Post Category → Apple & Tech

Ask my computer to shut up.

Bill Gates is, yet again, claiming that speech-driven user interfaces are about to become the Next Big Thing in computing.

Sure, he’s been saying that for a long time now. Ten years at least. I think Bill is taking the broken clock approach on this: say something often enough, long enough, and the laws of probability declare that you will eventually be right. You may laugh at me for predicting snow tomorrow … but give it six months. Then who’s the wise guy, huh?

Enough already. The gulf between Gates’ financial/business success and the acuity of his technological vision is stunning; there is probably no comparable figure in any industry who has been so wrong in the field of his supposed expertise. His obsession with voice-driven UIs – which probably stems from nothing more than too many Star Trek reruns back in the dorm at Harvard — is just one example of his propensity for mistaking his own geeky fetishes for technological inevitabilities.

No one wants voice computing, except for David Pogue, and he’s a Mac user. The din of an entire office running speech-driven computers boggles the mind. Not to mention that voice interaction is much slower than customary manual interaction. This technology has been around for years now, and if people wanted it, it would have taken off already. You know two-way video phones have existed since the early eighties? Probably you did. No one wants those either.

At this point I am tempted to draw a parallel between Gates’ obsession with vocal interfaces and the unhinged swearing that many a Windows user has directed against his or her recalcitrant machine. But I’m taking the high road.

In the meantime, will some tech journalist kindly grow a pair (pardon the metaphor, female readers) and ask Gates to either let the subject die or offer a plainspoken explanation as to why this decade-old prediction stubbornly refuses to come true?

Five Things Microsoft Shouldn’t Do

G.L. Hoffman offers some marketing advice in the wake of the news that Microsoft has hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that revamped Burger King among many other brands.

Certainly those guys have their work cut out for them. Microsoft is much more a part of people’s daily lives than perhaps any other brand that agency has worked on — we may occasionally get a Whopper or pop some of Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, but a lot of people spend a significant portion of their day staring into one or more Microsoft products. There are relatively few people whose minds aren’t already made up about Microsoft, who don’t have at least one horror story about how Windows or Office briefly made their lives miserable. If that weren’t bad enough, Apple is mocking Microsoft’s signature product in what is probably the most recognizable ad campaign running today. How do you turn a brand around in the face of all that?

Hoffman’s suggestions in brief:

  1. Get Bill Gates involved in the ads.
  2. I’m not actually sure what his second suggestion is; you’d best read it yourself. I think it’s something about innovating from the bottom up, then publicizing it.
  3. Respond to Apple.
  4. Ditch the Microsoft logo.
  5. Bring Gates back to save the company by making “smart” the new “cool.”

Suggestion 1 is obviously wrong. The only way to make Gates appealing would be to poke fun at his dorkishness, and he’s too uptight for that. Gates isn’t a lovable dweeb like John Hodgman’s PC character; he’s stiff and unfunny and rather painful to listen to. Likewise, suggestion 5 draws an incorrect analogy to Jobs’ role at Apple. Jobs returned to a company that lost its way without him; Microsoft is still operating in Gates’ mold: its culture is built around competition, not innovation, and its software products are designed to appeal to developers and IT managers more than end users. And there may be some people who vaguely believe Gates invented personal computing, but it can’t have escaped the public’s attention that the latest technical innovations to catch on with the public — the iPod, MySpace, YouTube, Digg, even that Kindle thing — came from companies other than Microsoft. Continue reading →

Microhoo redux?

Carl Icahn is obviously smarter than me. So I’m not quite sure why he’s threatening to oust Yahoo’s BOD in an attempt to woo Microsoft back to the table, as outlined in this article.

Microhoo! might sound like a good idea to Yahoo’s shareholders and once seemed like a pretty good idea to Steve Ballmer, but none of the grunt workers (the people responsible for actually creating and selling product) wanted this merger to happen. Icahn would be trading a short-term spike in shareholder value for years of paralysis, brain drain and slow, painful assimilation of two contrary corporate cultures. Meanwhile Google would continue to widen its lead in search, search-based advertising, online services, and whatever the hell else Microsoft is hoping to catch up with them for.

I admit it would be kind of fun to watch if the merger actually did take place. The spectacle of Microsoft slowly suffocating under its own weight has been amusing as it is; adding Yahoo’s ponderous bulk to the mix would elevate it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy.