Messages From the Future: The Fate of Google Glass

Messages From the Future: The Fate of Google Glass

Man, time travel sucks. I mean think about it, you know all this stuff- and I mean you really know this stuff, but of course you can't say, "You're wrong, and I know, because I’m from the future."

So you pretend like its just your opinion and then sit there grinding your teeth while everyone else bloviates their opinions without actually knowing anything. Of course my old friends hate me. I mean I was always a know-it-all, but I really do know it all this time, which must make me seem even worse.

Anyway I was catching up on current events and was surprised to realize that I had arrived here smack dab before Google started selling Glass.

Truth is, I'd actually forgotten about Google Glass until I read that they are about to launch it again. Which itself should tell you something about its impact on the future.

So here's the deal on Google Glass. At least as far as I know - what with my being from the future and all.

It flopped.

Nobody bought it.

Oh sure they sold SOME. Ultimately Google Glass got used mostly by very specialized workers who typically operated in solitary and didn't have to interact with other humans. Of the general public, there were a few geeks, opportunistic future-seekers and silicon valley wannabes, who bought them to keep up with developments or hoping to look as "cool" as Sergey did when he was famously photographed sitting on the subway (some PR guy later admitted that the whole "I'm just a normal guy slumming on the subway looking like some hipster cyborg" thing was just an orchestrated Glass marketing ploy arranged by Googles PR firm) but they didn't. That's because none of those geeks were young, mincingly-manicured-to-appear-casually-hip, billionaires. No. They just looked overtly dorky and as I recall, slightly desperate for the smug rub off that comes with publicly flashing a "cool" new product. But that didn't happen for them. Quite the opposite.

Glass just smacked of the old I'm-an-important-technical-guy-armor syndrome. The 90's cellphone belt holster. The 00's blinky blue bluetooth headset that guys left in their ears blinking away even while not in use. And then Google Glass.

The whole "I'm just a normal guy slumming on the subway looking like some hipster cyborg" thing was just an orchestrated Glass marketing ploy arranged by Google's PR firm.

You know, sometimes you see a new innovation and it so upsets the world’s expectations, it's such a brilliant non sequitur, that you can't imagine the events that must have lead to such an invention. You wonder what the story was. The iPhone was one of those.

But Google Glass was so mis-timed and straightforward - the exact conversations that lead to it seemed transparent. In hindsight, they were just trying too hard, too early, to force something that they hoped would be a big idea - and eventually would be, if only a little over a decade later, by someone else.

Here's the scene:

Sergey and his hand-picked team sit in a super secret, man cave romper room on the Google Plex campus. Then Sergey, doing his best to pick up the magician's torch as an imagined version of Steve Jobs says:

"As we have long discussed, the day will come when no one will hold a device in their hand. The whole handheld paradigm will seem old and archaic. And I want Google to be the company that makes it happen - now. We need to change everything. I want to blow past every consumer device out there with the first persistent augmented reality solution. The iPhone will be a distant memory. Money is no object, how do we do it?"

And then within 10 minutes of brainstorming (if even), of which 8 mostly involved a geek-speak top-lining of the impracticality of implants, bioware and direct neural interfaces, someone on the team stands with a self-satisfied twinkle of entitlement in his eye stemming from his too good to be true ticket to Google’s billion-dollar playground wonder-world which he secretly fears is little more than the result of his having been in the right place at the right time and might rather be more imaginatively wielded by half a dozen brilliant teenagers scattered throughout that very neighborhood, let alone the globe, says:

"We can do this, think about it. We need to give the user access to visual content, right? And audio. And our solution must receive voice commands. So the platform that would carry all that must naturally exist close to each of the relevant senses - somewhere on the head. And that platform - already exists. (murmurs around the room) Ready? Wait for it... a HAT!"

A sniff is heard.A guy wearing a t-shirt with numbers on it says: "...Augmented Reality ...Hat?"

And then someone else, who is slightly closer to being worthy of his access to the Google moneybags-action playset, says, "No, not a hat… Glasses! Think about it - glasses have been in the public consciousness forever as a device for seeing clearly, right? Well, enter Google, with glasses... that let you see everything clearly, more... clearly."

Everyone in the room nods and smiles. Even obvious ideas can carry a certain excitement when you happen to experience their moment of ideation. This effect of course must be especially pronounced when you've passed through a recruitment process that inordinately reveres academic measures of intelligence.

Either that, or it was just Sergey’s idea from the shower that morning.

In any event, the iPhone was such a truly disruptive idea that one cannot as easily pick apart the thought process that lead to it. Too many moving parts. Too much was innovative.

But Glass was a simple idea. Not simple in a good way, like it solved a problem in a zen, effortless way. No, simple like the initial idea was not much of a leap and yet they still didn't consider everything they needed to.

What didn't they consider?

Well having seen it all play out, I'd say: Real people - real life. I think what Google completely missed, developing Glass in their private, billion dollar bouncy-house laboratory, were some basic realities that would ultimately limit adoption of Glass’ persistent access to technology: factors related to humanity and culture, real-world relationships, social settings and pressures, and unspoken etiquette.

Oh and one other bit of obviousness. Sex. And I mean the real kind, with another person’s actual living body - two real people who spend a lot of money to look good.

But I guess I get why these, of all über geeks missed that.

While admittedly, sunglasses have found a long-time, hard-earned place in the world of fashion as a "cool" accessory when well appointed and on trend, in hindsight, Google glass should not have expected to leap across the fashion chasm so easily.  There are good reasons people spend umpteen fortunes on contact lenses and corrective eye surgeries. Corrective glasses, while being a practical pain in the ass also effectively serve to make the largest swath of the population less attractive.

Throughout history, glasses have been employed predominantly as the defacto symbol of unattractiveness, of loserdom. They are the iconic tipping point between cool and uncool. The thin line separating the Clark Kents from the Supermen. Countless young ugly ducklings of cinema needed only remove that awkward face gear to become the stunning beauty, the glassless romantic lead. How many make-over shows ADD a pair of glasses?

Throughout history, glasses have been employed predominantly as the defacto symbol of unattractiveness, of loserdom. They are the iconic tipping point between cool and uncool. The thin line separating the Clark Kents from the Supermen.

Sure, there are a few fetishists out there, but for every lover of glasses wearing geekery, there are a thousand more who prefer their prospective mates unadorned.

Leave it to a bunch of Halo-playing, Dorito-eating engineers to voluntarily ignore that basic cultural bias. And worse, to maybe think all they had to do was wear them themselves to make them cool somehow."

But didn't you SEE Sergey on the subway?" You ask. "He looked cool."

Well, Sergey had indeed been styled by someone with taste and has been valiantly strutting his little heart out on the PR runway in an obviously desperate effort to infuse some residual "billionaires wear them" fashion credibility into his face contraption.

But look at that picture again, he also looked alone, and sad.

And to think Google Glass was a really good idea, you sort of had to be a loner. A slightly sad, insecure, misfit. Typically riding the train with no one to talk to. Incidentally, later- before Facebook died, Facebook Graph showed that Glass wearers didn't have many friends. Not the kind they could hug or have a beer or shop with.

And to think Google Glass was a really good idea, you sort of had to be a loner. A slightly sad, insecure, misfit. Typically riding the train with no one to talk to.

Wearing Google Glass made users feel like they didn't have to connect with the actual humans around them. "I'm elsewhere - even though I appear to be staring right at you." Frankly the people who wore Google Glass were afraid of the people around them. And Glass gave them a strange transparent hiding place. A self-centered context for suffering through normal moments of uncomfortable close proximity. Does it matter that everyone around you is more uncomfortable for it?

At least with a hand-held phone there was no charade. The very presence of the device in hand, head down, was a clear flag alerting bystanders to the momentary disconnect. "At the moment, I'm not paying attention to you."

But in it’s utterly elitist privacy, Google Glass offered none of that body language. Which revealed other problems.

At least with a hand-held phone there was no charade. The very presence of the device in hand, head down, was a clear flag alerting bystanders to the momentary disconnect. "At the moment, I'm not paying attention to you."But in it’s utterly elitist privacy, Google Glass offered none of that body language.

In the same way that the introduction of cellphone headsets made a previous generation of users on the street sound like that crazy guy who pees on himself as he rants to no one, Google Glass pushed its users past that, occupying all their attention, their body in space be damned - mentally disconnecting them from their physical reality. With Glass, not even their eyes were trustworthy.

Actually, it was commonly joked that Glass users often appeared down right "mentally challenged" as they stared through you trying to work out some glitch that no one else in the world could see. They'd stutter commands and and tap their heads and blink and look around lost and confused.

Suddenly we all realized what poor multi-taskers these people really were.

Any wearer who actually wanted to interact with the real world quickly found they had to keep taking off their Google Glasses and stowing them, or else everyone got mad.

It was simply deemed unacceptable to wear them persistently. And in fact users reported to having been socially pressured to use them quite a lot as they had previously used their phones. Pulling them out as needed. Which utterly defeated the purpose. On some level - that's what broke Google Glass. It wasn't what it was supposed to be. It wasn't persistent. It was more cumbersome and socially uncomfortable than the previous paradigm.

