Michael McNeil, Author at The Oasis Digital Blog

Leaders vs. Entropy

The other day my wife made a funny word association looking at our company’s timesheets. She commented that the category “Misc Management” looked an awful lot like “Mismanagement”. This got me thinking. I should clarify that what I am writing has nothing to do with that particular use of Misc Management, it is an appropriate catch-all category. What it did is point my focus at a common hazard that threatens leaders.

Another very important distinction for the purposes of this article. I am writing this for leaders specifically, not managers. They are very different and valuable roles. If your job is to set direction for a family, group, or organization then this article is for you.

Just like any other highly effective role, successful leaders are dogged by the temptation to be complacent and settle once they achieve a goal. Common signs of this are:

Constantly focusing on what has been achieved
Your time is filled with “running” the show
You start managing instead of leading
Defining yourself in terms of what you manage

We have to remember the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which I believe to have spiritual, social, relational, and political implications in addition to physical properties.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

The entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium.

In Lay terms:

There is a tendency for all matter, systems and energy to decline into a state of inert uniformity and decay.

A Layperson’s Definition of Entropy

Entropy is a measure of randomness/order/disorder

The fallacy that we ever “arrive” as people permeates our society. We falsely believe that if we have a certain job, or reach a certain goal we will have happiness. The irony is that the second law of thermodynamics applies to us just as much as it applies to inanimate systems. We need to continue to grow, continue to learn, continue to develop in order to avoid degradation.

Look at physical fitness. Once someone achieves a high level of fitness, what happens if they stop exercising and sit for a month. It seems obvious that the person will lose that edge. There will still be a high level of fitness but it will not be the same. If the sitting continues for six more months the person will hardly be recognizable. Why would any other aspect of ourselves be different?

If I do not spend time in prayer, my relationship with God deteriorates. If I spend less time focusing on maintenance of my home, it deteriorates. If I spend less time focused on the goals and direction of my business, it deteriorates. I could continue with dozens of other examples.

Leaders can never afford to stop looking towards the future. In my pursuit of being a good leader, I will never arrive. I will always need to labor over the next hurdle and look into the horizon. If I do not, I simply stop being a leader and entropy takes over.

Look at those leaders that you follow. Are they focused on a future objective? Do they focus on what has already occurred? Any person who is trying to lead hits periods of doubt, whether they show it or not. If you see a leader beginning to slide into the grip of entropy, provide encouragement. Often a naturally gifted leader only needs a small bump to get back on track. If someone you are following has been off track for some time, you should probably reconsider your commitment to them. The easiest place to apply this is politics. Focus on candidates with a vision for the future, not those that just pick at their opponents.

If you are a leader, challenge yourself regularly about your future direction. Most people are expected to lead in some aspect of their lives. By keeping a vision for what you are leading today, you will be more likely to become the type of person everyone wants to follow. Do not be afraid of the future, find the vision for something better and set a course to the next horizon.

Traditional Project Management is Dead

The discipline just does not know it yet.

When I speak of traditional project management, I mean a very rigid approach where the end is predetermined, with a level of specificity to allow for detailed estimates, and schedules. This can be the construction of a building, or the management of an election campaign where massive change is not allowed. The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project management as:

“the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.”

I prefer this, more organic definition:

“Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, understanding, motivating, influencing, and directing resources to achieve a set of goals.”

I am continuously intrigued by the application of principles across different aspects of our lives. As people we tend to want to segment our lives and decision-making when often the exact opposite is what we need. Lessons we learn in one aspect of our life often are directly applicable to others. This article on the psychology of our personal development is a good example. You can read it here.

As people we can often see how far we have come looking into the past. We see growth, we see our failures, we puff up at our successes, yet we hit a wall looking into the future. “The end of history illusion” is very real and very applicable to the far reaches of our lives. This even applies to specific professions.

I think this phenomenon helps articulate how I feel about a number of technologies. I often receive a quizzical look from people when I suggest that some company or system is a “dead man walking”. My assessment is sometimes incorrect, but more often accurate. (Blackberry – correct, Cisco – wrong, Novell – correct, Microsoft – we will see)

My intent in this article is to apply all of this thought specifically to project management. I have a number of friends who are project managers or construction managers across a number of fields. New technology, manufacturing realities, and a wavering economy are a wrecking ball to the traditional task-based, progress-tracking, Gantt-chart-toting PM.

Traditional project management is based on the premise that work can be estimated. This is the foundation of projects everywhere and a natural expectation on the part of those paying for the project. The disruptive reality is that estimating is far less accurate today than it was ten years ago for many kinds of work. The pace of technological and social advancement means that we are not estimating a predictable set of acts by a predictable workforce. If we are truly honest with ourselves, I think we will see that it is impractical to try to hone estimates very closely at all. Our society is changing even more quickly than in the past. In order to encompass all the variables in an estimate today you have to increase cost and schedule estimates to astronomical heights. This has been true to a degree throughout my career, but there are fewer companies/people today who are willing to pay a premium for something to be built predictably.

Technology

Advancements in materials are impacting every corner of our world. From LED light bulbs to durable paints to large flat screens you can lift with a couple of fingers, things are different every single quarter. The changes blow gaping holes in traditional practices and understandings. I would question any project that is not impacted by new and challenging technologies. We cannot live in the past. This specifically damages estimating, the idea that you can predict what will happen next is preposterous.

Manufacturing

Large scale manufacturing at a component level has severely declined in the US. Sure, we assemble parts manufactured in other countries into a finished product, but we are turning raw materials into finished goods at far lower rates than in the past. This impacts the choices and the quality of materials dramatically. Products at the quality level we need for certain applications are 3x or 5x what they are for the common part. A simple explanation can be seen in the steel industry. First Japanese steel starting eroding the American steel industry. It was well known and accepted that the quality was different. Now, our steel industry is almost gone and most steel comes from China. If you need very specialized steel with certain properties it is extremely expensive. In the past, it was only marginally more expensive because it was manufactured up the road, not around the world. On the other end of the spectrum, cottage manufacturing is on the verge of booming with advancements in 3d printing et al. These techs yield highly specialized parts at low production numbers for a fraction of the traditional cost. How can traditional approaches adapt to these conflicting realities?

The Economy

Money is tight, budgets are stretched. Not much stupid money floating around these days. Not much more needs to be said…

Conclusion

I believe the Agile processes pioneered in the software industry hold the answer. Many of these concepts are also defined in Total Quality Management systems and the Baldrige Continuous Improvement model. Unfortunately, none of these and the iterative cycle they promote have ever really been adopted across the project management industry. The barrier to doing so is the simple fact that many project managers are not deep experts of their industry, they simply manage schedules and compile information provided by others. As a group, project managers need to engage in their profession. I believe that project managers in the future will need to have a greater understanding and take a larger role in the active delivery of complex projects.

