At the Mall with Apple and Microsoft

We've seen this before, but it seems worse now. On a winter's Saturday, a trip to the Natick Mall showed two very different retail experiences.

The Apple Store is lively with people of all ages. The further into the store you go, the more customers will you see, excitedly playing with, learning about, and buying stuff.

The Microsoft Store employees outnumber the customers. The liveliest place is not in the store, but out front, where a two-year-old girl is dancing to the big XBox video.

It's no wonder that Apple, with but a sliver of the desktop computing market share, is worth twice what Microsoft is worth.

iOS ease-of-use? Ha!

For inexplicable (or, at least, unexplained) reasons, Apple doesn't allow browser extensions on iOS (iPad and iPhone). Browser extensions are small apps that allow you to things such as save a link to a service such as Pocket.
Pocket, formerly Read It Later, allows you to save links for later reading. It also provides a cleaner version of the web page so that you can read it without ads and other cruft that accompanies most web content. I've been using Pocket/Read It Later for years and recommend it to anyone who uses the web a lot.
Installing the extension on all browsers on Windows and OSX is easy and fast. You get an icon on the browser toolbar.

On Windows, Mac, and Android, you can then save a link from your browser to Pocket. Clicking the icon saves the link to Pocket.
On Safari on iOS, however, here's what you have to do to set up a bookmarklet so that you can save to Pocket. (For the record, Chrome on iOS doesn't support extensions, either.)

How to Save to Pocket on iPad

For people new to or not adept with computing devices in general, this is onerous. For the record, Pocket isn't the only one afflicted by this Apple limitation. Other apps such as Instapaper and Evernote have to provide the same gnarly work-arounds.

You can save links to a Reading List that is synchronized with Safari elsewhere, such as on your Mac. You cannot, however, get at your Reading List from other browsers, via iCloud, or on an Android device.
In a word, pfft.

Toward a theory of technology education

Impressive title for a blog, eh?

Well, I'm nowhere near that full theory, but I've got a few pieces that are starting to take shape. The ideas are based on my experiences providing technical support for many people over many years.

Smart, good people call themselves stupid because their computers and telephones block them from doing a simple task. We've created a culture of disrespect that's the result of bad user interface and bad  software release practices (unannounced changes so that something that worked in one way yesterday doesn't work today).

A generation was mocked by the flashing 12:00 on their VCR clocks because a) each VCR had a different way of setting the time and, more importantly, b) the manufacturers were too fricking cheap to include a 50¢ battery that would preserve the time setting when you unplugged the device momentarily.

It's not likely that the industry is going to change its ways, so it's up to us. That's where this nascent educational theory is coming into shape. It has a few core principles that I'll be developing over a series of blogs:

• Language


• Expectations


• Community of learning


• Context

I'll touch on the first one, language, today.

If you don't know how to spell a word, look it up in the dictionary.

How many of you, as nine-year-olds, stared blankly at your teacher when she told you to look up a word that you didn't know how to spell? This moment may have been the beginning of your understanding that adults are nuts.

Second only to English language usage, English spelling rules are nonsensical and contradictory. (The phrase look it up, for example, uses the verb look in an archaic fashion as a transitive verb and sends us looking upwards. Perhaps a grammarian could help me diagram the sentence Look it up in the dictionary.)

The other day, a Mac user tried to explain her problem, that the thing with the pointer was missing from her desktop.

"I use it to navigate," she said.

I asked about the mouse pointer, which seemed to be ok.

"I click on it to read the New York Times," she said.

The icon for Safari was missing from her Dock.



If you saw the Safari icon in the wild, how would you describe it? A compass, right? How does that correlate with web browsing?



Once you make the association between an icon and the idea or activity, you're most likely just to forget that you even know it. Trouble surfaces, however, when the icon disappears. Is the program gone? Probably not.

Recommendations

• An icon dictionary that explains what each icon represents - what program it runs and what you do with the program. In the previous example, describing that icon as Safari wouldn't have helped much.


• People who work on the computer must document what they've done and why. The reason that the Safari icon was gone was that the Mac owner's son preferred Firefox and wanted to make it the default browser for his mother. He didn't tell her nor did he set it up so that she could get to the New York Times website as she's previously done.

Living and working in a tech news bubble

While the tech press is all tangled up with the upcoming Microsoft, Apple, and Google product announcements, it's time for for a marketing reality check. What are consumers generally hearing about these new products?

It turns out that the mainstream media isn't covering this and so, we can assume, most folks aren’t receiving much reason to get excited. Local newspapers and television stations and even a few national channels give only passing mention to topics such as the Microsoft Surface tablet, iPad Mini, or Nexus 7, or Windows 8.

I chose several Boston-area television and newspaper web sites along with a couple of national resources: WBZ (CBS), WCVB (ABC), and WHDH (NBC), Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram (a nearby, mid-sized daily), CNN, PBS, and Fox News. For each site, I searched for articles with certain keywords in the title.

Note: I would have used Bing on IE for searching in an effort to replicate what a typical non-technical user might use. Bing, however, doesn’t support date-filtering of its search queries.

The Microsoft Surface tablet is a hot new product second only to Windows 8 in terms of company impact. The people who are cover Microsoft and Windows products for a living are having a hard time understanding, let alone explaining the difference between a Windows 8 tablet and a Windows RT tablet, both due for the release this week. The average news consumer is troubled by a surfeit of news to confuse. On average, people have been offered one story about the Surface in the past month. Most sites, in fact, hadn’t reported on the Surface after the June announcement and the recent scheduling of the product release.

The Nexus 7 is a fun product that's receiving a lot of good coverage in the trades. In our local media survey, however, only one site, the Boston Globe, had a story about Google’s breakout tablet.

Apple has an announcement scheduled for October 23. Most people who speculate about such things expect that we’ll learn about a 7-or-so-inch iPad that’s generally been called the iPad Mini.

Meanwhile, all of the chatter about the iPhone 5 hasn’t made clear just what Apple released. I sat with a person recently while an ad for the refreshed iPod line showed up on TV. Seeing the brightly colored bouncing devices, she asked, "Is that the new iPhone?"

Microsoft is betting the company on its radical redesign of the user interface in Windows 8. While the tech press has been covering each of the nooks and crannies, Windows 8 has received scant coverage in our press pool. We found an average of fewer than four stories in the last month. During the same period, the sites averaged more than 27 stories about Big Bird. CNN and the Boston Globe provided peak coverage while PBS, home of our faithful feathered friend, posted just one. After the spike following the October 3 debate, Big Bird’s gone back to quieter corners while Windows 8 coverage continues its slow climb.

The results for Windows phone, including the much anticipated Windows Phone 8 release, were too small to measure.

If you search the web for these products, you’ll find lots of coverage. Google news search provides a much higher return on tech news, so it’s not surprising that these terms are more visible in Google news sites. Most folks, however, aren’t searching for news about gadgets and software. Google Hot Trends shows the current topics in high demand. People are interested in sports, celebrities, and a few disasters and tragedies. Their lives are uncluttered by commentary about tech in general and new product releases, unless it’s something from Apple. Watch the trends in the days after Apple’s announcement.

For those of us in the tech marketing trades, it’s good to spend an afternoon with people who don’t give a damn about this stuff. It’s good to remember that, for people are buying these products, technology is a tool and not a goal.