Electric Barbarella
Summary: A cheezy pop-song provides the story that unravels the method behind the madness of the modern consumer electronics industry.
I knew when I first saw you on the showroom floor, you were made
for me.
The opening line in a cheesy pop song summarizes an emotion that
happens a million times a day in consumer electronics stores around
the Western world. The way that technolust opens up wallets seems to
have something to do with mankind's toolmaking and tool using
behavior, like our adult toys represented a stedy evolution of clubs
and rocks.
Nothing could be more seductive for a manufacturer, either. Wider
profit margins, easy marketability, the potential to set new
standards, plus accessories and upgrades that'll keep you afloat for
quarter after quarter. And when consulting your drawing board for
building a better club for today's caveman, there are rules to
follow. Most were hammered out after WWII when America returned to a
peacetime bolstered by a recovering economy and a sudden need to do
something with all those factories built to make warplanes and
shells. And if we follow the rest of the pop song, they fall into
place quite melodiously.
I took you home and dressed you up in polyester. Princess of my
dreams.
PCs used to have the technolust appeal back when they were still
sexy and a higher megahertz was better than a bigger cup size. But
somewhere in the mid 90s they crossed over the novelty barrier and
became commodities. Nobody cares anymore about who makes the box they
buy so long as it meets the state-of-the-art. The attraction is now
all in the perhipherals which accompany a PC, such as handheld
computers and digital music players that dock and synchronize.
Few PC makers have managed to snatch back the libidos of consumers
by adding plastic curves to their beige boxes, except for Apple. The
difference was a matter of degree. Compaq kept the beige box and
stapled-on a plastic front-panel with a bulge. Apple was simply more
extreme. The lesson is that you should never be half hearted—even
when the additions are purely synthetic. Throw all of your
swank-and-swagger into it, and if you haven't got any,
hire some.
Emotionless and cold as ice, all of the things I like.
The best gadgets come without commitments or complications. And
while it's a tempting revenue stream, very few home appliances will
sell when they have a mandatory service plan attached. The TiVo, for
example, is useless without the monthly service that uploads broadcast
schedules into its memory. Ideally, those sort of services should be
free.
Satellite TV is an exception, but here the tables are turned
because companies like Direct TV are not selling the appliance,
they're selling the service—and the service is desirable
all on its own. The appliance just comes along with it because you
need to have something to decode the signal with.
Any service must embody low commitment, cancel at anytime
garantees, and completely guilt-free pleasures. With both ReplayTV and
TiVo on dodgy financial ground already, expect their functionality to
come bundled with the next generation of satellite recievers.
The other side of the emotional attachment coin is
humanizationA. Gadgets tend to be completely inhuman, entirely
inanimate. This is because nobody needs to relate to their
VCR or pocket assistant. Anthropomorphised gadgets exist for children,
but at some age—around adolescence—the need to see a face on
your telephone dissipates, flushed out by hormones. Not surprisingly,
the gadgets popular with pubescent teens and older tend to be curvy,
sleek, and phallic. Any emotion expressed should be the emotion of a
Corvette: fast and desirable.
The way you look, the way you move, the sounds you're makin' in
ultra-chrome, latex, and steel.
Being first-to-market helps a lot, because after you've
invented a category, nobody
wants to dance with the fat chick
who shows up late. However, if you do happen to be
late, make sure to kill 'em with sweet design and space-age
materials. Even if it doesn't make sense. Especially if it
doesn't make sense.
Such as putting your next line of laptops in titanium shells, or
something.
I plug you in, dim the lights.
Batteries are never sexy. Even when the gadget is portable. If it
isn't portable then it's gotta plug-in and draw lots and lots of
watts. This is not a time for low-power components and conservative
volume, this is a time for heart-thumping bass.
People want oomph, they want horsepower, they want to feel
the vibrations between their legs, they need to think they've got
something for their money.
Let someone else figure out where the next amp is going to come
from.
Your perfect skin, plastic kiss.
