Apple Watch is not Sexy!

Those were the words of Jean-Claude Biver, the head of LVMH's watch division.

Image courtesy: Apple Inc.

He opines that the Apple Watch is condemned to become obsolete.  Even though Apple is making a Gold watch, it is just going to become a useless piece of Gold jewelry (if you can call it jewelry) after Apple releases the next version of the watch in their self cannibalization effort. 

He also aptly said “The smartwatch is an information device that tells you that you’ve got mail or a message, whereas a high-quality Swiss mechanical watch is a communication device that communicates to others who you are.”

A Swiss mechanical watch is a man's jewelry.  People do not wear it to tell time, they wear it to show who they are.

As I mentioned here, Apple should not be aiming at the watch market at all.  Apple should have thought outside the box and created a wearable computer.   A wearable computer that could be worn anywhere on the body.  Unfortunately, they chose the wrist and unfortunately, they named it Watch.

Here is a beautiful design where a watch is paired with the wearable computer.  There are many ways to pair a wearable with other accessories that people already wear: clothes, accessories like belts, necklaces, bracelets, finger rings, ear rings, underwear, etc. 

Companies should think outside the box and come up with wearables that just serve their purpose and not try to replace another device.  Stick to the minimalistic design.

Wonder what happened to Apple's inspiration from Dieter Rams' minimalistic design principles.

Planned Obsolescence

I recently watched a documentary on BBC about planned obsolescence.  It is an interesting view on the current marketplace and how companies have been designing for obsolescence. This phenomenon has been going on for a long time. 

I remember as a kid when all the ballpoint pens had refills, not just the high priced ones.  You bought a pen or two and kept replacing the ink cartridge refills.  Or, you used a fountain pen and bought ink bottles to refill the pen.  I must have gone through most of my primary education with just a few of these pens.

And then I came to the US where everything is disposable.  Bic pens were the first disposable ballpoint pens I used.  I was shocked to see people chucking pens in the trash as soon as the ink ran out. 

Fast forward to 2015.  People are chucking MP3 players and phones as trash as soon as the battery runs out.  Or, in some cases, as soon as the newer version is released. 

Thanks to the advances in 3D printing, we are coming up with technology to literally 'print' everything as a single unit.  No need of assembly, dis-assembly, servicing, replacement of parts, and such things.  You buy one unit and throw it away at the end of its life.  The end of life could be defined by either its functional usefulness or its capacity (battery life, ink, etc.).  This is ultimate consumerism at work.

What this is doing is making consumers spend more and buy more.  This will help corporations sell more and make more money, but we have to look at its global impact.

• What this does to our environment?  
• How is it recycled?
• How do we separate the components for recycling?  
• How much does it cost to recycle?

There is always a fine line between usability, design and being responsible to your consumers, to the environment, to the economy and to the world as a whole.

There are cases where this technology makes perfect sense.  Say, parts for a satellite which are never serviced once launched.  These parts need to work in harsh environments and need all the protection they can get.  These parts could be built as a single unit so that they are well sealed and can function optimally.

Nanostructures come to my mind as a great fit for this technology but unfortunately, the current 3D printing technology is still measured in mm and not in nm.  These structures are too small to assemble.  It makes more sense to just build them as one cohesive unit. 

3D printing is seen as a boon for making spare parts when none are easily available.  Companies are taking 3D printing to places where no man has gone before: printing food, printing prosthetics, printing tissue, printing organs and other areas that we have not imagined yet. 

We truly live in an exciting world today! 

Brand Love

I was at a Marriott in Minnesota recently.  It was cold and snowing that week.  One morning I get up and look out of my window to see the road and the lawn completely blanketed by snow.  I got ready and came down to go to the client office.  I had equipped myself with a muffler around my neck, ear muffs, winter gloves and a coat.  I was ready to brush the snow off my car and scrape the ice off the windshield. 

I walk out and am greeted by a car that had no snow or ice on it.  I glance around to see that someone had cleared the snow and ice off all the cars in the parking lot.  I was, to say the least, pleased with the pleasant surprise Marriott offered.  They made my life easier and they made me look cool.  While all my colleagues (staying at another hotel chain) were sweating in the Minnesota cold scraping ice off their windshield, I simply got in my car and drove off.  It not only saved my time but also saved me from the trouble of clearing show and ice in sub-zero climate.  You can bet I am going back to that Marriott.