I am excited for the changes that are coming. For those that embrace the change occurring around them the future is quite bright. For those that want to cling to the past, they will find themselves on the outside looking in at projects they do not understand. To bring this full circle we need to visualize where our particular industry will be in ten years and build those skills. I would have expected people to realize the importance of this looking back at the impact of computers etc. I guess “The end of history” illusion is powerful in all aspects of our lives.

2014 Guide to Chromebook Apps

One of the challenges when entering the Chrome ecosystem is the lack of familiar names and products. The go-to apps on a Chromebook are not the normal fare, and for good reason. Apps on a Chromebook exist in collaboration with the internet at a very deep level. On other platforms, internet goodness is considered a feature, not the root. This does not mean that Chromebooks are useless without internet connectivity. They are not “just a laptop that runs a browser for an operation system”. If you have not figured out the fallacy of these myths please stop reading, I cannot help you.

Previous Chromebook Articles:
A Year With Chromebooks
I Love This Chromebook
A Misunderstood OS

Following is a quick rundown of the apps that I rely upon in my daily use of my Chromebook Pixel. It is very rare that I desire any legacy PC and certainly rarer that I cannot accomplish a task without one. This has happened. The most notable being the lack of support for dropbox zip-format lunacy (well documented). In order to access an archive I had to use a Windows machine. Other than that I cannot think of a time in the last 6 months I ran back to an old platform. So on with the list:

1 Chromecast ($35 Google Play)

Yes, my first app is not an app. This is an example of the mind splitting differences between the Chrome ecosystem and Windows or OSX. This piece of hardware “behaves” like a supercharged app. In a couple of clicks you can stream your favorite media or mirror your screen for anyone to see. All wirelessly and painlessly. A significant improvement over Apple TV and other media boxes at a fraction of the cost. A must have.

2 Google Drive (Free)

Drive really represents a number of apps rolled into a single interface. Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDF Viewer, Cloud Print are just a few. These offline apps are incorporating many of the benefits of the Quickoffice acquisition by Google. It is important to understand the offline capability, it is best used for new content creation and premeditated editing sessions. If you store everything in the cloud you cannot edit it if you are offline. This is not a failing of the app, it is a reality of the architecture you are using.

3. Lucidchart (Freemium, Subscription)

This application is a great value and an example of a rethinking of a traditional space. Lucidchart rethinks how we build diagrams and incorporate them into our work. Not only is it web-centric, but it actually improves upon the standard set by Visio, SmartDraw and others. The tools are easy to understand and use, the user base is broad with lots of templates, and the integrations with JIRA and Google Apps are well done.

4. HootSuite (Free for individuals)

HootSuite is an excellent aggregation point for social networking. I like to consolidate feeds and HootSuite is an excellent place to do that with support for almost all of the top social networks. The interface is well thought out and translates well to touchscreens. Well-designed!

5. Chrome Remote Desktop

If you work with other machines this app is automatic. There is not a lot to say other than it works like it should and is constantly being improved upon. Looking back it was quite spartan a few months ago and now has a number of additional useful features.

6. Pixlr Editor (Free)

Outstanding photo editor that rivals Photoshop for most users. Excellent community support. I was getting a little irritated by a Chromebook bug up until a couple of weeks ago, but that seems to be completely gone. I use this app a couple of times a week when working with images. Hard to over-emphasize the intuitive toolset if you are a Photoshop or GIMP user.

7. Keep (Free)

Up until earlier this year I was an avid Evernote user. I even paid for the professional version. Keep has removed Evernote completely from my consciousness. I use it extensively for writing articles like this one. I can edit here, on my tablet, or even on my phone without a thought. Everything I do is automatically backed up in Drive and goes into my normal archival system (more on that in a bit). It still needs a few more features to be indispensable but like other apps listed, enhancements are coming regularly.

8. Cloud9 IDE (Freemium)

After waiting for quite a while, Cloud9 emerged as a viable alternative to a traditional IDE. If you are working with supported tools, the FTP and Git integrations are powerful. I am currently using Cloud9 to develop my personal and business websites. I am hoping to branch into some web app development next.

9. Various content consumption apps! (lots available)

The ones I use, not in any particular order: YouTube, Netflix, Google Music, Google+ Photos, Kindle Cloud Reader, DropBox, Google Play Books and Movies (viable option to Amazon).

10. Spanning Backup ($40 per year, the link sends you to a discount code saving you $5)

Unlimited backup of your Google account and Drive storage. An automated, daily, incremental backup of your mail, contacts, calendar, and files. There is not a size limitation and it is easy to export your files for local backup at any time. My personal backup solution has morphed radically with the switch to Chromebooks. Instead of trying to carry all my files with me I let Google curate them in Google Drive. Spanning backs them up each day and about once a month I export them in a zip file to a local external drive. Periodically I make a copy and place it in my safe deposit box. This way I have 4 copies in different places without a lot of effort. Thinking this way requires a paradigm shift that I will write about in the future, for me it has been very freeing. I no longer spend large chunks of time performing administrative tasks to protect my files. I execute some simple processes at regular intervals and I have peace of mind that my photos will not just disappear in the cloud.

I am sure my list of top apps will be different a year from now. As I work through this article I am stunned by how little is missing. And to those naysayers out there, most of the apps listed above work offline. There are obvious exceptions but a lack of internet connectivity does NOT keep me from being productive. Enjoy the freedom and flexibility you get with a Chromebook, many of us have dreamed of these features for most of our techie careers.

Merry Christmas!

Using JIRA: Be a Winner not a Loser!

When using a tool like JIRA to curate your project management processes it is important to use it effectively. It is very easy to move off of the “happy” path and into the weeds that cycle a project into chaos. I want to touch on a few of the pitfalls and also highlight a couple of creative ways to use it.

Pitfalls

#1 Death by Ambiguity

When putting your work into any issue tracker it is always tempting to create items that are not only unhelpful but ultimately damaging to your project. If you are early in a project and dividing large chunks of work for future definition, items like “Email Notifications” or “User Profile Page” are not good for the project. Items like this feel good at the time, a list of them covers the breadth of the project, but they will hurt even in the short term. How can a developer know where to start with these? They span major components of an application, UI, server, client, and more. In many teams the same developers will not even work on these different components of the software.

Later in the project these can be damaging as well. For example, a few months down the road a developer is now taking on responsibility for the administrative screens in your shiny new application. They keep noting the need to work on email notifications but do not know where to start. The naming of this ambiguous item gives them the false sense of security that it is noted and will be handled, when nothing is further from the truth. Preliminary design work may desperately need to be done for the notifications to be ready in a future chunk of work (milestone, sprint, release), yet nothing moves. Developers that do not have the responsibility for other parts of the system touched by the item cannot, on their own, break it up into pieces.

