I’m pretty much a beanpole, so I don’t have room to complain, but nobody likes to pop a button off their pants the day they turn a year older. I did that today; kind of demoralizing. Getting older is not my favorite thing, but at least we humans have an opportunity to up our worth each year.

The software we use can’t share that hope. A ridiculous comparison, but I couldn’t help make it after the timing of two events: Only mere minutes after the demoralizing button pop I found myself reading yet another Federal Government RFP including yet another requirement for Windows 98 compatibility. Me, I can shed a pound or two. Windows 98 couldn’t be more obsolete. Buried next to it is Netscape Navigator.

Here’s the skinny on Windows 98:

The most recent edition of Windows 98 was released in mid-1999, so it’s coming up on being nine years old. To put that in perspective, Windows 98 is older than the birth of SCORM and Flash-based video.

Stats released in January of this year tout Windows 98 as holding a whopping .4 percent of the browser market. Even Linux claims 4.4 percent! We don’t have to cater to that bugger! Windows 98 was officially dropped from Microsoft support in summer of 2006, and finally, Windows 98 can’t run either the latest Microsoft browser or the media player. All that means it can be challenging to create cutting-edge web-based products when they MUST function on the Windows 98 dinosaur.

Sure, we can chalk up this archaic requirement to an RFP template being reused for the last 9 years. But let’s not forget that RFPs beget contracts. And contracts beget lawyers. Let’s do a favor to the developers and in turn to our audiences.

Dear RFP authors, please update the specs!

On February 12, Microsoft will be pushing an automatic update to PCs far and wide that will transform Internet Explorer version 6 into version 7. The blogosphere is abuzz about how to avoid the update if you want to and is asking how Microsoft can tuck a software update into what should be security updates. That’s neither here nor there to me. Why folks would purposely avoid the update is outside my lane. I leave that to IT units at individual offices and agencies. I’m actually kind of psyched to see it; perhaps less cross-browser testing is on the horizon!

See, browsers are not like televisions. Different brands don’t all work the same. Imagine being a video producer and delivering your product to a broadcaster, then stopping by Circuit City for the big debut. Wouldn’t that be a surprise if one TV shifted the picture out of frame while another resized the image to bizarro dimensions, and a third finally displayed the video correctly. Well, you could just produce three versions of your show, right? One for each kind of TV. That’d be a hoot. We may not have to generate completely separate products, but web developers do wrestle with a similar scenario.

Despite the best efforts of organizations like the WC3, browsers just don’t all work the same way. They don’t display content the same way. Pieces move or resize or disappear completely. Depending on the goals of your organization, those differences can have large impact.

The latest stats show Internet Explorer 7 holding 21 percent of the market. IE6 holds 33 percent, Firefox 36 percent, and then a steep drop down to Safari, Mozilla, and Opera. Notice the name Netscape isn’t even tracked anymore! Depending on your goals and audience, you may need to test your websites/applications on all of those browsers (not to mention platforms like Mac or PC) to make sure everyone is seeing the same thing and enjoying the same experience.

So how do you decide how much time and effort to put into cross-browser and platform testing? That depends on what you’re doing. If you’re facing a closed audience with predictable systems, you may be able to cut down on testing. For example, a DoD agency targeting an internal audience can feel pretty good about things as long as they’re targeting Internet Explorer 6 (until Feb 12?) and Windows XP. Meanwhile, that same agency may have a public-facing website, one offering critical information or training, one that could reflect on their image and mission. In that case, how accommodating should it be? Is it OK to serve up content that may look wacky on a Mac because it holds such a small share of the market? I’m happy to say that’s not my call. But I could help you think through it. And would you believe it comes down to time and money? I know you’ve never heard that before.

I will say this: There are standards out there, and if we stick to those when building, our chances for success are good from square one. Further that, simply having the experience and awareness of cross-browser/platform issues is another big advantage. Finally, it’s about paying attention your audience and making educated decisions. My decision would be to dump IE6. One version of that browser is enough for all of us.

