You’d have thought, over the years, given the abysmal failure of Don’t Copy That 2, the patronising You Wouldn’t Steal A Car adverts and Neil Kinnock’s “well alright!” speech at the Sheffield rally in 1992, suits would have given up trying to “engage” with patronisingly-stereotyped “young people.”
You’d also be wrong. The latest attempt (as reported by El Reg) comes from cybersecurity firm Symantec, “collaborating” with Snoop Dogg to launch a competition to find the best rap about Internet security and cybercrime.
Using the thoroughly “down wiv da kidz” title of HackIsWack.com, it offers a prize consisting of “2 tickets to Snoop concert, meet his mgmt/agent, Toshiba laptop” (their formatting, not mine) and says that entries will be judged based on originality, creativity and message.
Unsurprisingly, El Reg is unimpressed. Neither is anyone else.
I can’t help but think that this is an attempt by Symantec to try to stay relevant in the consumer security market, where the growth of free solutions such as AVG Anti-Virus and Microsoft Security Essentials (along with more robust security built into Windows itself) means the only reason you’d buy Norton AntiVirus is if you’re misinformed, or an idiot. This could well be part of the strategy that’s led to the recent proliferation of the awful Norton Security Scan… but that’s another story.
Apple co-founder and prolific turtleneck wearer Steve Jobs once said that computers are like a bicycle for the mind.
I like this analogy, but given a number of recent events, I’m doubtful of its truthfulness.
See, since the start of this year, we’ve had the introduction of the iPad (or Jobsian Fondle-Slab to readers of El Reg) which, in my opinion, fits more closely with the concept of a bicycle than a PC ever will. This also applies to the majority of single- or only multi-purpose devices out there: smartphones, e-readers, music players, etc. All of these have something in common: an idiot could use one.
At present, my analogy’s probably making very little sense, so here’s a simple thought problem.
A bicycle is a very simple machine: you sit on it, turn the pedals, and you move. Steer with the handlebars, brake with the… brakes. A man who’s never ridden a bicycle in his life could easily walk up to one, and in a very short space of time be scooting around like there’s no tomorrow.
Image courtesy of Phil Sangwell on Flickr, modified under licence
As a contrast, let’s compare this with, say, an inter-city train. With an inter-city train, the principles are virtually identical: you get on, tell it how much power you want from the power cars, and apply the brakes when coming to a stop.
However, of course, I, having never driven a train of any form, could almost certainly not saunter up to the cab of the 4:15 from Waterloo and drive it to its destination. The first reason for this is, of course, is that I’ve never been inside the cab of an inter-city train before, and would not know what buttons or levers to use when and where. In short, I’m incapable of driving an inter-city train.
There is, however, a more pressing reason: would you get on a train if I were the driver? With no prior training, I could, in all fairness, probably work out and memorise how to do a few simple tasks (accelerate, sound the horn, etc.) The fact I c0uld do this, however, does not qualify me as a train driver.
This bears a parallel with computing for the reasons I’ve outlined above: firstly, the majority of the time, computers, in their present form, are simply too complex for an inexperienced user to “get” without extensive training. And, let’s be brutally honest, people aren’t willing to undergo extensive training when they’ve been told their computer will “just work”: they will, instead, memorise how to perform a few tasks (or demand a crib sheet.) And, of course, this then falls apart when something goes horribly wrong, or even a planned upgrade takes place and something moves: the user simply has no way of knowing how to handle it.
My second point is that inexperienced users are made gullible and dangerous by their inexperience: this is made obvious by the fact people still install “free” smiley programs, still fall for scareware attacks, and still fall for over-the-phone malware scams. This is what happens when a person uses a computer without understanding it.
But again, we then come to the problem of training: if a computer is like a “bicycle for the mind”, why should the user have to spend a significant amount of their lifetime learning to use the thing? After expenditure of what’s now regularly in excess of a thousand pounds on a new computer, they expect it to “just work”, which it never does. This isn’t an OS- or manufacturer-specific problem: even if a car is very convenient, it’s still easy to reject learning to drive on the rhetoric of, “why bother when I can just take the bus?”