People who left them on in social situations were openly called "glassholes".

People who left them on in social situations were openly called "glassholes".

They were smirked at, and laughed at walking down the street. I know because I did it too.

There were lots of news reports about people who got punched for wearing them in public. In fact, anecdotally, there were more news reports about people getting beat up for wearing Google Glass in public than I actually saw on the street wearing them. The court of public opinion immediately sided on the position that Google Glass was little more than some random stranger shoving a camera in your face. Other people stopped talking to wearers until they took them off. They didn't even want it on top of their heads.

In hind sight it was pretty quickly clear Google Glass wasn't going to be a revolution.

I read an interview somewhere (years from now) that someone on the Google team had admitted that they more than once asked themselves if they were on the right track - but that the sentiment on the team was that they were doing something new. Like Steve Jobs would have done. Steve Jobs couldn't have known he was on the right track any more than they did - so they pushed forward.

Except that I think Steve Jobs sort of did know better. Or rather, he was better connected to the real world than the boys at Google’s Richie Rich Malibu Dream Labs were. Less dorky and introverted, basically.

The problem with innovation is that all the pieces need to be in place. Good ideas and good motivation can be mistimed. Usually is. That's all Google Glass was. Like so many reasonable intentions it was just too early. Selling digital music didn't work until everything was in place - iPods and iTunes were readily available and insanely easy to sync. HDTV didn't hit until content and economics permitted. And the world didn't want persistent augmented reality when Google created Glass.

All the above disclosed, Augmented Reality is still indeed your future. It's just that when it finally comes, well, when it happened, it didn't look like Google Glass.

Like, at all.

And I know, because I'm from the future.

My First Message From the Future: How Facebook Died

My First Message From the Future: How Facebook Died

It was a hot, sunny Boston morning in July, 2033 - and suddenly - it was a freezing London evening in Feb 2013, and I had an excruciating headache.

I have no clue what happened. No flash, no tunnel, no lights. It's like the last 20 years of my life just never happened. Except that I remember them.

Not knowing what else to do I went to the house I used to live in then. I was surprised that my family was there, and everyone was young again. I seemed to be the only one who remembers anything. At some point I dropped the subject because my wife thought I'd gone crazy. And it was easier to let her think I was joking.

It's hard to keep all this to myself though, so, maybe as therapy, I've decided to write it here. Hardly anyone reads this so I guess I can't do too much damage. I didn't write this stuff the first time around, and I'm a little worried that the things I share might change events to the point that I no longer recognize them, so forgive me if I keep some aspects to myself.

As it is I already screwed things up by promptly forgetting my wife's birthday. Jesus Christ, I was slightly preoccupied, I mean, I'm sorry, ok? I traveled in time and forgot to pick up the ring that I ordered 20 years ago… and picked up once already. All sorts of stuff changed after that for a while. But then somehow it all started falling back into place.

Anyway - that's why I'm not telling you everything. Just enough to save the few of you who read this some pain.

Today I'll talk about Facebook.

Ok, in the future Facebook, the social network, dies. Well, ok, not "dies" exactly, but "shrivels into irrelevance", which was maybe just as bad.

Bets are off for Facebook the company. I wasn't there long enough to find out - it might survive, or it might not, depends on how good they were… sorry, are at diversifying.

At this point perhaps I should apologize for my occasional shifting tenses. I'm finding that time travel makes it all pretty fuzzy. But I'll do my best to explain what happened...  Happens. Will happen.

Anyway, seeing Facebook back here again in full form, I marvel at the company's ability to disguise the obviousness of the pending events in the face of analysts, and corporate scrutiny, with so many invested and so much to lose.

But hindsight being 20/20, they should have seen - should see - that the Facebook social network is destined to become little more than a stale resting place for senior citizens, high-school reunions and, well, people whose eyes don't point in the same direction (it's true, Facebook Graph showed that one, it was a joke for a while - people made memes - you can imagine). Grandmothers connecting with glee clubs and other generally trivial activities - the masses and money gone.

The Facebook social network is destined to become little more than a stale resting place for senior citizens, high-school reunions and, well, people whose eyes don't point in the same direction

There were two primary reasons this happened:

First - Mobile (and other changing tech - including gaming, iTV and VR).  I know, I know I'm not the first, or 10,000th guy to say "Mobile" will contribute to Facebook's downfall. But there is a clue that you can see today that people aren't pointing out. While others look at Facebook with confidence, or at least hope, that Facebook has enough money and resources to "figure mobile out", they don't do it. In fact there is a dark secret haunting the halls of the Facebook campus. It's a dawning realization that the executive team is grappling with and isn't open about - a truth that the E-suite is terrified to admit. I wonder if some of them are even willing to admit it to themselves yet.

Here is the relevant clue - the idea that would have saved Facebook's social network, that would make it relevant through mobile and platform fragmentation - that idea - will only cost its creators about $100K.  That's how much most of these ideas cost to initiate - it rarely takes more.  Give or take $50k.

That's all the idea will cost to build and roll out enough to prove. 3-6 months of dev work. Yeah it would have cost more to extend it across Facebook's network. But that would have been easy for them. So, Facebook has gobs of $100Ks - why hasn't it been built yet?

The dark secret that has Facebook praying the world doesn't change too fast too soon (spoiler alert, it does), is that - they don't have the idea. They don't know what to build.

Let me repeat that, Facebook, the company, doesn't have the one idea that keeps their social network relevant into mobile and platform fragmentation. Because if they actually did… it's so cheap and easy to build, you would already see it. Surely you get that, right?   Even today?

Perhaps you take issue with the claim that only "one idea" is needed. Or perhaps you think they do have the vision and it's just not so easy; it requires all those resources, big, complex development. And that today it's being implemented by so many engineers, in so many ways across Facebook with every update. Perhaps you will say that continually sculpting Facebook, adding features, making apps, creating tools for marketers, and add-ons, will collectively add up to that idea.  This is what Facebook would prefer you believe.  And it's what people hope I guess.

Well, that's not how it works. Since the days Facebook was founded, you have seen a paradigm shift in the way you interact with technology. And that keeps changing.  I can report that the idea that will dominate within this new paradigm, will not merely be a collection of incremental adjustments from the previous state.

Hell, Facebook was one simple idea once. One vision. It didn't exist, and then it did(and it didn't even cost $100K). It answered a specific need.  And so too will this new idea. It won't be a feature. It won't look like Facebook. It will be a new idea.

I know, I've heard it, "Facebook can just buy their way into Mobile". You've seen that desperation already in the Instagram land grab. It's as if Mark said "…oh… maybe that's it..?? …or part of it … Maybe…?"

Cha-ching.

The price was comically huge. Trust me, in the future a billion dollars for Instagram looks even dopier. How much do you think Instagram spent building the initial working version of Instagram? Well, I didn't work on it, but like most projects of their ilk I am willing to bet it was near my magic number: $100K. I read somewhere that Instagram received $250K in funding early on and I seriously doubt they had to blow through more than half that on the initial build.

And Facebook's desperate, bloated buy of Instagram is virtual confirmation of the point. See, you don't buy that, and pay that much, if you have your own vision. If you have the idea.

And Facebook's desperate, bloated buy of Instagram is virtual confirmation of the point. See, you don't buy that, and pay that much, if you have your own vision. If you have the idea.

Unfortunately, Facebook will eventually realize that Instagram wasn't "it" either. No, the idea that will carry social networking into your next decade of platform fragmentation and mobility isn't formally happening yet. Rather the idea that will make social connections work on increasingly diverse platforms will come about organically. Catching all the established players mostly by surprise. It will be an obvious model that few are thinking about yet.

And that leads us to the second, and most potent, reason Facebook withers - Age.

Facebook found it's original user-ship in the mid '00s. It started with college-age users and quickly attracted the surrounding, decidedly youthful, psychographics. This founding population was united by a common life-phase; young enough to be rebelling and searching for a place in the world they can call their own, and just barley old enough to have an impact on developing popular trends.

Well, it's been almost a decade for you now- time flies. Those spunky, little 20+ year-old facebook founders are now 30+ year-olds and Facebook is still their domain. They made it so. And they still live their lives that way. With Facebook at its center.

But now at 30 things have started to change - now they have kids. Their kids are 6-12 years-old and were naturally spoon-fed Facebook. That's just the nature of life as a child living under Mom and Dad. You do what they do. You use what they use. You go where they go. Trips to the mall with Mom to buy school clothes. Dad chaperoning sleep-overs.  Messages to Grandma on Facebook.  It's a lifestyle that all children eventually rebel against as they aggressively fight to carve out their own world.

So give these kids another 6 years, the same rules will apply then. They'll be full-blown teenagers. They started entering college. They wanted their own place. And importantly, they inherited your throne of influence for future socializing trends. Yup, the generation of Mark Zuckerburgs graduated to become the soft, doughy, conventionally uncool generation they are... or rather, were,  in the future.

