Dial one for usability

The telephone is one of the greatest and most straightforward inventions in human history. A human, who wishes to talk to another human but unable to do so in person due a great distance between them, be that his mother, his friend or a representative of his insurance company, picks up the phone, dials a number, waits till the other person answers and talks. As simple as that, end of story.

During the years the telephone has somehow become a device most people really hate. I mostly blame operators, handset manufacturers and providers of added services, namely the industry people who only care for their own pockets way before the well being of their customers.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Suppose you want to call a customer service of whatever company you need to receive service from. Here is how this should happen.

You pick up the phone and dial the number, after exactly one ring, the system answers and informs you of the average waiting time for this service. If you dial from the recognized phone the system addresses you by name, otherwise it just politely calls you "Dear customer" and asks you to enter the number you wish to be reached at. After that you are free to hang up. This is it.

After the time stated by the system is up, your phone rings. The human representative of the company is on the line, with all your information right in front of him, ready to be at your service without any additional delay.

Attention, you did not wait on the line listening to a bunch of crap all the time, they had enough time to pull your data, if for some reason you can not take the call at that time, you can just hang up and try the same later. If for whatever reason, the call is disconnected, the system knows who was the last person you were talking to and it will call you back. Everyone is happy, and you know what, if that company is so cheap that it does not want to pay for the call, I am sure you could work out some arrangement so that you will be charged with the operator fees, you would pay them anyway.

Even if for some reason, you do not agree with me that this is the best possible solution, and indeed I did not provide answers to all questions in this short post, you should at least acknowledge that this is a possible one. How many systems you know that work like that? None. If you do please tell me about them.

Now it's time to wake up, the dream is over, back to endless cyclic menus, annoying commercials, battery life screwed by endless waiting online for the people that are kind enough to give you the service you have already payed for. Good morning everyone.

Listen to Mr. Pink

Don't get me started on Nokia. I liked them too much in the golden days of 6310i, the best phone I have ever had. It all went down hill from there. I have hardly managed to find one I could use, the 3310c, at least from limited offering we have here on our planet.

Trying to synchronize the phone with my Mac, in order to backup my phone book, however, have brought me nothing but suffering and anxiety. First this happened, then after I finally managed to make it work, it filled my phone with corrupt and duplicate names. Frustrated, I wrote the "Why is that?".

Amir Kirsh wrote his post in response, claiming that a successful company should focus on what to do and what not to do, choose what is important and what it could do without. I certainly agree, and in a way, this is exactly the problem with Nokia. They should have focused on making a good phone.

Listen to this. According to the GSM arena, Nokia have around 250 different models of phones. Even if you don't agree with Barry Schwartz, it is way too much. So speaking of focus, we would all rather Nokia produced ten good, well engineered and very well supported phones, now don't we? Instead, they save their effort on providing a decent iSync plugin, when they wrote a complete and totally useless Nokia suite. Need I remind you, we are talking about number one cellphone manufacturer in the world. Number one. And they are too busy producing yet another half baked and unsupported model. Why is that?

Allow me to finish with a quote from "Reservoir Dogs".

Mr. Pink: Look, I ordered coffee. Now we've been here a long fucking time and she's only filled my cup three times. When I order coffee, I want it filled *six* times.
Mr. Blonde: Six times. Well, what if she's too fucking busy?
Mr.Pink: The words "too fucking busy" shouldn't be in a waitress's vocabulary.

They really shouldn't

Deathwishers

Some industries just never cease to amaze me with their strange stubborn behavior that follows them right to their death. Take, for example, the case of computer related literature. It died, almost completely due to the fact that Internet covers all possible needs of a learned and resourceful professional to an extent no book could ever reach, especially in our rapidly changing reality. One would think that book publishers would do something about it before they find themselves out of business. Well it certainly does not look like it.

Let's take a more specific example. Follow me, go to amazon.com and type 'eclipse' in the search bar. Scroll down a bit, to the 'eclipse, building commercial quality plug-ins' title. See it? Good. Now, I would not buy this book. Why? Well, you see, it's from 2006, two major eclipse versions ago. And look, it still costs a little over forty bucks, not to mention shipping to the planet I am writing from. And it does not help that there are twenty pages of reviews, recommendations and links on the Amazon, page. Good job guys, but I still won't buy it.

What would help, however, is the ability to search and view the contents of this book online, for a small fee. Say, five dollars for this book and like, fifteen bucks for the entire eclipse section, for all books up to last year editions. This is an amount I could and would like to invest in something like this, because, even if the book is outdated it may still contain techniques and ideas I could use. I am not talking downloading, just viewing on demand. It would also be great if searches could return results from all books I have purchased this way. Sort of small digital library.

Certainly beats not selling the book at all.

"That's pretty sick"

Now this one is funny.

You see, Microsoft - they were always notoriously bad on PR. They built products almost everybody used, and at the same time, the same people hated their guts. They have managed to get in trouble over same issues other companies walked from, just because they had very bad publicity all around. Their marketing campaigns, remember the dinosaurs, were not even funny.

So Microsoft has decided to make a funny one. They have decided, that the reason Vista did not fly was not because it failed to deliver on so many promises, took hell of a lot of time to get out and copied way too many features from Mac. Nope. It was because of the prejudice. Because people judged Vista before they even saw it. Have they seen Vista with fresh, unbiased eyes, they would just fall in love with it on a spot.

So, in order to scientifically prove their point, they have created The Mojave Experiment.

You can look at it here. One word. Moronic. You are not going to believe what you will see there, I promise.

What they have done is, they invited a bunch of, er, "typical users", that have never used Vista before and asked them what they think about Vista, in general. Then they have shown them the new version of their most advanced, top secret operating system that was currently under development and would only be out like much later and asked them what they thought about it. After everybody said that it was the best thing that have ever happened to them in their entire life they have told them that it was actually a Windows Vista. And in an instance, all the people that just moments ago thought that Vista sucks, suddenly agreed that it was, in fact really great and they want one so bad they would never leave the room without a copy.

It would have been funny, but they have gone so low with it, that you would really think their target audience was a herd of retarded sheep. Here are some highlights.

There is that one young guy who is being told that instead of having a "dull background", he could have a moving video or a picture instead. Wow, he is amazed, he says it's "sick", except...wait, would not the video in the background be like, totally unusable. And having the picture there, I thought it was the future already. Wait, it gets better.

Some guy is being shown a totally new concept, the pride of Microsoft research... the Gadgets. To the uninitiated, it's just like, ah, say OS X Widgets, or Yahoo Widgets you could use on XP. Just like them, only... no, exactly the same actually. Needless to say, the guy is very impressed and says he likes Gadgets.

I could go on forever, but just one more. On the bottom on the page, there are links to demonstrations of actual Vista features. Let's see... Record a TV.. that's new. Oh wait, what.. only on Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, what ever that is... oook. Let's see what else, parental controls that allow you to limit which games your child can play by their rating. Unless your child is anything like you, good luck with those. Right. Let's stop here.

If you really want to sell more Vista copies, do not use a bunch of second grade actor college dropouts. Just keep bundling it with every new PC on the market, as usual. You will do just fine.