This is where the iPad, and the myriad of inferior and superior devices that will invariably follow, will find their niche. In some cases, it already has: consider centenarian Virginia Campbell, who purchased her first computer – an iPad – earlier this year and received half a million YouTube views in the process.
Of course, I’m not saying PCs are going to become redundant: they’re still exceptionally useful and powerful multi-purpose machines that can do practically anything you tell them to (within reason.) I’m definitely not planning on chucking out my PC in favour of an iPad: in fact, I’m planning on ordering a new laptop within the next few months. However, el Jobso said it himself best at D8 this year:
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.
In two words, he’s right.
PCs are great, but most people simply don’t need them: now that there’s a new class of alternative devices that can do the same things, but hassle-free, people will inevitably begin moving to them. And yes, it’ll be uncomfortable for those of us who have invested a significant portion of our lives in learning how to tame PCs. It will be even more uncomfortable for software freedom advocates: even discounting the RMS-style FSF “freetards,” the walled-garden approach of Apple, Amazon, Motorola et al makes many uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable as it is, though, we’ll get used to it. Eventually.
Or Richard Stallman will suicide bomb Apple’s HQ in Cupertino.
As I speak, Steve Jong-Il Jobs has just departed the stage at WWDC in San Francisco, having just unveiled the next iteration of the iPhone to a crowd of squealing fanboys who were so busy pumping their incoherent babblings onto the Internet they actually brought the leviathan Wi-Fi network screeching to a halt, forcing Jobs to ask people to actually turn their laptops’ wi-fi off while he finished the demo.
The new phone has a number of features – apart from a new, slimmer, more squarish (and, in my opinion, more handsome) design which should be familiar to any regular Gizmodo reader, a new camera with a flash, and an absurdly-christened “retina display” with a 960×640 resolution, the new “killer feature” is something called FaceTime.
Ostensibly, this is a video calling feature: unlike 3G video calls it seems to only work over Wi-Fi for now, and, technically, the implementation doesn’t look half bad. It should also help to silence critics who’ve “pah”d at the fact that previous iPhones have lagged behind other phones, which have been able to do this for year (my Skypephone, before it died, could handle video calls – after a fashion, since there was no forward-facing camera).
I’d be willing to argue, however, that no-one will use it anyway. True, it’ll see a minor explosion in use for a little while, but then it’ll fall back to its core usage: people who communicate through sign language, and grandmothers who want to see their little cherubs’ faces when they speak to them.
My rationale is as follows. Firstly, video calling is far more inconvenient than conventional phone calls.
With my current non-smartphone, to place a call I dial the number (or select a contact) and press the phone to my ear, and talk when the other end answers. On the iPhone, this is a largely similar affair – hit “phone”, select contact or dial number, put phone to ear, wait for other end to answer.
With video calling, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, you have to activate FaceTime while the phone’s still ringing. Then, before the other person answers, you have to hold the phone up, in front of your face, so that you can see the screen reasonably well and the camera can see you. It’s generally here that you realise you look like a drunken elephant, and quietly deactivate the video call part.
Credit to Apple, this does seem to be a little better than the status quo: now, it seems, if the video (carried by WiFi) goes, the audio will stay put. However, it doesn’t tackle the critical issue that I need to hold the phone a foot or so away from my face for it to work properly: until Apple invents some kind of anti-gravity technology to make it hover alongside me as I walk down the street, I can’t see this problem going away. (Besides, I can’t imagine doing that in public: it’d make you look like a complete and utter fool.)
Second, there’s another very good reason why video chatting hasn’t caught on already: most people like the privacy. I can’t imagine, for instance, anyone wanting to answer phone in Facetime if they’ve just come out of the shower, or if it’s four in the morning and they’re desperately trying to hide the other person in the bed when the husband calls. And this is before we even begin to account for facial expressions or other potentially embarrassing gaffes.
So, I suppose it’s good Apple’s finally implemented it (and I’ll know if they’ve implemented it well when I’ve seen it.) However, I don’t imagine it’ll see much use at all.
