Are gadgets getting too complex for the average person? My parents don’t even use all the features of their standard Verizon Wireless phones. And I pray that they don’t decide to get a Windows Smartphone because I know I’d be writing a personal FAQ for each of them.

A Netherlands researcher noted that “Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices.” This was reported in a recent Reuters article. It also noted that the average consumer in the United States will “struggle for 20 minutes with a device before giving up,” and even a group of employees from the consumer electronics company Philips couldn’t figure out how to get some new products to work.

What are the reasons someone has to struggle for 20 minutes to get something working the way he or she wants? Is it poor user interface design? Poor documentation? Operator error? I am a big fan of simplicity when it comes to a user interface. Two phrases from former college professors come to mind when I think about this. One: K.I.S.S., which stands for keep it simple stupid! Overly complex hardware or software products are not only confusing for consumers to figure out, but also mask bugs and other problems increasing the chance of a buggy product being shipped. The second phrase that I think of is from a computer science professor. He said to design your code to do one thing and do it well. This is better than doing 14 things half-assed like much software and hardware I see these days.

This is a great video to promote Internet Explorer 7. I wish they would put it on TV since I think people would laugh so hard! It also does a great job not showing the product, which is exactly what so many companies do these days. Hype up the brand/name, and deliver something new and usable. Anyway you can watch it in WMV format, or click below to watch it via YouTube.

You have got a plethorea of services that start with “Windows Live”:  Windows Live Messenger (WLM), Windows Live Mail (WLM) [wait, which one is WLM?!], Windows Live Local (WLL), Windows Live Safety Center (WLSC), Windows Live Expo (WLE), Windows Live Favorites (WLF), Windows Live Search (WLS).  Then there is another set of “Live” services: Windows Office Live (WOL) and Windows OneCare Live (WOCL or WOL).  But the worst came today when I found out about the new Windows Live Local Search Free Call (WLLSFC).

At a company with over 60,000 employees, and a committee could ruin much of the work they do by making a huge mistake in naming.  I don’t mind getting rid of MSN, which has a slow, clunky, non-innovative history attached to it.  I understand that the naming works with the new organizational structure, but it makes no sense to the consumer to add extra words or letters. 

Why not make MSN into just Live?  Live Messenger, Live Mail, Live Search, Live Local.  You could even play off it for advertising Live (change it to live as in living).  They could do something even better, and get a whole new word/letter/phrase similar to “i” in iPod and iTunes.  Branding is a huge pain and I think they are digging a hole with the new naming pattern.  People can hardly tell what services are without long names like “Windows Live Local Search Free Call”.  That is an absurdly long name, which could have been called Live Search Connectoid.  I am partial to the word “connectoid” because I think it sounds interesting and unusual.  Microsoft is trying to continue domination of the desktop by keeping the word Windows as a top buzz word.  I think they are excluding users of Apple or Linux platforms who can easily access the Web 2.0 software being used.

When Lucent spun the Enterprise Networks Group out in 2000 it had to come up with a name.  They picked Avaya, pronounced uhv-EYE-uh, because it would set them apart and capture what they were doing.  Google was a made up word that came from the word googol, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and the founders liked the definition of “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth”.  Red Hat came from a lost Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes).  Cisco is short for San Francisco, Intel came from INTegrated ELectronics and HoTMaiL as it was originally spelled was constructed with the letters HTML, which were used to create the web-based software.

What do you think of this new naming scheme from Microsoft?  How would you change it?

PS: I do really like the name Microsoft, and it would have been nice to see them stick that back in.  They have made great software.  I know the name has had a bad reputation with games, but the Xbox has changed that around and given birth to Microsoft Game Studios. 

As posted on Scoble and Engadget this morning, interesting developments. I have been hearing talk about some kind of mobile device, the question is what functionality it will contain. My guess would be a mobile media center with wireless connectivity and some link to xbox live. Maybe two flavors: one for business, one for media. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks.

