings me to my second point.

Another reason why I felt that customers were particularly at ease with her was the lack of that all so frequent patronising attitude towards the customers. This may come as a surprise to some salesmen or technologists (truly, technologists are only another kind of salesmen, and salesmen of snake oil, most of the times) but no, clearly no: people don't want to feel ignorant. They know they are, but then that's a completely different thing. And then among technologists a patronising attitude is yet so common. The popularity of comedy story series like The Bastard Operator from Hell among system administrators may be taken as an example. The stories themselves are quite funny, but I do believe that it is precisely its adoption by that particular segment of the general population that reveals a subplot of an often patronising attitude towards users. I believe it is there, in a higher or lower grade for one person or another. We (I've worked as a sysadmin too, that's maybe why I find BOFH funny too) like to dumbfound users with “precise” data and then revel on their confusion. I was once told that from a delivered half an hour presentation (with PowerPoint, a blackboard, a storyteller carton or a Rivera mural, whichever you choose is irrelevant) people will only remember one in ten things at most, so you'd better make sure that the audience remembered the right ones. I think this particular saleswoman was doing the right by pre-filtering information, making sure that potential customers got the yeast of the difference between one product and another, which is precisely what her customers were asking of her, nothing else. And all this while still making them feel good about the shopping experience, as opposed to making them feel stupid. I'm sure she was behaving this way because she had a deep understanding of her customer's needs, an understanding that only can come from an even deeper empathy.

While I have said that this person was a women, I have said that she also was a not very young one (I would guess 40+), so you this person obviously sits comfortably in one of the population segments least likely to be concerned with technology. In the light of the results, I believe this situation was working completely in her favor. But then how many managers would choose a male twenty-something to deliver this service instead of her? Aren't they supposed to be a lot more "knowledgeable" about technology? But what about empathy with larger segments of population?

I guess that all this could be dismissed as an anecdote, but I believe that there are far more important implications. Most companies tend to have a “corporate culture” that tends to make all recruited employees look alike, aligned towards whichever is the main "mission" of that company. Even when some don't have an explicit culture to use as a benchmark, in my experience most persons in charge of recruiting tend to settle for persons who are as similar to them as possible (let's think of it as finding the “another me”), which after time will lead to the same results. These homogenous employee bodies are, by definition, unable to empathize with the population at large and are disconnected from the diversity that thankfully still defines the world. And you know what: that disconection is a recipe for failure. Eventually, unless the situation is corrected, it will happen.

The same way I hope that this saleswoman employer is really aware of the value she's bringing to the company, I am convinced that only companies that have a workforce that understands and empathizes with their customer base (read: a diverse workforce) will eventually prevail.

Microsoft is a good example. They use a heavily peer-based recruitment procedure, where all coworkers participate. So there you are, they will all be trying to recruit their own clones, because most people empathizes with similar people. To make matters worse, Microsoft is adept to asking "clever" questions that require equally "clever" answers. However, we all know that there are many types of intelligence and it is a very hard thing to measure, so the most likely outcome is that the company will look for people with the same kind of intelligence that they already have, based on some kind of arrogance like "we're the best and we only want the best". No darling, you are "you" and you want more like you.

But what is the problem with all this? Microsoft is one of the most successful companies ever and billg the richest man in the world, but yet they haven't managed to be loved, or ever liked by their customers, who buy their products because there is no other better or sometimes even possible option. Then, most of their enterprises beyond Windows and Office have failed, famously failing to "get" the Internet in the 90s, or to "get" open systems. I really think that one of the reasons of all this disconnections is the lack of empathy with their customers, in part produced by their monoculture. Remember that while IBM or HP have been with us for centuries (in computer time) across changing paradigms, Microsoft is a much smaller blip in the radar, which hasn't been through any major transformation that implied modifying its very essence. Both IBM and HP have, though. Do they have a more diverse workforce?

Now, I believe Google is going the same way. They have famously failed to get social networks, the part that will probably end up being the most valuable. My wife recognized Facebook immediately as the most interesting thing coming out of Web 2.0, so why couldn't Google. Well, perhaps the answer is that there is nobody like my wife working at Google, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't hire her if she applied. It is an engineer-centric culture, for good and for bad where like in any endogamy, all errors of judgement are magnified. Guess what, Google is popular with engineers, but will they manage to get to the general public when it gets to things that matter?

But this problem is not exclusive of big companies. I think that the Open Source communities have the same issue. Linux, for example, according to Eric S Raymond is "an operating system developed by geeks and hackers for geeks and hackers .... and too many of us like it that way and will actually defend our isolation as a virtue". So just imagine how can you empathize with a majority of users with that attitude. Forget about it.

World domination will have to wait, I'm afraid, just as Microsoft's or Google's.

This thing of bloggin' is interesting

Of course, it helps to be stuck on a bus station for two hours without anything better to do, but....

Next post will be about GOD. No, not Rod, I said GOD.

Finally got my hands on an iPad

But didn't buy it, mind you!

I was roaming Gatwick airport, after a succession of well unexpected (I was flying Easyjet) efficiencies left me with a couple of hours to kill before boarding. From all the "airport shops" I really only can barely stand the "gadget" ones (I could do with HMV too before I moved on to iTunes) so there I went to Dixons to have a look at anything they could throw at me.

And yes, they did have some iPads. The first thing that struck me is how they seemed to be extremely popular with children. I almost had to fight them off the things: I also wanted to play, and they seemed quite absorbed by some kind of game. Once I got one I could easily see the good response of the UI. Whenever I thought of tactile interfaces I was always thinking of the ticket machines in Madrid's underground: sometimes it felt the only way of "selecting" something was by punching it, rather than fondling it. In the iPad case very light touches are enough to trigger actions. Then the UI feels extremely well polished and all the default apps seem to have a "point" (I mean, "wobbly boobs" app didn't seem to be installed in that particular case. Neither iMaraca, though this one may make a bit more sense on an iPhone).

To me the whole idea of using the same surface for input and for output makes a lot more sense that using an "output only" screen and then to have a minimal trackpad input that has to be extrapolated to movements in a much bigger screen. What is worse, the trackpad is, so to say, "remapped" every time you raise you finger from the surface and drop it back again. Of course, technically it only passes "vectors" that apply to the current mouse position but my point is that all the mental math hampers users. People gets used to it, of course, but then some people also got used to programming assembler for IBM mainframes. But intuitive it wasn't. What it better than "touch exactly the point of the screen that you want to interact to"? Forget about single interaction points, vectors, movements, how do I get up there, etc. Just a one to one mapping between input and output, with no scaling.

The main concerns about the iPad interface remain textual input and "fine selection" (e.g. select a single character in a text, or a pixel on an image). For the first I can say it is obviously much better than any mobile but way worse than a "proper" keyboard, specially for "touch typers" like me. The second could be achieved with the very easy "pinch zoom" features, but still may fall a bit short.

And BTW, I will still probably not buy it, £700 for the 64MB 3G (the one I feel would be useful enough) is a bit too much for me, and I have never considered myself anything close to an "early adopter". But then who knows. If I ever buy it (hint for Apple: lower the price) I will write a proper review here.