This got me thinking about customer loyalty and brand loyalty. 

What is Customer Loyalty?

Customer loyalty is where a customer is loyal to a particular company/service/product.  Customer loyalty can be garnered by offering rewards, discounts and other perks. 

A simple act like clearing snow off cars, which is not part of their SLA or contract goes a long way in making the customer happy and finally loyal.  What Marriott did was make me cool and kick ass.  This reminded me of one of Kathy Sierra's posts on this subject (Image courtesy: Kathy Sierra).  

Brand loyalty, however has to be earned in a whole different way.  Brand loyalty is earned by offering exceptional products and services.  

Companies like Apple command brand loyalty mainly by producing excellent products that consumers want.  The products are of such high quality that they command a cult-like following of brand loyalists.  Apple has also creates an ecosystem (iTunes) that ties the customer into their products for a seamless experience (and forced brand loyalty).

Other companies indirectly force brand loyalty.  Take for example Canon or Nikon in the imaging market.  Once a consumer invests significant amount of money on the foundation product (say, the camera body) and a few accessories (say, lenses, flash, etc.), it is hard to switch to another brand due to the fact that they are different standards (say, lens coupling).  Switching would mean an entirely new investment to get back to where you were.  Not that these companies produce inferior products.  Both produce products on par with each other which makes it even more difficult to keep customers from wavering.  Hence, proprietary standards like lens coupling ensure brand loyalty. 

Customer loyalty is directly related to cost, discounts and rewards.  Once the rewards and discounts vanish, the customer will easily wander.  But, brand loyalty is not related to any of the factors mentioned above.  Irrespective of the cost or rewards, customers will always be loyal to the brand.  This kind of loyalty can only be commanded by producing exceptional products.

Everyone takes great service for granted.  Great service is not going to garner loyalty.  But the opposite is absolutely true.  Bad service will absolutely drive away customers.  Businesses should concentrate more on dispute resolution than on exceptional customer service.  It is human to make mistakes.  But, what sets apart great businesses is how they resolve disputes.

Businesses should concentrate on both customer loyalty as well as brand loyalty.  They both require different strategies and resources, but go a long way in customer retention.

Remember, the cost of customer acquisition is always higher than the cost of retention. 

Designed to Annoy

After writing about Design for Assembly, Design for Usability, Design for Accessibility, I thought of writing about a design that I found very annoying.  

I recently rented a Toyota Yaris.  It is a sub-compact car and hence has a small windshield.  What struck me was the design of the windshield wiper.  The Toyota designers used a single 4-bar mechanism to incorporate the windshield wiper.  The design is so bad and the wiper arms are so huge that it obstructs the view of the driver more than the passenger.  Not that anything should obstruct the view of the passenger riding along with the driver.  This is what the driver sees while driving in the rain.

For a tiny windshield, there was no need to use such high gauge sheet to create the arms.  At the very least, the pivot could have been on the passenger side so that the driver saw just the swing of the arm.  Or, have a single arm pivoted in the center and not use a 4-bar mechanism at all.  There are so many ways to make this design unobtrusive and much more streamlined so that it doesn't distract the driver.  Sure, at high speed, it is barely visible, but at lower speeds, it is glaringly visible.  A few moments after I started driving the car, this was the first thing that I noticed.  It is so annoying that I had to take a pic and write about it!

This got me thinking about what constitutes good design.  Here is what I came up with, in no particular order:

• A good design should be innovative
• A good design should be intuitive
• A good design should be simple
• A good design should be aesthetically pleasing (especially consumer products)
• A good design should be unobtrusive.  The user shouldn't even know it exists, unless one of its purpose is to make itself known
• A good design should be minimalistic
• A good design should be functional and useful
• A good design should be green (environmentally friendly)
• A good design should be durable

Designs that live by these principles will always be classic and admirable designs.  And this wiper design barely follows any of these principles.

Gamification in life

Amazing talk by Carnegie Mellon University professor of Entertainment and Technology, Jesse Schell.

BYOD dilemma

 Of late, I have been seeing a lot of personal devices at work.  People are bringing their own mobile devices to work in order to enhance their productivity.  This phenomenon has been termed BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).  The tech-savvy, always-on and super-connected people are the first ones to BYOD.  

 It is interesting to see people carrying tablets to meetings, but is it really helping them be more productive?  There is the other question of 'need' versus 'want'.  Today it is a 'want', but tomorrow it is going to turn into a 'need', just as we saw with the mobile phones.  This phenomenon is affecting how IT manages the networks and the additional personal devices on them.

