To those celebrating Good Friday and Easter, I offer holiday greetings.
And to those celebrating Passover, which begins tonight, Chag sameach (which means “holiday greetings,” more or less).
No bread for the next eight days. I think I need a book called 101 Not-Too-Awful Meals You Can Make With Matzo. Actually, I like the stuff, but my kids are less than enthused. (For those who’ve never tried it, it tastes pretty much the way it looks.)
The Chicago Trib has a story about someone suing Sears over the power and capacity of a wet/dry vacuum.
(The picture accompanying the story shows a lawnmower, not a wet/dry vac. Um… hello? One cuts things, the other cleans them up.)
The lawsuit claims two things:
[1] The appliances can generate, in some instances, only 38 percent of the advertised horsepower, and [2] the tanks were less than two-thirds as large as advertised; … only when the motor assemblies are removed from the tanks is the actual capacity as high as that stated. (numbering mine)
I just bought a shop vacuum myself a few weeks ago for our vacation place. There were four or five models on the hardware-store shelf.1 The all had varying capacities and horsepower.
Vacuum capacity is measured in gallons. You look at the tank, which is a cylinder. Most folks who would buy one of these for their shop have an innate understanding of how big a five-gallon bucket is, for example. (The house paint congealing under your workbench is probably in a five-gallon bucket.) So if you really care about absolute tank size, you almost assuredly have a model for comparison. I can look at one of these things and estimate within reason how big the collector bucket is.
Anyone who’s ever had a wet/dry vac knows that the motor hangs down well into the tank. So I can also look at one of these puppies and come up with a mental model of how many gallons the tank is likely to actually hold.
When would that be useful, specifically? Maybe I knock over a five-gallon bucket that was filled with water, and somehow the water is contained on my garage floor. If I had a five-gallon shop vac and had never looked inside it (which you have to do to empty it, or even install the filter when you set it up), would I be disappointed that I couldn’t suck up the entire contents of that spilled bucket in a single pass, without emptying the vacuum?
Even in the far-fetched scenario where I know exactly how much liquid I’m picking up, the likelihood is approximately zero that I’d care about the precise size of the container.2
In other words, even when the metric relates to some quantity that I can understand in the abstract, its specific application isn’t very meaningful.
What I care about, in this case, is relative size. I compared the various vacuums for price, relative size, manufacturer, etc. I wanted one about yea big for a reasonable price that wasn’t a piece of junk. The exact measurement wasn’t a factor; rather, I assumed that a two gallon unit would hold considerably more than a one gallon unit, and that the five gallon version would hold much more again. I asked, how often do I want to empty it v. how much room do I want to make to store this thing? I asked, how often will I have a cleanup, wet or dry, large enough to make me wish I had bought the bigger version?
The absolute number of gallons wasn’t a factor; the comparative number was.
I have no idea how powerful a horse is, especially when that number is translated into engine data.
I have some concept of horsepower when it comes to cars — not a lot, but some. Still, I understand that absolute horsepower is meaningless without also knowing torque and gear ratios, curb weight, and other data. A given car with a 350-HP engine is more powerful than the same car with a 300-HP engine, but I am not sure that Car X with a 350-horse engine is more powerful than Car Y with “only” 300 horses.
Wet-dry vacuums? I have no idea how powerful a 1.5-HP motor is in the abstract.
Nor do I care.
Because I don’t need to know.
What I need is some assurance that a 2-HP vac will outsuck a 1-HP vac.
If every vacuum generates only about 40% of the rated horsepower at the business end of the hose, so what? How does that affect me as a user/consumer? As long as the 2-HP unit is still about twice as powerful, then my needs — and expectations — are met.
This concept is critical to understanding metrics in the workplace.
The metrics that matter are longitudinal — in other words, the same measurement of the same stuff under the same conditions at different times.
Let’s say my client satisfaction rating is 70%. What’s that mean? Is that good? Bad? Who knows.
