Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
Geek Reviews Are Only Relevant To Geeks
Watching the Apple/PC/Apple desktop computer consumer shift in the 90s and 00s and now the Symbian/Apple/Android mobile device consumer shift has been a fascinating opportunity to observe geek and mainstream consumer behaviour.
Different sides of each argument about which platform is better and why, is fought fiercely by both sides with claims that opponents are fanboys and there’s what appears to be a clear “winner” and degrading of the “loser”. Previously such discussions were the realm of technology enthusiasts sometimes with reference to “geeks” in closed rooms or halls and perhaps on bulletin boards or newsgroups where only a handful of like-minded people interacted. Newspapers would report on technology and with journalistic education backing them would try to present both sides of the discussion as rationally as possible. At that time few geeks responded to technology articles in the mainstream press (few that there were anyway). This was partly because responding was difficult but also because they preferred a heated argument with like-minded friends and colleagues.
Fast-forward to today. Social media is in the hands of millions (perhaps a billion) worldwide. Newspapers are fading fast and downsizing whilst blogs and internet news sites are fast becoming the place people turn to for news and information - especially opinion. Responding to articles written by anybody is very easy and gone are the days where such debate was had in halls and behind closed doors amongst a small minority. The internet is listening and it takes precious little to spark furious debate. Let us suppose that there is no such intent. No page views or circulation to consider. The writers of todays tech “news” websites seldom have journalism qualifications, training or experience in the traditional sense. The editorial of their work may or may not be very thorough. What remains then are less than balanced pieces of news for the reader to make up their own mind but rather the opinion of that writer, that geek. Therein lies the problem. To a geek, a new device is an opportunity to play with new features, functionality and gimmicks that they may use in their day to day lives. Sometimes being able to set the wallpaper to a moving image of a fish means so much to a geek that they’re happy to open task managers to close applications that have stopped responding, put up with bad battery life and so on, just to have that one killer feature. Mainstream consumers would never care.
Geeks are fickle and will change allegiances when enough “cool features” are present in the next big product. They will jump the fence to the other side and begin to argue against the system they used to use. Mainstream consumers usually go with what works and is cheap.
Those reasons alone make geeks the least ideal to report on technology. Their bias changes with time based on what’s “cool” at the time and they change sides based on their own needs. They are in essence the opposite of the “mainstream” consumer.
Mainstream consumers don’t read Tech Crunch, The Verge, Mashable, Engadget, BGR or anything like it. They read newspapers, magazines and talk to friends. The choices of the mainstream consumer drive companies like Apple. Not geeks. If you are reading this, it is highly likely you are one yourself. So the next time your fingers are itching to type out a flaming response to a tech blogger about their opinion about which new smartphone is the best, just remember that your opinions don’t matter. You are the worst qualified to have an opinion, which reminds me, I need to stop this post before the irony sets in.
Working From Home is a Privilege
A few days ago Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer enacted a new policy via a Memo sent by their HR department. In short the message is, you need to report to the office and stop working from home.
I work in Engineering and currently in a multiple discipline environment (where all aspects of engineering: civil, mechanical, electrical, process, chemical are considered as part of the design process) and yet I am still permitted to work from home from time to time. Company policy states that working from home is not permitted without written permission from your supervisor. In practice it is rarely given out so I consider myself lucky.
There’s a lot of entitlement these days over what is acceptable and what isn’t. We have the technology for video and audio conferencing, instant messaging, email and passing around vast documentation in soft copy. Commuting times have never been longer and the incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing travel completely have never been greater.
Working for yourself or with short contracts allows you to set your own rules and work wherever you please (provided you accept contracts with companies amenable to your requirements). If that’s you, good for you. You are in the extremely small minority. Perhaps minuscule and imperceptible to the rest of the world. For jobs where you have a boss and their approval is required for your on-going employment and remuneration, working away from an office requires two things: measurable output and trust.
Measurable Output: Sitting in a meeting deciding how to direct a design is still work, yet all ten people get to show for it are a bunch of meeting minutes. Is this worth as much as a ten spreadsheets created in the same space of time? To an ill-informed observer the spreadsheet represents measurable results for hours expended whereas the meeting doesn’t. Does that mean that meetings are less valuable? Not wanting to go into what makes an effective meeting let’s agree that meetings are a vital part of all collaborative efforts. So rather it’s the opposite. Good meetings are invaluable.
