April 8th, 2005
The "Top Ten" most inexcusable failures of technology?
Just about everywhere you look on the Internet, in newspapers and magazines, and even on TV, you’ll see new and innovative products being showered with accolades and awards. As a former lab director at Ziff Davis, I was a part of the testing and reviews engine that hoisted great products onto the pedestal while raking the poorly done ones through the coals. But through it all, it was easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and where, overall, technology was not only failing us but doing so inexcusably.
How do I define "inexcusable?" Inexcusable failures are the ones where we continue to pay a severe penalty in productivity for everyday tasks while the end game (how it should work) is obvious but the path to it is obstructed for reasons that have nothing to do with science. In other words, when you look at all the problems that have so far been solved by technology, it’s appalling that some of these simpler issues have yet to be ridden from our lives. I say this knowing that somewhere, these problems are being solved by some solutions provider. Invariably, in response to complaints about one problem or another, I’ll get e-mails from vendors who say "We solve that problem" or from the Apple faithful who scream "Get a Mac!" But for one or two companies to have solved the problem isn’t good enough. These problems are so blatantly killing the productivity of thousands of people that there’s no excuse for them to not have been universally addressed.
When you see my list (which isn’t yet up to 10 items and is by no means final.. . I’m looking for suggestions), you’ll no doubt be quick to point the finger at the parties that should be blamed for standing in the way of progress. But quite frankly, I’m tired of fingerpointing. I just want it fixed so I can rid my life of repetitive time-draining nuisances. Using our TalkBack below, feel free to chime in. If your suggestion gets into the top ten, I’ll dig through my pile of unopened FedEx and UPS boxes and send you whatever trivial goodies I can find.
The incomplete Top Ten List of inexcusable technology failures that drive people batty:
- Eight years ago, when I was in Europe, I watched with envy as my at-the-time future in-law called directory assistance on his cell phone and, instead of being connected directly to the restaurant he was trying to reach, the 411 operator simply programmed his phone over the wireless network with the restaurant’s phone number. How many times have you called 411 a second time for the same person or business’ phone number? Enough said.
- Speaking of phones, we’re getting there slowly, but it’s still taking too long for all landline phones to work the same way that cell phones do in the way that you can edit the complete phone number you’re about to dial before finally dialing it. When I think about the number of times I’ve had to rekey a complete number into a landline phone (either on first dial or redial), I feel embarrassed for the the people who make them.
- Many people have attempted to explain to me why all of Bob’s e-mails to me have a line-feed (or carriage return) forced into the middle of each of his lines of text at a location where he never intended it to be. Bob’s e-mails to me aren’t alone in this affliction. I get dozens of these a day and, invariably, the line-feed is inserted into the middle of a Web URL in a way that makes it impossible to go directly to that Web page with a single click. Instead, I have to cut and paste the URL in pieces from the e-mail into my Web browser. With really long URLs from shopping sites, this process makes me want to jump out of a window. While we wait forever for the forced line-wrap problem to be eliminated from our lives, perhaps the people who make our e-mail systems can find it in their hearts to detect those situations where URLs are chopped up and figure out a way to put them back together again. Part B to this problem covers the e-mails that have no text in their bodies and instead, require me to open an attachment in order to read the e-mail message. Try opening that e-mail with any PDA or smartphone.
- How many times have you received an appointment request from someone that isn’t sharing the same e-mail system as you? How many times have you had to cut and paste a bazillion times from the e-mail message into your calendar. OK, so there have been some proposals for calendaring standards and, for whatever reasons, they’re not universally supported. Or maybe they’re supported, but not "embraced," if you know what I mean. I don’t care. Regular Expression text pattern recognition technology (REGEX) has been around for more than two decades. What text patterns are more recognizable than dates and times? Oh, sure, there are enough variations in date and time formats to throw a 10-year-old PERL programmer for a loop (pun intended). But, not an infinite number. With a half-way decent software developer, a month’s worth of free pizza, and a couple of cases of Jolt Cola, most e-mail clients could be programmed to recognize 99 percent of the data that needs to be pushed into the new calendar item’s fields can be much more conveniently pushed there, even if it needs to be user-assisted. I’ll take anything — ANYTHING! — over the way it works now.
- In addition to appointment requests, there’s another collection of data that invariably shows up in my e-mails that could be handled a little bit more intelligently: contact info. So far, vCard has been a complete failure. Sure, most e-mail clients can handle it. But hardly anyone actually uses it. Almost every e-mail I receive has all of a person’s contact data (first name, last name, addresses [physical, e-mail, Web, IM, etc.], and phone numbers) inconveniently placed at the end of their e-mail (where the signature goes). Not only should it be relatively easy to push all of this data into the right fields in my contact manager, I should be able to push it to ANY contact manager (not necessarily the one my e-mail provider decides I should be using). For example, even though I use Outlook for e-mail, I wouldn’t dare use it for contact management. For that, I have a relational database (based on Sybase’s SQL Server, if you must know) that, because of its relational capabilities, allows me to see everybody I know (PR firms, employees, and end-users that’s connected with IBM (or any other vendor for that matter). E-mail clients should have the intelligence to parse contact data found in an e-mail, the ability to easily push that data into some fields in a user-designed form, and then, when the user presses the save button, have that data flow to the contact management database of their choosing. Sure the capability is there to do this today, but you have to be a software developer to use it. It’s 2005. C’mon folks.