Many CIOs are fighting to keep the personal devices away, while some are embracing the phenomenon and helping drive organizational productivity and effectiveness.  As the BYOD trend accelerates, CIOs should think of 'how' to support and enable them effectively (with corporate security as well as employee privacy in mind) rather than 'whether' to allow them in the first place. 

Let's take a step back in time to an era when Internet was becoming popular.  Majority of what you could find on the Internet was not very useful.  It was either personal opinion or entertainment.  At that time, most companies banned the use of Internet by employees at work since they felt that it was a productivity killer.  But, then, as the Internet matured and became an information super highway, and the material on the Internet became more useful, corporations opened up the gates since everyone saw the benefits.  Nowadays, one cannot live without the Internet.  All the user manuals are on the Internet.  All the company SEC filings (like 10k) are on the Internet.  All trade publications are online.  There is no need to walk to the library anymore.

Coming closer to when the iPhone was introduced, the same cycle repeated.  Everything that was initially available on the iPhone was for entertainment and consumption.  So, naturally, corporate thought that it would be a time sink to provide employees with an iPhone.  As the Eco-system matured for smart phones, everyone realized the value it can bring to the table: employees checking and responding to emails from anywhere, sales people checking their accounts and closing sales on their phone, looking for information on the Internet, accessing and viewing documents from anywhere and so on.  Now, we are at a point where not having a smart phone is seen as counter-productive.

The same cycle is repeating again with tablets.  When the iPad was introduced, it was seen as a device for entertainment and consumption.  As more tablets are entering the market, companies are developing productivity applications and coming up with all kinds of innovative ways of using them. 
Whether IT wants it or not, tablets are here to stay and their presence will only grow in the workplace. 

So, what can the CIO do about this new phenomenon?

People extensively use smartphones at work.  Some are employer provided and others are personal (BYOD).  People use them to access work related information some of which could be confidential and secure data.  I still see that many companies do not have a well defined policy when it comes to usage of smart phones.  Companies define how they should be used and that they will be wiped if stolen/lost.  But, when it comes to firmware upgrades or OS upgrades, IT is nowhere in the picture.  When it comes to Apps, there are no set policies on what can/cannot be installed.  Everyone is aware of viruses and malware that are rampant on personal computers.  What people do not realize is that the same is becoming true for smart phones (recent report).  If your smart phone is infected (by an App you downloaded, or by some activity), the company data could be compromised.  There are no guidelines on protecting the smart phones.

The same holds good for tablets too.  When an employee brings a personal tablet to the workplace, they are breaching the security of the company.  The employee can access corporate data on the tablet, and they can also install any Apps that they desire.  This can cause serious issues for the IT department from the corporate security perspective. 

Majority of the personal devices are not secure.  Compare it to the company provided computers.  The corporate IT always makes sure that the latest patches to the OS are pushed to all the machines and they are up to date on the anti-virus.  This ensures that there is a commonality amongst all the computers.  IT recognizes the threats and secures the respective patches and applies them.  How many of us regularly apply patches to our mobile phones?  How many of us are even aware that new updates are available to the OS as well as the firmware for our personal mobile devices?  Not many.

The other big issue is the difficulty of keeping track of devices accessing the corporate network.  This can become a nightmare to the IT department.  Plethora of the mobile devices (and the ever changing landscape) also means that there is no standardization of the devices or the OS or the form factor or the applications running on them.  Jail broken devices could enter the fray.  

 One way to circumvent the security issue is to allow connections only through remote desktop.  Do not provide direct access or VPN to the company network.  Employees sign that their device is monitored by company and can be erased in case of misuse.  If you do not agree, do not bring your own device to work.

Benefits are not just the company saving on its costs, but increased employee engagement, organizational productivity and increased innovation.  Employee satisfaction will be high due to the ability to choose their own device, especially in these days of a glut of mobile devices.  Mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful and more enterprise applications are being offered on them.  It is paramount that the CIO and IT decision makers embrace this and capitalize on the opportunity, rather than shun it.  But first, they have to craft a solid policy around all this. 

Customer feedback - how not to do it

I recently received an interesting package from American Airlines.  It was a bunch of certificates for recognizing employees for their outstanding service excellence.  I achieved Gold status with them and I assume that is the reason for this package.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that frequent flyers were given the opportunity to recognize outstanding service.  I am all for recognizing great work.  But, what surprised me was the medium chosen for gathering feedback. 

