Technology as Marketing Follow Up

Frivolous technology that's used as a marketing tool results in an Arm's Race of Technology as manufacturers try to out-do their competitors. We consumers encounter expensive, feature-bloated products instead of the basic, trusty, inexpensive things we've grown up with. It may be that eBay will turn out to be a Luddite's best friend. Some of those quaint, clever gadgets we're so familar with are no longer made. Expect to see eBay affiliates opening brick-and-mortar shops soon.

Technology as Marketing

I'm about as suspicious of technology as I am about email from Nigeria. That's because technology is the snake oil of the twenty-first century. Adding new "bells and whistles" to something, regardless of whether they're needed, is considered a good way to get consumers to buy something they already have.

For example, if you manufacture coffee makers, there are a limited number of circumstances under which people will buy your product:

0. Their old coffee maker broke and needs replacing.

1. They finally moved out of their parent's house (or divorced) and need one of their own.

2. They need to give a practical gift.

3. A new one will make life much easier.

Over the first three circumstances you have little control. (Well, actually, you could ensure that their old coffee maker breaks if they bought your old model and you made it cheaply enough. But then who would be daft enough to buy the same brand of coffee maker that broke? Then again, if all your competitors also made their coffee makers nearly as cheaply as yours, all you'd have to do was make sure the thing outlasts the warranty. Or you could simply market the same coffee maker under a few different brand labels.)

Where was I? I seem to lost my train of thought. So while I'm looking for my train (and wondering where my luggage has gone off to) let me explain the business with starting the above list with zero.

I wanted to present content in this blog with a good balance between Ludditism and Geekiness. But I'm a bit concerned that there may be much more Luddite than Geek here. Of course, the fact that this is a blog should help balance things out. It's not like I'm scratching this into parchment under candlelight with India ink and a nib. No right-minded Luddite[1] would dare go near a computer let alone build a blog using one.

What does this have to do with my zero-starting list? I think I can answer that. Starting at zero is something programmers do. If we have a list (or array) of ten to "iterate" through, we go from 0 to 9, not 1 to 10. I do know the precise reason for this, but to explain it would diverge even more from coffee-making than ever. So let me wrap this up by convincing you that programming habits pervade my being to such an extent that they leak out into daily life, if you could call this a life. And thus I am a geek. QED.

Now then, I was leading up to the idea that if you want someone to buy your coffee maker, and that person already has one, you have to convince that person that yours will make his/her life better. In the absence of technology, you might achieve this by making the coffee maker look more attractive in some way by some combination of redesign and advertising. You'd pay a gorgeous model to appear in a commercial while using your coffee maker. Then you'd pay her some more to make bedroom eyes to a bleary-eyed man who was using your coffee maker during another commercial.

Or, you could use technology. It's cheaper than a model. And some people are tired of gorgeous models, especially the homemaker who has to get up a 5:00am each weekday and get three children off to three different schools before racing to work, hopefully remembering to drop the fourth child off at daycare on the way.

So what you do is hire a couple of engineers to add a few features, like the ability to tell the difference between a weekday and the weekend in order to automatically brew at 5:00am on the former and, say, 5:10am on the latter. (Don't forget, her kids have soccer on Saturday and Sunday school on Sunday.) And you add another feature where it knows if any particular weekday is, in fact, a holiday. And another feature that keeps the coffee maker's clock synchronized to the NIST atomic clock in Boulder CO. Because you know and I know that Super Mom doesn't have time to set her coffee maker's clock every time junior presses the GFI Test button and cuts off the power to it. More importantly, she knows it.

But what she doesn't know is that your coffee maker doesn't know the difference between really important holidays such as Memorial Day, and those lesser ones such as Veteran's Day, with the difference being that her work place doesn't open on Memorial Day but does open on Veteran's Day. She also doesn't know that the coffee maker will utterly fail to synchronize with the NIST atomic clock because the signal is too weak. Worst of all, she doesn't know that if she forgets to add the water one night, it'll try to brew anyway the following morning, turning the hot plate on under an empty pot. And that night will happen to be the one that the kids are sleeping over at their Gramma's house so that Mom can sleep until 8:00am. Except that she'll awaken at 6:37 when her smoke alarm pierces her precious sleep.

But that's a good thing, because then she'll need to buy another coffee maker!



[1] "Right-minded Luddite" is, of course, another oxymoron.

Cool Low-Tech Things

I get excited by simple, effective solutions to problems. Items that can be taken apart easily, and that have replaceable parts that can be found in any hardware store, give me a thrill. Such items rarely become obsolete and are good investments.

They make me want to shout!

So this blog will feature an on-going list of Cool, Low-Tech Things. (I was almost going to make it a top-ten list of things, but then I remembered how I don't like such evenly numbered lists of things.)

The first item is a wonderful personal care item. Anyone with problem sinuses or asthma should have one. It's the Neti Pot. I have the ceramic Neti Pot from the Himalayan Institute, which I bought at our local health food store.