On the subject of meetings - what’s wrong with having them over the phone? Or video-conferencing? I learned a long time ago that there is no substitute for “pressing the flesh”. Human beings interact with more respect, more fluidity and more personally when they are in the same room. Whether that’s because our ears respond to higher and lower spoken frequencies than are carried by telephones, visual cues from body posture, micro-expressions and such that aren’t noticeable over a video conference, or something that we as a species don’t yet understand about the “vibe” of people together in a room - I’m not sure. Maybe it’s all of those things. Have to been to a rock concert? Can you honestly say the experience was the same just listening to that exact same song on a music player alone at home, compared to that concert with thousands of people listening live to the band play?
Trust: With workforces being so volatile these days, people change jobs all the time. Management change is frequent and companies are acquired, split, rejoined, re-split and resold regularly with each transition creating policy changes and still more staff changes. Traditionally employees could build a trust with their employer over time. In most companies now this doesn’t happen. Building trust takes time and it’s that time that most managers don’t have and trust is simply never built.
In short, management generally don’t trust their staff and face to face meetings are required for collaborative efforts which are, in effect, what nearly all company projects require. Allowing an individual to work from home who can be trusted also creates a divide with those employees that can’t be trusted and this drives employee dissatisfaction and increases staff turn-over. These are the reasons it is avoided and I can’t see these reasons changing in a big hurry.
What’s been wrong with the way this story has been told is two fold: assumptions that if a Male CEO made such a call, no-one would care. It was a management call, but what makes it news is that it flies in the face of Yahoo being a technology company where working from home is more common. It seems to be the general consensus that forward-thinking companies allow their employees to work from home. In my experience this is complete rubbish for the above stated reasons. The second problem is that most of the coverage is done by people that already work from home as freelance journalists and bloggers. Frankly, their opinions about the right to work from home are not representative of the majority of employers and are hence not based in reality.
The fact is that working from home is a rare privilege and a niche situation. It’s not a right and it’s not in our near futures.
The Glass Ceiling Is Lower Than You Think
Over the course of the last few years Google have been developing a rather interesting piece of tech they have come to call Google Glass. This week Google have opened up applications from people in the United States to “test drive” a pre-consumer ready Google Glass and provide feedback to Google to refine its development. 28min 45sec (to 41min 20sec) in The Exastential podcast episode “An Orb of Technology” Clinton and I discussed our preliminary thoughts on Google Glass. Not much has changed in the intervening 8 months to change what I said at that time. Admittedly with a better look at the current evolution of Glass it’s clear that they’re trying to make it less of a distraction visually however it will still be distracting and require refocussing the eyes regularly to use.
The bigger issue here is where do you use Glass? Notwithstanding its limitations, the dangers of distraction when using it and the cost of buying one - where can I use one? Clearly not when driving a car. That’s too much of a distraction and no different to operating a mobile phone when driving which is already illegal in most countries.
Consider wearing one around the house. The camera/video on my smartphone or compact camera or DSLR will be far superior and I can’t surf the internet as effectively as when using an iPad or Nexus Tablet. For that matter, are my desktop or laptops broken? Certainly you’ll get less concern around your house than out in the street.
Well then how about on the street? At the swimming pool? In a restaurant? There are already laws regarding what and who can/can not be photographed/filmed with/without consent and it’s obvious when someone holds up a camera that they’re taking video or a photo. With Glass however you could be recording video at any time and although a small indicator light on the front indicates when you are recording, it could easily be disabled in software or if not the average person on the street would likely not know what the light meant and would just assuming you were filming them. Taking candid photography can even carry fines or jail time in some countries so clearly out in public is a big problem. Would anyone really risk it? I suspect some might, but when lawsuits start happening I suspect they may stop.
The office is also one of those grey areas but for a different reason. Using Glass within Googles walls I’m sure it’s fine but surely in any other company having such a device would be less useful for work and hence be prohibited in the same way many employers block Twitter and Facebook on the corporate network. Your boss wants your undivided attention so wearing them in meetings is unlikely to be permitted. Until a way could be found to utilise Glass to improve an existing common office task I suspect they will not be used in business environments.
There is no doubt that Google Glass is futuristic, geeky and very tech-lust-worthy; perhaps even cool, but the question is will it ever be a mainstream product? Due to privacy laws and concerns I suspect the Glass ceiling is much lower than you think for a product like this, and the Glass will likely remain a very niche product like the Segway.