But let’s say it was 65% the last time I measured it, and 60% the time before that. Now I have valuable, useful information. Client satisfaction is improving. I must be doing something right.3
In reality, both of the vacuum metrics are in effect longitudinal.4 Users don’t really care about capacity or horsepower as a fixed number, but rather as a basis for comparison.
The Sears/Craftsman lawsuit becomes interesting if, for example, the Craftsman vacs generate only 38% of rated horsepower as the plaintiff claims but WidgetCorp vacs deliver 80% of rated horsepower. Now I might feel deceived to fire up my new Craftsman wet/dry vac and discover that it doesn’t suck… as hard as the same-rated WidgetCorp one I used to have. But if my old 5-HP vac also delivered only 2 HP at the business end, just like my new one, I won’t feel in the least cheated. I compared metrics, expected similar rates of sucking power, and got what I expected.
The only metrics that matter in our professional lives are longitudinal metrics, comparisons of the same thing at different times. Are we getting better, marching in place, or slipping?
So without looking, tell me the actual delivered horsepower and actual tank-shutoff capacity of the wet/dry vac in your garage or basement. Yeah, I don’t know either, and I just bought one a few weeks ago.
What I do know is this — it’s large enough and powerful enough to deal with the kinds of messes I’ve come to expect from the last three or four years in that house. And that’s all that matters.
CBS MoneyWatch posted an article yesterday about being too nice a boss that’s misguided in some unfortunate ways.
The article lists six signs that you’re being “too nice”:
Number 5 is capital-W Wrong, and number 6 is misguided when it gets into the details.
Credit is like love; the more you give, the more you get. The more credit you accord your team, the more credit will accrue to you as their manager and leader. The more you say “we did” mixed with “Robin-did,” the harder your team will work, the more they’ll get done, and the greater the amount of credit and respect you’ll gather.
Few managers praise their teams enough.
That doesn’t mean you need to say constantly, “Robin and Leslie keep this place running, and I don’t know why they need me to manage them.” But managers say “I” often enough. Remember that “we” includes “I.” Good leaders are secure in their leadership… and know that grooming their replacement allows them to move up, gives the team even more incentive to work harder, and presents a strong picture to your own manager.3
Number 6 is more nuanced. Clearly you don’t need to be best buddies with your team or, worse, participate in damaging gossip or rumor-mongering. However, we spend increasing amounts of our time at work, and multiple studies show one of the determinants of workplace success and happiness is strong collegial relationships coupled with caring about each other as people. There’s a balance each manager needs to find between friendliness and oversharing.
My biggest takeaway is that the author sounds like she’s managing scared. However, I see nothing in her bio to suggest she’s ever been a manager.
Managing scared is not a recipe for success as a manager. Yes, there’s plenty to be scared about — what’s the competition doing, are we doing everything we can to deliver the best work for our customers or clients, is the market changing faster than we can adapt. Do worry about those kinds of things. But don’t worry that your team might be out to get you. It rarely happens that way.4
Rather, focus on helping them succeed, take an interest in their professional development, care about them as people, and share the credit while absorbing the brunt of any blame. Do this, and there’ll be very little blame, a whole lot of credit to you and them, and a clearly marked road to success.
One segment of my Legal Project Management training courses focuses on giving and receiving tasks/assignments correctly, culminating in a fun practice exercise that attendees really get into.
One critical piece of getting assignments/tasks right is the readback, where the assignee relates to the assigner what she understands the task to be. The reason it’s so important is that even the best of us don’t communicate as clearly as we think we do. Communication requires… well, consider the child’s game of telephone:
Here we have six kids passing a message starting with the girl on the left (step 1). When she gets the message back (step 6), do you think it bears much resemblance to the message she sent out?
Now consider this variant:
It’s the same six steps, but now the go from the assigner’s brain to her mouth (step 1), to the assignee’s ear (step 2), to his brain (step 3). Now he translates that back into speech (step 4) that passes back to the assigner (step 5), who converts it to brainwaves (step 6) and compares it with the original.
It’s simple. What could go wrong?