- Imagine if, ten years ago (a couple of years after the gravity of the Web had a chance to sink in with everyone), vendors of all software set themselves on a course to turn error messages into interactive software repair assistants. Using the error dialog box, you could catalog the error in a log of your choice, forward it to some central repository (either corporate or with the vendor), generate a trouble ticket for your support staff, or better yet, repair the problem with one click. Today’s online knowledgebases make it clear that for some subset of problems that cause error messages, there’s an explicit set of steps for eliminating that error. Today, things are a little bit better than they were 10 years ago. For example, after setting focus to some (not all) such dialogs in Windows, you can copy some of the information contained within the dialog to the clipboard. Some dialogs ask if you want to pass the information on to a certain software vendor. But these stop gaps are a far cry from what we really should be able to do with an error dialog. Half the time, cut-n-paste simply doesn’t work and in some situations where it does, the error message means absolutely nothing to anybody who might care (including the vendor of the software). Where the error messages exhibit some limited interactivity with a vendor, they are too fixed in what they can do (for example, maybe I want to be cc:ed on the information being forwarded to a vendor or maybe I want to add something to it. Yet, somehow, while this fundamental issue remains largely unaddressed, vendors find it in their hearts to add significant amounts of bloat to their products — bloat that only a small fraction of users are interested in.
- Are your appointments replicated to some place other than your primary system? A system at home for example? A PDA? A smartphone? Having my calendar available to me (and others) at any time and in any place is a huge step forward from where we once were. So why is it that when I’m in one of those places and my calendar pops up a reminder to make a call or attend a meeting, that a dismissal of that reminder doesn’t wipe out the reminder in all the other places that my calendar is being replicated to. Because of this "bug" (some people will say this is a feature) and the way many conference hosts now have permanent conference call phone numbers (for accounting reasons) to use when holding a conference call, I once called into another company’s conference call because I thought a reminder that showed up on my screen was current. I sat on the call for a good ten minutes before I barged in and asked why I needed to be on the call. My interruption was followed by several seconds of dead silence (shock was more like it). Fortunately (for them, not me), prior to my barging in, nothing sensitive (or worthy of press coverage) was said.
- I’ve complained about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again. The idea that, when I upgrade to a new system, I need to buy some third-party software to help migrate 80 percent of what was on the old system over to the new one followed by several man-weeks of heavy manual lifting to cover the remaining 20 percent, is ludicrous. From the point of view of a systems vendor that wants to keep its customers from jumping ship to another provider, not being able to do this is just plain dumb. If, for example, I owned a Dell notebook and Dell made it possible to migrate to a new Dell notebook by attaching the two to each other and pressing one button, I’d have to think long and hard before I went out and bought a Thinkpad or some other vendor’s notebook. Same goes for desktops. Booting into a firewire-based hard drive mode, the way Tim Bray did when he upgraded his Powerbook, seems like a step in the right direction, but one that should have been taken about 15 years ago.
- The more people telecommute (especially now that the U.S. government is requiring it), the more they’ll be taking notebook systems that are designed to access the network resources at work, and using them to access the network resources at home. For example, a printer. Trying doing this when the two systems (the one that wants to print and the other that plays host to the printer) run on different operating systems, are part of separate domains or workgroups, or one of the systems is currently logged into a virtual private network. Doable? In some situations, yes. But it’s still way too painful. My printer at home is attached to a Linux box. I gave up on SAMBA and now, I just use the Internet Printing Protocol. But that’s because with IPP, I only have five problems instead of ten (four of which are other family members requesting technical support). You can’t tell me that this is a problem that couldn’t have been solved ages ago. Some of you are out there saying "It is solved! You’re just an idiot for not knowing how to do it." Like I should need to know more than pressing the print button and picking a printer. Call this the "mixing work with pleasure problem." Business networks and home networks don’t mix and, as home networks become more important in the scheme of things, the problem is going to get worse. Not better.
- I’ll leave this one open for you. Gotta gripe? Are you fed up with the way different voice mail systems use different keys on your numeric keypads to delete messages? Don’t like the fact that every notebook has to use a different type of power supply with a different type of plug and a different type of battery? That the USB port isn’t bi-directional or that your notebook’s port replicator isn’t a USB hub that can keep the devices connected to it charged up, even when your notebook computer isn’t docked? Perhaps my list is too narrowly focused on computer stuff. Maybe all the automobile manufacturers are making the same mistake with their technologies. Choose your poison. Or replace one of my nine. Let me know using our Talkback feature what’s getting under your skin and maybe the manufacturers who can make a difference will listen instead adding features to their products that hardly anyone cares about.
