Many of you wrote in about my piece last week in which I summed up 2006 as “The Year of Not Enough Outrage” because no one seemed to care much about disasters such as the ongoing Sony rootkit fiasco. Much to my surprise, it appears a large number of you are outraged but overwhelmed: There’s so much to be outraged about you find it hard to know where to start, so you find yourself exhausted before you begin.
I suspect much of this feeling is generated by the sheer complexity of the stuff we deal with. In IT the deluge of detail that pounds us every time we do anything is tough on our spirits, making it hard to get up enough of a head of steam to do anything when we’re pissed off.
Most of us in IT want to be painstaking, accurate and logical in our approach to building systems and solving problems. But all too often the pressure of dealing with staggering amounts of detail forces us to take shortcuts. We put software and hardware into production that we mostly but not quite completely understand.
We want simplicity and good design but we are too exhausted to feel outraged when it isn’t delivered. OK, your product can do a thousand things, but how about making it easy to do the handful of things I bought it to do?
When I use the word simplicity I don’t mean dumbing down, I mean adding polish and applying serious design effort to make the software or hardware not just usable but actually a pleasure to use.
What got me thinking about simplicity was the launch of Apple’s iPhone. The first thing I thought when I saw the iPhone was a lustful “Ohhhh, shiny.” The second thing was, “Damn! I just dumped Cingular so I can’t have one!”
The reason Cingular had to go was outrage. My son, like most teenagers, is a text-messaging fiend, so on the Cingular Web site I signed him up for the Messaging Extreme package, which allows for 3,000 messages.
The following month his combined incoming and outgoing total was 2,400. To my surprise and outrage I got a bill for an extra couple of hundred bucks for my son’s texting (really, 10 cents per text message is highway robbery). For some reason my service changes never made it from the Web server to Cingular’s accounting system (how convenient, a suspicious mind might think).
I called customer service and a CSR with a bad attitude offered to reduce my bill by $170. When I pointed out this would mean that Cingular’s failure to properly update my account options would then be costing me $70, the CSR said, “I don’t have to give you the adjustment, we just offer it as a courtesy.” This was a definition of the term courtesy of which I had been previously unaware.
More outrage set in and I asked for a supervisor. After almost two hours on the phone I got a full refund.
I had to repeat the whole process the following month when the Messaging Extreme package was still not applied to my bill. After another round of customer disservice I decided to go with T-Mobile. Choosing T-Mobile was mostly driven by my son’s desire for a Sidekick (which I must admit is very cool) and the fact that T-Mobile has an unlimited Internet and texting option.
From what I can see of the iPhone it may be the cell phone I have been waiting for. It may be the first multifunction personal peripheral that really works. I know Mr. McNamara in his blog said the iPhone is overhyped, and perhaps I am geeking out a bit with gadget lust here, but the device appears to have the simplicity that I look for.
Apple is eerily good at this kind of design. For example, even though I have seriously looked, I have yet to find another music player that is as polished and elegant as the iPod, and even though I have yet to see the iPhone in the flesh, it seems to have those same qualities.
So there you have it: Outrage and lust. That’s a lot of emotion for one column and I’m now going to have to add more outrage, because unless the iPhone is offered by other carriers I will have to go back to Cingular.
Rampant emotions to backspin@gibbs.com.
