a pesky metaphor problem

Last week Rob Conery pointed out how lame web authentication models really are. And surprisingly, so are the leading edge concepts of it. This week Jeff Atwood picks up the torch, kicks open the door, and sheds more light. Web authentication is far more tedious, far more cognitively burdensome, and simply far more fraught with risk, than say opening your wallet to show credentials to an authority figure, in everyday use. 

Unrecognized by his readers Jeff is doing a good job of reducing a complex topic into sesame street manageability, and everyday street smarts. Making plain that one of these things, is not like the other. 

If you read past the excerpt and connect back to the ‘alpha-geek’ debate you notice an inevitable rise what I call metaphor hostility. The troubling and all to common practice of thrashing the future with the stick of the present. What is increasingly being called is-ism. 

In plain language, a metaphor is a shuttle, that carries a general idea, from a well known situation to another one altogether. 

In my experience metaphor hostility is a petri dish of logical fallacy, and it can be recognized in two forms. 

1) the label sucks. 

When the reader fails to recognize what is suppressing his own imagination, he casts blame on the form of the shuttle.

2) the general idea sucks. 

When the reader fails to re-frame the general idea for use in an unfamiliar situation, he casts blame on the general idea for being faulty. 

What is the alternative? Play the metaphor as a game. Take it for a walk. Try it on for size. But mostly, make believe to understand where your natural discomfort comes from when doing something entirely new. 

But back to authentication, and some ways that we might make it usable again in everyday life, here are the words of Jeff Atwood:

It always pained me greatly that every rinky-dink website on the entire internet demanded that I create a special username and password just for them. Yes, if you’re an alpha geek, then you probably use a combination of special software and USB key from your utility belt to generate secure usernames and passwords for the dozens of websites you frequent. But for the vast, silent majority of normals, who know nothing of security but desire convenience above all, this means one thing: using the same username and password over and over. And it’s probably a simple password, too.

This is the status quo of identity on the internet. It is deeply and fundamentally broken.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If you open your wallet (or purse, or man-purse, or whatever), I bet you’ll find a variety of credentials you use to prove your identity wherever you go.

via Coding Horror: Your Internet Driver’s License.

when industries collide, design concepts look quaint

This review from David Pogue does a good job of illustrating how quickly, people feel uncomfortable when one design paradigm is grafted on to another – without first re-factoring both concepts for the new aim in mind. 

“Google Mail. Google Phone. Google Voice. Google News. Holy cow. Is there any corner of our lives where Google doesn’t want a toehold?

Not anymore. It’s here, just in time for the holidays: Google TV!
…Now, the idea of bringing the Web to your TV is not a new idea. It’s been kicking around since the Internet was still in pull-ups.

But no matter how many times the industry tries to cram Web+TV down our throats, the masses just don’t swallow. That’s probably because when we sit down at the TV, we want to be passive, with brains turned off, and when we surf the Web, we’re in a different mind-set: more active, more directed.

For some reason, though, this year, the tech industry is going Web+TV crazy. Maybe it’s because they’re all focusing on Web video, not the whole Internet enchilada (e-mail, browsing and so on). Already, you can get services like YouTube, Netflix on demand and Amazon movies through set-top boxes like Apple TV, Roku, Western Digital Live Hub, TiVo Premiere and many others.

But Google TV wants to reopen the case for the whole Internet on your TV. It offers access to Web video but also has a full-blown (well, mostly blown) Web browser built in.

At this early stage, only three gadgets have Google TV: a 46-inch Sony TV (the catchy-named NSX-46GT1, $1,400) and two devices that put it on your existing TV, a Sony Blu-ray player (NSZ-GT1, $400) and a set-top box from Logitech called the Revue (steeply priced at $300). I tried out the Sony TV and the Logitech box.

This much is clear: Google TV may be interesting to technophiles, but it’s not for average people. On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity.

For starters, it requires a mouse and keyboard. That’s right. For your TV. Hope you weren’t going for that rustic look in your TV room…”

similar yet vexingly different – design and innovation

What do the following items add up to: 1) the loss of a chief visual designer, 2) the prototype launch of an all knowing answer-engine, and 3) the talk of an antitrust investigation? Answer: a difficult week, for Google

Google is in the news so much that they usually escape notice. But now it’s different somehow. It’s as though journalists are actively to trying to prepare us a world after Google.