Origami Project

Have you ever been working away on your computer and wished there was a better way to interact with it? The mouse and keyboard are great and all but how about something more tactile or something three-dimensional? I often feel this way — I feel restrained, overwhelmed by the limited control over how my machine responds to me. Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a circus through a key hole. Think about it: all the lights, power, and excitement funnelled through these antiquated devices named after a small furry rodent and a musical instrument!  How awkward!

As an example, think about the Chinese keyboard. It hurts my brain to even begin thinking about it. An article on Slate does a good job of conveying the complexity of using one of these keyboards. There’s the Pinyin method, the Wubi method, and in Taiwan there’s the Zhuwin method. But it also mentions that older people who aren’t comfortable with these input methods like using an electronic writing tablet to actually draw the characters. They are then understood by the computer just like the handwriting recognition software that PDAs use these days. Of all these options, this seems like the most natural way of interacting with a computer, but its slow input speed limits widespread adpotion.

So what is a good interface? Well as corny and far-fetched as it sounds, I have always thought that the interface that Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report would be a great way to deal with information overload. I honestly believe the human brain is capable of processing much more information than we think; it is figuring out how to organize and communicate that information that is tricky. This interface allows one to not only interact with the information actively but also be immersed in that information. Defense company Raytheon is actually developing something like this for the U.S. military.

How long will it take for a better user interface to gain widespread adoption? What will that interface be? A user interface connects a user to a machine, and combining the power of the human brain with the raw speed of these little boxes that sit on or beside our desks will unleash power that could previously only be imagined through TV and movies!

Update: Another step toward getting people immersed in user interfaces: a group of scientists involved with the AIST have created a device capable of displaying “real 3D images”. They say, “Most of the 3D displays reported until now draw pseudo-3D images on 2D planes by utilizing the human binocular disparity.” However, this is the first device that displays “dot arrays in space where there is nothing but air.” Check out the pictures in the article; the images are clearly primitive at this point, but think about the early Apple II monitors. Monitors have come a LONG way since that!

Online banking isn’t new, and has been improving over the last few years. You can even check your statements from a year ago via your banking website. Then you have Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken to aggregate your financial statements into an easy to read dashboard. It is extremely similar to how RSS aggregators work. I have my main accounts with Washington Mutual, and they have done a great job utilizing technology and providing me with the simple information that I need. Here is a quick list of cool things I love about WAMU.

• Online statements, and summaries
• Images of checks online! (front, back, zoom, etc.)
• Email updates and alerts
• Online bill paying
• Transfer money between accounts
• Temporary credit cards for online purchases

My improvement list:

• Three factor authentication (PIN + fingerprint + card)
• SMS verification or authorization of a transacation immediately
• Vendor (utilities) request money, and you authorize (pay) with a click.
• All ATMs fee free like WAMU (not so much technology)
• Integrate “points” from credit cards into Microsoft Money
• Account cards to give people to authorize a deposit into your account online

The two themes from my list are, 1) I think they need to make online banking a bit more secure and 2) they need to push more information to the user instead of waiting for them to initialize something. With these changes, we could start to see the paper check go away completely! Each year I send dozens of checks away in the mail, and then wait for them to hit my account. I totally prefer the instant “Visa check card” log so I can track my transactions without delay, and I think these improvements would further my love for Washington Mutual.

I manage them by saying “just buy me a beer next time we go out” or “I’ll buy lunch next time”. I think this tends to work in the long-run, as long as you have friends that are relatively in the same personal financial position as you. But I honestly have never analyzed in detail what my exact position is with money I have lent out to and money I have borrowed from friends and family. How would you do that anyway? Keep all the receipts? Input them into an Excel spreadsheet? Input every transaction that involves more than one person paying? What a pain!

So my next question is what are the things that cause these debit and credit balances among friends? Well, here are some that I run into:

• Not having correct change to pay for my portion of the meal at a restaurant
• A single roommate being the contact person on apartment-related bills (water, electricity, etc.)
• A single person paying for food or refreshments at a party that is actually hosted by a number of people
• Receiving “employee-purchase” items from friends who are not giving them as gifts
• Just plain loaning money to someone who does not have enough cash with him

Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom have come up with an innovative and, most importantly, easy way to keep track of this mess. They created BillMonk to “ease the strain of finances on friendships by providing a tool that manages social money in a manner that is easy and fair.”

