I was the first person to see Star Wars

Well maybe not the first in the world, but I did see it at the Edmonton Meadowlark Cinema theatre in 1977, the day it opened, and I can tell you, there weren't many people at the theatre.

My Dad's worked at CFRN, Edmonton's CTV affiliate, where film reviewer George Kelso told him I might like to see this new movie - kind of a space cowboys movie, he called it, after seeing the review screening the day before.  George knew I was a science-fiction nut, and having just returned from a three-month trip through Israel and Europe, I had some free time while I looked for a summer job before going to UBC the next fall.

Meadowlark's Cinerama theatre was my favourite movie location. Opened in 1969 with Krakatoa East of Java, it went on to play movies that were highly influential in my film appreciation.  The legendary print of 2001:A Space Odyssey in 70mm with the first magnetic sound strip in production was a huge event. 2001 also set the bar for state of the art optical effects and highly detailed models, a standard I though was unassailable until Star Wars took it to the next level.

And I knew about what it took to create special effects in movies - somehow it was an ongoing source of fascination to me, and also it seems to my cousin Stu Bass, who has gone on to edit numerous TV shows. Optical printers, travelling mattes, all that stuff came from perusing Dad's books on special effects. So after seeing the crawl and the tilt down to the planets, I thought that after almost ten years, the effects were not going to be much better than what Kubrick could do in 1968.

Until I saw the star destroyer. It was pretty clear right then that Industrial Light and Magic had done something only dreamed about in film production - a motion controlled camera that could repeatedly reproduce the same sequence of moves. Motion control is key to photographing miniatures, where the camera usually is the one that moves around the model, and in a way to be able to later blend background, foregrounds, and multiple objects in the frame from the correct camera position.

Now, almost 40 years later, we have tickets to go see Episode VII. Little did the 19-year old me imagine I'd be going to a new Star Wars movie with my wife and son 40 years from then.

Some things are sweet on every level.

May the Force be with you.

Another brick falls from the Apple facade

At one time, Apple prided itself on not having focus groups, of not listening to what customers said they wanted.

That was the Steve Jobs way.

Steve was not driven by market data. Steve just designed the things he thought the world needed, and that he would love to use, then made an organization that he drove very hard to create and ship them. Those of us who happened to also like those same qualities of fine workmanship and ease-of-use, also bought the products and were very grateful for having tangible things in our lives of that quality. Unlike most CEOs, you could sense that Steve used almost every feature of every product that Apple made. When its design fell short, that's when the difference between Apple and every other tech company became crystal clear:

If Steve didn't personally love his experience of using an Apple product, he made sure it didn't ship until it did. 

No other computer company had the unified vision to drive to a integrated and seamless user experience. There are, and have been, designers with as good taste as Steve, with the ability to articulate and lead a team to create that kind of user experience. But few of them succeed at bringing the entire product to market with that design integrity, and the reason is that the organizational structures prevents the kind of cross-organization head-bashing required to drive the compromises out of the product, and to drive the unity of the user experience forward as a corporate goal. (As I write this, after hearing from my friends who drive the electric coupe, it looks like Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be another exception - the driving experience of the Tesla is often exclaimed to be in that same manner, someone with the taste to know and articulate the quality they seek, and the power to demand the organization work together to achieve it).

Ironically, few CEOs care about their products enough to fight their own organization to achieve as uniformly great products as Apple did. Bill Gates may not have had Steve Jobs' taste, but from watching the many times he demo'd Windows it was very clear that every BSOD event was not the way he wanted it to work. It takes a maniac to drive an entire organization to attend to every excruciating detail that makes a great product. And the larger the organization the more personal energy it takes to keep the compromises from creeping in. It's tiring, as Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki remarked "Don't let the bozos grind you down."

In a few years, when the history books look back at the post-Jobs era at Apple with the benefit of more obvious hind-sight, they might begin with the new Apple TV - the first introduction of a new Apple product (not service, as many of those half fallen flat - remember MobileMe?) that sucks, and sucks in the exact manner that Steve worked tirelessly for many years to prevent.