Communication requires a round-trip message with the message remaining intact. The only way to confirm that the message is intact is to compare what you sent with what you received, or more specifically, what you think you sent with what you believe you received.
Lack of readback is one way assignments get messed up.1
Here are two examples from things I read in the past few hours.
1. What’s The Hunger Games about? According to an Associated Press report on box office receipts, it’s “about teens battling to the death in a post-apocalyptic competition.”
No, it’s not about that at all. Yes, the 74th edition of the annual Hunger Games forms a central plot point of the movie, but it’s about teens battling to the death in the same way that Citizen Kane is about “Rosebud.” Or the same way that a client’s real issue is the legal problem she presents you with.2
(By the way, forget the fact that the movie is getting all sorts of hype and go see it!3)
2. How can two people talk about the same thing and mean different things?
There is a blog called Not Always Right that features unfortunate interactions between customers and salespeople, in which the customers usually come off looking silly. Sometimes, I’m sure, they’ve earned it. But this exchange caught my eye:
(The store I work in is a store full of little girls’ accessories. With headbands, nail polish, and necklaces, it’s fairly obvious this is a store for little girls.)
Me: “Hey there, how can I help you?”
Customer: “Yes, do you have any little girls accessories?”
Me: “You’re in the right place.”
Customer: “Oh, good! Where would I find them?”
Me: *gestures* “Anywhere in the store.”
Customer: “What do you mean?”
Me: “The whole store is full of little girls’ accessories. That’s what [store] is all about.”
Customer: *somewhat ditzy* “Oh. Okay! Thank you. Goodbye!”
(I watch as the customer prances off into the mall and goes straight into another girls accessory store.)
Leaving out the editorial comment describing the customer as “somewhat ditzy,” what’s going on here?
As I read it, the customer lacks the specific words to describe what he’s looking for. (I suspect the customer is male.) He’s been asked to pick up some girls’ accessory with which he’s unfamiliar. He doesn’t know how to describe it… and the salesperson isn’t at all helpful. Consider these scenarios:
The salesperson should have asked, “What kind of accessory…” or “How old is…” or a similar question to help the (possibly embarrassed) customer.
Likewise, when you’re communicating with a client, you need to find ways to be sure the client understands what you’re talking about. (For starters, speak the client’s language, not lawyerese.)
It works the other way, too. If you don’t deeply understand the client’s business, you’re not likely to understand what the client is really asking. Either they’re speaking gobbledygook (see meaningful nodding, above), or they’re dumbing it down because they know or suspect you’re not getting it. Neither is a success indicator.
Legal Project Management relies on effective communication, among other things. Without communication, though, it’s pretty hard to get to those other things in meaningful ways.
Have you seen The Hunger Games yet?
First, it’s not a kids movie. That’s not to say kids won’t enjoy it, though they may find it disturbing.1 It’s an adult movie that is about adults more than kids, using the story of a young girl, Katniss Everdeen, to reflect and refract our own culture back at us.
Second, I often look to cultural touchstones and references to highlight specific points in the Legal Project Management training sessions I do. For example, I often refer to Capt. Sullenberger (checklists), Harry Potter (vision), or New York City traffic (risk evaluation).
I saw The Hunger Games Friday2, which eventually led me to think about how well Katniss embodies some core principles of project management.
(Spoiler Alert: I don’t know that I’m revealing anything here that you won’t already have absorbed through all the stories and reviews and the zeitgeist itself, but still, it’s possible some of the information below might tip off moments in The Hunger Games.)
Discovering the real business (not legal) problem is one of the first things a project manager must do, and one of the most difficult and overlooked.
Katniss thinks early on that the “business problem” is her survival. Over time, she comes to realize that survival itself is a small part of the problem, albeit a critical one. She also has to attract sponsors. She has to get people to like her, not an easy task for her prickly personality. She has to feign a love interest in her fellow “tribute” (participant) from her home area, District 12.
