Nerve Endings Firing Away

This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

[Source: Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto] Quite a burn on the open source community. But the criticism is mostly accurate. I use WordPress for my blogging needs and cannot be more pleased with its ease of use and utility. If you are a WordPress.com user, you can use all of WP’s goodness without bothering about the tech geekery. At work, even using FTP brings looks of puzzlement and summons to an IT guy so you can imagine. So in that sense, Apple’s iPad dumbs it down to the average users who is not tech savvy can use the web, check email, and tweet from their couch. Those who think users are not as ‘dumb’ as we think then this ReadWriteWeb story on Facebook logins should be Evidence A (read the blockquoted paragraph in bold and initial comments on the post). This is not a knock on the people but instead on the technology that we consider dead-simple but in fact is still complex. When my parents were visiting last year, my dad opened Firefox and typed in his email ID in the Google search box to check his email. And then got ragged when I made a face.

I love open-source projects and products but none yet has come close to being convenient and easy to use. If any other company, open-source or not, makes a better tablet, I will love it. Because that’s what rational consumers in a free market do. Make choices that are optimal to them. And not just hold some open computing ideals in their mind when makign their purchasing decisions. We could wish they did but we cannot emotionally blackmail them into upholding our open-source values. After all, it all boils down to what people want and what they are willing to pay for. Fanboyism will only take a company so far; remember Apple almost went bankrupt in the 90s and only rebounded when they launched first their iMac and then the iPod that proved to be popular products for the general market.

Apologies for a flurry of posts on iPad-related stuff if it is not your thing but it extends beyond a new product into understanding consumer behavior, brand management, product promotion, marketing, supply chain efficiency, media manipulation, and oh yes, innovation.