Lars Pind

Bugger. I was going to sign up for listen.com, because it sounds like just the right thing, but they’re not available outside the US. :-(

I normally don’t read any books in Danish, because the chance that the best book on a topic happens to be in English is much greater than the probability that it should be in Danish. Although that’s true most of the time, there is an obvious exception. One is if the book happens to be about Denmark in some way. In that case, it’s more likely that the book also be written in Danish.

But sometimes, a book just happens to fall out to the less probable side: The greatest book on a topic actually happens to be in Danish.

Ole Grünbaum’s Tekno-fetichismen (I trust you non-Danish speakers out there can grok what the title means in English) is such a book.

What it says is something this: We tend to chase technology for technology’s sake, forgetting that it should be driven by humans. We envision an “information society” or a “network society” that we have to hang on to, or catch up to, or connect every citizen to. But then we tend to forget that a network society is not a network of computers, it’s a network of people. It’s all about people. Why do we keep forgetting that?

When you summarize it like that, it sounds banal. It’s not. It’s insightful. He punctures myth after myth, and even though I consciouly try to always be people-driven, always needs-driven in my approach to technology, I make mistakes, too. It just happens, it’s so deceptive.

And the reason it’s so deceptive is that information technology plays to a very basic emotion, a very fundamental trend in our world: The movement towards individualization. Individualization in the positive, constructive sense. That each individual focuses on, and is free to, shape his own life, get the most out of who he or she is. The individual is in control in his or her own life. And that’s the way it should be. Who else should be in control?

This has been a long, slow movement, putting individual before society. But not instead of. People need each other, they always will. So there’ll always be a society, many societies. But societies should serve the individuals. What else are they good for?

This change is sweeping through all areas of life, education, work, love life, family. And the personal computer and the internet are both results of and catalysts for this movement. And that’s why we keep mistaking technology and the real trend. We experience how the personal computer and the internet empower us, and we like that. So we start liking the computer and the internet, and think that they’re responsible for this. And we think “if only we could get more computers and internet into our schools, we students would be more empowered.”

But that’s precisely missing the point. You can introduce new technology all you want, but if the institution is not willing to change, it’s going to go nowhere. Or at least not where you wanted it to go. It’s people, dammit.

During the past two days, I’ve had two opportunities to experience the pain that normal people experience when using normal computers. A couple of friends, both with higher degrees of education, had had a virus attack on their PC. The reason they found out was that they’d accidentally installed a virus program by clicking on some banner, and now it’d pop up once a day and tell them they had a virus. Now what? It didn’t offer to remove the virus. And they weren’t sure what was going on in the first place, or what to do about it. Not surprisingly. I tried installing another anti-virus program, but then it complained that it wouldn’t install until you uninstalled a third anti-virus program. Sigh. “Take it to the doctor!” How are normal people to figure out this mess?

The other story was my Mom, who’s using Fastmail over IMAP. She was over quota, which fastmail kindly told her about. So she deleted some mail in Outlook, she even archived some of her email when Outlook asked her. But it didn’t help. Outlook’s archive feature only touches the hard disk, not the mails stored on Fastmail’s servers. It’s not easy to figure out what to do, unless you have a computer scientist son to ask. Even though my Mom’s been a programmer herself for 35 years, and she’s had her own 50-person software company. Still can’t use those damn computers.

When is this industry going to grow up? And do you really trust Microsoft to make computers more usable?

Nokia’s hit factory

One of his first steps was to drastically accelerate the expansion of R&D sites, while keeping the teams within them small. His reasoning is simple: The smothering influence of the home office can lead to tunnel vision. “If you just have R&D campuses around headquarters, you might become what we call ‘home blind,’” Neuvo says. “You need to have your finger in the wind in many places” to fuel the imagination. Colleagues say he used his international academic connections like an intelligence network to cherry-pick acquisitions ranging from hot startups to R&D sites that other companies had put on the block, as well as to identify rising young talent.

...

But Neuvo’s crucial achievement was to infuse his burgeoning operation with a hacker spirit, to make his staff, as he puts it, “challenge and not shrink from making mistakes.”

Sour notes:

If the industry were smart, it would seize this moment. Instead of trying to hack its customers, it would seduce them with a pitch that goes like this: Getting free music is a dodgy affair—pay us a little bit, and we’ll give you a Napster-like free-for-all.

It wasn’t until recently that I heard about how the sounds that a car says when the door closes is carefully design by sound design artists. This morning I heard how they also consciously design the smell of a new car, to make it smell just right. Of course! Everybody knows and appreciate the smell of a new car. It’s probably a powerful factor in the purchase decision.

ASP.NET for Apache ... unfortunately, it only runs on Windows.