So project ahead with me to that future state, do you really think Facebook is going to look to these kids like the place to hang out?? Really? With Mom and Dad "liking" shit? With advertisers searching their personal timelines?

No - way.

 So project ahead to that future state, do you really think Facebook is going to look to these kids like the place to hang out?? Really? With Mom and Dad "liking" shit? With advertisers searching their personal timelines?No - way.

Don't even hope for that. See, the mistake a lot of you are making is that Facebook was never a technology - for the users, Facebook has always been a place. And 6-7 years from now these kids will have long-since found their own, cooler, more relevant place - where Mom and Dad (and grandma, and her church, and a gazllion advertisers) aren't. And it won't be "Social Network Name #7", powered by Facebook (but Facebook tries that - so I bought their URL yesterday - I recall they paid a lot for it). You will find it to be a confoundedly elusive place. It will be their own grass-roots network - a distributed system that exists as a rationally pure mobile, platform-agnostic, solution. A technically slippery, bit-torrent of social interaction. A decisive, cynical response to the Facebook establishment, devoid of everything Facebook stood for. At first it will completely defy and perplex the status quo. That diffused, no-there-there status makes advertisers crazy trying to break in to gain any cred in that world. But they don't get traction. The system, by design, prohibits that. At least for a year or two. Not surprisingly some advertisers try to pretend they are groups of "kids" to weasel in, and it totally blows up in their faces. Duh. It will be a good ol' wild west moment. As these things go. And they always do go. You've seen it before. And the kids win this time too.

 It will be their own grass-roots network - a distributed system that exists as a rationally pure mobile, platform-agnostic, solution. A technically slippery, bit-torrent of social interaction.

Then a smart, 20-year-old kid figures out how to harness the diffusion in a productized solution. Simply, brilliantly, unfettered by the establishment.

And at this point, you might say - "… well… Facebook can buy that!"

Sorry, doesn't happen. I mean, maybe it could have, but it doesn't. Don't forget, Yahoo tried to buy Facebook for a Billion Dollars too.

For a kid, the developer of this new solution is shrewd, and decides that selling out to Facebook would weaken what he and his buddies built - rendering it immediately inauthentic.

Seeing the power of what he holds, this kid classically disses Mark's desperate offer. It's all very recursive, and everyone wrote about that. My favorite headline was from Forbes: "Zucker-punched". And anyway, Google offers him more (which is not a "buy" for Google - later post).

Look, it doesn't matter, because at that point Facebook is already over because Facebook isn't "where they are" anymore.

Their parents, Facebook's founding user-base, stay with Facebook for a while and then some, those who still care how their bodies look in clothes (again Facebook's Graph, famously showed this), will switch over presumably because they suddenly realized how uncool Facebook had become. Then even more switched because they needed to track their kids and make sure they were not getting caught up in haptic-porn (something I actually rather miss now). And that kicks off the departure domino effect (or "The Great Facebalk", The Verge, 2021 I believe).

Later, Grandma even switches over. But some of her friends are still so old-timey that she'll keep her Facebook account so she can share cat pictures with them. And of course, she won't want to miss the high-school reunions.

some of [Gramma’s] friends are still so old-timey that she'll keep her Facebook account so she can share cat pictures

So that is Facebook's destiny. And you know, I am from the future. So I know.

Oh one last thing, in Petaluma there's a 14 year-old kid I bumped into the other day - quite intentionally.  He's cool.  He's hungry. When he turns 20, I plan on investing exactly $100K in some crazy idea he'll have. I have a pretty good feeling about it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Why Apple's Interfaces Will Be Skeuomorphic Forever, And Why Yours Will Be Too

Why Apple's Interfaces Will Be Skeuomorphic Forever, And Why Yours Will Be Too

"Skeuomorph..."  What??  I have been designing interfaces for 25 years and that word triggers nothing resembling understanding in my mind on its linguistic merit alone.  Indeed, like some cosmic self-referential joke the word skeuomorph lacks the linguistic reference points I need to understand it.

So actually yes, it would be really nice if the word ornamentally looked a little more like what it meant, you know?

So Scott Forstall got the boot - and designers the world over are celebrating the likely death of Apple's "skeuomorphic" interface trend.  Actually I am quite looking forward to an Ive-centric interface, but not so much because I hate so-called skeuomorphic interfaces, but because Ive is a (the) kick ass designer and I want to see his design sensibility in software.  That will be exciting.

And yet, I'm not celebrating the death of skeuomorphic interfaces at Apple because - and I can already hear the panties bunching up - there is no such a thing as an off-state of skeuomorphism. That's an irrelevant concept.   And even if there was such a thing, the result would be ugly and unusable.

Essentially, every user interface on Earth is ornamentally referencing and representing other unrelated materials, interfaces and elements.  The only questions are: what's it representing, and by how much?

Essentially, every user interface on Earth is ornamentally referencing and representing other unrelated materials, interfaces and elements.  The only questions are: what's it representing, and by how much?

For example, there is a very popular trend in interface design - promoted daily by the very designers who lament Apple's so-called "skeuomorphic" leather and stitching - where a very subtle digital noise texture is applied to surfaces of buttons and pages.  It's very subtle - but gives the treated objects a tactile quality. Combined with slight gradient shading, often embossed lettering and even the subtlest of drop shadows under a button, the effect is that of something touchable - something dimensional.

Excuse me, how can this not be construed as skeuomorphic?

Is that texture functional - lacking any quality of ornamentation?  Is the embossing not an attempt to depict the effect of bumps on real world paper?  Are the subtle drop shadows under buttons attempting to communicate something other than the physicality of a real-world object on a surface, interacting with a light source that doesn't actually exist?  The most basic use of the light source concept is, by definition skeuomorphic.

Drop shadows, embossing, gradients suggesting dimension, gloss, reflection, texture, the list is endless… and absolutely all of this is merely a degree of skeuomorphism because it's all referencing and ornamentally rendering unrelated objects and effects of the real world.

And you're all doing it.

This whole debate is a question of taste and functional UI effectiveness.  It's not the predetermined result of some referential method of design. So when you say you want Apple to stop creating skeuomorphic interfaces - you really don't mean that.  What you want is for Apple to stop having bad taste, and you want Apple to make their interfaces communicate more effectively.

So when you say you want Apple to stop creating skeuomorphic interfaces - you really don't mean that.  What you want is for Apple to stop having bad taste, and you want Apple to make their interfaces communicate more effectively.

The issues you have had with these specific interfaces is that they either communicated things that confused and functionally misled (which is bad UX), or simply felt subjectively unnecessary (bad taste).  And these points are not the direct result of skeuomorphism.

"But," you say, "I don't use any of that dimensional silliness.  My pages, buttons and links are purely digital - "flat" and/or inherently connected only to the interactive function, void of anything resembling the real world, and void of ornamentation of any kind.  Indeed, my interfaces are completely free of this skeuomorphism.”

Bullshit.

I'll skip the part about how you call them pages, buttons and links (cough - conceptually skeuomorphic - cough) and we'll chalk that up to legacy terminology.  You didn't choose those terms.  Just as you didn't choose to think of the selection tool in photoshop as a lasso, or the varied brushes, erasers and magnifying glass.  That's all legacy - and even though it makes perfect sense to you now - you didn't choose that.  Unless you work at Adobe in which case maybe you did and shame on you.

But you're a designer - and your interfaces aren't ornamental - yours are a case of pure UI function.  You reference and render nothing from anywhere else except what's right there on that… page… er, screen… no ... matrix of pixels.

For example, perhaps you underline your text links.  Surely that's not skeuomorphic, right?  That's an invention of the digital age.  Pure interface.  Well, lets test it:  Does the underline lack ornamentation, is it required to functionally enable the linking?    Well, no, you do not have to place an underline on that link to technically enable linking.   It will still be clickable without the underline.  But the user might not understand that it's clickable without it.  So we need to communicate to the user that this is clickable.  To do that we need to reference previous, unrelated instances where other designers have faced such a condition.  And we find an underline - to indicate interactivity.

"Wait," you say, "the underline indicating linking may be referencing other similar conditions, but it's pure UI, it's simply a best practice.  It is not a representation of the real world.  It's not metaphorical."

Nyeah actually it is.  It just may not be obvious because we are sitting in a particularly abstract stretch of the skeuomorphic spectrum.

Why did an underlined link ever make sense?  Who did it first and why? Well although my career spans the entirety of web linking I have no clue who did it on a computer first (anyone know this?).  But I do know that the underline has always (or for a very looooong time) - well before computers - been used to emphasize a section of text.  And the first guys who ever applied an underline to a string of text as a UI solution for indicating interactivity borrowed that idea directly from real-world texts - to similarly emphasize linked text - to indicate that it's different.  And that came from the real world.  We just all agree that it works and we no longer challenge it's meaning.

Face it, you have never designed an effective interface in your whole life that was not skeuomorphic to some degree.  All interfaces are skeuomorphic, because all interfaces are representational of something other than the pixels they are made of.