JasonSnell reviews the new Apple TV and outlines the exact kinds of details that drive him crazy - the same kind of details that would have made Steve throw the thing across the room at the design meeting. and yell at the team about falling so short of the expectations of an Apple product. The examples Jason talks about are the exact kind of issues many of us in the user experience role face when we are the expected to be the lone voice of the customer in a large organization. A good example - having to enter a password multiple times, probably because the Apple TV software group, and the iTunes software group have competing requirements, and their VPs trying to meet their quarterly objectives don’t have someone demanding they overcome their small-minded group objectives to ensure the overall user experience doesn’t suck. The new Apple TV doesn't link to the iCloud keychain, so you have to enter passwords again. The iOS Remote App that made it so much easier to enter alphanumerics and used the touch screen as a remote - doesn't work with the new Apple TV. The iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad screen is the perfect remote for a new Apple TV, while the physical remote could have been just a stand-in for those folks who didn't have an iOS device in the house. Whether Steve thought the killer feature for moving Apple TV from a "hobby" to a product was Siri control, cross-channel search, or physical gestures, none of these is done as well from the new remote. To abandon the iOS Remote app is a tragic lack of vision - the one thing we had come to count on from Apple.

Steve used to do that for us. He was our user experience advocate, and used his influence and deep commitment to ease-of-use to force the organization into aligning itself to the user experience. Tim doesn’t seem to be as driven by it. Jony could - if he starts spending more time using the products than on how they look and how they are packaged.

Because in the end, that’s what makes a product so beloved. That someone cared as much about saving my time and frustration as much as Steve did, and overcame structure, titles, and organizational entropy to demand it. As someone who had the privilege to create a few small products that people told me they loved to use, I know that is the great gift Steve Jobs gave to us all.

iOS vs OS X - Doesn't Apple "Get It" Anymore?

I've often been puzzled and mystified by the adulation poured out on behalf of Steve Jobs. I mean, I admired Steve Jobs long before it was fashionable, as a product designer he had excellent taste, combined with the unusual skills for a product designer of being able to command the respect and resources to deliver that uncompromised vision to the market.

While current Apple executives tell us that Steve didn't want Apple to be run by the question, "What would Steve Do?" the cadre of us Steve-as-superlative-product-designer people think that sometimes they should.

Because Apple isn't designing good stuff for me anymore. That wasn't a problem when Steve was designing or at least vetting the products before they got to market. Apple was not run by focus groups, its products were what Steve loved to use, and those of us who shared his taste were satisfied, and it was good.

Don't get me wrong, I think Steve Jobs' narcissism led to great products, because they had to pass that critical filter. If Steve didn't love to use it, we wouldn't either.  And there are more things coming from Apple that I don't think Steve would have loved, and I certainly don't. Apple Music for one. iCloud for another.  Apple seems to struggle on all their cloud-based services, and I think it's because they lose focus on who it's for. It's for me.  My music has to be front and center in Apple Music, not U2 or Beats One. I'm supposed to be able to share my family's music. My iCloud photos are supposed to show up on my and my friends devices.

But these are quibbles. There is a much bigger piece missing from Apple's puzzle, one that without Steve, will not be obvious to the executive suite until we help show them.

It's time to bring together OS X and iOS, cause it's a mess.

Apple struggles with reduced iPad sales and scratches their heads as to why. Seems real simple to us. My iPhone is a fantastic device to handle phone calls, messages, email and apps.  But for the real work, I put my Macbook Pro on my lap and get to it.  The reason is simple:

No one creates serious content on an iOS device. Can't be done. We may knock off the quick email reply, or tweet a few bon mots, but it was designed to be a reader device. For Steve. And for a few million other folks.

The MacBook retains its role as the beautiful, speedy machine I work at. When we are in pro mode, it's Microsoft office, with multiple open Word files, and cutting and pasting with Excel. Or immersed in Adobe Creative Suite, sketching content, rendering animations, collecting an article. The Mac crept in to corporations under the arms of creative professionals, and we use Macs to do our work.

That's why the iPad Pro and Pencil are so misplaced.  While Jony Ives has done the regular masterful job on the weight, aesthetics and chamfers, and Eddy has packed the iPad Pro with sweet processing power and the Taptic Engine that smoothly fools me into thinking I cam being stroked by a cashmere cat on my iWatch, there is a fundamental problem with the iPad Pro that Apple has probably considered and rejected.  It's just the kind of big leap idea that made Steve so many friends and enemies, when the inevitable has to be faced, as he did moving the company from OS 9 to OS X, and from PowerPC to Intel.