A couple weeks ago was in a situation where I wanted to commend an American Airlines employee who went above and beyond her call of duty to find me something vegetarian to eat.  I passed my appreciation to her and it made her day.  But, I now have this card and am wondering how I could use this.  Based on the instructions on the card, here is what I have to do:

Chances of me following this procedure and commending someone: 0
Chances that someone will follow this procedure: 0 (unless they are related to the AA employee)

Imagine, I have to run to a post office, get an envelope and stick a stamp on it and mail the envelope.  I can't think of the last time I went to the post office.  All for what?  To send feedback!

I don’t know who devised this plan, but in this day and age of technology and connectivity, it is a no brainer to use technology to achieve better results.  Look at the following process, and tell me how many people wouldn't gladly use it to provide feedback (assuming that frequent flyers like myself will have the App and will always be logged into it):

Here is a mockup of what it would look like on an iPhone:

If this process was implemented, I would have gladly utilized it on my plane journey on American Airlines (albeit, I would have had to wait until the plane landed).

I have used the example of QR codes here, but that could be replaced by any other technology (like NFC, for instance).  

In another incident, I was at a local Home Depot and all of us know they suck in customer service.  You go to an aisle looking for the things you want, and if you don’t find it, you look around for a HD rep and cannot find any!  After walking around for some time you find a rep who tells you that he does not work in the area!  Duh.  After all these frustrating visits, I finally met one salesperson who was extremely enthusiastic to help everyone.  He would be in plumbing, but if you asked a question about electric switches, he would gladly walk over to that department and help you.  On the way, he would talk to any customer who seemed lost.  He was proactively helping out every customer with a smiling face.  That was quite a change and I passed my appreciation to him and told him how helpful (and different from everyone else) he was.  He immediately whipped out his business card, wrote the email ID of the HD CEO and passed it to me with a simple request: "Could you please send an email to my boss with the exact words you told me?  I would really appreciate that".  I was glad to do that, and hopefully, his boss recognized his outstanding service.  It was as simple as that.  An email.

But, if HD had an app that I could use, it would have been even better.  

Simple systems and simple processes guarantee results.  When you design a system, make it as simple and brain dead as possible.

Google Android Market or Amazon Appstore

I recently worked on an app (520or90.com) as part of Seattle StartupWeekend. We developed a web site, an iOS app as well as an Android app. When it came time to publish our Android app, we had to make a choice of where to publish it? Google Android market or Amazon Appstore or both? We finally ended up publishing on Google Market. We are planning on publishing the app on Amazon Appstore at a later time. Here is the reasoning behind the decision:

Timing:

We had to get our app out on time because our release date was inflexible. SR520 tolling had started, and the commuters were going to hit it as the new year (2012) rolled in. We wanted to be there to help the commuters make an informed choice when they had to cross lake Washington.

Google market promised to publish the app instantly as long as we adhered to their ToS. And, our app did.

I had heard that Amazon market took about a week (or more) to review and approve the app. [We were having the same issue with our iPhone app. It was the first one out of the dev gate, but had stalled in the iTunes approval process. Thanks to the holiday season and all.]

Timing-wise, it made a lot of sense to go with Google market.

Access:

We wanted the users to have easy access to the app, and wanted a seamless install process.

All the Android devices (phones) I have seen come with the Google Market app installed on them. As for the Amazon Appstore app, one has to install it manually. I am sure the Kindle Fire will come installed with it, but we were targeting all the Droid phone owners.

Usability:

Based on all the apps I have installed from the Amazon Appstore, they seem to suffer from the 'ET phone home' syndrome. I for one, do not log into the store all the time. So, the apps stop working when they cannot call home. I understand that some of the paid apps are licensed on the server, and they connect to the mother ship to verify the license. But, what about free apps? Why do they have to connect? Download new ads? We didn't want our users to go through this.

Cost:

Android dev license fee is one time $25. Amazon AppStore subscription is $99/yr. But, Amazon waives the first year fee, to lure new developers. So, cost was not a driver in this decision.

Reach:

Google Market can publish apps around the world.

Amazon Appstore only allows publishing within the US.

This really didn't matter for us since we were hyper-local (Puget sound only). But, our Droid carrying friends in India and other countries could not have enjoyed (tested) the app if we were on Amazon.