Look I know what the arguments are going to be - people are going to fault my position on this subject of currency and and how referencing other digital interface conventions "doesn't count" - that it has to be the useless ornamental reproduction of some physical real-world object.  But you are wrong. Skeuomorphism is a big, fat gradient that runs all the way from "absolute reproduction of the real world" to "absolute, un-relatable abstraction".

Skeuomorphism is a big, fat gradient that runs all the way from "absolute reproduction of the real world" to "absolute, un-relatable abstraction".

And the only point on that spectrum truly void of skeuomorphism is the absolute, distant latter: pure abstraction.  Just as zero is the only number without content.  And you know what that looks like ?  It's what the computer sees when there's no code.  No user interface.  That is arguably a true lack of skeuomorphism.  Or rather, as close as we can get.  Because even the underlying code wasn't born in the digital age, it's all an extension of pre-existing language and math

Look at it this way - an iPad is a piece of glass.  You are touching a piece of glass. So as a designer you need a form of visual metaphor to take the first step in allowing this object to become something other than a piece of glass.  To make it functional.  And that alone is a step on the skeuomorphic spectrum.

Sure you can reduce the silliness and obviousness of your skeuomorphism (good taste), and you can try to use really current, useful reference points (good UI), but you cannot design without referencing and rendering aspects of unrelated interfaces - physical or digital.  And that fact sits squarely on the slippery slope of skeuomorphism.

I read a blogger who tried to argue that metaphoric and skeuomorphic are significantly different concepts.  I think he felt the need to try this out because he thought about the topic just enough to realize the slippery slope he was on.  But it ultimately made no sense to me.  I think a lot of people want a pat term to explain away bad taste and ineffective UI resulting from a family of specific executions, but I don't think they have thought about it enough yet.  Skeuomorphic is metaphoric.

OK so let's say all this is true.  I know you want to argue, but come with me.

In the old days - meaning 1993-ish - There was something much worse than your so-called skeuomorphic interface.  There were interfaces that denied the very concept of interface - and looked completely like the real world.  I mean like all the way.  A bank lobby for example.  So you'd pop in your floppy disc or CD-Rom and boom - you'd be looking at a really bad 3D rendering of an actual bank teller window.  The idea was awful even then.  "Click the teller to ask a question" or "Click the stapler to connect your accounts".

And that was a type of "skeuomorphism" that went pretty far up the spectrum.

Back then my team and I were developing interfaces where there were indeed, buttons and scroll bars and links but they were treated with suggestive textures and forms which really did help a generation of complete newbie computer users orient themselves to our subject and the clicking, navigating and dragging. You would now call what we'd done skeuomorphism.

My team and I used to call these interfaces that used textures and forms, ornamentally suggestive of some relevant or real-world concept "soft metaphor interfaces".  Where the more literal representations (the bank lobby) were generally called "hard metaphor interfaces".

These terms allowed for acknowledgment of variability, of volume. The more representative, the "harder" the metaphoric approach was.  The more abstract, the "softer" it could be said to be.

these terms allowed for acknowledgment of variability, of volume. The more representative, the "harder" the metaphoric approach was.  The more abstract, the "softer" it could be said to be.

To this day I prefer these qualifiers of metaphor to the term "skeuomorphic".  In part because "skeuomorphic" is used in a binary sense which implies that it can be turned off.  But the variability suggested by the softness of metaphor is more articulate and useful when actually designing and discussing design. Like lighter and darker, this is a designer's language.

I hope after reading this you don't walk away thinking I believe the leather and stitching and torn paper on the calendar app was rightly implemented.  It wasn't - and others have done a solid job explaining how it breaks the very UX intent of that app.

But the truth is - there are times when some amount of metaphor, of obvious skeuomorphism in interface design makes tons of sense.  Take the early internet.  Back then most people were still relatively new to PCs. Ideas we take for granted today - like buttons, hover states, links, dragging and dropping, etc, was completely new to massive swaths of the population.  Computers scared people. Metaphorical interfaces reduced fear of the technology - encouraged interaction.

And I think, as Apple first popularized multi-touch - an interface method that was entirely new - it made all the sense in the world to embrace so-called skeuomorphism as they did.  I don't begrudge them that at all.  Sure - there are lots of us that simply didn't need the crutch.  We either grew up with these tools and or create them and feel a bit like it talks down to us.  But Apple's overt skeuomorphic interfaces weren't really aimed at us.

Remember the launch of the iPad, where Steve Jobs announced that this was the "post PC era"?  Apple didn't win the PC war - and instead deftly changed the game.  "Oh, are you still using a PC?  Ah, I see, well that's over.  Welcome to the future."  Brilliant!

But the population WAS still using a PC.  And Apple, with it's overt skeuomorphic interfaces, was designing for them.  Users who were figuratively still using IE6.  Who were afraid of clicking things lest they break something.

These users needed to see this new device - this new interface method - looking friendly.  It needed to look easy and fun.  And at a glance, hate it though you may, well-designed metaphorical interfaces do a good job of that.  They look fun and easy.

Communicating with your users is your job. And to do that you must continue to devise smart UI conventions and employ good taste - and that means choosing carefully where on the skeuomorphic spectrum you wish to design.  Skeuomorphic is not a bad word.  It's what you do.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Years ago my business partner at Red Sky, CEO Tim Smith, used to tell a story about having met Steve Jobs in a most unusual, almost comic, situation. Tim has, after all these years, felt the pull to write it for posterity, or therapy maybe.

It's a great read.  If you're a bit stunned at the loss of Steve Jobs you will appreciate it as I did.

Read Tim's story here.

I never met Steve. I always thought I would some day, egoist I am.  The man shaped the lives and careers of so many of us, and we (I) invested so much of who we are in him.  He played such a central role in our days.But as I sit here and write this I feel a tugging that I recall having only once before.  And although it was understandably quite a lot stronger and more personal then, I recognize the feeling.  

It happened on the morning my grandmother, my father's mother, passed away.

I drove to be with my grandfather and we spent the day together alone in their house.  It was an emotional day, her presence was everywhere.  But the most poignant moment came when the two of us sat down and, in thick silence, ate a slice of fresh pie that my grandmother had made only the day before.  Her fingerprints were in the crust.Nothing had been said before, or subsequently, that was ultimately more emotionally meaningful to me than that moment. The feeling washed over  me as I realized simultaneously - that she was gone forever, but how fresh and delicious the pie was.It was a strange, ghostly feeling - both utterly empty and yet full of meaning.

I guess sitting here, writing this now, I feel something similar that must be playing out in so many ways all over the world tonight.I usually delete the following... but not today.

Sent from my iPad.

Rhapsody Acquires Napster, Apple Terrified

Rhapsody Acquires Napster, Apple Terrified

This week on: Battle of the Forgotten Media-Player All-Stars!

Wow, maybe doctors could deliver this news to test your yawn reflex.

It's rare that something is so unbelievably boring that it transcends being ignorable and actually makes me want to write something about it, but man, did the folks at Rhapsody pull it off.  Now that I think about it - I never thought of Rhapsody as having "folks at" before now.

Both music service-cum-companies have hovered so far down the food-chain of cultural relevance that I'm sure those of you who are old enough shared my first thought which was - "Wait, there is still a Rhapsody AND a Napster?"

The whole thing is so low-rent, it smacks of having happened on EBay.   "In your cart: (1) Napster - size: small, and (3) Pair Mens Socks - Black."

Like those Batman sequels with the nipple-suits where they started pulling in 3rd tier villains like Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze, you wondered who the bozos were that went for that.

I mean, once it went "legit" who the hell kept using Napster anyway?  BestBuy - of all companies - bought Napster.  Someone at BestBuy must have thought that was a big idea.  "Gentlemen, my kids seem to know all about this 'Napster'.  Can you imagine if we had  the Napster?  Why, we could appeal to 'generation x' and bring our brand into the new millennium using the world wide web."

And then there's Rhapsody.  That was RealNetworks big entry into digital music services so many years back.  I imagine through some “crap,-how-can-we-get-something-out-of-this-before-it-tanks” deal, Rhapsody was spun out of RealNetworks just last year.

RealNetworks was a big thing back in the 90s.  But you never hear about them anymore.  What happened?  Ah, the legend of Real Networks.

RealNetworks had the de facto cross-platform online media player, RealPlayer.  But they were also the guys who would stop at almost nothing to hijack and infest your computer, your browser, your system preferences, your subscription settings and anything else they could get their stealthy little hands on.  After installing the Real Player app or plugin you'd open a file and suddenly realize that all your preferred offline applications had also been usurped by Real Player.  It was your responsibility to locate and uncheck various territorial features that Real brazenly snagged without your consent.  You were consistently inundated with ads and offers and reminders to upgrade (and pay) or make Real the default for this or that.  You would have to research methods in your OS for wresting control back to the default apps that you wanted default.  They pioneered the method of designing web pages that appeared as though you were downloading a free version of the app - only to realize that the free version was almost outright hidden and you'd downloaded the for-pay subscription version instead.  Upon launching, you'd wonder why it was asking for a credit card for a 30-day free trial when you could have sworn the download button you clicked was for a "Free Version".  Real seemed to stop at almost nothing to unwittingly force you to use their app.  To out-smart you.  To trick you.  To intentionally exploit a population of computer noobs who were themselves not expert users.  Which was most of the general population at the time.

