Josh's Thoughts

I was just catching up on my recorded Office episodes when I saw something that I thought I’d never see… a commercial for Quaker’s Life Cereal featuring an interracial family. Asian father, Caucasian mother and a bunch of little mixed kids. It’s awesome to see an interracial family on tv, but it’s sad that it happens so infrequently that I noticed it.

FYI – I’m part Korean.

My mom recently purchased a MacBook and was using Parallels to run Windows XP for some accounting software she needs for work. First, she ran into some issues printing from the Windows vm (which is somewhat problematic, but seems to be a solvable problem) then her HP OffficeJet 6310xi decided to crap out with all lights blinking and a power reset error. She freaked because it happened while she was in the middle of receiving an important fax.

I attempted to troubleshoot the problem using my favorite tool – Google along with the HP support site and online chat support. I found this thread on the HP support forum. The problem seems to be a known bug with no resolution other than to take the printer in for servicing or buy a new one.

My mom then purchased a new HP printer which was broken right out of the box confirmed after an hour long call to HP support. She then, against my advice, purchased yet another HP printer from a helpful sales associate at Staples who told her that HP printers suck and that HP seems to be spending so much effort marketing their PCs that they’ve all but forgotten their printers. – (Note to HP: You know it’s bad when your resellers think you suck.)

The third printer came with a very interesting installer that kept telling her that the device she was attempting to install was not supported by the installer. Without being able to access HP support for Macs because they aren’t available for chat or after 4pm mountain time on Saturdays, she went ahead downloaded a late stage beta installer for Mac OSX Leopard from the HP support site and tried running it with the exact same result.

All of this madness happened over the course of 4 days.

Now I know that through some research and more time spent with support my mom probably could have found a resolution to her problems (maybe some of them were even “user error” related), but the past three days were enough to push her to the point of tears. Let me say that again for any HP people who might stumble on this post – SHE ALMOST CRIED because of these issues.

To me, my mom represents the most typical, but largely ignored, user. She uses a computer for work, email and accessing the Web. It’s a tool to get the job done, and she only wants to think about it for the few hours a workday she spends in front of it. She is not technical and doesn’t want to be. She considers every minute she spends working for her computer, a minute of her life lost. It’s a shame when companies forget about these people. The total lack of empathy is amazing in this day and age. I won’t even get into how overly technical and impersonal their support site is. It looks like it was written by technical writers for a technical audience, not for the normal folks who buy HP printers at Best Buy, Staples, Costco, etc. It makes me sad.

Since HP doesn’t seem to care about it’s users, they’re on my shitlist. I wouldn’t mind if someone, maybe a whole department, lost their jobs at HP because of their lack of concern for their customers. It would be even nicer to see their stock price drop along with tears and gnashing of teeth on a biblical proportion. Done.

Looks like Apple has filed a patent for a “Dynamically Controlled Keyboard“. This is particularly interesting to me because in the summer of 2004 two friends (James and Felix) and I filed for a provisional patent based on the exact same idea. I emailed James tonight to get the exact dates and reference number for the provisional patent in order to verify what I’m writing now, but I couldn’t wait for him to reply before writing this post. I’ll write a follow up once I get his reply.

Anyway, the story goes…We were on our second pitcher at the UCI pub (back then I was living in Newport Beach, CA) talking about interface design when the idea struck to create a keyboard that would provide visual cues based on functionality available to an application at any given moment. Thoughts of the old plastic templates people use to lay over their keyboards for programs like Wordperfect came to mind along with visions of the Korean professional Starcraft gamers I watched on tv when I was in Seoul. James and Felix dug the idea, both had experience filing patents, so we went for it.

To make a long story short, we didn’t follow through for a couple of reasons. We were all very busy at the time, starting a business manufacturing/marketing keyboards and related software (first application was probably going to be a “How to type” game for kids) wasn’t optimal, and, honestly, I lagged a little and caused us to lose motivation. It’s kind of a shame we didn’t see it through. I can imagine James’ reply to my email with a big “I told you so” in it.

The biggest tragedy isn’t that Apple filed the patent, it’s that I still haven’t had the chance to work on something cool with James and Felix. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Apple comes up with for this keyboard of theirs. Maybe one day we’ll really have dynamically controlled, context aware computer interfaces and I won’t have to keep showing my mom how to use shortcut keys.

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a voracious reader (much better reader than I am writer or speller btw). I read as much as I possibly can for work and for pleasure. I probably spend nearly a thousand dollars a year on books, the most expensive of which are books related to technology and design (recently dropped $75 on a human factors book that I probably won’t get to for another couple of weeks).

The interesting thing is that I can’t remember ever seeing a book on web product management. There are tons of books on user experience design, hci, usability, design best practices, software and web project management, and development. I own a bunch of them enjoyed most of them (you’ll be able to check out my favorites on my reading list if I ever get the time to update it), but have never seen one related to what I’ve spent over half of my career doing – web product management and community development. In fact, with all of the web 2.0 hype, I’ve never even seen a book on social media and online community management (there are some books about blogging and I think I even saw one on citizen journalism once). Maybe it’s because I haven’t looked hard enough or that I’m looking in all of the wrong places. Another theory I have is that product managers aren’t interested in writing books because they’re so damn paranoid about their success. You’ll notice that designers and developers write quite a bit, developers probably the most of all, especially if you include open source code. They don’t seem to be protective of their knowledge because they know their true value is in their ability to build/create.

Product managers, on the other hand, rely heavily on others to build/create/maintain their products. It could be that they (we) fear that once the secrets of their success are published anyone will be able to do the job. There’s probably more to it than that, like trade secrets, the possibility of being sued, no time to write, and complete inability to explain success or failure. The statement, “I don’t know why it worked, but it did” comes to mind.

I’d appreciate comments and thoughts on this matter. I know I’d buy a book on web product management if one existed. I’d even try to write one given the opportunity.

The title of this post says it all. When I started this blog I thought I’d be able to find the time to say something interesting. I have the time, but realized that I have nothing interesting to say.In the meantime, so you can get to know me better. Things that piss me off in no particular order:

• Humidity above 20 percent
• My inability to get a good haircut
• The RIAA even though they’re now saying ripping CD’s for personal use is still ok
• Professional politicians
• MTV
• Most ad agencies
• US Air