I do know that Amazon Appstore has other advantages: Ability to use Amazon account to pay (1-click). Ability to purchase once and use on multiple devices using the same credentials. Amazon does market the apps by offering them free for a day. You need to be lucky to be picked, though. This has its own pros and cons.

Of course, with the Kindle Fire, there is only one place to buy your apps - Amazon Appstore. So, if you want your app on the Fire, then you better publish on Appstore.

Enterprise Cloud

There has been a lot of talk about cloud computing tools and services and how it could reshape the competitive landscape.

A very small group of early adopters are using cloud computing in the Enterprise arena. One of the main reasons for the lackluster adoption in the Enterprise is due to the lack of full understanding of the benefits and risks of cloud computing. There is a lot of hype thrown out by marketing and it is hard for executives to sift through it.

The main concerns when it comes to cloud computing is security, business continuity and compliance.

Adoption has been great in small companies and especially, amongst technology startups. But, this evidence is not factored in by the large enterprises. When you see Fortune 500 enterprises using paper and Excel to manage their data (database, what?), one has to wonder how long it will take for them to consider cloud solutions. It is not an easy task to implement a new technology or roll out an application in an enterprise that is busy rolling out consumer goods or airplanes. There are a lot of moving parts and interdependencies which make the move very tricky and expensive. When the mission critical applications are on the line, it is not easy to justify the change.

Marc Andreessen commented that enterprise vendors like Oracle are doomed because everything is moving towards the cloud. He said that the clock is ticking on old-line software and infrastructure companies and they need to cloudify their applications or perish. His evidence is based on his vision and premise that cloud is the future. His evidence that a lot of startups utilize cloud-based alternatives to enterprise software as well as infrastructure is well founded because most startups are cash strapped and cannot afford to cut huge checks to enterprise vendors. It is a boon for startups and helps them keep their costs down and be nimble. But, the same does not hold true to enterprises. There are still a lot of hurdles to clear before enterprises accept cloud computing. They need to see a lot of evidence and benefits in order to make a switch, and still, it will take a decade before we see much traction. Also, specific to the point Mark makes, someone still has to create all the infrastructure and software to run the cloud in the first place. So, there will still be a place (albeit smaller) for the so called old-line software and infrastructure companies.

Based on a report in the HBR, some of the highly valued benefits of cloud computing are:
- Increased business agility
- Flexible capacity
- Faster adoption of new technology
- Lower fixed costs (moving capex to opex)
- Lower up-front costs to develop/deploy IT systems
- Always on newest versions of software without IT updates/patches

The article also lists the following as the advantages of the cloud:
- Makes it easy to experiment at low cost
- Enables deeper collaboration with business partners
- Frees up IT resources to work on more strategic things
- Is a source of competitive advantage for early adopters
- Lowers cost of doing business
- Lowers overall IT costs

Many executives believe that cloud computing can give them considerable advantages, but are still hesitant due to the fact that they do not have answers to their questions on security, reliability and implementation costs. All the information from marketing is not helping either. Technical executives understand the implications of cloud computing, and the gap is in educating the non-technical executives and getting their buy-in.

Salesforce has successfully made in-roads into enterprises and there are lessons to learn from this case study.

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net makes an interesting observation (read full interview here) when it comes to enterprise software. He talks about the disconnect in the customer-vendor relationship. He says "There are literally lawsuits from vendors to customers and customers to vendors in that industry. It's kind of a crazy industry because there's this asymmetry where you'll sell software to an enterprise, and they will pay you regardless of whether that's successful or not. That's entirely unlike SaaS where customers will only pay us if we're successful."

From a common sense perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Why would you pay for a car one year before its delivery, only to find out that it is not at all what you wanted?

But, the reality is quite different. You are not paying for a run of the mill car, but a custom car with styling and performance characteristics defined by you. Hence, you have to pay in advance and wait a year to have the car delivered.

Majority of the enterprise applications need configuration and/or customizations to suit the client's specific needs. This is what takes the time to create and is what incurs up-front capital investment. Even if we move into the cloud paradigm, this still holds true and the costs are going to be incurred. What is going to be different is that the infrastructure costs will go down since you are renting rather than buying on your own.

Cloud is here to stay, for sure. But there will still be a mix of on-premise and cloud hosted solutions from what I can see, with the cloud being the majority.

