Now that we know what the future looks like part 2
Posted: October 30, 2008 Filed under: Futurama Comments Off
A while ago I got a bit obsessed about what the human benefit might be of the effect that technology was having on representation and meaning in society. ‘Cheap, easy, global media’ has is no longer a theory in a university library. It’s the reality we get every day. So, once we’re past this, what do we actually want the world to be like?
I guess the key point is that no discussion about the effect of the internet on our lives has ever really seemed that interesting or relevant. Yes, it empowers certain groups, and yes, it would appear to hack away at what Godin calls the ‘TV industrial complex’, but the overall goals of our society seem somehow irrelevant to all this, and vice-versa.
So all this technology has given us a means to achieve something dramatic. Now all we need is something dramatic to achieve. Killing marketing might be fun (and is another good example of a suprising, latent socialism in our supposedly capitalist society), but it doesn’t exactly feel like a unifying goal.
We see the same ambiguity in the ‘progress’ of today’s globally-interconnected banks (can anyone remind me why that was a good idea?), and across many ways in which our lifestyles have changed.
Isn’t e-commerce marvellous? Well is it? We seem to have sucked half the fun out of shopping at the same time as we were hoovering out a quarter of the inconvenience. And isn’t search wonderful? Well Google may have revolutionised the world’s information, but it has also invented a complex game of bait and switch for these increasingly soon to be redundent marketers to play, as they build whole web eddifices for non-human audiences.
What about media? Now every halfwit in the world (including me) can have their say on every issue and only the afforemention bait-and-switch people get to decide what floats to the top (using an algorithm not a person). Isn’t that brilliant? Isn’t it?
And isn’t it super what Barack Obama has done with the internet as a political tool? Well, yep, again it’s difficult to argue with all this if you’re an Obama supporter (as I am), but alongside all of the engagement we’ve seen, Obama has also raised frankly obscene amounts of money in a system which will allow him to massively over-match his opponent’s media spend. Is that a good thing? Many of us in Europe will cheer an Obama landslide if it happenss but if McCain had been the one to make the internet work for his campaign, how many of us would be claiming foul play, the insidious re-enforcement of a technology gap, and question about free speech and fairness.
So, every once in a while, perhaps we should stand back a bit, attempt to stop being dazzled by the complexity and opportunity of it all, and start thinking about how we can get all of this hope pointing in the right direction.
Could we find a way to use the internet to reduce consumption, to make presidential races issue-based, to find the most powerful personal stories and share them, to praise and elevate editorial, to decouple and re-understand risk in our banking systems, to redefine search so that it can’t be gamed, to find a way that groups can bridge differences not concentrate around similarities, or to find ways that our governments can engage more interestingly with their electorate?
Most importantly, surely we can we use this vast network of devices to make sure no one votes for Sarah Palin?
Fighting the blue monster
Posted: October 29, 2008 Filed under: microsoft Comments Off
Whatever shape the buttons on your laptop, Microsoft has spent the last few days at PDC revealing some very interesting ideas about what the future of computing may hold.
Yet, with every news story – about the release of an abstracted operating system idea, about a new operating system with some nice looking UI elements, or about web-based office applications – the great unwashed of the internet can do no more than revert to tedious Apple/Windows zealotry. The first comment will say ‘Why do you stick with Microsoft, Microsoft is shit, look at Vista’, the second will say ‘Give Microsoft a chance, they’ve done a lot of cool stuff’, the third will say, ‘My iPhone is very shiny’ etc etc.
It’s just not very interesting.
You can’t boil down these million pound companies to ‘good’ or ‘bad’. And once again it’s easy to see echos of what Hugh McLeod started with the Blue Monster idea, encouraging Microsoft staff to feel empowered to represent themselves rather than being defined by the media and their detractors.
Apple clearly rules the art of the product announcement, although I have not seen that done well without the masterful Jobs. Microsoft – sometimes to their downfall – is better at speaking with the technical community, which can position technology prowess over usability and delight in products, although they’ve started to address that with the excellent 0ffice 2007 and the new Surface offering, both of which put innovation in customer experience at the heart of the product.
What we see onstage at PDC, Mix etc is genuinely enthused Microsoft staff (in various degrees of chino and trainer-wearing geekiness), expressing their honest passion for the subject of technology and how it can be transformational. Amongst all that are some very interesting ideas:
1. Life in the datacentre – it’ll be hard for companies to get this but harder still for developers. The shift in programming paradigm is much more radical than required changes in governance (although potentially complex, espcially around jurisdiction) and user experience (often negligable)
(Also well worth looking at this week’s Economist special feature on Cloud computing, its effect on business models, its effect on innovation, and its potential transformative effect on emerging economies.)
2. Software AND Serivces – not Software OR services
3. The speed of touch (and multi-touch) adoption is accelerating rapidly
4. Performance at last identified as key ingredient of (Vista) ‘user experience’. Suggstions are not just what Windows 7 will run quickly, but that it could boot in a matter of seconds. These realities are a vital part of MS regaining the reputation it earned when NT4.0 made all other OSs on the market at the time look like they were from a different decade.
5. Many of the new UI features of Windows 7 were explained directly in terms of ethnographic research (e.g. users have multiple windows open but cycle between them), users need to search across multiple drives / devices / users want to be able to re-arrange task bar items, users need to be able to look inside tabs inside browsers for quick preview). It is great news that Microsoft has put research at the heart of design and innovation and it will be very exciting to see how these improve the overall usage experience, especially as we know that some relatively minor changes can have a dramatic impact.
Will Microsoft ever have an Apple-style unveiling: stage-managed and high-octane? I don’t think so, and in a way, I hope they don’t. As a company which necessarily has so many constituents they should define themselves by not just what they do directly for consumers, but how they support designers and developers in building better end solutions. And those answers simply aren’t simple.
And, whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can look as long as you like at events like PDC, and you won’t see anything but a desire to be doing stuff better. Unfortunately the pantomime villian tag just won’t fit.
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