While industrial tools rarely need special touches, consumer
electronics live and die by their moulded finish. Steve Jobs was
famous for his fanatical attention to the color and feel of the
plastic shell for his NeXT line of computers. But while NeXT was a
failure, it wasn't because of Steve's fetish with plastic. Today his
same attentions can be seen in the line of Apple desktops and
portables that followed his re-ascension to the throne. From the mice
made from solid, clear lucite, to the tactile feel of the keyboard,
they present the illusion of quality from what is really just another
mass produced item.
Our private life is subject to investigation.
You'd be surprised how few people there are who really care what
you know about them. When a consumer invites a new toy into his home
he's giving you a license to collect data on him—wittingly or
not. Watching habits can be logged by Personal Video Recorders, for
example, and uploaded back to a central server.
But data gathering comes in all shapes and sizes. A wireless phone
company, as an example, can identify which series of cell towers are
were used to carry a call, and from that they can know which
neighborhoods are home to the people who work at the successful
industrial complex on the other side of town, what roads they take to
get there, and what stores they stop at on the way.
That's worth money to the right people.
People say they heard about our deviation.
Three words for you, baby: Word. Of. Mouth.
Reward it, somehow.
Wear the fake fur, fake pearls for me, and put on your mystery.
Have you heard the myth about the Dvorak keyboard layout?
It has its roots in the way the QWERTY keyboard layout was
designed, and I'm sure you've heard that it was made that way to
deliberately slow down the typist and prevent the printing hammers
from sticking together (you'll also notice that the word 'TYPEWRITER'
can be written using just the top row of keys—a deliberate feature
made so salesmen wouldn't have to hunt very far when giving a
demonstration).
When the root mechanical problem (sticking hammers) was solved, it
occured to a U.S. Navy efficiency professor to improve upon it. The
result was a new layout, named after the inventor. Among its features
are a middle row that contains all of the most common letters, so your
fingers don't have to stray far.
The myth, therefore, is that the Dvorak keyboard is faster to
use.
It isn't.
But listen to a
Dvorak advocate for a while and he'll convince you that it's
vastly superior to QWERTY in every way. The annecdotes of people
improving their typing speed or setting records are highly suspect,
and more likely to coincide with the fact that a QWERTY typist is
spending time learning to type better at the same time they're
learning a new layout. There is no correlation to improved speed and
the Dvorak layout, these people were merely focusing on their typing
skills and—surprise surprise—got better at it.
This brings us to the number one selling point for a gadget:
pseudo superiority.
Sony invented “Mega Bass” to help sell their walkmans,
but it is a complete non-feature. It's just a very limited version of
a dial which has been on hi-fi sets for decades, but was impractical
to put on portable units plugged into cheap headphones. Yet it makes
the walkman “better”. It has one more feature than the
other guy. It makes Sony walkmans “superior.”
Computer operating systems are gang colors for zealots who focus
irrationaly on the fake fur and fake pearls to imbue them with meaning
they don't have. The reason why Dvorak is no better than QWERTY is
because of the human ability to learn and adapt. You will build
reflexes, you'll learn new instincts. Look at two people who've put
the same amount of effort into learning Mac and Windows respectively,
and after a year their productivity will be indistinguishable from
each other's. Issues such as where the “X” button is
located on the titlebar, or how close to the screen edge the menus are
placed, will cease to matter.
Humans are simply good at mastering the tools they need to use.
(Lock-in is the real issue and the real reason people hate alternate
ergonomics. Once you get the reflex down, it's hard to give it up. If
you've invented the category then you get to decide where the keys go,
and only the bored or the fanatics will try to re-learn someone
else's.)
Common sense and adequate testing is all you
really need to design an effective tool with. After a certain point,
you stop making good design decisions and cross the threshold of
superstition and focus-group B.S.
However, pseudo features make great selling points. As long as you
understand that you don't need to fund special science or hire a PhD
to tell you where the 'Play' button should go, you can chuck all kinds
of voodoo into the device and—if you're the market leader—force
your competitors to run after you with copies.
Try to resist, then we touch. Hallucinate and tranquilize.
And that, my friends, is the end of the pop song.
Apologies to Duran Duran.