She doesn’t fully uncover the business problem until the very end of the survival struggle, where she learns the rules have changed once again. Only at that point is she able to finish working the real problem, which leads to her survival and the upcoming complications of the remaining two books (three movies) in the series.3
Katniss is a whiz with a bow and arrow, as the opening scene (and the trailer) show. On being thrown into the arena, she sees a powerful bow available in the supplies area, one with which she has practiced (and shot an apple in a way that leads to the best line in the film).
However, she has learned4 not to jump to execution — which would be quite literal in this case were she to try to grab the bow. Instead, she snatches some basic survival gear from the outskirts of the staging area and retreats quickly to the woods in order to better understand how the other participants will play out the survival battle.
She has learned as a bow hunter not to just take a shot if circumstances aren’t appropriate, a lesson also shown in the opening scene. She almost falls into the execution-first trap. She doesn’t, though, and thus buys time to plot a survival strategy.
We see other evidence of her plan-first thinking (e.g., attacking the supplies dump), though she is also able and ready to react to opportunity; she doesn’t get caught in analysis paralysis.
She doesn’t spot all the hidden stakeholders that we, the audience, get to see (e.g., President Snow), but she becomes aware of the effect they have on the contest. Indeed, the ending comes about because she finally discerns the true goal of those stakeholders even if she can’t name them (“they want”).5
How do you trust another combatant in an arena where only one survivor will emerge alive?
Nonetheless, she builds two alliances that will serve her well, one that’s clear early on and another that develops while she and another character are both hiding in trees.
Both alliances will end up saving her life, the latter in a particularly unexpected way.6
She has a good sense of whom to trust, in part because so many of her fellow participants have shown aggressively through the training period that they are not to be trusted, that they revel in their existing cliques. She affords no trust to those who show they’re not worthy of it. She does reach out with trust to two participants who have not shown any sign either way. Either or both could easily be out to trick her, since in the end for them to live she must die. Yet she recognizes that her project — survival itself — may depend more on trust than on the pure go-it-alone spirit that has driven her since childhood.
And in the final scene in the arena, she asks a fellow participant, “Do you trust me?” At this point we think she’s speaking honestly, though we can’t be certain she’s not setting him up. She has given him trust in the past, and now she asks for his trust in return.7
Katniss and the audience — and indeed the onscreen audience watching the games — all believe they understand what “Done” is.
They’re wrong. (See the discussion of the business problem above.)
Her working hypothesis is a pretty good one; it has kept one person alive for each of the preceding 73 Hunger Games. However, by unpacking the hidden stakeholders and understanding their true goal, she is able to come up with a slightly different take on “Done.”
It proves to be accurate.
More interestingly, it’s a “Done” that we, the audience, should have spotted 15 minutes into the movie. All the clues are there… as they are to the participants, too. And to the citizens on the nation called Panem8 where the movie is set.
They don’t put the clues together. Neither does Katniss, until the end.
“Done” is not survival. That’s the children-gladiators’ “Done,” not the project’s “Done,” not President Snow’s “Done.”
Only by recognizing the gap can Katniss manage the project to the successful outcome she seeks.
Katniss Everdeen is a project manager I would absolutely want on my side, and not just because she’s killer with a bow and arrow.
According to the Globe and Mail today (I’m leading seminars and teaching in Canada this week), the best-selling business book in Canada is titled Best Practices Are Stupid.
To which I say, Hear, hear! (I say it in principle; I haven’t read the book, though I do wish I’d thought of the title.)
To be clear, it’s not best practices themselves that are stupid, in my estimation. The best practice for a given business unit, law practice, etc. is exactly that — their considered judgment as to the most efficacious way of dealing with specific problems.
What seems clear to me, however, is that their best practice is not necessarily yours.
I was a Principal Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services (mid-90s or so) when I first really registered the term “best practice.”1 I found it laughable then for at least two reasons, and little has changed.
In my many years consulting and teaching, I never tried to sell a client “best practices.” For one thing, I’m not arrogant enough to believe I actually know the absolute best practice. Instead, I’ve focused on better-practices-than-what-you’re-now-doing, tailored to the specific circumstances, capabilities, and organizational culture of each given client.