Is Kindle going to kindle your reading?

Ever since Amazon released their Kindle reader I have been wondering why Amazon went into the hardware business. Amazon's core is their service offering, be it their online merchant services or cloud computing/storage services, and this move into hardware is a pretty far adjacency to the core. Move into far adjacencies (in this case, hardware) is always fraught with risks, especially when you don't have Jonathan Ive on your design team.

First of all, Kindle is not a replacement to a computer or a PDA or a web connected phone. One should realize that neither is the opposite true. Kindle is conceived to be purely a physical book replacement.

There are two parts to what Amazon has released:
- EVDO service to dole out the eBooks
- Kindle, the reader

In the first case, Amazon is trying to provide a direct wireless service to download books directly to the reader. No need to download to a computer and then transfer it into the reader. This is an excellent move from a services POV.

In the second case, Amazon has failed to produce a reader that is sexy and attractive to a sophisticated book lover. It has produced a reader with a lot of room for improvement.

The book market is $24 Billion a year in the US alone. This includes all categories of books. The eBook market $54 Mil annual and growing. This is a good market to be in, and Amazon has made a good move.

eBooks initially failed in the market because they were too early in their intro. Akin to Newton for PDAs. Newton failed mainly because the market was not ready for its acceptance, and the interface sucked. Its form factor sucked, and Apple learned a great lesson from this failure. Newton's hand writing recognition was flawed, but the main reason for its failure was the market timing. The same is true for the eBooks.

Until now.

Amazon is trying to copy Apple's model of creating their own mp3 players and selling them for a premium. Unfortunately, this only works if your hardware has the oomph to command a good market. Like this blogger, I also feel that opening up Kindle to be a platform and letting other developers come up with hardware will give Amazon the best bet in succeeding in peddling their eBooks.

DRM and activation requirements can kill the eBook. Books bought on Amazon cannot be read on other readers, and vice versa. Why not make it similar to a physical book. A physical book can be loaned to a friend. Why not do the same with an eBook. As long as there is only one copy floating around, there shouldn't be any problem. As soon as the book is transferred to my friend's reader, I can no longer read it on mine. Come up with a handshake transaction mechanism to move the book around. Make it simple for people to do with eBooks whatever they are used to doing with a physical book. And, remember, the best marketing for a book is to be read. If no one reads your book, it doesn't get sold.

One thing that Amazon needs to consider is the cost of the eBooks. They need to choose a pricepoint that will spur the eBook sales. I don't have any data on how many they have sold after the introduction of Kindle. But, I have a feeling that $9.99 is not a sweet spot for eBooks.

They could also look into the advertising model when it comes to periodicals and blogs. The time commitment for a book is huge compared to a blog posting or an article in a periodical. So, the Ad model might work when it comes to blogs and periodicals. I would never (directly) pay to read a blog.

Another point to consider is the service's longevity as this author points out. What if I plunked $400 on a Kindle, and the service shuts down in a few years? This hits upon the price point of the reader itself. Introduce an inexpensive reader, and once the service takes a good foot hold, introduce better models with more features, AND charge boo-koo bucks for it. Prove yourself first, and then milk the market.

Some things that would make an eBook successful can be learnt from the successes of the iPod:
- Interface - simplistic interface with minimal buttons that just did its job: Dole out music.
- Design - Need great industrial design
- Brand marketing
- Integration and connectivity of the player, computer, software (This has been solved with the EVDO delivery)
- Windows support (No need of platform support)
- iTunes store (Amazon store)
- Form factor
- And last but not the least is Accessories - Sleeves, jackets, the most expensive ones are cars!

Something that the Kindle could benefit from is style. And, a water tight case.

Some of the benefits of eBooks/Kindle are:
- A great boon for independent freelance writers. Akin to music and blogs, everyone of us could write a book and publish it!
- No worry about the book spine and closing books.
- You can also upload your documents to the reader to read them.
- They are green. They do not waste paper or other natural resources.
- Convert any book to large print automatically.
- Take up space of one book, but can hold thousands.
- Random access and searchability.
- eInk technology is cool and makes a great reading device.

Will be really cool if they can add a "reader" to it and make it an audio book. That would have to wait for good text to speech technology, though.

Look at what the MP3 player did to your record/CD collection. Books are going the same route. Of course, this will take a generation to happen, since the older generation is tightly knit with the physical book concept. The older generation did not grow up with computers. The new generation is growing up with computers and MP3 players and what not. They are more prone to adopting the eBook than anybody else.