In 2000, someone at a party told me that very soon books would be obsolete. The Rocket eBook had been around for less than a year, billed itself as the “first usable, mass-marketed electronic book,” and could hold a whopping 10 novels. Other competitors were also generating a lot of press—these included the Gemstar, the Everybook, the SoftBook, and the confidently named Librius Millenium Reader (I can’t help hearing here the theme to Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000″ skits). The “death-of-the-book” meme—as old as the computer—had once again been revived.

Today we know that reports of the death of books had—yet again—been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the e-book bubble quickly burst, and the digital text utopia did not arrive. People were buying neither e-books nor e-book readers. While the analog book had been evolved to gratify human sensibilities over millenia, e-book readers still had significant problems to overcome in the area of user interface. A 1999 article in the New York Times on whether such devices meant “the end of the story for books” offered some good reasons for skepticism—or at least cautious optimism:

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, ”I think it’s only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading.”

But he conceded: ”One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness. The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?”

Designers of e-book readers were well aware of the need for them to be book-like. The Rocket eBook was the size of a paperback. Other devices were weighted to the heft of an actual book. One device, by Everybook, tried to get closer to the feel of traditional books by using facing LCD screens. But these were not innovations that readers wanted to curl up with. The problem seemed to be the screen itself.

User reticence about digital reading was already a well-known fact. Electronic texts weren’t themselves new: The Gutenberg Project had been digitizing texts since 1971. Yet computer-based reading hadn’t taken off, even on the Palm Pilot, which had been around since 1996. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen was prescient at least in part:

“It’s a pure matter of technology: The screen resolution is too bad. We know from human-factor studies that reading speed is 25 percent lower on the screen than on the printed page.”

Nielsen thought that 300-dpi screens might solve the problem by providing the same clarity as that of print.

But as resolution improved, it became clear that it wasn’t the only problem. The fact that electronic screens are back-lit makes it both un-book-like and unpleasant for long-term reading. What was required was “digital ink” on a screen (or even paper-like medium) that reflected light in the same way as a real book. Xerox and MIT had been diligently working on this problem while the first wave of e-book reader hype came and went.

Eight years later, the fruits of work on “digital ink” (and “electronic paper”) are only just making themselves known. Today we have the iLiad (2006), the Sony Reader (2007), the soon-to-be iRiver eBook Reader, and the just-released Amazon Kindle.

With the Kindle, Amazon has one-upped other available readers by offering a wireless connection (via Sprint’s EV-DO network) that allows access to Web content and does away with the problem of synchronization to a computer. Unfortunately, the device costs $399, books at least $10 apiece, newspapers $15 a month, and blog subscriptions $2 a month. A $399 price point for the device is a problem, and history has not been kind to paid subscription models when it comes to Web content. And as Jay points out, we can’t yet be confident that we can get the books we want in electronic format. Further, PDFs will need to be converted to the Kindle’s proprietary format to be read on the device. So despite digital ink and wireless access, there are still some significant barriers to entry for users interested in e-books.

But beyond cost, content, and format, there is still the question of user interface. Do we yet have a device that gives readers enough of the full experience of reading a regular book to be a real breakthrough (as Robert Darnton puts it, “the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness”)? Perhaps we’ll need something that is much more book-like in look and feel—including multiple (digitally inked) pages that bend—before reading on an electronic device doesn’t seem, at a primal level, sterile and less gratifying than the real thing.

Asus recently began selling a $399 Linux Laptop, the EeePC (on sale here), with a $299 version to be launched soon. That’s a very low price for a 2 lb., 7″ display machine—usually ultra-portables belong to a high-end and expensive category. The Toshiba Portege R500, for example, retails for $2000 or more.

The EeePC is getting great reviews and apparently has been selling one every two seconds in Taiwan. It isn’t the only affordable Linux machine making mainstream inroads—Dell has been selling Linux Unbuntu systems, and Everex just started selling a sub-$200 Unbuntu machine at Wal-Mart. But the EeePC is the first cheap ultra-portable to be marketed to a new niche—not business travelers with money to spend, but average computer users who want an affordable way to take the Internet with them. (The only affordable laptops with a similar form-factor, and perhaps Asus’ inspiration, are those in production for the One Laptop per Child project).