So don’t fall for some “best practices” spiel. Rather, look at your own capabilities and goals, examine the gap between them,3 and then build a plan that will narrow the gap in a way that fits your organization’s capabilities, culture, and circumstances.
Of course, if you want to throw money at a consultant….4
Two articles in today’s (Sunday’s) New York Times1 speak to many of the ideas I’ve been teaching in my classes and writing about in my books.
I’ve said repeatedly that professional-project leadership — e.g., Legal Project Management — is about far more than traditional techniques to manage budgets and schedules. Indeed, you can manage the heck out of schedules and budgets and be totally unsuccessful in reaching your project goals, let alone feeling good about the work you’ve done.
One article is by David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. In it he gives an overview of the techniques he recommends for managing your time, which are related to what I’ve described in The Off Switch.2 Allen writes:
I have found that most professionals take action based on whatever is the latest and loudest in their universe…. This day-to-day, minute-to-minute arena of “reaction versus pro-action” is where the scales tip to “productive” or “unproductive.”
I’ve long preached the gospel of important-instead-of-urgent, not just in my seminars, books, and training sessions but in the work I’ve done as a manager and leader the past 20 years. If you’re trapped by the urgent, caught up in reaction, you’ll accomplish far less than you expect… and you’ll be miserable and frustrated at the end of the day by the amount of work that you’re not getting done.
Check out his article, then pick up his book, or mine, or attend one of our seminars. Or read one of the other books on the subject or attend a different seminar, but do something to shake up your way of working before you drive yourself crazy, or into the ground.
And then there’s this from the article:
One possible path to that feeling of control is to … find work that requires little if any thinking, but merely reacts and responds to what presents itself. That’s a real option: I once met a senior vice president in a global pharmaceutical company who, after taking an early retirement package, became a duck at Disney World.
Most of us wouldn’t enjoy being a duck at Disney World or elsewhere, but Allen notes that for this VP “it was probably easier to have a good day at work, and then leave it behind.” If you wish you could do that, and aren’t cut out for the web-footed life, then you need to find your work-work balance. How do you get the most important stuff done at work and leave at the end of the day feeling good about yourself and what you accomplished? That’s work-work balance, and the topic of The Off Switch and of David Allen’s work.
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The other article is about the way offices are laid out. It offers insight not just into office design, which may be of little interest and even less under your control, but about our need for different working environments (ambiance) at different times.
My daughter, for example, often goes up to Starbucks to work on her schoolwork, and a children’s book she’s writing. She says that she finds too many distractions when working at home, even though our house is relatively quiet. The TV is rarely on, for example, and the dog is mostly silent. But because she’s used to doing a gazillion different things at home, all of which are available to her at any time, she finds it easier to wall off these distractions and take a different approach at a coffee shop.
I work most of the time from my home office, but I find I get a different type of work done when I’m on a plane, for example, or when I’m at our vacation place on the water. When I worked at Microsoft, for example, I’d often take my laptop on lovely summer days out to a table in a courtyard or next to the duck pond (clept “Lake Bill” in the early days of the company). Different environments, different distractions, different flow of people.
There’s more to productivity than closing your office door and hearing your inner voice hector you with “Focus, focus, focus!”
The wizard Merlin, according to T.H. White (The Once and Future King), lived his life backwards.1
He was a bumbling wizard, prone to mistakes. It’s likely his fallible nature that makes him such a memorable character in White’s tales.
Well, that and the fact that he could get away with calling King Arthur “Wart.”
There is a project management technique occasionally called Merlin that asks you, the project manager, to become the backward-living wizard. You are standing at the end of your project’s long road, and you look back along the timeline. Your project is a success. Looking back, see the steps along the way that made it successful. Now that you understand those steps, return to our present, before the project begins, and diagram the road you saw, but moving forward from the present.
I’m all for visualizing success. Basketball players visualize themselves making the shot. Tiger Woods, before he became mortal with his putter, used to simply visualize the ball rolling into the hole rather than worry about releasing the putter. Dilbert creator Scott Adams talks about it all the time.
