Software is just software again

What I love about this period in technology is the purity that software has regained after two decades of it being smothered by a culture of maintenance and services.

When I first saw a computer program running as a kid, what blew me away was the magical simplicity of what I saw. The ability to do something remarkable that had never been done before, and all you had to do was type RUN and hit the Enter key and just marvel at it.

Then after a while, flip-chart toting management consultants discovered the software industry and cunningly conceived of a dozen ways to extract the maximum amount of money from software users and basically fucked everything up with maintenance contracts modelled on underworld protection rackets - "keep paying us money, and Brian here won't smash the place up" - and long term implementation projects.  

I used to secretly suspect that I was simpleton because my eyes glazed over whenever I saw software that wasn't instantly gratifying and needed a team of consultants and three hours to explain its many virtues to me. Now I realise the problem didn't lie with me. It's just that I missed software.

In fact I imagine in the future, that the period between 1985 and 2010 will be looked upon as some kind of Dark Ages for software, when its early wings were clipped and it was promptly enslaved by the last shift of 20th century industrial complex.

But now software just software once again; born again on the shoulders of clinically disintermediating app stores and the web. Recapturing the power and magical simplicity it always had.

Long live software.

Relativity

Whenever I upgrade stuff, at first I'm blown away by the new and usually bigger or better thing. Usually, though, after a while you gradually forget what life was like before the upgrade and your perceptions and expectations normalize around the new thing.

Coming up on seven years ago we upgraded from a seven year old, 32 inch CRT television to new 40 inch LCD which at the time if felt like a huge upgrade and I couldn't imagine needing or wanting a bigger TV. Back in 2005 they pretty much didn't make them any bigger than 40". However these days 40" is probably the entry level size for a living room TV.

I tricked my wife into needing my iPhone 3GS when I upgraded to the iPhone 4 in 2010. Again, I remember the shift to the new high resolution display was stunning for a few days, then gradually you get used to it. It's only whenever I'm messing with the old 3GS - usually trying to fix some FUBAR'd up iCloud contact sync issue - that I'm reminded of how bad the 3GS display looks. Back in 2009 it looked fine, today it just looks like shit.

What's also interesting, sitting at a macro level above all this, is how used we've become to this phenomena, how we simply expect things to be replaced or fall redundant after a relatively short space of time - at least relative to the pace of change ten or more years ago. In a sense it's like we're living in a modern renaissance where we expect nothing short of revolutionary improvements in either service, material integrity or capability every few months. Our collective expectations have become re-normalized. 

And if product lifecycles continue to be compressed in this way, I wonder if we'll eventually lose our upgrade sensitivity, whether we'll cease to be bothered about the next ground breaking improvement. And if this will then bring our new renaissance to a close, to be followed by a long dark wilderness of homogenized banality where, ironically, we'll be living the equivalent of a latter-day 1974 all over again, only this time without all the sci-fi ambition that led us to this present era.

Um....

Shifting perceptions

It's funny how perceptions evolve.

At this precise moment it's still considered a bit odd for an ordinary, regular business to have a Facebook Fan page. Just it was considered a bit odd back in 1994 for an ordinary, regular business to have it's own website.

On Tuesday, after falling out with BT on account them demonstrating to me just how good a job they can do when it comes to delivering bad customer service, I asked Twitter to recommend an alternative. The @BTCare account noticed and offered to help, but I declined, calculating that it was a hollow gesture and I'd wasted enough time trying to count the ways they had failed me to four individual BT representatives to no avail.

Then yesterday my mobile rang and it was a very apologetic woman from BT, informing me that they'd reviewed my case, were gobsmacked at how they'd messed me around, apologised profusely and totally resolved my complaint. So, now I'm not cancelling my account.

At first I thought, possibly naively, that my expressions of profound displeasure over four phone calls had somehow meant my case had been flagged for review. Then I concluded that the @BTCare account might have escalated it after spotting my tweet.

Besides being pleased with my final if belated resolution, my instinctive initial response was that it was sad that it's only the people who complain on Twitter who bounce organisations into fixing things out of fear of public shame.

Then I changed my mind.

Large organisational hierarchies and the people in them passively conspire against taking and correctly processing negative feedback. They don't mean to ignore your protests, in many cases the individuals are mostly helpless and even if you do have the time and motivation to sit down and write a letter of complaint - which, frankly, most people don't - the point is often moot by the time acknowledgement of liability arrives. It's easier just to cancel your account and walk away in disgust.

But real time complaints on Twitter provide these organisations with a final chance at saving the day and overcoming their organisational dysfunctions. In that sense it's not actually the case that they are being publicly or pathetically shamed into finally doing something they should have done sooner.

Twitter customer care isn't about moving quickly to silence noisy complainers to protect the brand (however desirable a parallel by-product that may be), it's actually a critical, last chance to finally save an organisation from itself.

Portrait of an axe murderer

In the olden days - like, before 1994 - whenever members of the public had the misfortune of appearing on the news - usually on account of being either of the participants in a murder or some other crime or misdemeanour - the photos were often scrappy, Polaroid-esque shots that looked like they were taken at a dimly lit Fondue party one night in 1978 and which had since been used exclusively as coasters for overfilled coffee cups.

In somewhat stark contrast with n-megapixel, perfectly posed Facebook avatar shots that only show our best, most pouty-est, pensive sides. Or, if you're not the pouty, pensive sort; the crazy beer swilling, crazy axe-murderer psychopath side.

Just because we all own an average of 8.4* cameras each, 36%** of which are with us at all times.

So, now when you have the misfortune of having your head lopped off by some angry miscreant, the news watching public now get to see your moody posed pre-decapitated self and not your grainy 1978 Fondue party self. Which I suppose is sort of interesting. At least in an aesthetic, production value sense.

But not half as interesting as the poor sap who gets wrongly fingered for the crime but whose only Facebook avatar the press ever run is the crazy axe-murderer out-on-the-town shot he pulled as a joke for his mates for three seconds one Saturday night in 2008.

* I made this up, but it's probably true.

** Same.

Reverse Gamification

I'm bored with the Gamification meme. Someone should start a counter-meme promoting, in the same faux-professorial way, an emerging trend whereby videogames take on the mind-numbingly boring attributes of most enterprise software applications.

From this day forth, let ERPification flourish and influence game designers the world over to create games with overcomplex UI models and shit value for money.