June 4, 2002
Are All Features, Features? ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The first products to be built with every breakthrough technology always carry forward the assumptions of the old. The early radio newscasts featured writing fit for print, while the first television shows were re-packaged radio programs. More recently, in our collective experience, the first expressions of the World Wide Web were immediately called "pages," as in the pages of a book or a magazine.
This is more than nomenclature; it's also concept.
It helps us move rapidly from the old medium to the new, and that doesn't just apply to consumers. It also helps engineers and designers.
Unfortunately, while creating the basic features and functions of these new products, the creators are operating from a soon-to-be outdated paradigm. They have to imagine how any new device will work in practice.
So, it's no surprise that the early controls of television sets were essentially identical to radios.
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All this brings me to the constant new product introductions in the world of tiny personal technology. Every new device promises to do everything: Why, it's a bird! No, it's a plane! No, it's a combination cell phone, calendar, email tracker, voicemail forwarding word processor, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presenter, video game playing keyboard, Internet connected text message sender, speakerphone, World Wide Web-surfing personal appliance with a color screen.
Exhausting, isn't it? And yet how would you describe it to a police officer if you unwittingly lost it in the parking lot of your supermarket? My bet is you'd say, "I dropped my cellphone."
The person I like to follow most on these tiny issues is David Pogue of The New York Times. While he gets down to the technical nitty-gritty, he's also human. When he recently described a new device as having a "gerbil-sized keyboard," I actually laughed out loud.
And that brings me back to the point. We are not gerbils.
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I remember designing a system which placed a human in front of three television screens. There was a VCR on his right and a VCR to his left. With the newfangled programmable video switcher we used, images could come and go from absolutely everywhere. But at the first training session, we learned an alarming lesson: Nobody could work it. They couldn't keep track of where anything was coming from or going to.
So back we went to the drawing boards.
We changed the program to back off the hot technology. If an operator loaded a tape in the right-hand VCR, he would see it on the right television screen. If he loaded a tape on the left, he saw it on the left. To record video on tape, what he saw on his right TV screen, would record on the right VCR. And so on.
We limited the new technology to about 30% of what it was capable of. And miracle of miracles: Every one of our human operators began to run the system intuitively. And perfectly.
Let's remember this time, and the promises that are being made. We've got 6 Billion people on the planet and very soon 2 Billion of us will have cellphones.
I've got a feeling our cellphones will end up much simpler than the features that are being pushed now. And I bet they will also have a few features none of us have even imagined.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