Miguel Heft, of the New York Times, suggests there is some trouble in the magic kingdom (a chief visual designer moves on – to Twitter). But he seems more concerned to know if engineers are blinded by data? He also asks, if companies are in danger, when they fail to recognize what designers have to contribute. 

“…Google is unapologetic about its approach.“We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience, said….”

“CAN a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want?”  Read the whole article>>

Henry Ford might have answered his question this way: ‘if I asked the people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses’. 

A century later, does our always-on, increasingly networked, and ever-measured, world, make Heft’s question any more difficult to answer? Not really. And it doesn’t excuse Miguel from blurring the boundaries between design and innovation.  Doing so isn’t much help to either cause.

Heft would like us to make a choice: innovation, or customer delight? Which side are you on? A sort of one-two punch sets the article in motion, and succeeds in making it hard to see what ideas are lurking off to the side.

For argument’s sake, let’s just say that when Google is trying to decide which – one of 56 – shades of blue to use that is a design decision. And when it is trying to assess if wolfram alpha is a Google-killer or not, well that is an innovation decision. Your first clue is that no one around you knows just what a wolfram alpha is yet.

If the flight of a brilliant designer was big news, then news of wolfram alpha seemed bigger. Steven Wolfram lifted the lid on his fantastic computing machine, an answer engine, to a small group of well-placed users over the weekend. While he denies any aims to be making a Google-killer who wouldn’t be flattered by the comparison. Have answers become the new search? Here is what Nova Spivek had to say:

“It’s not a “Google killer, it does something different. It’s an “answer engine” rather than a search engine”.

But how different? And what difference would that make in the everyday lives of people who google? One hands-on reviewer, TEDchris, posted this thought experiment on his blog:

“…The much-hyped new computational engine Wolfram Alpha soft-launched last night. It’s been dubbed by some a Google-killer… so, just for fun, I ponied up a few questions to compare the two, trying to focus on the types of specific queries that Wolfram Alpha is designed to excel at.” Read more:  – http://tedchris.posterous.com/wolfram-alpha-vs-google-1#ixzz0Fq9VivRO&A

As well as this conclusion.

I’m sure it will find a powerful niche.  But even in its target area of specific answers to data-based questions, a lot of people will be Googling for a while yet.

As fascinated as users are with its strengths, they are quick to grant the incumbent an easy win. But back to Heft’s Question. Can a company do the wrong thing by listening [quite literally] to its customers? Certainly. Especially when the customer tries harder than it should to help you out. TEDchris’ experiment is an object lesson in how not to learn from people who use what you have to sell.

Looking closely at the experiment above, we see that TEDchris gins up seven questions for the wolfram alpha that is intended to help show it off.  He follows this with a bake-off; entering those very questions into Google as a control measure. Meaning, that if the differences between the ‘answer’ paradigm, and the ‘search paradigm are breathtaking, then wolfram alpha scores the ribbon.  If not, then Google remains champ. The design of his experiment indicate that, TEDchris knows just a little too much about the technology. Would-be innovators must learn to see past this common illusion.

This is where Debra Dunne and John Seely-Brown have an argument. Or, as Henry Ford might say, if it is innovation you’re after, it isn’t about making faster horses. In other words, the promise of a new paradigm is not aptly measured by the standards of the incumbent.

Seeing around corners requires a deep understanding of what people do and believe. Neither the incumbent nor the new entrant will earn a significant new following from random acts of design – classically trained or not.  And while inventive technology is vital to innovation. It just happens to have a history of misleading its creators.  Recall for a minute the breathless talk of the Segway Transporter. Exciting yes. Adopted by millions? Not so much.

Debra Dunne and John Seely-Brown encourage would be innovators to focus on observing pain points. Something, they argue that Google’s micro tuning ways with data might never show.  Good. But, what about knowing peoples simple pleasures? Or better yet, the activities they are otherwise get engaged in (when they are inclined to search)?

If an answer engine is the answer to the question of what’s next, then TEDchris would have been better off performing a different experiment. I would encourage him and others to get up from the laptop, and live a little.