Visualization is effective in terms of believing in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to get others to believe in you.
But it works best as a snapshot rather than a roadmap.
The trouble with visualizing the successful path is the same as learning from our successes: It’s hard to determine which particular factors were germane to that success. That’s where superstitions come from.
Not all superstitions are those that even the superstitious laugh at, such as the manager who carefully steps over the foul lines when he goes to the mound to switch pitchers. A superstition is any belief in cause and effect that isn’t (or is unlikely to be) validated by reality. ”I won’t change my socks while we’re on this winning streak” is a superstition. But it’s quite likely that “the project won’t be successful if John is on the team” is a superstition, or “creating big Gantt charts was the key to project success.” Maybe these last two statements are true, but with little evidence to support them, how much credence should you accord them?
I know executives who were called successful in business because they worked on a wildly successful product, or project. What happened when they moved to another product? Did they continue to be successful? Some did. Some did not. Some products and projects are successful in spite of the executives who headed them; others are significant factors in product or project success.2
It’s hard to learn the right lessons from success.
On the other hand, failure sometimes — not always, but more than for success — has clear fracture points. You can often identify spots where “by doing this we caused that, and that led to our downfall.”
As a project manager, it’s a good exercise, at various times in the project, to put on Merlin’s robe and pointy hat3 and live backward.
The project has crashed and burned. Looking back, what caused it to fail? Capture that, and then work on ways to avoid or correct the issue.
Go to the end and look back once again. Epic fail. What caused it? Again, capture and correct.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.4
It’s easier to stop the dominoes from falling over if you understand when and where they’re likely to fall.
Merlin as project manager.
Just don’t call people on your project “Wart.” They may not understand.5
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(Tomorrow, back to managing projects, people, and teams. But I needed to get this off my chest!)
Friday I wrote about why keeping computers functioning — Windows, Apple, smartphones, etc. — is so hard.
It’s also inexcusable. There’s no reason Windows computers1 should be as failure-prone as they are.2 (Mouse-over the footnotes to see their content if you want; no need to click.)
And it’s (mostly) not Microsoft’s fault, as I noted.
It’s largely the fault of software companies and computer manufacturers.3
If the ten largest software companies and three or four largest computer makers followed these ten rules, our Windows computers would be much, much more robust. We’d stop getting mad at them, getting work done instead.
If the big guys did it, others would fall into line.
Here’s my list.
Here are further thoughts about each of these commandments.
In a sense, this is the only commandment really necessary; the others are glosses on this one.4 Don’t make decisions for me. Don’t work around me. Don’t disrespect me, no matter how inept you believe I am. Some users are exquisitely inept, true… and the industry is making it worse for them, not better, with the stuff they do in the very name of ineptitude-prevention.
Dropping icons on the desktop is a minor annoyance; you can remove them, right?5 Except that (a) some people store useful stuff like documents on their desktop, and they can’t easily locate them among the clutter. And (b) some programs keep replacing the icons after you delete them.
This one’s on the computer makers: Toshiba, HP, etc. Sony at one point would sell you a clean computer for an extra $50… and apparently so many people rushed to take them up on it that they dropped the idea!
I’m not speaking just about the extra apps they install, such as AOL trial accounts or browser toolbars (see #4 and #7 in particular). I’ll get to the (unfortunate) reason for those applets below. Installing them alone only takes a bit of disk space, but activating and running them is a killer. These apps slow up your computer, add a lot of time to the turn-on (boot-up) sequence, pop up uninformative messages about updates, try and fail to resolve issues, etc.
If these commandments ever really took hold, we wouldn’t need these apps. We don’t need them today, in fact, but it would be even more obvious.
Here’s the one place you can put an icon on the desktop: Let users launch your diagnostic problem (a) if they have a problem and (b) the built-in Windows diagnostics don’t resolve it. Otherwise, stay the heck off my processor. I paid for it; it’s no longer yours.