Asus is achieving success in a traditionally perilous niche. UMPCs, for instance, failed to catch on: they were too expensive. And while devices like the Pepperpad are less expensive, they are not cheap enough to capture the market. Tapping this niche isn’t just about creating the right Internet device; it’s also about breaking a certain price barrier. Asus is breaking that barrier both by offering Linux instead of Windows and by eliminating a regular hard drive in favor of 4GB of Flash storage.

Flash storage certainly helps reduce price, but why so few gigabytes? The idea is that customers are doing more of their work and storing more of their data online. With this fact in mind, the EeePC includes links to Google Docs and other online applications (although it also includes the free Microsoft Office-compatible OpenOffice.org suite). Here’s a user review that I think captures the essence of the need that the EeePC satisfies: “Good form factor. Basic apps are all I need. Browser very fast. Boot in a little less than 15 seconds.”

There are a few industry lessons here. The first is that hardware devices are becoming commoditized because of the predominance of Web applications. More and more, such devices are not the endpoint for users, but merely (preferably lightweight and fast) tools to reach the place they really want to be—online.

Here’s the take of Tom Krazit of Cnet:

“End users desire the ability to take the full Internet with them, the experience they have on their PC, in a nomadic or mobile fashion,” said Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing in Intel’s mobile group. That’s language straight from the playbooks of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, both of whom this year have emphasized their commitment to delivering a PC-like Internet experience on a handheld device.

Tim O’Reilly also puts it well:

We are starting to see the real blurring of handhelds, cell phones, cameras, and other consumer devices. Everything is becoming connected, and computing truly is becoming pervasive…. As people get seamlessly connected, wherever they are, devices become less important, even throwaway, and the continuity of the user’s data becomes most important.

O’Reilly’s conclusions are borne out by the PC market decline in Japan in favor of smaller devices. They are also borne out by the recent entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. In fact, Google Android could drastically change the phone market by leading the market toward open source, unlocked phones that allow developers to bring wireless devices to the next level by giving users more choices when it comes to applications. It’s a move similar to the opening up of the Facebook API (with new competitor OpenSocial in pursuit) to allow a greater level of connectedness over the Web—not just via links, but via data exchange and functionality. The point is to bring state of mobile phone technology up to speed with the latest developments in Web applications, and that means especially making them more compatible with social networking and video-sharing applications.

So here’s how I trace these connections:

Social Networking–>Web applications predominance over client software–>Open APIs/Open Source–>Hardware lightening and commoditization in favor of social network access

That’s how I think cheap and lightweight hardware like the EeePC, the “cannibalization” of proprietary software by open source, recent developments in social networking, and Google Android are related.

I recently found this question on Linkedin:

Right now social networks and blogs dominate the web landscape. What do you think people will be utilizing online 8–10 years from now? Are there advancements in software or web development that you think will become as pervasive as social networks/blogs/etc.?

 

I took a stab at answering, but soon realized what a truly difficult question this was—and how lame my response really was (something about real-time virtual reality and that we’ll all be immersed in virtual worlds, but that technology is already here).

The truth is, who knows what the Web will look like in 8 or 10 years? A decade ago we were excited by email. AOL had the only visual Web interface and tons of people were using it. HTML was the language of the Web, and video had to be small to be seen well.

I did appreciate the creative analogy in this response:

I don’t see this Internet thing keeping people’s attention that much longer. Remember Beanie Babies? Oh, the Internet will be around but it won’t be top-of-mind. People will be used to just like they are use to TV, Radio, and the Telephone. I mean, do you really get excited to watch TV or talk on the telephone? And who even owns a working radio these days. The online world will go the way of the automobile. A necessary evil. Of course, the automobile will be online in a decade or so, which means there won’t be any need to step into the offline. I just hope virtual scent will be created by then because I’d really miss the smell of gasoline when I filled my tank.

I’m not sure I agree, but I sure hadn’t thought of that.

Ten years ago, we had maybe an inkling of how the use of applications would evolve. While the technology itself has remained pretty steady, how we’ve used it has expanded exponentially. What was once a home for static websites is now an infinite realm for interactive social networks, blogs, and wikis. Who would have guessed?