Here's why it's so cool. First, there are no moving parts to wear out. Second, it doesn't require special expensive chemicals that must be purchased from the manufacturer. (It can be used with ordinary kosher salt or sea salt.) Unless I drop it or lose it, I'll be able to use it my entire life. Wow! But best of all, it really works. Treat yourself with one right away!

NPR's "Drafting a Genetic Map of Human Diversity"

In "Drafting a Genetic Map of Human Diversity," NRP reports that a new genetic map "will help determine who will benefit from drugs and who won't." What if researches find out that no one will benefit?

This NPR audio track discusses the ethical implications of the new map as much as its medical applications.

TurboTax -- Angst and Euphoria

My home computer runs Windows NT. It serves me well. But I get nervous every time I need to update a program. Why? Microsoft stopped supporting NT quite a while ago. So I've become adept at locating that little "System Requirements" section on packaged software.

I've used TurboTax to file my federal taxes for 2001, 2002 and 2003. But when I sought out the latest version for 2004, I noticed that Windows NT was absent from the "System Requirements" section.

I bought it anyway. I'm sure they didn't mean to imply that it won't run on NT. They just left it off because ... well, nobody has NT anymore. Besides, perhaps it is time to buy a new computer. Or at least I'll buy a new hard drive and install Windows 2000 on it. And if I don't switch to Windows 2000, I can always run TurboTax on my office computer.

Before I cracked open the shrink wrap, I decided to check out the TurboTax website to verify the system requirements. After a mere six mouse clicks, I had my answer:

System requirements misprint on the Welcome Back CD packaging

The TurboTax Welcome Back CD packaging incorrectly lists Windows 95 and NT as supported operating systems. You can review the actual system requirements with the links below.

Then I got mad. This is all the fault of a lazy Intuit IT department and a team of inconsiderate programmers. And because of them, I have to invest time and money updating a perfectly good computer. I decided to rebel. I would do my taxes by hand.

Just before I clicked on my browser's close button in a huff, I noticed an inconspicuous link called TaxFreedom. "This looks interesting," thought I. In my rebellious mood, I envisioned a site that would show me how to give the IRS a virtual middle finger. If I could blow off doing my taxes, I won't need software.

But the link led me to another TurboTax site that offered to "Prepare and e-file your federal return FREE and get your refund fast!" Well, I wasn't born yesterday. I know nothing's for free. What's the angle? Apparently, they do your federal taxes for free, but you have to pay for having your state taxes done. That's okay. My state taxes are a breeze to do.

The system requirements (yes, I checked that right away) informed me that this would work only with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. I did have the right version. But I've configured my firewall to block IE from the Internet. So I spent some time figuring out what IP addresses I needed to allow in order to get IE to work.

After I convinced myself that it was for real, I decided to give it a try. "I'll just enter my name and address," I told myself. It was nearly midnight.

Well, by 1:30am I had completed both my federal and state taxes, the latter by filling out the form at my state's website. My cost? Zero. And I believe it took less time than if I had been able to install and run TurboTax, since it's necessary to download several megabytes of TurboTax updates before filing.

Incidentally, I got a nice refund and I returned TurboTax with no questions asked.

So maybe I can keep using NT for a few more years....

Douglas Adams

Many events and influences led to my starting this blog. As this is day number 42 of 2005, it seems appropriate to mention Douglas Adams.

Mr. Adams is well known in geek circles for authoring "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." What I like best about his works is that they're filled with humorous examples of how technology fails. The more sophisticated it is, the more utterly infuriating it becomes to operate. And it fails us at the most inopportune times.

One of my favorite examples of this is the motion-activated radio on board the Heart of Gold. You don't even need to get up to change the channels or mute it. On the other hand, you have to sit awfully still if you don't want to change it inadvertently. Obviously the engineer who came up with that idea wasn't too fond of dancing.

If you think that's silly, consider the earliest CD players. (And at the risk of showing my age, remember their precursors, vinyl?) You certainly couldn't jump around too much without causing the player to skip. So audio equipment was anchored to walls, and the individual components placed on foam isolators.

Another example. How many of you cell phone users have repeatedly said, "I can hear you. Can you hear me?" Pretty soon we'll see phones equipped with the popular ICHY button, which will automate this. Come to think of it, why stop there? Why not have these buttons, too:

"I'm fine. And you?"
"Hi! How are you?"
"This is true."
"Cool!"
"Whatever"
"Can't make it then. How about next Tuesday?"
"Bye"
"See you, later."
"Take care."

If those last three seem vaguely familiar to you, does the term "sig" or "signature" help?

Before I end this entry, I'd like to encourage you to point your browser to the online Guide, hosted by the BBC, which you'll find here.

Bye. See you later. Take care. Whatever.

What the heck is a Luddite Geek?

From WordNet (r) 2.0 :

Luddite
n 1: any opponent of technological progress
2: one of the 19th century English workmen who destroyed
labor-saving machinery that they thought would cause
unemployment

From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001) :

geek n. A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves - and some who _are_ in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard `hacker' as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.

Well, that should give you an idea where this might be headed.