Had he captured seven genuine situations (from personal experience) over the course of a day or two, he would have notices different types of uncertainty he were featured in his experiment. And he would have known the consequences of each. Because we no longer pay much attention to tasks like, commuting, tying our shoelaces, and using a search engine, much of our everyday life is hiding in plain sight.

Had he found a simple way to face up to these experiences, then his questions for wolfram alpha would be different.  More importantly his insights about an answer engine, would have included ideas about where people might need and want to access to better answers.

bob nardelli’s haircut

Businessweek, takes a look at some disturbing patterns of behavior by Chrysler’s CEO. Nardelli, came up through the ranks of GE under Jack Welch, and is regarded as a management genius. But his record at the Home Depot – and now Chrysler – are beginning to display a dismal pattern.

When Cerebrus Capital chose to make Chrysler private again, their choice of Nardelli for CEO raised eyebrows. But people were excited to by the promise of an outsider CEO in Detroit. They sensed in him the chance to demonstrate a true corporate transformation, which by now was decades overdue. Nardelli, unlike a Detroit-man, was ‘someone who was ready to make difficult decisions’. And someone not limited by various myopia that were common in the auto sector.

The simplest lesson is: to stop recruiting for the cult of personality, but to recruit a whole team; that is capable of generating a sound transformation plan.

In the context of shrinking economies around the globe, let’s say that every company in business today faces the same pressure: spend less than you make. Witness the daily reports of job reductions. 

Managers are faced with balancing irreconcilable forces: 1) the harsh reality of shrinking economies, 2) the surge toward expansive planning. What has made the second option seem so natural over the past several decades, were a sequence of economic bubbles that lead managers to overconfidence. And, when improbable bets paid off, (or at least didn’t fail punitively) there was always more cash on hand for the next acquisition – with little question from corporate boards-of-directors. But, now that few businesses can expect that their industry will grow in the next 4 quarters, managers feel disoriented and unstable.

A common watchword these days is pragmatism. Where pragmatic is code for: ‘lowering our levels of competitiveness. And doing more of what we know how to do’. Which sounds like myopia being made fashionable. However, pragmatic means: being matter-of-fact. So, I would presume this should include dealing with unpleasant matters-of-fact. Detroit and Wall Street aren’t the only ones watching their industries ‘get a haircut’. Take a look at newspapers, magazines, and the advertising industry.  They too, are dealing with difficult matters indeed.  Yet for all of their anxiety, it appears that any instinct for entrepreneurship has dropped out of the zeitgiest in business.

It is the fundamental changes that hide – so readily – in plain sight.

…Nardelli’s cuts haven’t always served strategic ends. At Home Depot, he replaced many veteran hardware guys and retired tradesmen with twentysomethings making less money. The cuts gave profits a short-term pop, but lackluster service drove away loyal customers.

At Chrysler, Nardelli cut costs partly by robbing from tomorrow. Car companies are nowhere if they don’t have new products in the pipeline. But he cut capital spending for new models from more than $3 billion in 2007 to $2.3 billion for the next two years. When the feds showed up to assess Chrysler’s viability, they noted that Nardelli’s team planned only four new models for the next five years…

…One of the great ironies of Nardelli’s tenure is that though he billed himself as the plucky outsider waging war on Detroit myopia, his strategy differed only in degree from what the car guys have been doing for years: restructuring. Like his predecessors, he wasn’t able to wring concessions from the unions fast enough. Instead, he saved money by paring white-collar ranks. His legacy is a Chrysler so hollowed out it may no longer be viable as a standalone company.

The Nardelli effect can be felt everywhere right now. And if other executives and managers like him are ‘robbing from tomorrow’, then a true recovery will take longer than analysts are projecting. The only problem with essays like this one, is their tendancy to leave readers with the impression that this was simply one person’s folly. Companies and their analysts are quick to find a scapegoat. We simply clean the desks of the offender and escort them to the lobby.

For all that, we have a difficult time holding a management team to account. Mostly because we still accept the idea that a single leader is responsible for success. The lone genius rides again … he is robbing from the future. 

for more  Bob Nardelli’s Bumpy Road – BusinessWeek.