So, how will the Internet landscape look in 2017? Your guess is certainly as good as mine. Take a crack at answering. I’m interested to see what you think the Web will be.

Friday I spent most of the day at User Focus, the UPA DC metro chapter’s second annual conference. In their words, the conference was:

A one day exchange of ideas and experiences that demonstrate the value of usability in successful design.

It was that indeed. I really liked it. Small, close to home, and full of attendees working in the area. Understandably, it was good for networking, but it was also notable for the focus of the presentations.

Unlike national events in which you might hear top-tier media firms brag about pushing the limits of Web design and interactivity, the attendees and presenters were talking about issues facing organizations in this area, namely federal government and nonprofits.

How, for example, do you make the two-million-page Census.gov site easy to navigate? Can nonprofits better serve their members via well-designed online social networks? Topics maybe not have been sexy, but they are real and applicable to the folks I work with and the clients we serve.

I also have to give a shout to Ovo Studios, one of the few vendors set up at User Focus. Their usability testing suite was cool for sure. What impressed me is that they offer their software on a lease-to-own basis, Ovo by the Pound. That means small Web design/development companies can offer some pretty high-end usability testing and reporting without having to drop huge dollars up front on software and training. For those of us working fee-for-service, that’s awesome. We can write those services into our proposals and afford to execute them no matter how infrequently they’re purchased.

Sony has recently announced that they plan to sell the first OLED TV during the holiday shopping period this year. OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. That’s right, I said organic! This new technology uses a film of organic compounds that emit colors. The new technology doesn’t require back-lit LED and uses way less power.

Will Wheaten, my buddy from Star Trek: TNG (although I liked him better in Stand By Me), explains it better than I can:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ufs9Wx0VXQ]

It’s not all sunshine, though. OLEDs have limited lifetimes and are easily damaged by water. But maybe the coolest thing about OLED TV is you can bend it like Beckham! Get ready to trade in that old plasma screen. That’s already old school compared to the emerging OLED world.

In a recent survey by ChangeWave, the iPhone is receiving a customer satisfaction rating of 92 percent. (By comparison, Blackberries receive the second-highest rating, at 50 percent.) At the risk of sounding like another Apple cheerleader, I have to admit that I’m one of these customers.

But I hadn’t expected to be.

I haven’t had good experiences with PDAs and smartphones. The Treo 650, for instance, was a nightmare when it came to bulk, reception, and sound quality. And gradually the idea of hunkering down over a tiny glowing screen with a stylus seemed less and less cool. A friend reminded me, “You work in an office—you should want to spend less time at the computer, not more.” So I bought the simplest clamshell I could, resisted the temptations of the Crackberry, and felt liberated from my gadget obsession.

Then the iPhone ad campaign began. I admitted to myself I was curious, but I reminded myself how much I hated smartphones and tiny screens. I had trouble believing that any touch screen could be genuinely comfortable. I’ll go see a floor model, I thought, and that will be that.

Of course, that’s like an alcoholic walking into a bar to look at a “floor model” of the latest brand of vodka. Once a gadget freak, always a gadget freak. I went to my local AT&T/Cingular store after work—after the lines had died down and the mobs had left it looking like the remnants of a party: dirty floors, disorder, and a significant number of stragglers snapping up the final stock. I asked myself if I wanted to be one of these people. One guy received his new iPhone over the counter with a classic air of paranoid covetousness—like Gollum possessive over his precious (and it should go without saying that there is significant overlap between tech early adopters and Lord of the Rings devotees). The staff had long since run out of the decorative gift bags.

“You bought into the hype, man, you got sucked in.” These are the things that reformed early adopters say to each other. My friend wouldn’t even look at my iPhone he was so disgusted. “I swear,” I said, “I went in to look at a floor model.” And that’s what I had done. And the next day I found an Apple store that hadn’t sold out, and walked out self-consciously transporting, through a crowded mall, the black decorative gift bag that is a mark of pride or shame, depending on your state of mind.

What sucked me in?

First, the iPhone is aesthetically pleasing. Second, it’s a pleasure to use. And that’s about it.