Some forethought and design need to be taken early in a project to avoid these problems. Use a standard that works well for your organization. Break it up into meaningful chunks that will match up with your development team structure. For example we might enter the item as a part of other related work tied to the client, server, administrative screen design. This way the feature heads into the design process without cluttering and confusing future waves of work. Another solution is to specifically identify a design item for the feature. This is valid work and is worthy of being tracked as a part of most projects.

#2 Death by Stagnation

Another major pitfall is not breaking up larger items that are well defined. A large irritant to a customer (internal or external, there is always a customer) is seeing the same item stagnant and not moving for months. We try to keep most of our items at a size that can be completed in a week. This way the customer can see progress on a continuous basis. This often means that a particular item might be broken down into many parts, yet there is often resistance to this extra work. Not breaking up these components can leave your progress hidden from your customer.

All customers want to know when their shiny new application will be finished. This is a normal desire and one we challenge constantly in the custom software world. We all know we cannot control outside factors that impact or drive a customer’s business. In the course of a project, stresses and pressures will often come and your customer may begin to scrutinize the project in a different way. The game changed and you are still moving along. When the customer comes to look, will you have 20 large items moving slowly or 150 moving quickly through your process? I would much rather have a large number of items being clicked off weekly. The customer can see steady (sometimes daily) movement. They can predict themselves when the application might be completed.

#3 Death by Silence

Any system is only as good as the information flowing through it. The natural human tendency (especially for developers) is to only communicate when it seems important. Just like your marriage, your project needs good strong communication to be healthy. This seems so obvious, but I have watched this kill projects time and time again in my career.

JIRA specifically is a platform that is well suited to capture the story of a feature or item as it goes through its life-cycle. If used properly, you can come back years later to make a change and be up to speed in a few minutes. On some projects we have design, workflow, commits, and technical discussion going back ten years. Our detailed data predates most of the employees at the customer, providing a historical perspective that adds yet another layer of value.

Capturing this data takes a culture that requires effort to build and diligence to maintain. Ask each developer to comment on their progress on a regular basis, establish some guidelines. Have Project Leads check this as a regular part of their work process, build a culture of positive accountability. Find places to establish checks and balances that will protect these guidelines and give you the confidence they are occurring.

Outside the box

While just avoiding the issues identified above will make your project better, we have found a couple of creative things that are quite beneficial when working with our customers.

#1 Screenshots/Video

Media is powerful. We have recently started looking for screenshots on any resolved issue that is customer-facing. Having these available paid dividends immediately. Pictures are not only worth a thousand words, but more importantly they apply clear context to all the words you did write. Many of your customers are visual learners, use this to your advantage. Providing a screenshot or demonstration video beats a live demo every time.

#2 Feature based agile board

A quick and easy way to make a customer understand you value their priorities is a custom filter and agile board in JIRA. Simply add a label or a component, customize a filter, and create a board. Nothing will please decision makers more than seeing their high priority item flow through to completion. Giving that visual on the board can also eliminate those challenging schedule questions. They can see for themselves and begin to approximate completion. Do not underestimate the value of that last sentence. Giving customers the ability to answer their own questions quickly is powerful.

Conclusion

While not comprehensive, these ideas and concepts should help many who use JIRA or are considering the product. Staying on the good path takes effort but will pay off in improved communication with your team and your customer.

The Failure of Not Failing

We place such an emphasis on success in our culture and it is quite annoying to me. Perfection seems to be something we celebrate, and in some ways we should. What we do is idolize success without failure. For some reason we forget that failure is a necessary part of our development. I would venture to say no human being in history stood up and walked for the first time without falling. They did not speak their first words with perfect diction. Failure is a requirement of learning.People are often amused that one of my standard sequences of questions during an interview go something like this:

What is your greatest professional success or honor?

What is your greatest personal achievement?

What is your biggest professional failure?

What did you learn?

If you are comfortable, what is your most profound personal failure?

What did you learn?

I believe that these are important questions. I do not believe you can be a good leader unless you have failed. Sometimes people fail spectacularly, I know I have. A good leader understands how to keep going in the darkness of adversity, especially when they caused it. Good leaders have learned how to pick themselves up and keep going with that sick feeling of failure in their gut. A good leader can encourage others when the outlook is bleak and nearly hopeless. Adversity and failure are a good source of wisdom.

Unfortunately our school systems perpetuate this myth of perfection. Some of the most inflexible, unproductive, and unteachable employees I have had were 4.0 students. This is not a criticism of those students! Top grades are a great achievement, and they should be proud. What it is not, is a badge that means they know more than everyone else. I would argue their education is still incomplete because they have not failed. They do not know what inner strength they might have because they have not faced that embarrassment. I would not go so far as to demean those students, or not have class rankings, but we need to have it in context.

As a society we need to stop attaching a stigma to failure, especially for young people. As a young person grows, failing a class or getting fired from a job can be a learning experience more powerful than any classroom lesson. The world, especially the business community, is a complex place. You have to be dynamic and move fast. We need to equip our youth with the ability to recognize failure now and learn from it, not hide it. We need to celebrate that question above, “What did you learn?”.

Personally I value teachability and self-awareness along with intellect. Some of the smartest people I have known were some of the least teachable. The wisest and most productive people I have known were simply humble and teachable.

Our political system and sensational media also drive this perfection myth. How many candidates in the last presidential election were eliminated because of some scandal or failure. Some of these were real and some were trumped up but the dialog was the same. Can the candidate recover from this? Are they stained beyond hope?

This was infuriating to me. I want people in Washington who have had to recover from failure. Our country is failing and we need these people to show us the way. Continuing to send spoiled, silver spoon lawyers that know nothing of personal adversity will not change the result. We do not need perfection in Washington, we need reality.

I would encourage parents to incorporate discussion of failure into their dialog with their kids. I would encourage all managers to add it to their dialog with their employees. I would encourage voters to add it to their criteria in assessing candidates.

Failure is not only an option, but a necessity to be a valuable member of our society. Can we please start recognizing this?

Cloud Computing & Business

Over the last few years there has been a raging debate over the intelligence of cloud computing for consumers. With the success of Dropbox, Drive, et al, we see the tide has turned. Consumers are increasingly happy being seamlessly (mostly) connected to their data across their computing platforms (pc, laptop, tablet and smartphone). The current running debate is about policy, and every so often you run across the conspiracy theorist (partially correct) that avoids Google’s knowledge of his existence. The overwhelming conclusion of this debate is that convenience trumps fear. If you look at the behavior of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks you can see them steadily pushing people away from privacy, and it is working. Consumers are comfortable with their personal details hanging out there for the world to see.