And these tactics partly worked for a while because at the time there was no overt, popularly accepted etiquette for this kind of interaction.  I think it's fair to say, in fact, that along side malware, Real Networks played a pivotal role in shaping the intuitive distrust in downloading and installing that many users have today and more so, the related etiquette that companies who offer downloads, newsletter subscriptions, messaging options, installers and uninstallers exhibit today.

Ultimately - it was Real's surreptitious disrespect for users' true control (breaking the 1st Interactive Axiom) that undid them as a standard.   If only Real Networks had focused their effort on continually improving their product in line with users' best interest and respectfully trusting that users would gravitate to the best solution, they might be a, uh-hem real player today.

Well Real learned the hard way what happens when you disregard the 1st Interactive Axiom.  As their big lead began to tip downward, they moved too slow to strip themselves of the aggressive methods and then did what they could during the last decade-plus to keep up with Apple's iTunes, having acquired Listen.com and founding Real Rhapsody.  But like so many others, the reliance on multiple 3rd parties to assemble a user experience ecosystem (media player software, content, and portable hardware) was an utterly doomed strategy.  They all tanked-  Real Networks, Yahoo with Yahoo Music, AOL, E-Music, etc. under inconsistent quality and confusing user experience which lacked anything resembling simplicity.

Now Rhapsody, has what's left of Napster's user-base....and I'm wondering if there's any peanut butter in the kitchen...?

Oh sorry guys - um, that was the end.  Cool?  I promise next time I will have some actual news. 

Why Teenage Users Do Not Indicate Your Technical Future

Two teens predicting the future

Why Teenage Users Do Not Indicate Your Technical Future

So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email is going away because, as we all know, "teens" signal what's coming in the future.  And since teens use Facebook and Twitter and SMS, and don't use email, that naturally means email will soon go away for all of us.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier defended this idea, employing a recent PEW report that only 11% of teens email daily (a significant generational drop).  Then she said:

"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today."

You've heard this elsewhere right?  A bunch of times probably.

And it makes a terrific little sound bite, and feels all edgy and smart and progressive.

And it would be - except for the fact that it's completely dumb and wrong.  Maybe even backwards.

Theoretical beneficiaries like Sandberg's Facebook, but also countless other less-well-positioned wannabe visionaries, parrot this meme because they love the idea that this mystical teenage behavior might be a reliable predictor of our future.

Depending on who you ask, the logic behind this theoried prediction tool follows one or both of the following threads:

a) Digital-immigrants that they are, those poor professional adults are so out of touch, so weakened by requirement for metaphor and instruction, and mystified by digital tools in general, that their use-case must naturally be antiquated and waning.  Whereas those brilliant little digital-native rag-a-muffins just seem like they can pick up any interface or game and play without instruction, so they must be the only ones who genuinely understand the true-use of digital media.

And/or,

b) Teens current technical preferences will inexorably follow them as they age and enter the workforce, ushering in sweeping infrastructural changes that will impact us all.

"So," the expert goes, "uber-smart companies will prepare for that change, not get caught scrambling when it's too late.  We should be progressive and develop new corporate communication policies that minimize reliance on email and involve the preferred tools of our upcoming workforce: Facebook and Twitter and SMS."

OK, look people-- the reason teens appear to inordinately prefer Twitter and Facebook and SMS over email is so simple -  they're just talking.  Got it?  Chit-chatting.  Socializing.  Partying, labeling, posturing.  It's what their life-phase destines them to do.  And like verbal communication, there is a high value on short response-time and convenience.  Conversely there's not much use for persistence and record-keeping. So Twitter/Facebook/SMS make perfect sense - they are arguably the right tools for the requirement.

Now let's project ahead to the forewarned, paradigm-shifted time when these teens enter the workforce.  What is often ignored in the analysis is that those previously myopically social teens will suddenly be saddled with something completely new, something they did not carry as teens; suddenly they will have responsibility.  It's a new life-phase and a related set of new needs will enter their use-case - the need to communicate officially and discretely, to record and execute plans, to manage interaction across teams, most importantly in all of these is the need to keep a persistent paper-trail, a record of their work and communication.

And all of a sudden email looks a whole lot less lame.  In fact - it looks indispensable.

Skype (or something like it) - not even on the panicky email-is-going-awayers' list of tools for consideration - can do some of this and is way better suited to carry the torch, assuming it undergoes some significant design changes.  But email remains the best tool for that ubiquitous work-place requirement.

Will email go away?  The specific technical approach will.  Someday.  But not because teens don't use it today.

Whatever as yet unnamed tool eventually rises to replace email - you can be sure that it will behave quite a lot like email.  Rather, it will essentially be email - only maybe faster with a lot more features.  But it won't be Twitter, or Facebook, unless they reinvent themselves to be, well, emaily.

Blogs are another story.  Why don't teens keep blogs?  They sort of did in the 90's, what happened?  Well everyone did stupid things in the 90s.  But the truth is teens had no more reason to keep blogs in the 90s than they do now.  They just didn't know any better then.  None of us did.  But again the lovers of those meddling teens predictive abilities don't seem to recognize the fundamental difference in use-case between Facebook, Twitter, SMS and a Blog.

Blogs serve a very different purpose.  Most bloggers have reached a phase in their lives where they feel they have something to share with the world.  They have lived a certain amount of life, and or have acquired unique experiences they deem worth sharing. This can happen early for some, later for others.   As such, you might argue that blogging is a "mentor's" life-phase tool.

And with all due respect to teens -  they are still experiencing the world.  By-in-large they are not yet the mentors/experts/teachers.  They are still filling their lives with experiences and knowledge that - someday - they will feel a strong desire to pass on.

And when they do enter that phase of their lives, they will look for a tool that does something a lot like a blog does.  Or they will write a book, or maybe start a company.

Teens are not tapped into some sort of advanced, predictive, knowledge-base.  There is no magic here.  Yes, they are "digital natives" and as such can learn to operate some technologies somewhat faster on average than "digital immigrants". About the scan of an instruction manual faster, if I'm being generous.  But the frequency with which they use a technology once they've learned it, is no indication of changes to come for anyone but teens right then.

Most technologies will fall in and out of relevance over the phases of a user's life and career, because as you age and advance, your needs change.  Adoption of one tool as a teen user, may or may not have any meaning as that user ages and gains responsibility into adult-hood and a career.

In short, teenagers will only dictate what technologies they themselves use.  And as they enter the next phase of their lives, don't be surprised when it ends up looking quite a lot like what the rest of us are already using today.

If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look for solutions that improve your life today.

And then maybe tell a teenager about it - because they'll probably have to learn to do whatever it is when they get older.

Gap is the Biggest Wussy on Earth

gaplogo

Gap is the Biggest Wussy on Earth

So we all saw the new Gap logo. It looked weird. It looked wrong. It looked like all sorts of other unbecoming words that were broadcast over Twitter and Facebook within hours of its unveiling.

Then, in what is going to be (or should be) remembered as the biggest corporate branding fail of the last decade, Gap caved in to all the little whiny Tweeters and defensively pulled its shiny, new logo.

Anyone who thinks that move was rational - that pulling the new logo was the best thing Gap could have done in the situation - is somewhere between equally ball-less and an idiot.

No, it was the worst thing Gap could have done in the situation. I've read a few posters who think the whole thing was an intentional rouse to gain attention. Far fetched. There are better ways of gaining attention than intentionally making your company look like a bunch of bumbling idiots. That's not it.

I'm sure Gap thinks they were "using the medium intelligently to respond to consumer opinion" or something one might read in a Forrester report on social marketing. But really they are just pussies.

The fact is, any time you launch a logo redesign you have some people who complain. The new logo always "feels weird". It feels weird because it's different. Like the...mirror image of a photograph which never feels "better" than the original orientation - until you get used to the novel nature of it.

Critics crawled out of the woodwork - and the internet lets their short-term opinions sound big. But a company has to differentiate between that kind of blip, and the long-term strategic reasoning behind their decisions.The truth is - all those whiners would have gotten used to the new logo. And they would have come to associate it positively with the brand, so long as Gap continued to invest in it and in their creative marketing efforts as they have done.

When the iPad was announced by Apple - the whole world spent 2 weeks laughing at it and making comparisons to tampons. It was ridiculed. SNL did skits about it. People made YouTube videos roasting it. It was the laughing stock.Who's laughing now?

Apple had the balls to commit (this kind of thing really doesn't take much in the way of balls - just the basics - which is why Gap is such a colossal wuss). And iPad's critical consumer responses naturally waned, like all these things do. This wasn't an oil spill for christ sake, it was a brand.