It’s not because I need to check email away from the computer. It’s not because Web surfing is absolutely essential wherever and whenever. It’s not because I get to listen to music while talking on the phone and chatting and emailing and surfing the Web and looking at photos and using Google maps and popping off a beer cap with the built-in bottle iOpener. And after all, the iPhone’s greatest innovation is that it does less than any other smartphone!

Really, it comes down to intriguing innovation in user interface that is hard to resist. The touch interface makes it enjoyable to surf the Web—the only small device I’ve used for which this is the case. And when I say “enjoyable,” I don’t mean merely “functional” or “tolerable,” and I’m not saying that what it does is more useful than other phones; it’s just fun—justifiably unnecessary.

The best way to describe why this is so is to say that the iPhone decreases the distance between you and the tasks you’re trying to perform. That’s an immediacy that technology usually takes away via mouse, keyboard, and stylus interfaces. Getting to use your fingers, on the other hand, is satisfyingly basic—even primal. Hence the iPhone may also be the anti-gadgeteer’s gadget in the same way that the Wii is the non-gamer’s video game. And both I see as an extension of recent trends in social networking, which have become successful by lowering the barrier of entry for users and applying principles of simplicity and immediacy that Google and Apple have adhered to for some time.

The only question left, of course: will it blend? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dr5zAOc7-0]

What a luxury to be able to respond directly to a news story about you or your organization. Google recently announced a system allowing such responses on their Google News blog:

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question.

MediaPost discusses the potential conflict here between Google and mainstream news outlets. What exactly is Google doing? Are they now a news outlet? Will they employ journalists who will actually pursue the reactionary soundbite and edit it for publication?

I realize Google is becoming the everything to damn near everyone, but this move seems to me to be a huge jump away from what is, according to Google’s Company Overview webpage, their mission:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Where does it say “creating information”? Google is search. Google is online applications. Google is search-based advertising. Google is, well, according to this Google page, Google is lots o’ stuff, and it’s adding more stuff every day.
I remember a time when another company that made its bones in search decided to expand into a cloud of features and services, diluting the brand it had solidified. It became the everything to damn near everyone. And then Google showed up and kicked Yahoo!’s ass. Does anyone else feel like they’re listening to Justin Timberlake? “What goes around, comes back around…”

Megabrands can, for a time, get away with breaking some of the 22 immutable laws of branding, simply because the train is rolling so hard and fast. But I’m a firm believer that you can’t get away with diluting the brand to something indefinable. If you get into the information creation business, Google, it may well end up hurting your brand.

Ah, the free sample—staple of bakeries and food courts everywhere. “Hey buddy, check out this ginger chicken on a toothpick!”

That’s confidence, right? This stuff is so good you just taste it and you’ll want to buy it.

You know what I love about the food court sample? It’s always there. Sometimes on a busy day I just walk back and forth grabbing toothpick after toothpick. Score!

Think they notice it’s me over and over? Think they care? Listen, the chicken is cooked anyway, someone’s got to eat it.

When the day comes that I’m hungry enough, I’ll buy a meal. In the meantime I tell hungry friends to go eat there—ooh, did someone say viral marketing?

And now is when I compare ginger chicken to Web applications.

I just finished an online whiteboard collaboration with my team that works 80 miles away from me, and it was fantastic. “Oh, WebEx,” you say. “Maybe MS LiveMeeting or Adobe Connect.” Nope. Check out vYew, a FREE online collaboration and conferencing tool. It rocks.

Their model is much like the ginger-chicken-on-a-toothpick model (as taught at Wharton). After a simple registration, I get a taste of the chicken, not the whole bird. But I can return again and again whenever I need it. No trial expiration, no watermarked examples.

Much like the generous folks at 37 Signals, which offers up free online tools like Campfire (group chat) and Basecamp (project management), vYew is giving away their product to folks who need just a little bit. Currently, I may only need to use this online collaboration tool a few times a year, but now that the sample hooked me, it means two things:

1. If I need more (more pages, file uploads, etc.) I will become a paying customer to them as opposed to one of the other players
2. I’m telling other people (you) about them

Great product. Great model.