What about in business? That is a whole different animal, isn’t it? I would argue that just like trends in the midwest trail the coast by a predictable period of time, business adoption of technology compared to consumers follows the same pattern. Lets look at the rough era of proliferation of certain technologies in consumer electronics vs. business for a moment:

In the 1980′s computers became comfortable for consumers. I lump the Ataris, Commodores, Amigas and others in the category of computers. By 1990, computer penetration into the consumer consciousness was complete. By contrast it was not until the mid-1990′s that businesses automatically assumed each employee needed to have a computer in order to be productive. That pushes the acceptance gap at roughly 5 years. When it comes to mobile phones the adoption has been almost simultaneous. This is an anomaly that I think is easily explained by the critical nature of phone communication on business.

When you jump ahead to smartphones the gap is once again present. Smartphones became the norm for consumers with the proliferation of Android and IOS. Business is just now deciding that employees need smartphones to be productive. Previously they were optional and only for certain worker classes. I personally believe that the lack of dumbphone options on the market is driving business adoption, not some recognition of the value of smartphones.

You can also see the same pattern developing with tablets. As of this year most families assume they need a tablet as their next logical computing purchase. They are a hot commodity. Business is just now dipping their toes in the water, not certain that their applications can be ported to effectively work on them. Over the next couple of years I think we will see a rapid acceleration of the adoption of tablets in the workplace. Ultimately I think they will supplant traditional pc’s completely for some classes of workers.

These brings me back to the issue of the cloud. I hear a standard set of objections when considering cloud computing for business applications. They typically are:

Security (Data, Intellectual Property, etc.)
Cost
Bandwidth

I believe that the widespread adoption of tablets and the required cloud computing platform will happen. It is an unavoidable tsunami coming that will obliterate some businesses while others surf to new heights. Here are my thoughts on each of those objections.

Security

I would boil it down to this simple argument. your current servers are on a network that is connected to the internet. There are routers and firewalls between your data and the unwashed, but it is still connected. If your employees can browse espn.com, then nod yes. In a cloud service like Google Apps for Business you are also behind routers and firewalls. The question is, who will do a better job protecting you, your IT guy that you do not pay enough, or Google’s highly paid engineering teams dedicated to internet security. While your guy is chasing that cabling problem on the second floor or rebooting the CEO’s laptop, Google’s team is identifying the latest threat and deploying adjustments in their system to counteract them. Who will you bet on?

Cost

If you are spending what you should on servers, data centers, backup solutions, UPS systems, etc. then a solid cloud option should be a wash in terms of cost. If you are doing a cheap, risky job on your IT see my previous point on security. You need to belly up to the bar and pay the bill. Your business and your customer’s data is worth it.

The cost of storage in the cloud is dropping steadily. There are even solutions that only charge you when you access your data. This is a powerful tool for companies that archive many years of large data. I often hear executives lament that the only time they need it is in a legal dispute and often then backups are bad and the data is lost anyway.

Bandwidth

This is a valid concern in the old model. Many people hang onto the idea that their data has to be present in the same building for it to be safe. This is simply the wrong way to view it. Cloud computing works when your primary storage is cloud-based and backups reside locally. When you pull files as you need them instead of massively syncing files to the cloud your bandwidth requirements drop dramatically. Sure, once a day/week/month pull a backup overnight but this is far different than trying to live sync files to the cloud as a backup. Drive syncing is a horrific drain on the network and completely unnecessary.

There are other arguments as well. Some I have touched on in other articles. The cost of computing hardware actually drops when you go to a cloud-based architecture. Tablets and Chromebooks are inexpensive and fully capable of performing most tasks in business. Sure CAD, extensive graphics work, and modeling are all the domain of workstations. But email, browsing, business documents, business graphics, are all readily executed in the cloud. I believe this wave is coming and I am seeing the benefit of moving Oasis Digital to the cloud two years ago. The benefits have far outweighed the negatives, hands down. I think that will be the case for most businesses in the coming years. The PC is dead, long live the cloud!

A Year With Chromebooks

A year ago we purchased the Samsung $249 Chromebook from Amazon. For a long time it was easily the best selling laptop on Amazon. Then in February Google released the Chromebook Pixel. A video and shots of the device were leaked widely on the web and panned universally as foolishness that would never become reality. Google had in fact been hard at work building this device to their specifications with a clear focus on existing in the same class as the Macbook Pro. One of their goals was to establish that a cloud based computer could be used as a primary computing device. They believed that this would give Chromebooks the needed panache to convince average users to try.

I will start be saying that the fact that I am still using the Pixel as my primary computing device, I literally handed down my Zenbook to a new employee, as a clear sign of success. I have always been a power user of a pc, pushing applications places to perform tasks they might not have been intended to. I would like to take the time and run through my top 5 dislikes of the Pixel first and then hit my top 5 likes of the device.

Dislikes

1. Battery Life

It is a real shame that Intel did not have their act together yet for the launch of this device. The Haswell platform has substantially better battery impact than the Ivy Bridge processors. That said the device would have been greatly imporved if it was 1-2 mm thicker and had another 1-2 hours of battery life. I regularly get about 5 hours use on a full charge if I pay attention to the screen settings. If I do not it is not unusual to burn through my battery in less than 4 hours. This is a shame.

The lack of battery life also has required that I take my tablet with me in more situations than I normally would have. On a long plane flight out to San Francisco my Pixel has no chance, this means I am currently writing this article on my tablet en route to Charlotte. Again, a shame as I would prefer to travel with one less device.

2. USB 2.0

The lack of USB 3.0 ports is baffling and to this day I have not heard a good explanation. I guess it is possible they were trying not to tax the battery any more than it already was. It is also possible they were just saving money. I find the former far more likely with the latter just not jiving with the rest of the premium feel of the device.

3. HDMI

With the only port being a mini display port it was a little frustrating at first accumulating the needed adapters to make this device useful in all situations. Once I acquired the HDMI, Display Port, and VGA adapters needed I was fine but my bag was a little more cluttered.

4. Serial Number

Yes, I am really reaching to find 5 things I do not like about the device. The support for the Pixel is fantastic and they have successfully helped me navigate a couple of situations well. Sometimes they just remind me of something I should already know but at least they do not send me a snarky video of how to Google it! All that said a precursor to getting support is entering the serial number. This number is etched into the bottom of the device and is so small I have to get my jeweler’s monocle out to read it. The number is also not to be found in the OS anywhere. This makes getting support when hooked up to my monitor, power supply, and peripherals quite a pain.

5. Accessories

Other than the battery life my greatest frustration has been the lack of high end accessories to go with this premium device. The pat answer of using the accessories designed for the MBP is just not acceptable. The unusual, and fantastic, screen aspect ratio gives the unit a different footprint making most aftermarket cases awkward at best.

Then there was the debacle of spare power supplies. Obviously the person who managed this aspect of the supply chain has spent their whole career chained to a desk. Everyone I know that is a power user and relies on their laptop as the primary computing device immediately buys at least 1 if not 2 spare power supplies. It was fully 3 months before they were available and then you could only purchase 1. This was utterly ridiculous and unacceptable. Hopefully the person responsible has been beat around the head and shoulders by enough coworkers armed with Nerf swords that this will not happen again!