Every app that has to run when the computer boots up takes time at the worst possible moment — when you’re waiting for the computer to let you be productive. Windows takes too long to boot already.8
I don’t need “helpers” (Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office) until I need the app. If I want to view a PDF file — which I usually do in PDF Nitro rather than Adobe Reader anyway — I’ll pay the cost at that time to load some Adobe bits. Don’t make me pay for the time before I use it, especially since I may never use it.
For some apps such as unified communications (e.g., instant messaging or receiving calls on your computer), it makes sense to load the requisite software when the computer starts. But ask, don’t assume. Maybe I don’t want Messenger running every moment of my life.
The one exception is antivirus software; it simply has to run from the getgo.
Google Chrome, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Windows are outstanding in this regard. Everyone else, learn from them! Chrome in particular deserves kudos because it handles updates to add-on software in the same way. Ask on install if I want updates installed automatically.
There are historical reasons why some software can’t be fully updated until the computer reboots. Windows itself is often subject to that problem.9
Windows has a technical excuse. However, the rest of the system is not Windows. There are times when your application is totally absent, just sitting quiescent on the disk. That’s the time to update it.
Also, see #4. If you’re not in the startup sequence, you don’t need to force a reboot; just update when you first load. And if you are in the startup sequence (e.g., antivirus programs), do your update before you run the real code. It’s really not that hard. Really.10
Finally, if you really, really can’t figure it out, then set your updates to occur on the second Monday of every month, and then don’t nag about a reboot. Because Windows itself will update on the second Tuesday, and then reboot for you overnight.11
Incidentally, that Windows behavior is frustrating; no doubt about it. I am not convinced that every monthly update requires a reboot. Microsoft, take a deeper look. Fix it for Windows 8.
Applets installed by HP, Toshiba, etc.: First, let me address the applets12 that come with your new computer, such as trials of AOL or Tangent games. Almost no one wants these, but I understand why they’re there. (The computer manufacturers get paid to put them there. It’s profit in a cutthroat, commodity business.) Can we compromise? Put them on my computer, even put a (removable) icon on the desktop, but don’t put them in the startup sequence, where they cost time on startup and slow the computer down afterwards forevermore. If you absolutely, positively need to make them runnable, then ask me once, when I’ve had the computer for a day or two, to go through a list and select the ones I want to accept.13 (I’ll bet most people select zero.)
Browser toolbars: I do not want the Yahoo toolbar. I do not want the Bing toolbar. I do not want the Ask or Tell or any other toolbar. Neither do most people. They install them because they get tricked suckered talked into installing them. At least some of the offenders are now asking, but you have to know to spot and uncheck the box hidden among half a dozen installation screens. Again, it’s a paid, necessary-for-profit thing, but how profitable is it to annoy your potential customers? Really?
Not-to-the-purpose software: HP used to install things like photo editors when you loaded the driver for your new HP printer. What on earth does a photo editor have to do with making my printer work? And these drivers were astonishingly huge — which means not only do they take too much time to download, but there’s so much more code that can contain bugs. (And why do we need your photo editor anyway? There are numerous free ones at least as good, if I should want one. And I do want one. But I want to choose the one I use!)
Need I say anything more about this?
It’s called backwards compatibility. If it used to work, it should still work.
Microsoft offers examples of the good and the bad. Bad: They updated one of their programming languages (Visual Basic), and a lot of programs no longer worked. Good (or at least not-so-bad): When they added the ribbon (that thing across the top of Word 2007, for example) to Office, they also did their best to be sure that all of the old key combinations worked.14
Backwards compatibility isn’t always possible. Some advances totally break the old mold. After all, we’re not still using DOS… or punchcards.15
If your CEO’s computer breaks, the IT team falls all over itself to fix it. If she wants to use an iPad on your Windows network, you connect it.
The CEO gets all sorts of perks, special treatment, and downright fawning. Yet he can’t make his money without customers. If he thinks “maximizing shareholder value” is the correct end-goal, then he must remember that in the long term shareholders will abandon him when they sense customers are abandoning his company’s products.
What your customers want is simple. They want a system that works, that lets them get work (or play) done, that doesn’t make them jump through hoops, that stays as stable as possible even in the face of an unfathomable number of possible configurations and combinations of hardware and software.
It’s not as hard as you make it.
Get out of their way.
If the software companies and computer makers got these ten commandments right, or even mostly right, our computers would work a lot better than they do. One of the major causes of issues is the unexpected, unpredictable interaction among all of these programs. If we get rid of all of these pieces that have no need to be running, that shouldn’t be running by default, that take the user by surprise, our experience as users will be vastly improved.
I’m a relatively savvy user. I know how to dispense with most of the applets.16 17 I know how to turn off browser toolbars. I know what not to install. And yet the issues I have noted here cause significant pain in my computing life.
The collective pain it causes for a broad spectrum of users is huge. It’s unnecessary. And it’s contemptuous of all of us.
I help other people with their computers.18 I know how hard it is for them to deal with this stuff. It’s frustrating to them (and to me in loco geek-entis). It takes inordinate amounts of time out of their days. And it’s mostly preventable.
Please, computer and software makers, consider these commandments.
And in return, here’s a commandment for the users.
The 11th commandment is for you, the user.
There are antivirus programs that quietly get the job done, don’t require updates that need you, the user, to take action, and don’t nag you.19 Get one, install it, and use it along with Windows updating to keep your computer current and as safe as possible. (Remember that even the best antivirus systems can be defeated by user failures, such as clicking on spam.)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant on like this, but it’s frustrating watching users struggle — watching the industry struggle — and knowing that there is a potential solution. The industry needs to delight the users.
The industry cannot continue to go all Ernestine-the-Operator on its customers. In Lily Tomlin’s famous phrase, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”
The Phone Company. Remember them?
In 20 years, will we think about the computer industry the same way?
(Next week I’ll return to Legal Project Management, team management, and people management topics. I want to touch on one other item first, today and Monday.)
Someone pointed me to the image here as a fun way to head into the weekend.
At a high level, it’s accurate, unfortunately. (It leaves out a fourth class of computer, the smartphone, but you can lump that with the Apple path, except that most users don’t even bother with Step 1, feeling with some justification that it’s useless.)
This drawing leads me to a few questions.
Price and complexity.1
We’ve driven the prices down to commodity levels, leaving no margin for support and repair. In Apple’s case, because they’ve figured out how to keep their prices relatively high, there are Apple stores with self-proclaimed geniuses2 to do some troubleshooting, but Apple also builds planned obsolescence into their computers at a rate that would have made 1970s Detroit blush.
Complexity is the other reason. A computer to which you can add additional software is an astonishingly complex system which quickly devolves into a morass where, as with Schrödinger’s cat3 no repair person or software company can truly understand the current state of the world. Thus they cannot be assured of repairing it.
We? Not much.
Ah, much better question. The software industry could actually address this problem fairly simply and improve the situation manyfold.
It wouldn’t need every one of the, say, half a million software companies, called independent software vendors (ISVs), and the hundreds of computer manufacturers, called original equipment makers (OEMs).
Let’s stick to Windows for a bit, though the problem afflicts Apple and smartphones. (Let’s leave Linux out of the discussion, since it has different problems.)
Can’t Microsoft solve the problem? Technically, perhaps — but the various antitrust actions and consent decrees have stayed their hand. They are aware of it and want to solve it, but believe that legally they cannot do what needs to be done.4
But it wouldn’t take everyone to do it. Think 80/20 rule, or long tail. All the industry would need would be for perhaps a dozen large software vendors and three or four computer manufacturers to pledge together to solve the problem.
They won’t do it. They do not believe it’s in their interest to fix the problem, based on conversations I’ve had over the past five years. I would agree that it might not be in their short-term, individual interest. It would, I think, benefit us all in the long term, but you need to survive the short term to get to the long term.
So, on Monday: A manifesto5 of sorts on what the industry could do to fix the problem.
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