In this day and age of access anything anywhere, eBooks are here to stay.

Design for "Accessability"

Who hasn't encountered a product wrapped in such a way that it takes all your might to get it out of its packaging? The worst I have encountered are the hard plastic packaging that is molded around the product. You need to cut the plastic with a pair of scissors to get it off. The edges are so sharp, most often you get injured trying to cut this thing off. And, to top it all, you end up cutting the user manual that is hidden inside the packaging.

Packaging seems to have gone from Tamper-proof to Impossible-to-open.

These impossible-to-open packaging have become the common staple of our packaging industry. I don't know if they do it to protect us (which they are obviously not doing) or to protect the product (what harm would a pair of scissors get into, if not packed this way?).

What happened to the nice "pull me" plastic string sticking out of the plastic packaging of the yesteryear CDs? It was so convenient to pull the string and tear through the whole shrink packaging in one shot. It was a pleasure to unpack those CDs. They served their purpose of protecting the CD as well as sealing it from tampering. They also served their purpose of being easy to remove.

It looks like this kind of packaging was conceived to protect from shoplifting, but I don't see a shoplifter shying away from a product just because it is wrapped in impossible-to-open packaging. All this is doing is push away prospective buyers to products that are more elegantly packaged.

Design innovation

On a recent visit to New York, I happened to visit the Marriott Marquis in Time Square and was surprised to see innovation in an area where there has been none for a very long time. I experienced the new technology in elevators.

We have rarely seen any innovation in elevator design, at least from the end user's perspective. There are not too many players in this arena, which in turn is not a recipe for innovation. If any of their clients complained of long wait times, they always came up with other ways of solving the problem. Like, installing flat panel TVs piping News or other programming near elevators to take the mind off the long wait times.

But this new design tries to solve the elevator problem in a unique way. The distinct difference is that there is no Up/Down button to summon an elevator. Also, there is no display atop an elevator signalling where the car is. In place of the Up/Down button is a panel with a number pad and a display. Every elevator has a name (alphabet, in this case). And, the biggest change is that the individual cars have no buttons in them!

Say, you want to go to the 14th floor. You walk into the lobby and key in the number 14 into the pad. The display tells you to go to elevator "E". You go and wait for the car "E". When the car arrives, you just get into it and it delivers you to the 14th floor. The system is trying to schedule the cars and also batch people into cars based on their destination. So, in case of heavy traffic, you don't end up stopping on almost every floor.

For this to work, you need a lot of cars, and a lot of traffic too. The Marriott had about a dozen or more cars. I was not there during the peak hours and hence cannot vouch for the efficiency of the system, but it seems to work.

The one case where it fails is when you enter a floor number (say, 14) and halfway during the journey change your mind (say, 4th floor). There is no way to stop the car as it speeds by the 4th floor. The other case where it fails is when someone rushes into an open car and tries to find keys to punch the floor number. But, both these cases can be considered user errors and dismissed.

The next time you are in Times Square, check it out. To top it all, at the top of the building is the revolving restaurant The View.

Design for serviceability

Yesterday, the light bulb inside our Kitchenaid wall mounted microwave oven burnt out. Me being a handyman, wanted to replace it myself. I searched for the spare bulb online and found a place selling it. When I tried to replace the bulb is when I realized what I was up against. You need to take apart almost the whole microwave, in order to replace a bulb! First, it needs to be removed out of its enclosure, and then taken apart to get to the bulb. Wow.

I called the service center and they said it could cost anywhere from $75 depending on how long it takes to get to it. Wow. Nearly $100 in labor to replace a $2 bulb (No, actually, the bulb is $20. It is part of a premium product, you see). Talk about serviceability.

I used to replace refills in ball point pens when I was growing up. Later on, these pens became disposable and there was no need to replace the refills. The cost of the pens came down drastically and it made no sense to replace the refills. So, they no longer designed the pens for serviceability, and sealed it shut. Makes sense. It is a disposable product.

When I was working as a design engineer designing material handling equipment (during my Robert Bosch days), my boss used to review my designs. One of the first questions he used to ask me was about serviceability/maintainability. "How would you replace the chain on this conveyor?". If I took more than 30 seconds to explain, or if it involved removing 10 other parts, the design was rejected.