Fighting For A Place In The Automotive Future
The electric car is the future of the mainstream automotive industry - this is a fact and can not be challenged. I’m not talking about heavy-haulers or most off-road vehicles for the near future but the vast majority of vehicles in the world. I’m also not talking about the steering or the suspension or windscreens but the device that turns the wheels and moves the car around. For that, currently, it is the internal combustion engine and it is inefficient, requires a lot of maintenance, gets ridiculously hot and burns an ever diminishing resource that can not be easily replaced - polluting the world in the process.
Once you replace the engine and gearbox with an electric motor you have something that beats internal combustion engines in every way. There is only one problem: how do you lug around electricity with you? With petrol it’s easy as it has a high energy density and is a pourable liquid however with current battery technology it’s not that easy to carry electricity around. The best battery technology out there in mass production is lithium-ion - the same batteries that exist in most modern laptops, music players and smartphones. They’re light but have some safety concerns (then again so does petrol) and their performance varies with temperature - oh and they take a long time to recharge. Another problem: they discharge when left sitting for long periods. Whilst it’s true that petrol “goes off” as well that takes significantly longer to happen.
Some people have said that Hydrogen is better. Use it to drive a fuel cell to make the electricity to drive the car. Problem is that Hyrdogen takes electricity to make and it also has safety issues. More importantly it is not very wide-spread. How do you get it to the cars that need it? Electricity is everywhere. Almost every house has it and plugging in fast charging stations to “the grid” is also very straight-forward. With petrol and hydrogen you have to physically haul it to the petrol station - not so with electricity.
When automobiles started out, petrol stations were few and far between. In time, more petrol stations meant longer distances could be travelled between stops for the average person. These days petrol stations have rationalised into big chains and although it’s now less common to have them buried inside our suburbs or as part of convenience stores however they’re still quite abundant. Conversely electric car fast-charging stations are few and far between and Hyrdogen fuel stations are even more rare.
We have come to accept the fact that petrol is everywhere. We don’t run the risk of running out too often (keep your eye on the needle) and if you’re low on “gas” then you have no trouble in urban areas or major highways and freeways finding a petrol station to fill up your tank. This convenience has made us all very lazy. It’s nice to not have to think about it but the truth is that if you have a 4WD vehicle and plan to drive out into the desert, you should figure out how much fuel you’ll need in advance and probably should carry extra.
The current situation with electric cars requires some forethought prior to walking out the door - no different to heading for the desert albeit pretty much anywhere you might choose to drive. As a daily-driver with an overnight charge at home there’s no problem at all - it’s only the unplanned, spur of the moment, and long-distance trips where the wheels will fall off (or just stop turning) should you fail to plan your charging route in advance.
It’s not just that though. We’ve also become used to filling up the tank and getting in and out of a petrol station in 5-10 minutes. In truth that’s been a reality for many decades now and the charging time of the electric car varies between 1-2 hours even for a rapid charging station. That’s fine if you stop for a meal and dine-in but if you’re in a hurry, you’re out of luck.
One more problem - what if you do push it too far? You’ve run out of fuel and what do you do? A 5L jerry can of petrol won’t help you now. There needs to be a viable solution to give the car a rapid roadside charge to get it going again to make it to the next charging station. Such devices would need to be carried by every roadside assistance company before that problem could be considered solved.
The recent events between the New York Times and Tesla and the flurry of articles and opinions and discussion has spurred me to write these facts down. Now comes opinion.
Elon Musk (the man behind Tesla) knows that the Oil companies will jump on ANYTHING to highlight the weaknesses of electric vehicles. It’s happened before and it will happen again. Bad press will hurt sales and Elon knows this. It’s business and there’s a lot riding on his investment so his anxiety is understandable.
The New York Times highlighted the obvious: Bad planning and spur of the moment detours won’t cut it with an electric car. The rules for these cars are different and you need to observe them or it won’t go well for you. No different to driving a car in the early 1900s ill-prepared. It only proves the ignorance of the driver at the time and doesn’t highlight any flaws of the vehicle that were not already obvious.
So is Tesla too far ahead of the game? I honestly don’t think they are. The limitations posed by their vehicles are not so great as to not make them excellent cars. As battery technology improves (and it would serve Tesla well to fund battery storage research as much as they can) Telsa will be in the box seat with the best performing, best designed electric vehicles with many millions of kilometers of real-world road usage and knowledge behind them. In essence Tesla is putting itself in the box seat and fighting for a place in the automotive industry’s future. They are doing so in the best possible way - with no past baggage or dependence upon oil companies and the vices that creates. Oil companies will try to tear them down for obvious reasons, but more individuals should try and give them a chance rather than trying to tear them down too.