You can go on the site and sign-up for a FREE account. From there you can easily enter your debits and credits with people. You can also enter them from your cell phone, while at dinner, or at a bar, or at Target or something. BillMonk then takes care of keeping track of who owes who, and can let you know this information using a standard web browser or your cell phone.

What a great and simple way to solve such a nagging, ubiquitous problem. Check them out and let me know what you think!

I stumbled upon a new piece of beta software called Chatsum.  This one allows you to chat with web surfers on the same wave (website) as you.  You can chat, leave messages, and read other user messages.  This would make the web browsing experience completely different.  You can now surf with other people!  It currently works with FireFox, and a version is coming for Safari on Mac OS X Tiger.

I don’t like the idea of allowing other people to talk about a corporate website while looking at it.  If you had an upset customer, they could sit there and bad mouth you.  Even worse would be if they attempted to act like a company rep. and promise things or lie to the client or potential customer.  Not many websites allow/sponsor chat between users on the site, but it is possible with things like IRC and Java plug-ins.  A lot are using chat programs to offer sales help to potential clients.  I know HP, Dell, EarthLink, and smaller online shops use services like BoldChat, LivePerson, or ProvideSupport.  This is controlled chat, and I think that is okay, but I don’t like the idea of uncontrolled chat from a corporate perspective.

I have been archiving corporate email since 2004, and just started indexing it today. This is a huge process, and I am not going to bore you with the details or software that I am using. But I find it really interesting how I will need to sort and find “what I am looking for”. Most search engines are based on lexicons or the letters/numbers that make words. But our brains don’t always function like that.

For example, let’s say I had to submit a document to my boss regarding an upcoming meeting. I can remember if I did it during the during the week, and not on a weekend. I remember it was sent to me on a Monday because I got it in a meeting, and I remember the document came from someone in Sales. Well that seems logical to me and my brain, but there isn’t a way for me to put that in the Outlook search box or even the more powerful MSN/Google/Yahoo! desktop search tools.

Those are just a few ways I would like to search/query my email archive. Want more ideas? Tie it to phone logs (desk and mobile), calendar, and tasks (which I don’t use enough, so I think that needs some redesign). Give me a GUI that allows me to look at my history of where I was and what I was doing. That will help me find “what I am looking for”.

This is something I have discussed with a few colleagues awhile back, but I thought this would be a good time to bring it up. Everyone has heard about the massive computer virus breakouts of 2003 and 2004. Well, 2005 kept pace with 2004, but we didn’t see much growth in infected email. So why have we not been able to prevent the outbreaks? Well the problem is with the system of deploying definitions.Think about it this way. Once a virus is created, if done well, it would be deployed and start to spread exponentially. Symantec and antivirus companies then take 30minutes to and recognize the virus. Well instantly, the virus has a 30min+ head start, and thousands, if not millions, are infected before the definition is made. Next, every computer needs to download the new virus definition. This is where the process breaks. Your computer needs to get a new definition before the virus hits it. No matter what happens, you are going to strain the networks. Well, most software vendors try to minimize the number of times the software checks. For example, Symantec releases weekly definitions using their standard setup. You can customize it to update every 60 minutes, but I would guess that a vast majority don’t do this.

I would like to propose an idea. Create universal definitions that can reside on firewalls & gateways so that they can be deployed to local machines without straining the global internet. This would help push definitions to clients, but I think the next step would be to give definitions away for free. Remember, everyone who isn’t running antivirus software is opening your entire network to evil eyes and fingers.  So please keep your OS, software, and security software up-to-date.

What to look for in 2006? The hype is around instant messaging. We saw some hits of it in the 2nd half of 05, and it will continue to be affected until corporate IT staff can control the networks. We used to be able to control them by blocking ports, but now they all run over normal web ports (TCP 80&443) and the virus is being deployed as a url and not an attachment.  I would look for open wifi, mobile spam, and blog spam to take a hit this year too. All three have been in early stages without standards for the last couple of years, and this could be the year that they have one major outbreak.