You know, I hate to say it now - but I sort of liked the new logo. I mean it was Helvetica, sure. One might argue that seems old. But so are 5 dozen other logos that use it quite well. And Gap, maybe even uniquely, has the minimalist heritage to have owned the execution. The black and white was refreshing.

So the little blue square was sort of lame at first glance - but who knows how it all would have manifested across other products and marketing devices over time. Guaranteed, Gap, the nay-sayers would have wound down, and a new crop of less outspoken advocates would have embraced the new logo quite well.

You just had to have the very slightest teensy little balls a company can have.Instead you have displayed yourself to the world as an utter corporate whip. You've done more damage to your brand equity by pulling the new logo, than the blip of negativity that naturally comes with anything new.

Now I don't give a crap how "tough" or cool your models are styled to look.Now we all know - Gap is just a self-conscious little wuss.

Confessions of an Apple Freemason

apple-freemasons

Confessions of an Apple Freemason

I love Apple products. But something has been troubling me...

People have been calling me and my kind Apple Fanboys for many years.   Before that term was trendy they called us Apple fanatics. I used to resist these labels since from my point of view I was just reporting the obviousness between Macs and PCs. It wasn't my fault Apple products were superior.

Anyway this isn't about who's better or who's right . That's old news.   Apple is kicking butt these days and most of the anti-Apple people I've known have finally let go of their irrational embrace of a Windows PC-only paradigm, bought iPhones, iPods, iPads and iMacs and we can finally move on.

And my story starts there.

Because as any true Apple Fanboy will tell you, it feels oddly disorienting to see Apple kicking butt .  Yeah, it's what we fought for over the last quarter century, and yet now that we have arrived, the universe is out of balance, only perhaps not in the way you might expect...

iTudes

The other day I was ordering a bound photo album I made in iPhoto. The fastest shipping option I saw was still going to take too long, so I went in search of a more expensive overnight shipping option. I didn't find mention of such an option, so I called the Apple Web Store Support line - since they would know about shipping Apple's products. The first sales person I talked to naturally sounded cool - like a "Mac". When I asked if I could overnight the shipping of my iPhoto Album, after it was printed, the line went dead. I was on my iPhone so figured AT&T's connection dropped. I called back on a landline and this time got another cool-sounding "Mac". Once again I asked about paying more money for an overnight shipping option, and this time I think the "Mac" mumbled: "Oh we ble..." he trailed off unintelligibly and the line went dead again. This time it was clear - he hung up. In my ear. Mid-mumbled-sentance.And that's how I learned, or intuited rather, that buying Apple products online through iPhoto is unrelated to say, buying iPhoto itself.Thus started my troubling, mulling and stewing. Obviously, I shouldn't have taken being hung up on twice by Apple representatives personally. There is obviously a rational explanation. And yet I did take it personally.

"Made in California"

An important part of Apple's brand is it's personality, embodied by a slightly cooler than you, slightly smug, rather naturally stylish Californian called "Mac" (and this was true decades before any commercials featuring Justin Long were deployed). And if you're Apple, you'd recognize it would undermine your brand personality if US consumers dialed the Apple Store and were directed to random, heavily-accented operators in India who sounded like they had been hired by the floor-full, to save a few bucks. No, you would hire considerably more expensive, self-entitled, young Californian-sounding American College Students and you would save the money back by issuing a punishable edict that directed all "Macs" (operators) to move through those calls as ungodly fast as possible - even if it meant outright hanging up in the ear of some dumb customer who didn't figure out that the information vacuum surrounding Overnight Shipping for iPhoto Products meant Apple doesn't do that. Click - "Sorry, application 'telephone call' unexpectedly quit".

Little Dog

Apple has always had a little dog attitude. You know- the way a Jack Russell will act all self-important, and snarl and snap like he's all that. He has to do that because he's so small and powerless. Otherwise he would be eaten. That was Apple for it's first 20 years. But like me, maybe you have wondered what you would do if your Jack Russell Freaky Friday'ed into the body of a Great Dane or a Rottweiler. There is no room in our civilization for such a vicious K9, and Animal Control would probably put it down.

Well Apple has grown. And by grown I mean it has inserted itself into the body of a Microsoft, a gigantic swath of the population with iPhones, iPods and now trailing, Mac computers. Apple is enjoying more users than ever before in its history. You might argue that in areas, Apple has become a big dog. The problem, and the reason I currently think I would prefer Google own the digital universe despite their utter lack of aesthetic sensibility, is that Apple still carries itself like a small dog. Utterly arrogant, overly aggressive; a little dictator.

It was cute when the company had no power, it was necessary, endearing even. But now that so many lives are intertwined with that personality, now that a virtual ecosystem has begun to build itself around the company and its behavior, Apple's personality needs an adjustment; the arrogance, once an asset, has turned destructive.

Knights of the Apple Table

If you spend any time in the Apple Discussion boards you have come across a recurring comment convention. Some aspect of Apple's service or products pisses a customer off and by way of expressing the injustice, the customer will start by listing, in detail, all the Apple products he has owned over so many years; a precious few can even assert that they owned the first Macintosh Computer in 1984. As if such credentials should entitle them to some premier frequent flier status.

I used to laugh at those people - how lame, I thought, this is a company - you just buy their products or you don't. Apple doesn't owe you any more than that. The number of products you willfully purchased is a meaningless datapoint with regard to the little issue you are upset about now....and yet... I have begun to understand why they felt that way. Why some of them intuitively felt that Apple owed them a little bit more, perhaps more than all these new, fair-weather, iPod-gateway, converts. Why being shuttled through the same long cues and dismissiveness, as everyone else felt unjust. And why, after some real soul-searching - I now sincerely feel that way too.Apple does owe us. Some of us. For we are the loyal minority. The long-timers. The knights of the Apple table. They owe us because we were the kids who fought off the countless bullies on Apple's behalf at a time that Apple was weakest. We were Apple's first line of defense. The ones who tucked our precious Mac OS under our arms and carried it away from threat of disaster. We protected it.We defended Apple's honor against an inescapable and humiliating tidal wave of proof that Apple was the weakling of the personal computing party.

We fought these countless adversaries with the most valuable weapon of all:Our own credibility. Because Apple carried so precious little then.To keep the company alive - in effort of defending the unacknowledged rightness of Apple's mission, we put our very faces and reputations on the line in defense of an ideal that had not managed to manifest a meaningful footprint. Apple was weak, it faltered, it was shrinking to toy-like proportions, so as far as anyone knew at the time our assertive actions were reckless, self-destructive and ultimately doomed. But through it all - we fanned the Apple embers tirelessly.

These were the darkest years. Seriously, Gil Amelio? Really?  It took a level of courage and self-confidence to be an Apple supporter then.

My minuscule part in this legend was as the creative head of a highly-awarded Interactive firm at that time, and there was not one technologist, IT executive, or engineer who thought we should have a Mac in the shop. Like vultures they circled, "Apple is about to fold, Photoshop runs on Windows now, we need to move to PCs now"; it was their repeated and logical assertion.  It became an IT mantra.  And yet we fought.  My business partner and I, against the obviousness, we fought. So my company bought more ugly beige boxes from Gil because "Damnit," I said, "the OS is BETTER. And I believe in their rightness.  They'll come back." Obviously I had no clue Apple could come back - just a deeply wishful belief in the justice of it all.And I wasn't the only one. There were more of us. A well-documented, miniscule percentage of the personal computing population - we evangelized, consistently, passionately, angrily even - to the near-death of our professional relationships.

Frequent i-er Program

Apple's Steve Jobs died and was reborn to rule once more.

Could this have been possible had the believers ceased believing?   I don't think so.  When I recall the relative viscousness of our fight, no, I don't think so.

So I stand before you today, Apple, with the scars, and sacrifice that you survived long enough to rise to new power upon, and I ask you to remember.  Not to forget us.Maybe... maybe you do owe those few something after all? Those few who stayed with you from the 80s onward?  It wouldn't take much.

You could acknowledge our greater-than-mere-consumerism sacrifice by instituting a literal premier customer status that it takes years to acquire. A good friend of mine, had a simple suggestion: Lifetime Applecare.

Or maybe we just need you to grow up. Go the extra distance and show us all how such a great company - who survived thanks to a relative few fighting proponents - can mature gracefully. Lose the little dog attitude, and for Christ sake - respect your evangelists.  Find out who you're talking to before you treat them like annoyances.  I know you think "Hey - this is awesome, look at all the new customers we have now!" But look more closely and you won't see any evangelism in that body of new users. You'll just see users. Uninvested users who follow trends. And that's great, so long as you remain the trend.

Similarly, when you lose your loyal soldiers, the lifers - you'll have another problem. A population of trained, outspoken digerati who know your strengths and weaknesses intimately and who share a new mission. Look at this post. It's the inevitable byproduct of such a scenario. And a pretty mild one at this point.Now that you are strong, it wouldn't take a lot to get me back. But I... we, are not like the rest of your new customers.