Likes

1. Chrome OS

We have seen this pattern before with Google and they are up to it a third time. Android started out as a mockery of a phone. I used the original TMobile G1 from launch and suffered through Androids early growing pains. I was mocked by all my iPhone toting friends. Failure was assured, Apple could never be overtaken…well we now argue which Android phone is the best in the world and often Apple is not discussed. The same process occurre with tablets. Earlier this year Android tablets overtook Apple in this segment as well and I do not expect we will be looking back.

Chrome OS is growing up right before our eyes. New, exciting features are coming weekly now and the bridge for Chrome users on Windows/OSX is completely in place. If you use Chrome as your browser (most do) you will find them in place when you log into a Chromebook. Education is Apple’s mainstay and saved their mindshare in the 90s when their corporate influence vanished. If you look at the 25-45 year olds that primarily use Apple products it is that exposure in schools that deeply impacted them. What is happening right now, this year, should shake Apple to the core (sorry for the pun). Education is not just moving to Google but flocking to Google in droves. Chromebooks are far superior to iPads for education and Apple cannot afford to make the Air competitive. Google is winning the next generation.

All that aside I really enjoy using the Chrome OS each day. It is fast, predictable and allows me to move quickly and seamlessly between tasks. There are a few things I run into that I wish were present but creating content, interacting with my world, and working offline are all very effective. The big hole in the app support space is screen-sharing and collaboration tools that have business features instead of what Hangouts has to offer. I realize this will be fixed in the future but most of the big tools do not work with Chrome OS.

2. Keyboard/Trackpad

In a word it is fantastic. I am spoiled and will have a hard time adjusting to anything else. I have arthritis in my hands and even after a long day I can type smoothly and pain free on the keyboard. The key travel is perfect and superior to the Apple keyboard I use with it on my desk. The backlighting is so good I wonder ifit could be turned it down and save a bit of battery.

The trackpad is equally impressive. The surface is particularly pleasant, I will avoid analogies here, and the size is perfect. Scrolling and gestures are also excellent, especially when compared to Windows 8 efforts. I find this rather humorous because Google got it right on a device where it is a secondary feature and Microsoft could not get their cornerstone feature correct. That really says a lot to me.

3. Screen

Much has been written about the screen. Suffice it to say you cannot purchase an external monitor for less than $2000 that looks this good or has this kind of clarity. The screen is as good as it gets. I love it and it will be hard to move to anything lesser in the future.

I also have really come to love the aspect ratio. I have found it useful in much the same way I use my 10″ Sony tablet in portrait mode. It is perfect for reading and absorbing content. I might feel differently if my most common use was video but this format is absolutely outstanding for me. The last time I used a laptop screen this way was my Thinkpad with the 1600×1200 screen.

4. 1 TB of storage

This may be the most underrated feature of the Pixel. It took me a few weeks to get all of my data into the cloud but I no longer worry about losing information. It seems counter-intuitive but I prefer to have my primary storage be in the cloud with local being my backup. By having my data there it is instantly available from my tablet, phone, or any other device I log into. It is hard to describe how easy it makes being productive. I am writing this article and I know that as soon as I land it will be synced to the cloud and I will be able to review on my phone or Pixel before I board my next plane.

I am also particularly pleased with my backup strategy. Props here to Spanning Backup for an outstanding service, I highly recommend it. By using another cloud service I have my data in a separate cloud network and I have the ability to download it in bulk. I do this to an external drive at my office. I will also periodically copy it to another drive and stick it in a safety deposit box. Without much effort or cost at all I have 4 copies of my data. This is all possible because of the TB of storage received with the Pixel.

5. It (almost) always works

BSOD is not a feature of Chrome OS. ‘nough said. There are hiccups now and again, see #8 for why this is not an issue.

6. Build Quality

I am really impressed with the quality of the device. This has been covered elsewhere ad nauseum so I will not elaborate but it is really outstanding. There were those that were concerned with the hinge when it was first released. I can honestly say that I see no change with constant daily use, it is well made.

7. Speakers

The sound system this device has even impressed my teenage son. It easily fills a room with clear intelligible sound. It literally is the perfect device to use as an ad hoc conference phone. The shame is that none of the major meeting platforms support it. It certainly makes listening to media a pleasure.

8. Boot/Reboot speed

The device is so fast I have found myself not caring if I shut it down or suspend. This is a major shift from expectations on other platforms. I would suggest that the device really does not need both options, it really is that fast.

9. OK, I will stop

Yes, I love it! My adventure into a post-Windows world has been a rousing success and I do not expect to look back. I truly believe that those who can adapt and move this direction with the industry will thrive.

Three Critical Principles Of Developing Enterprise Software

Understanding, Workflow, Delivery. These three concepts sound trite, soundbites in technology for decades (substitute Execution for Workflow during the 1990s). It is hard to overstate the value of these key ideas and it is even harder to do a good job in making them a natural part of your team’s effort. They have many enemies:

Tyranny of the urgent
Laziness
Personal design preferences
Ego
Meetings
Distraction
Conflict

All of these can destroy an otherwise productive team. It is a leader’s job to manage these and protect the team from them. It is the individual team member’s responsibility to manage their own work and remove as much of this as possible. It takes everyone working diligently to work smarter for a project to succeed.

Understanding

All too often we jump into projects thinking we understand what needs to happen only to find that we did not. At that point work has to be redone, time is lost and the customer is frustrated. Disciplining your team to dig in and fully understand a set of customer requirements is important. Please note that written requirements accompany but do not replace the understanding required to provide a solution. The written requirements are a tool to use but cannot replace the cognitive process of understanding.

When you start a new project, there is a natural limit because a customer will not tolerate an extended delay at the beginning of a project. You cannot charge blindly across the customer objection but you absolutely need to understand the problem domain at a deep level. This is a fine line that is difficult to walk. Using tools in a way that trap critical information is very important to achieving this balance. Have the customer provide videos of key staff performing their work function or using their current application. Customers will want you to be present and witness this, but resist. We have found it is critical to capture this in a way it can be watched over and over again by team members. Through this process real understanding can occur. Without it your team will find it difficult to remember a meeting six months prior and have trouble decoding the typed up notes neatly stored on their computers.

It can also be helpful to listen to customers talk about their vision for the project. Again, do not do this in a meeting but obtain a recording of this. New team members can hit the ground running after reviewing such valuable materials and the tools are readily available. This is not to say you cannot have meetings that supplement this information but all too often a meeting is all that occurs. It is commonplace for notes to be sparse from these meetings and our memories are notoriously faulty.

Once you capture this knowledge it is important to translate this into a set of requirements. Sometimes customers will give you these, but most of the time they are too busy and this falls on you. Follow through and process this into a detailed list of features that can be pushed into your workflow.

