Origami Handheld--For Y0U N0W
Posted by Jerry Kuch Sun, 30 Apr 2006 15:09:00 GMT
I have a hotmail account.
I still use this account, despite the fact that the user interface and performance of the service are now so long in the tooth that you can practically see bare jawbone poking through the putrid, reddened, inflamed flesh of your inbox. Despite what appears to be a near total lack of effective investment in improving hotmail since about 1999, I still have this account for two reasons:
- History: I’ve used it for a long time, many people remember its address, and I’ve even lost track of all the other addresses that forward to it, so getting rid of it would be a hassle;
- Spam: It’s better for that account to drown in a plunging cataract of junk mail than one that I actually use regularly. Please spare me any discussion of the fact that hotmail has a “spam folder” and “spam filtering.” I’m not sure what the algorithmic basis of its spam filter is, but I’d assume that if it’s Bayesian, then it’s not what you’re thinking, but instead is eponymously named for the good Reverend’s little known, long lost, second cousin Cletus Jim Bob Bayes who “dur’n’t quite do numbers so good.”
Hotmail’s inability to identify spam as such (its ability to positively classify legitimate mail as spam is a whole other sniping blog post) does however give its users great opportunity to see what those crazy spammer kids are trying these days. I feel depressed to think that there might be a single human being who has been rooked into opening a piece of this garbage by a subject line that has somehow pandered to their needs (health insurance, a new job), desires (personal success, becoming a hit with the ladies, getting free consumer caca in exchange for being a secret sh0pper or poll taker), or fears (any number of things could be dysfunctional or deformed! Open this message and find snake tonic that will remedy this instantly!).
The letters that attempt to suck the user into opening them often use the promise of something presumably desirable to bait the trap. Now the ladies… This is understandable to anybody who has ever worked in Redmond and stood sullenly shuffling his feet on the sidewalk outside the Claim Jumper with the restaurant’s LED-based Mark of Cain in his hand, dolorously waiting for its brazenly flashing and beeping clarion call to herald the start of quasi-ritualized feasting on all the factory-prepared chili packable into one’s face port. By the way, a helpful tip on this matter? Stop wearing free company logo T-shirts and quit tucking them into your jeans, which you should also not hike up to your xiphoid process and secure with a superfluous belt. I have the fashion sense of Quasimodo, and even I understand this.
Now where was I? Ah, yes, I was about to rant about the teaser items promised in the spam. Lots of them are obvious. The aforementioned success with the ladies. The v1agra and c1@lis that presumably complement that as naturally as that quasi-rancid, off-brown dip substance goes with the Blooming Onion at the Outback Steak House. Large screen TVs. The free gas-sucking SUV that costs $120 to fill up even now, before Hubbert’s Peak is unambiguously behind us, and while the feckless goonscrewing of the entire Middle East is only in its early stages. A new computer. A vacation. A great work at home job with mucho $$$. And a new Origami ultra mobile PC!
”What? What’s that last thing? Something new and exciting I haven’t seen before? Where do I sign? What personal information do I need to surrender to get a crack at this sweet piece of war3z?”
Control yourself, n00b… and look at this thing. It seems kind of like a Tablet PC. But smaller. With a form factor a bit more like the PSP, except that you could probably have more fun on the sidewalk with a couple of pieces of colored chalk. Maybe it’s cheap? Nah, the prices I’ve heard bandied about make it sound comparable in price to a nice new x86-based Mac laptop, i.e. a product people demonstrably want and that isn’t based on some also-ran, low-rent Celeron chip. And the marketing drivel that tries to convince us someone would want one of these? Well, users who gulp down the Windows experience like it was store-brand wine cooler at a sorrority party, they must be signed up for it already. After all, if you check the weather on your RefrigeratorPC in the morning, and then receive an SMS from your GarageDoorPC telling you that you didn’t close it, before driving to your office where you’re going to spend nine hours gazing rapturously at Clippy and the Windows Update dialogs, before you return to your AutoPC (they’ve sold what, like two of these?) and drive back home to sleep before beginning the whole, useless Sisyphean process anew, how could you not want this?
One argument I’ve heard is that there’s some fraction of the day that I’m going to spend somewhere that, gosh darn it, I just don’t have Windows available to continuously prop up my digital hipster “lifestyle” and that this jarring discontinuity will be so bothersome to me that what I need to do is drop another $700 on some crappy device that I can squeeze into this crack of Windows-less despair like grout between the mildewed tiles in the shower of a $20 motel room.
The problem is that I’m not sure I need the digi-dork lifestyle to be so pristinely uninterrupted. Does Windows just need its users constantly in front of it, caring and sharing and interacting and consuming, because that will help with future quarterly numbers? If so, then it seems that The Maker’s problems are no longer the customer’s problems. Trying to make the customer experience of devices that once had a purpose “stickier,” as I heard some marketing guys at the next table wanking about, runs a real risk of driving the products across the border from “useful” or even “enjoyable” and into the savage hinterlands of “burdensome” and “irritating.” If your company’s problem is getting users to “spend more time in front of your product” then unless sitting in front of that product is intrinsically enjoyable or edifying somehow, then you’re turning it into a needy girlfriend and this isn’t going to be in your interest in the long term. People use things like personal finance software, systems administration tools, and a host of other product categories, to save themselves time. If they are going to want your product, they’re probably going to want it to make their days, shorter, easier and less difficult. They don’t want their days made longer, harder, and more mind numbingly boring by being forcibly shackled to your crappy products and their misguided, self-serving marketing strategies.
For years we’ve heard about the “Windows Everywhere” strategy. This appears to mean battering and shoehorning Windows into some form that can be run everywhere that a microprocessor may exist within an arm’s length, including situations where Windows may, from performance, usability, or style standpoints be utterly gauche. “Windows Everywhere,” pursued in this single-minded and dogged way turns the operating system into a Procrustean bed, on which the users, which is to say Windows’s customers, are stretched or hacked as necessary to fit not their needs or desires, but those of the product’s maker.
Origami looks like the latest unholy and frilly duvet cover to toss over Procrustes’s queen size. I can’t imagine who other than a paid shill could work up even an iota of enthusiasm for this thing, much less enough lust-blinded zeal to click on the darn spam mail that’s trying, in a manner as tone deaf as the process that probably led to Origami’s conception, to use it as the compelling hook to reel in a mark.
But what do I know? I’m not a marketer or a spam baron.