We had an income in 1984. We bought every OS you have ever released and more hardware than some companies do.

The people who call us 'Fanboys', who lump us in with this iPod generation of trenders, totally miss the point.

We are not Fanboys.We are the proud Apple Freemasons, and membership has been closed for a long time.

Apple Freemason Medals of Service

I started with a Macintosh Computer in 1985. I bought half a dozen beige boxes with names like Performa, LC, and Quadra. I bought a Duo. I bought the first iMac (bondi blue). And the second iMac (blueberry). I bought three Powerbooks. I bought the Cube. I loved my Cube. I bought another iMac (AV graphite). I bought two G3 towers(beige and blue), and two G4 towers. I bought several tube Monitors, and on the day it was available bought a 20" flat Cinema Screen and then the 23" Cinema Screen. I bought the first iBook. Naturally I bought the first G5 Tower, and then another faster G5. I bought two MacBooks (one white, one black), and I bought the first 30" cinema screen (with the necessary video card upgrade). I bought an iSight webcam. I bought the first iPod with mechanical spinning click-wheel and surrounding buttons, the iPod with four red glowy buttons, The first iPod Mini, the first Nano (still the best iPod design), and the clip-on Shuffle. I bought the first iPhone, the iPhone 3G, the 3GS, and now 4. I bought the first Airport Base Station. The first Airport Extreme. Numerous Airport Express bricks. The new Airport Extreme 802.11n. And I bought a coveted AppleTV. I recently bought a spanking new Nehalem MacPro Tower. I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and an iPad.I bought every Mac OS ever released. Every version of iLife and iWork. I bought Final Cut. I bought all manner of Apple adapter and cable and battery and mouse and keyboard in multiples.

Apple, you kind of made me buy those adapters.

I have spent untally-able dollars at the iTunes Store on music, movies, TV shows, apps and books, as well as photobooks and cards through iPhoto (minus overnight shipping). I have been a dual-account holder of mac.com since it was launched (boasting Virex!), and maintain two Apple developer accounts.

I didn't buy the iPod Hi-Fi. Sorry, that was the stupidest product I have ever seen. For a while I tried to pretend like I never saw it. So I guess I saved $349 there.

By my rough estimation, I have personally purchased well in excess of $70,000 of Apple products.

I additionally was directly responsible for ensuring that Apple products remained the dominant tools in my company of 550 people for the worst decade of Apple's lifespan to date.

And this is just what I remember.During the same period, I purchased maybe 4 versions of Microsoft Office.

You too?  Welcome to the Apple Freemasons.

Going Social On Your Ass

go social

Going Social On Your Ass

Three years ago some ad agency dweeb leaned into my office and smirked "Dude, our campaign just went social".

And I think, after a brief pause, my immediate reaction was to throw up in my mouth.  I silently hoped I would never hear that stupid little term again. That something "went social".

But boy it's catchy isn't it?  Sounds all proactive and edgy and exciting, right?  If you work in an ad agency, you probably just enthusiastically thought 'Hell yeah'.

Those of you who know me know I hate these little, after-the-fact terms.  Badges that agency people glom onto in an attempt to own the things that happen to them by accident.  To claim it somehow, despite the fact that they exist outside the users' intent.  "Viral", "Word of Mouth", and now "Going social".

Hello!?  It's all the same thing, people.  Yeah yeah, someone will feel compelled to bloviate on behalf of the need for, and variances between these dumb little labels.  And it still won't change the fact that users are in complete control - share what they want, how they want, only when they feel like it - and that advertisers have never actually had permission to interrupt or effect a desire of their own upon users no matter where they do it.  And if, in wishful disregard, the advertiser still has some desire for proactivity of any sort, may at best, bow low and deep, and beggingly offer service to the king, the user.

But they rarely do.  Advertising seems meaningless unless advertisers think they have control.  So we now spend a lot of money developing and executing marketing plans that will "go social".

In the words of my old friend Nick, Social "this."

Ad agency people: in a couple short years you will no longer be uttering that term.  So save yourself the pleated, acid-washed embarrassment, and don't utter it today either.

Look at the big picture.  Make things that are valuable.  Then be silently grateful that something you created isn't held in utterly dull regard by the user.

And then maybe I won't be forced to keep swallowing my own vomit.

Ba Da Bing!

Ba Da Bing!

It's cold in hell today.  Well, in my private corner of it anyway.

That's because my default home page - across all my browsers - was just changed to Microsoft's Bing.com.

In my world - that's really big news.  I have friends who have responded with utter disbelief.

For the last 24 years I have been, you might say, generally anti-Microsoft.  Or rather - I wasn't impressed with this company that had defaulted, and then bullied it's way, into ubiquity slightly ahead of availability of vastly better designed systems (cough - Mac OS - cough).

Yes, of course I was, and to a large degree, still am, an Apple fanboy.  And yet when I think about the companies that I would prefer to have rule the universe, I have always thought Google makes a slightly more benevolent ruler than either of the former.

Over the last 24 years I repeatedly asserted that the day Microsoft developed a product that is better than Apple, and later Google, that I would have no problem adopting it.  And of course that was so easy to say because such a thing had never happened.  Like ever.B

ut for the last month I have been trying Bing, and guess what, it doesn't suck.In fact, it doesn't suck so much that it's actually really great.  Dare I say - the greatest Internet search engine available today.

For over 10 years Google has held the status as the top subject in my private Internet kingdom.  The first logo I saw every morning, and the most used internet tool every day.  But all that changed today.

Using Bing, it's pretty obvious that search results are more relevant, videos more immediate, dynamic and easy to navigate, and images are more relevant, numerous and easy to view.And, gird yourself Google, I'm about to utter an alien phrase... it's cooler.

Using Bing, I realized that Google, the search engine, just slipped, unceremoniously, into the bottom half of the hour glass as an artifact of a previous time.  A time when aesthetics necessarily fell by the wayside in favor of functionality and conservative technical etiquette.  Business models had to actually work after the bubble burst- imagine that.  And the growing tidal wave of newbie mom and pop internet users were still a little confused by all them thar buttons and interwebs and emails and such.  Google's child-like branding and minimalist (read: mundane) approach to interface design and aesthetics made the company and it's site friendly and accessible.   ...Back then.

However, today, Google's obvious repulsion against anything remotely related to aesthetic beauty or adventurous U.I. has left it with all the design gravitas of a pocket calculator.  Yeah, it works, but there is no joy in using, it's not delightful, it's not cool.

As a Google corporate outsider it's hard to tell how much of Google's home page (and logo) - which has changed glacially in the last decade - was initially accidental or the result of advanced calculation, but in either case it worked at that time, and it's unlikely that anyone inside Google has been willing to take responsibility for messing with that success by fundamentally refreshing the product's appearance and behavior.

"DON'T TOUCH IT!" is the more likely conscience on the primary-colored campus.

But technology runs to commodity.  And one day you wake up and the only difference between two competing products is aesthetics and an implied lifestyle.In hindsight, "change it" is something Google needed to do some time ago.  Embracing the risk, reward and uncertainty of great design would have given the company a chance.  Might have pre-empted Microsoft's bid altogether.  But you don't write algorithms to do that, you employ artists, and unconventional U.I experts, you trust their intuition and taste, and you relegate to them some directorial control.  You don't drown them in statistics, limitations and testing.  That procedurally kills good design.Look at Apple - the poster-child of industrial design and aesthetics working hand-in-hand with great technology.

Apple gets it.  Pretty much always has.  Except for maybe when Gil Amelio was there.  And it's not like they don't do consumer testing.  They do - but they value great design.  And Google could learn a few things about consumers and marketing from the design powerhouse, if they would just pull away from the ones and zeros long enough to appreciate organic, intuitive creativity.  But alas, outside the occasional visiting artist who is paid to perform during the lunch-break (the videos we have all envied), Google does not seem to have any idea how to incorporate the intuitive creative sensibility into it's products in a meaningful way.I'm not saying Bing is some design nirvana - it's far from it.  It even shares many similarities with Google.  And I'm not saying that it is so advanced that Bing can't be unseated, but for now, it's just better than Google.  And in the small, small world of search engine powerhouses, that's all that matters.I will add that it appeared to be a rather unbecoming defensive move when Google announced an operating system initiative - just as the obvious superiority of Bing's search over Google's was settling into the Internet stream of consciousness.  Perhaps a bid to steal some of Microsoft's thunder - or keep them feeling the pressure of an inferiority complex that should be pretty well entrenched at Microsoft by now.For now, Google's well documented subservience to testing and data, and it's aversion to artistic intuition has done it this one infinitesimally small disservice: it has turned at least one staunch Apple Fanboy and Google advocate into a Microsoft convert.I'm writing this on a Mac.  One that has never revealed a positive thing about Microsoft.  And I even still want Google, with it's slightly more trustworthy corporate mission to "do no evil", to ultimately rule the technical universe.  And yet...

Bing is now my home page.