Workflow

There are very few times that enterprise software will be simple, and any complex project can be derailed without a clear process for execution. There can be variations by organization, but I will speak generally of the process we use. Below you see a graphical representation of our workflow.

It is important for the project lead or architect to lay out a particular piece of work. Once it is ready it should go into a bucket where all the developers on a project can see the work that is staged. We often place these into milestones, sometimes referred to as sprints. Developers pick up the work and push the item through development, peer review, internal testing, and QA Testing.

The enemies I listed above mostly rear their heads to attack your workflow. There are always reasons that make sense at the time that lead to workflow destruction. A leader is responsible for guarding the gate. If any of these are allowed into the team and allowed to take root, there is a high likelihood of project cancellation, termination, and failure. Pushing items efficiently through a workflow allow for the most important part of a software project to occur: delivery.

Delivery

From a customer’s perspective you have not really done much until they have software in their hands. Use the previous two efforts to both understand the core features and aggressively push them through your workflow. Use your understanding to plot the quickest path to putting software in customer hands for comment, feedback, and tactile success. Getting a project to that point is critical to its continued success. Completion of some limited functionality is far more valuable to your customer than partial completion of 100s of features. Shipping is golden, a lack of shipment is a recipe for disaster.

RE: Design/UXD Conference Day 2, San Jose 2013

Day 2 in San Jose, and I need to give the same disclaimer as yesterday.

“You can find more information at the conference website (http://www.redesignconference.com/). I will run through the sessions and attempt to communicate those points I found especially poignant. Much of this will be iterative, in that the presenter had a point, I may have heard it as they intended it or applied my own analysis to it. Either way, I should qualify that all of these ideas are not mine but at the same time many of these ideas were not the presenters’. That should be clear as mud!”

What We Can Learn from Disruptors – Carrie Whitehead – Zappos

What We Can Learn from Maps – Eric Rodenbeck – Stamen Design

What We Can Learn from a Voter – Adam Stalker/Daniel Ryan – Obama for America

What We Can Learn from Gaming – Christina Wodtke – Publisher, Boxes and Arrows

The Experiential Difference – Jesse McMillin – Virgin America

The story of Netflix and Blockbuster are a cautionary tale for any business. 5 years ago Blockbuster was in excellent financial position, expanding markets, a solid business. The markets and Blockbuster scoffed at the upstart Netflix and its business model. The truth was, complacency had invaded Blockbuster and today they are bankrupt while Netflix, despite missteps, is growing and positioned well for the future. The moral of the story is incremental improvements to business are important and powerful but CANNOT substitute for innovation. We need to look ahead, see patterns, see opportunities, and innovate.

We need to design for one task to touch many channels. Retailers like Amazon have to consider this. Users might browse on a tablet, phone, pc or tv. They might review products on the tablet and complete orders on the pc. They might manage gift lists from their phones or make media purchases there through apps. They might stream movies on their accounts from their TVs. All of these are part of a single task arriving from multiple touch points.

Quick technology geeked out moment and an example of good design: I am editing this post on my Chromebook Pixel. I have my notes open in Evernote in a window to the left of my editor. I can scroll in the Evernote window by placing the mouse over the background window and moving two fingers on the touchpad. I can do this without changing focus from my editor. I can scroll in Evernote while typing in my blog editor. Excellent design!

Mapping data sets is both an old discipline and one that in many ways is brand new. Over the millenia maps have been key to many things. They told stories about the land they described. Cartography is collected as a highly prized art form. Maps today have been reduced to a simple tool. Very little depth is present. Sure, you can make it look different with the treasure map layer on Google, but there is not a story there.

When we consider data in various systems we can choose to look at the numbers in tabular format or visualize data in graphs, charts or tools. If we take this a bit further and “map” the data in multiple dimensions, unusual patterns are visible, new questions are raised, and a greater understanding of the data is possible. The human interface for interacting and exploring this data still needs to be developed. Hollywood has its ideas, and we all know how realistic that is. It is clear that we are very close to being able to tap into historical data at a level that was impossible previously.

When we do map data there is an opportunity to return to the storytelling of mapmakers of old. We can intentionally weave a manager’s job description in how the data is presented and manipulated. We can provide the “rest of the story” to a busy executive wondering how effective his workforce is many levels of management isolated from him. We can empower users with predictive inputs to help them make wise decisions in their businesses.

Big data no longer means collecting snapshots, it means collecting everything. The election in 2013 was an unprecedented opportunity to both track and influence social networks. The Obama campaign partnered tightly with Facebook and Google to provide daily inputs that directed the campaign. Every night 66k election simulations were run and analyzed, data was constantly challenged and tested, and changes in strategy were implemented. They had deep access to millions of voters’ data, during an emotional election season, with a crescendo of activity culminating in the election. What a researcher’s dream.

One use of social media was really surprising to me. The campaign had a list of undecided voters. They mapped those voters on Facebook in many ways. What photos were they tagged in? Who were they friends with? Who did they share with? Where did they live? Then they would measure the influence of their supporters with those voters using the same metrics, and score the “influence factor” of that supporter. Then they would send messages from the campaign giving supporters instructions regarding who to talk to. By this method and the election day vote efforts they estimate they swung 5 million voters nationwide. This is greater than the margin of public vote victory for the president.

Two other efforts, “The Life of Julia” and the explanation of Obamacare were both very successful. On both of these initiatives 75% of the users stuck through the application all the way to the end. This is a very high retention rate. The Obamacare app moved people through the legislation from 4 different inputs, through 500 paths, to 8 conclusions. Both of these applications flowed against the resistance we have to clicks in design.

One last conclusion from the campaign discussion was the way they drew people into donating. The entrance page for donations was very simple, the user simply selected an amount. There was much information that needed to be filled out but the user was not presented with this until they decided to give. The user rarely backed out once they made that decision. They found this far more effective than the past approach of presenting users with forms prior to the donation moment.

Game designers identify user types when building a game. These consist of killers, achievers, socialites and explorers. Another list is expressers, competitors, explorers, and collaborators. There are similar patterns at play in a business when interacting with their enterprise applications. Executives, managers, workers, and administrators all have similarities in both personality and job description to these categories. If we map both personality and job against a category of user we can learn something about how to build an interface suitable for their use. It appears there is fertile ground in this area that could yield increased productivity.

In a media-cluttered world we crave things both immersive and memorable. We need to remember that when building systems. We cannot incorporate whimsy and humor in everything we do, but there will be opportunities to do so. Our users and clients will thank us if we do.

Now that I am through the conference I feel like I can put down the firehose and absorb this information. What a valuable experience, and a conference I would highly recommend.

RE: Design/UXD Conference Day 1, San Jose 2013

I am attending a two day conference focused on User Experience Design. At the end of the first day I can clearly say this was a valuable event even if every presenter tomorrow is really awful. You can find more information at the conference website (http://www.redesignconference.com/). I will run through the sessions and attempt to communicate those points I found especially poignant. Much of this will be iterative, in that the presenter had a point, I may have heard it as they intended it or applied my own analysis to it. Either way, I should qualify that all of these ideas are not mine but at the same time many of these ideas were not the presenters’. That should be clear as mud!