Now, I am looking at an appliance which costs upwards of $3000 (it is an oven combo), and I need to call a service technician to replace a piddly bulb! How wonderful. I thought premium appliances are better designed. Maybe, Viking makes better serviceable appliances...

Good design for serviceability may not necessarily mean a good design for manufacturability. But, in most cases, a good serviceable design is a also a good manufacturable design. The components will be simple and easy to assemble.

On the flip side are the products from Apple. Take iPod for example. For it to be aesthetically and visually pleasing, Apple decided not to put any screws. So, what happens if you want to replace the battery. Tough luck. In these cases, the aesthetic appeal wins over everything else, since that is what this brand represents. This would also mean that the components that go into making an iPod are of high enough quality that they don't warrant regular replacement/repair.

Where does one draw the line? In case of the microwave, nobody cares if there were 4 more screws INSIDE the microwave to hold a receptacle for a light bulb. But, Kitchenaid didn't want that (not to mention the 8- 12 screws right on the front of the enclosure). In most appliances, the design should be such that the fuse and some simple parts (that are failure prone) should be easily accessible. I agree that there is no need to give good access to the magnetron coil in the oven. But, a door hinge, or a door spring, or the fuse, or the bulb. C'mon, they can do better than this.

This shows how much the designers think before they finalize a design. Usability is another big area where Kitchenaid appliances lack big time. Don't even get me started on their cooktop design. That is a topic for another blog.

Tilting perspectives...

I know it is hard to merge images of 3D objects, but there has to be a way to easily merge satellite images. Check this picture of the skyscrapers in Chicago and see how they are bumping into each other. From the looks of it, the images were taken either by different satellites, or by the same satellite at a different time/location.

This is an interesting problem since we want to see images of things from an angle so we get the feeling of depth. We don't want perfectly overhead shots of all the terrestrial things. Then, it wouldn't be fun to look at them. Windows live has the same problem too. Anybody who wants to allow panning a satellite image hits this problem. This issue is not noticeable in things that are not tall, and things that do not cast a long shadow. So, they could detect tall objects and try to keep them all in the same grid (same camera angle) and try to connect grids wherever they do not detect tall objects.

It will be interesting to see how this problem will be solved.

Spinning Apple

Isn't this good timing or what? Microsoft is getting ready to release Zune, and Apple posts this notice on their web site that a very small number of iPods were released with a virus in them. Apart from the spin Apple put on this story and blamed Microsoft for the failure (which I don't agree), this seems like a well timed (marketing) message than anything else:
- Apple hardware and software are (generally) free from viruses (for a variety of reasons).
- Microsoft software and hardware is susceptible to viruses. So, Zune buyers beware. Zune is Microsoft hardware and runs Microsoft software, and has wireless connectivity. So, it is susceptible to viruses!

Or, is it my imagination running wild?

Google maps 2 ....

I was complaining about the lack of a scale on Google maps, and one of my friends pointed me to a pedometer. It is pretty cool. A very useful feature to measure distances by clicking points on a map. Cool interface too. But, Google still needs to add a scale to their maps so that one can get an idea of the 'scale', for a lack of words, of the map. At least, we have APIs that we can use and enhance/add functionality.

Google maps

Today, I was using it to get directions to the DMV and it gave me the shortest distance to the destination. The shortest distance did not involve the fastest freeway. That got me thinking... Yes, Google maps is cool. But there is a lot of scope for improvement.

When it comes to directions, there are several factors that could be considered:
- Would I prefer to travel on freeways or highways?
- Can I use a carpool lane?
- If there is more than one route to the destination (of similar length), which would I prefer?
- What if one of the routes needs me to climb 2000ft. and I have an old jalopy?
- Would I prefer the scenic route or the shortest route?
- And so on and so forth...

When it comes to plain maps, what is with the missing scale? When does a map make sense without scale?

These options seem like a lot of questions to ask, but there are ways of efficiently implementing these options in a non-irritating way. Note that not all options apply to any one particular situation.

There could be other services like:
- Bookmarking favorite locations, and applying them while getting directions (touch points).
- Pictures of the destination.
- Satellite imagery of the destination/route. Oops, they already thought of this one.
- The current weather at the destination.

To implement the mentioned services, the server needs to contain all the information or be able to retrieve all the information in real time (like, lane restriction, weather pattern, geography, traffic patterns, etc.) . This wouldn't be a major challenge, but would make the tool more useful and customizable.