Sorry Google, you have some work to do, Buddy.

How the Apple Dress Code Undermined the iPhone

iPhone Collar Tug

How the Apple Dress Code Undermined the iPhone

I can't be the only one. The only lifelong Apple fan boy who wears shirts with collars on occasion. Am I?

I ask because if there were others, if maybe even one of us worked for Apple on the iPhone team, the iPhone headphones would be designed differently. It's a fact - no two ways about it. That somehow this critical design flaw should never have survived the Apple design process, unless of course, they really all do wear t-shirts - exclusively.

Hey, I wear t shirts. Cool ones too. But now and again - and maybe more often than some, I wear similarly stylish button-down shirts with collars. And this is where the design flaw reveals itself.

See, the wired iPhone mic catches on your shirt collar. And by catches on your collar, I mean the sharp edge of the mic invariably snags your collar with enough force to tug the earpiece out of you ear, and then the earpiece and mic fall 4 feet to your knees mid-conversation. It never fails. Turn your head an inch too far and - pop.

"Wait, HELLO!? Hold on, I can't hear you - sorry! Hello? you still there? Oh hi, sorry - my headphone just popped out of my...."

Never fails. I really don't get it.

Oh sure, it looks nice. It looks awesome. And it even feels nice in your fingers; that little wired mic. But by God, as sure as I am writing "mac genius" that headphone catches on my collar and pops out of my ear.

genious

Maybe like you, I've become subconsciously sensitive to the problem. I have developed this acute reflex due to "the pull". That feeling when the cord tugs at my earbud, the mic having snagged my collar. At the slightest resistance, my head freezes and I carefully bring it back to center, just shy of popping the earbud from my ear. There was a point where I would use my patented oval-head-move to release the mic from said collar. I'd gotten pretty good at that too, that oval-head-move; made me look like a pigeon walking down the street. But alas - whatever momentary satisfaction I may have had at releasing the mic - it only caught again a moment later. Without fail.

As a result I finally gave up and now walk around with one hand holding the mic to my mouth. Just like I did years ago with poorer sets designed by your average run-of-the-mill, low-end industrial designers. It would appear to most passersby that I am actually holding the mic to my mouth so that my voice is better heard, but no. The mic works fine without that. No, I am simply trying to keep the earbud in place, simple as that.Naturally, this never happens when I wear a t shirt. And maybe that's the idea.

.......................... UPDATE ..........................

earpodmic

With the release of the iPhone 5, Apple has introduced Ear Pods.  Apple has clearly attempted to address this problem with the new Ear Pod mic (pictured right) which now has rounded edges at the top of the mic - limiting the likelihood of catching.  Additionally the functionality of the mic buttons feel improved - they are much more responsive and easily controlled. The sound quality of Ear Pods is better, the fit, in-ear, is also vastly improved.  To be honest, I'm not sure what they could do to make these much better.  An "untangle" button maybe?

Indeed I can report that if the previous mic made you crazy, you will be quite please with Ear Pods.  What a relief.If you would like to get Ear Pods - and forego the added cost of a new iPhone 5, they can be purchased at Apple's website. I did, and for less than 30 bucks it was totally wort it.

Hey Apple, The 90s Called and Wants It's White iPhone Back

hasbro idog

Hey Apple, The 90s Called and Wants It's White iPhone Back

When Apple started using the color white as it's industrial design foundation back in the late 90s - it evoked all the coolest parts of Star Wars' Storm Troopers, 2001: A Space Odyssey - and bathroom fixtures all at once.  It was a powerful design conceit that differentiated the company assertively for a decade - and big-banged out trends that are still rippling their way down the lower design food-chain today.

Then, with the advent of multicolored aluminum iPods, Black MacBooks and silver iMacs, Airs and Mac Pros, it looked as though His whiteness was finally, at long gasping last, bowing out.  And none too soon.

The fact is, the whole white consumer technology thing has been done to death.  There is all manner of non-Apple, white and plastic-chrome "iWhatevers" on the market.  So ubiquitous is the white and "chromed" plastic look that anything done that way today usually has "made in taiwan" embossed on the side or comes from a gum ball machine.And then

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G.

When I saw the white and chrome iPhone 3G - an exclusive color way for the premium 16GB model - I remember mildly deflating and uttering, "...really...?"  And then I think I just squinted at it - waiting for the coolness to kick in.  A reality distortion field.  A different angle.  Anything.

But no - with all the industrial design 'tump'* of Hasbro's plastic iDog, here was my favorite company's most awesomest product announcement on Earth and it carried itself in the housing of a 10-year old Hello Kitty school supplies compartment.  With free pink eraser.  I half expected to see a keychain ring hanging off one corner.

The application of ancient white plastic to the high-end iPhone model smacked of an obvious attempt to re-invigorate the material.  To wrest ownership of the scheme back from the i-mitators.  To scotch tape the bastard if necessary, back onto a pedestal, by serving as an indication of one having afforded the "high-end" model.

But instead, the thing felt old and just made me wonder if the exceptionally cooler looking 8GB model in black would be fine after all.Turns out it is by the way.

I do have an old friend who chose the white model.  On purpose.  He said he thought it was cool. I said, "...really...?"  And he said, "Yeah it's totally cool."  I wasn't totally convinced.  I know him better than you do.  I think, like a lot of people, he just liked the idea that it would passively communicate the status of his greater purchase price.I asked my wife what she thought about the design choice - she told me that it was probably just targeting girls.  I look forward to my friend reading that.

Either way - I hope it's the last time we see such a cheap use of shiny white plastic in Apple's industrial design for a long time.

The Apple I love sets trends.  I'm willing to forget this ever happened if the next iPhone has that sweet black anodized metal border of the iPod Touch, and... it's gone? Oh now that's too bad.

*Footnote:  "TUMP" is a word I learned years ago from my friend and business partner Tim Smith, who's southern roots go a little too deep to entirely shed the stigma of banjo playing on the porch.  As it was described to me, it's a cross between "tip over", and dump and thump.  Both evoking an action and a sound, I have come to find it a surprisingly useful word, even when describing the unfortunate unveiling of the white iPhone.

Why Do Music Ringtones Suck So Bad?

Why Do Music Ringtones Suck So Bad?

Sorry for the belligerent title. But you know it, I know it, and everyone you know knows it, except maybe those 11-year-old-girls at the mall who smell like strawberry lip-smacker and buy Live Strong-knock-off rubber bracelets that say "I'm Rad" at Wet Seal, that music-based ringtones are so very lame.

I've used them. I confess. At a time when there were no other options, before phones networked with PCs. And yet, like most others, I can honestly say - the following is always true:

• If you liked the song before you made it into a ringtone, you come to dislike it after it's a ringtone.

• No matter how cool or witty the song choice may have seemed when you assigned it, all humor and hipness mysteriously evaporates into embarrassment the instant it rings in public.

• You only hear the first 6 seconds of the song, which on repetition generates a kind of pavlovian annoyance for you and everyone around you in ear-shot.

• You realize that at some point you actually started answering your phone to make it stop ringing - not to have a conversation with the caller.

• You either a) start apologizing to the nearest ears every time your phone rings, or b) try to ignore their stares and honestly pretend like you didn't notice them there.

• Having been interrupted or annoyed by your ringtone, associates start cracking jokes and making fun of it, so you get pretty good at telling the story of why you chose that song, via one of two tactics, either you try to make the song sound emotionally meaningful to you, or you try to paint yourself as a fun, free-spirit who is just so fun and, well, free-spirited that having a silly song on your phone is just a sign of how fun and free-spirited you are. No matter your story-tactic, ultimately you're just hoping your sincerity will convince these people to no longer think of you as somewhat dim and immature.

• You find yourself changing the song choice often in an ultimately futile effort to find one that does not result in all of the above. Through this process you spend a lot of money.

• You occasionally have to remind yourself that everyone else uses music ringtones, so yeah, it's totally cool and there's nothing wrong with you doing it too. At some point you realize that you're reminding yourself of this more often than you would if it were true.

• And finally, as music alone, the song sounds like crap on the phone's scratchy, tiny, treble speaker.

Did I miss anything?

Are we so desperate for customization that we swallow any half-baked business plan the carriers spoon feed us?

Maybe not. Some people use online tools to side-step the carriers and convert their songs into ringtones - on purpose. Which must mean that those users actually want music-based ringtones. We think the more sophisticated of those users are just too busy to explore the landscape enough to find cooler alternatives.

There are even music-based ringtone hawkers on the net who write custom songs - specifically to be used as ringtones. With lyrics and everything. I've never met anyone who actually uses such a thing, but assume someone does.

Then you have the adults among us, the sophisticated, mature set, who choose "classical" music as ringtones. As though somehow appreciation of these classic sonnets by kings over the centuries makes their beepy midi better than the latest Baby Mozart puppet show. Spare me.

Yes, music has a place on a phone, in a media player app.  And someday users across the globe, who have insanely stylish alerts, will look back at this time in history and softly chuckle at the music-based ringtone users of today.