What Can Experience Designers Learn From Rock Stars – Tim Richards (@nanotim) – Blitz

Graphic Design and Branding – Andy Gilliland – Punchcut

What We Can Learn From Connected Objects Around Us – Jeff Devries – Motorola Mobility

Learning From James Bond, Experience Designer – Danny Sill – IDEO

What We Can Learn From a Bad Remodel – Steve Tatham – Disney Imagineering

Reframing UX Design as a Profession – Peter Merholz (@peterme) – Groupon

The discussion of group dynamics was very timely as I look at the development of my teams at Oasis Digital. We need to be able to work collaboratively and we need to work solo. A big challenge has been having that solo work fit back into the collaborative effort. We need a shared language to be consistent. Each team member learns to communicate within the team but continues to use that shared language when they work alone. If we push to stay consistent, then individuals can innovate within the language of the team.

We also discussed the need to have the core message down cold. When you know it inside and out then true passion and innovation can shine through. The best musicians will play a piece thousands of times so that they know it completely. That way when they perform they can meet the audience at the experiential level and communicate without worrying about the content. We should know our process and our message without hesitation. If we do that then we can meet our customers where they are and provide them with more valuable service.

We also need to guard against doing it ourselves. Those around us cannot learn if we do not teach them. This is difficult when faced with deadlines and requirements, but if adhered to then the benefits are substantial. In a modern organization we need to be flexible with the parts we play. There are no menial tasks or work that is below us, there is the team and a goal. The team members have a responsibility to all push toward the goal together.

When presenting an idea we need to speak with passion and honesty, we should not apologize for limitations. We need to put our thoughts and ideas out to the world. Good design has persuasive power and we need to master our craft.

There was also discussion about the need to separate the idea from the execution. I like the quote “save yourself from yourself”. Often we can be our own worst enemy and destroy our own ideas. We load them down with requirements and additional ideas which can lead to a loss of the original point. We should iterate on the execution (how the idea is realized), not on the idea itself.

Simple is often the best approach once the shared language of the team is established. You should be able to distill core ideas to fit on a bumper sticker. This is not sales, it is communication. This flows into another point that was made which was we should design for behavior instead of designing for information. The ways users are interfacing with information are distributed across platforms and devices. We should be looking at the behavior in each context.

When a music artist wants the audience to “go nuts” they “drop the bass”. This is a universal message that invites the audience to participate. You can hear this principle in much of the music played during warmups at sporting events. A lot of dance music will make heavy use of this idea as well. As designers we should “drop the bass” in our systems. No, we should not incorporate Dubstep into our designs, we should invite users to use our software. We can do this through emphasis, colors, and simplicity.

The merger of structural thinking and visual aesthetics is very important. We need to give content form and order. There is currently a convergence of physical spaces and screen spaces. A convergence of physical and electronic devices. We should start designing using good design principles and stop just putting the logo in the upper left.

Other design disciplines can teach us a lot. Industrial and Automotive design can teach us about feedback, the prioritization of information and sightless interaction. Landscape architecture can teach us about designing for space, considering flow and managing multiple user interactions. These are very important as we bridge the physical and the virtual. We can use these ideas to develop a consistent design experience that transcends interface options.

The way we store masses of information has changed the way we think and process. The way we use all of this input and store it outside of ourselves is a phenomenal change and we are only scratching the surface of its implications. We need to consider this change as we design a UI. Users today simply interact with applications differently than they did 5, 10 or 20 years ago. We will not be going back so we need to look forward.

We need to think from a systems perspective. We can learn a lot from systems that work (subways, ecosystems, beehives). We should not try to reproduce the same experience on different devices. We should make the experience make sense in the context of the use. This context changes between travel, home and work. There is a progression of interactions that is changing over time (keyboard/mouse > touch/voice > gestures/eye-gaze). These changes are additive, because we now use voice does not mean we stop using a touchpad or mouse.

Society keeps swinging between many devices and a singular multipurpose device. Not too long ago we all had phones, mp3 players, gps devices, etc. Now most adults have a smartphone and none of the rest. With the advent of the new physical devices (fitness tracker, smart watch, Google Glass) will these collapse into a singular device or will they have enough value on their own to persist?

Reverse mentoring can be powerful. Today, youth are coming in with skills and understanding that surpass those with experience in some very critical and narrow areas. Much like teachers had to move from being the knowledge experts in schools to guiding exploration by students we need to empower young coworkers to share what comes so natural to them. We need to adopt that role of guide to help them where they need it (most functional aspects of life), and not be threatened by their skills.

All developers should be concerned with the user experience. This is not the domain of an isolated team member. There is a shortage of designers so companies tend to use their design capacity for product execution and forget ideation and product definition. A good UX designer becomes a conductor and leader for the team. It is very easy for a team to get off the “good” path.

A Misunderstood OS

I have read a number of articles about Chromebooks, the new Pixel, and some of the implications of Google going up against Apple and Microsoft directly. I think there is a very important paradigm shift that I have not seen discussed to date. It is well known that as a Windows or Mac based machine ages it gets slower. Malware and bloated software like Microsoft Office all contribute to this phenomenon. Chromebooks, on the other hand, will get faster and more feature rich over time.This is a really understated aspect of the Chrome OS, likely because marketing types in fancy suits decided it was too cerebral of a concept to communicate. Even the brand new Pixel page in the Play Store only alludes to it in this paragraph:

Like all Chromebooks, Pixel boots-up in seconds and stays fast, requires almost zero setup or maintenance, and comes with virus protection built-in. Best of all, it stays up to date with seamless updates every few weeks.

Lets look at the following three scenarios:

Tom needs a new laptop but does not want to spend a lot of money. He looks at what is available and settles on a $500 Windows 8 laptop at the local store.
Richard hits up the Apple store at the local mall, he needs a lightweight portable computer. He really likes the MacBook Pro but common sense wins out and he purchases an entry level Air for $999.
Harry needs a new machine as well. He uses mostly web based applications so he decides to give the $249 Samsung Chromebook a try.

We all know their experiences once they get home with these devices will be a little different. Windows is still a little frustrating to set up, Apple gets your credit card number immediately, and Google, well, you have to log in. Ok, that is a significant difference but not the point of this article.

Down the line 6-12 months is when the real difference will show. Over time, Microsoft and Apple’s operating systems get bigger, thicker and heavier. A machine purchased a year ago running last years OS X or Windows 7 will not run as quickly today on Mountain Lion or Win 8. This is simply a fact that has been true for decades.

Contrary to that, our Chromebook is faster and can do more that it could when we purchased it 6 months ago. There are certainly limitations. It is still not that polished editing things offline, file management is horrid, and niche apps are almost completely absent from the platform. In some ways it is really lacking.

What is exciting is that the list of negatives six months ago was 3X what it is now. This gives me the confidence that these other issues will be resolved also. The release of the Pixel as a high end computing device will require these remaining limitations to be addressed as well. The crowd that will spend $1300 on a cloud based computer will not put up with an incomplete device for long.

All this to say that I think my Chromebook will be more productive a year from now than it is today. NO OTHER PLATFORM CAN MAKE THAT CLAIM. This truth alone should make a difference for anyone buying a new computer. If you use a preponderance of online applications and very few monolithic programs I think the Chromebook is a compelling choice.

Interestingly one of the biggest reasons holding people back is a lack of understanding of this OS. Google has done a poor job communicating just how different it is. As writers continue to focus on processors, memory, storage size and other legacy PC issues, it misses the real value of the OS altogether. For example everyone is scoffing at the Pixel having 32GB of storage while providing 1TB of Google Drive space. As I have seen with my 16GB device, this is plenty of space. Writers also tend to try to pit Chrome against traditional PCs feature for feature. They are apples and oranges and not comparable in this way at all.

I am looking forward to when the mainstream media will begin to recognize this very real difference and the obsolescence protection provided by a very thin, constantly upgraded OS. One thing is for sure,Windows 8 and OS X will need to go on a serious diet to compete in the future.

I love this Chromebook

Ok, first off, a mea culpa. I have thumbed my nose at the Chromebook since its launch. I thought it was pointless considering how Android was launching its tablet OS (4.0 Honeycomb) and my Asus Transformer had a detachable keyboard, 15 hours of battery life, and a touchscreen. I thought the Chromebook was silly and would die a similar death as other products that arise at Google. This did not come true. Currently Chromebooks are being manufactured by Samsung, Lenovo, HP, and Acer.

I could jump all over in this article so I will keep myself focused with the following list. It also allows people to jump around and read only what interests them (I love when authors do that and save my time). I plan to cover the following points:

Google still made a mistake.
Let’s give a nod to the inventor of the idea, Mr. Jeff Hawkins.
Does this mean that Windows RT has a future?
Is the future of computing disposable and temporary devices?

Google’s Mistake

The mistake is very simple. For some bizarre, unknown reason, Chrome works on an ARM processor Chromebook just like it does on Windows or OS X, but does not on Android. Getting Chrome to work well has been a labor of frustration on Android and it has only seemingly been pushed forward by Opera, Dolphin and Firefox driving them. There must be a political battle, competing agendas, or something within elGoog keeping sensibility out of the equation. It appears to me that the Play store and the Chrome web store could have been merged over a year ago. We could be running the full Chrome browser as an option on our tablets or Phablets and the marketplace would be simple. “Chromebooks” could be more functional because they would have access to all the tablet apps, developers would be happier, customers would not be confused, and marketshare statistics would not be diluted. I don’t see any losses here. Lets hope this comes together soon. Jelly Bean is wonderful, Chrome OS is wonderful, it seems logical that the two should become one.

The Real Genius

Most people have no idea the Palm Foleo ever existed. Let’s rewind to May of 2007 when the Foleo was announced by Palm. You can read the initial information here. Remember, this device not only predates Chromebooks, it was what inspired the Netbook genre in the first place. It is really clear to me that this device was on target and it would have been wildly successful. All that can be easily tracked by looking at the sales numbers of Netbooks for the following few years. I am not going to add all the links here but I will provide a link to the search.

The device was killed by a lot of smart people who lacked vision. I would encourage you to read some of the articles. PC Magazine, Gartner, Tech blogs galore, all panned the device as a fool’s errand. Unfortunately for Palm, their leadership caved and abandoned the man who dreamed their company up in the first place. I bet they all regret that decision looking back, Palm is but a fading memory and with it many fortunes. This amazing device was instant-on, had long battery life, was inexpensive, synced docs and history with the cloud, had an app store, sound familiar?

The truth is that Jeff Hawkins is and was a genius. He gets it and understands how the human mind interfaces with the digital world in a way very few others have. The list of the device categories he has either invented or heavily driven are:

PDA’s
Smartphones
Tablets
Netbooks
Touch OS
App Stores
Probably a few others I am too slow to remember

The guy is possibly the single most influential thinker in mobile computing history. And he works in technology part-time to fund his real obsession, brain research! The shame is that he is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Gates, Jobs, Schmidt et al. He has innovated as much as anyone in the last 20 years.

The impact of Chromebooks on Windows RT

I cannot imagine that the words “Chromebook” crossed anyones lips when Microsoft was discussing their target market. Bear with me as I make the connection. iPads and Android tablets are simply pdas/smartphones with really big screens. The devices and the OS they use spring from the “data bucket” concept. Their “orientation” is based on media consumption, not media production. Windows devices will always spring from a production mindset. Ingrained in the DNA of Microsoft is the utility of the computer. Creation of content has always been the focus of desktop and laptop computers running Windows, Linux, or OS X. Windows RT is a cloud focused, touch based representative of this ethos.

The Chromebook springs from the utility of the browser and web apps. Its premise is that all of life can exist in the cloud and production takes place in the browser. This is more akin to Windows RT than Android. I think I may have answered my own question I posed above. This may be why Chromebooks remain divergent from Android tablets. All the same I am irritated with Google for making my life complicated.

So with the connection made and the marketplace accepting the Chromebook, does that mean Windows RT has legs? I think it very well might but it remains to be seen whether Microsoft is really willing to bet its future on it. I believe if they do, they might have a chance to remain relevant. If they focus entirely on Windows 8 proper and its future brethren then I think they will devolve into obsolescence. Windows RT, in my estimation, is the only competitor that Chromebooks have. Only time will tell if Microsoft will place that bet.

Is the future of computing disposable and temporary devices?

Those of us that have been in the industry for a couple of decades understand the cyclical nature of technology. As I have written before, this is often in response to the same physical constraints being hit time after time. For the computer to be disposable, all data must reside in the cloud and they must be very inexpensive. Currently we are on swings for both of those things to be true. We have not hit the bottom of the barrel in cost of devices, because we have not yet approached the raw materials + production costs. We are also on a swing for all data to be stored in the cloud.

When you look back at the past you can see the progression. Computing started in the mainframe, moved to pc’s, swung back to client/server, moved to web devices, and now is moving to the cloud. The next step will be driven by yet unknown pressures solved by unknown technologies. For at least a time we will see the value of computing become more intrinsic to our lives but cost us less money, heartache and worry. A nice time to be using computers.

This article was written, researched and published on a Samsung Chromebook. I could have done this on a Surface RTjust as easily. This Chromebook is a great tool that I do not have to worry about compared to my top of the lineZenbook. For a day’s work it functions just as well. THAT is amazing.