It's this: The innovations that Apple is bringing to iOS are exceeding that of OS X, and the user experience is diverging.  This is very dangerous ground for a company that taught millions of people that they should care about user experience, and in fact it might be the most important thing to care about in technical products.

Consider this: Many creative pros use a stylus, and pressure sensitive tablets from Wacom are standard fare. But coordinating your hand on a table and your eye on the screen is tedious and unintuitive. But holding your hand in the air to draw on a vertical screen is tedious. So useful tablets are actually now displays, with a pressure-sensitive stylus (ala Cintiq). Doesn't this sound a lot like an iPad? Of course it does, and apps like Astropad serve to fill that gap that Apple has left.  But the iPad is lower resolution that a large screen iMac or MacBook Pro, and variable pressure is coarse compared to the pro tablets.

Until the iPad Pro.

Now there is sufficient CPU, memory, and screen resolution that the gap between the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro is closing. We want to use the power of that A9 processor, and the resolution of the new screen and Pencil, but want to use it on the full Adobe suite, not the "light" version for iPad.

The resolution to this problem is really simple and clear, just the kind of solution Steve loved. It's this: The iPad Pro should run OS X, iOS should be a sandbox on OS X (like dashboard), and Apple needs to merge the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch user experiences. The results? Adobe could run the full Creative Suite and users could design with Pencil. The decision developers have to make about whether they support an OS X app or an iOS app start to converge.

Will there be transition pain? Possibly, but far less than moving millions of users from OS 9 to OS X, or entire applications from PowerPC to Intel.

iOS in an OS X sandbox. Bring together Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Obvious. It's what the army of creative professionals who create on Mac are awaiting. It's what Steve would have done. And that was good enough for me.

Bye Jurgen

Many people know Jurgen Gothe from his 23-year stint on CBC Radio 2's DiskDrive.  I worked with him before that, when he was a relatively unknown programer and voice on CHQM-FM in the late 1970s.

℅ Vancouver Radio Museum - http://www3.telus.net/vanradiomuseum/home.html

CHQM was at the time the premiere Easy Listening station in Vancouver, and FM radio was still finding its feet with diverse and eclectic stations and listeners. Jurgen programmed the 9pm-midnight FM Opera segment on QM-FM every Sunday. Hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag to say that Jurgen was not actually in studio from 9pm to midnight every Sunday - that was me. A UBC student paid $4/hour in a quiet radio studio with a set of albums and a tape. The tape had Jurgen's mellifluous voice, describing the opera selected for that evening, and several voice segments to be played while I flipped the record over the other side (remember those - two sided records!). It was a great shift for a student, especially for someone inexperienced with Opera - After managing some technical stuff for a few minutes, I then had 20 minutes of unbroken listening through fantastic studio speakers, while I did some math homework.  Heard some good operas too.

CHQM was a great employer for me during my years at UBC. The operations director Terry Higgs, arranged one summer for everyone to take their holidays in sequence, with me filling in while they were away, giving me a chance to do lots of radio station jobs, from erasing and dubbing tapes, to recording and editing commercials, especially on their new Neve-equipped studio.

CBC long-timer David Grierson was also a CHQM grad before he moved to Vancouver Island. David handed the reins of his show Vancouver Live to me and to John Dritmanis where we carried on the tradition of recording new musicians performing and bringing them to a wider audience. 

Spock Down

Long of digit and of nose,

Aquiline,

A face for the dark villain

Redemption in transition

Karellen ears and upturned brow

Half an alien from planet and from cyril

On the struggling path to unity

A hand person

ancient blessing now a greeting

disabling with a pinch

caressing with the back of two fingers

outside looking in

deep sight unhindered

by coloured feelings

live long and prosper

for you are and shall always be our friend.

one to beam up

Eulogy for Esther Kauffman z"l

I've created a memorial site for my mother Esther Kauffman, including the eulogy I gave her and many pictures of her life with Dan and I.

Androids and Cyborgs and Robots, Oh My!

While listening to one of my favourite radio programs Spark, it occurred to me that even Nora, who is as well-versed in high tech as anyone, was not making clear distinctions between robots, androids, and cyborgs.  Now while that might not appear to make much difference in this crazy world, it has been a decades long study for me, as part of my pursuit to understand this question: "What is a person?"

You might think that that's a simple question. You're a person, I'm a person, most of the readers of this blog are people (other than the spiders and other web-crawlers which scan it looking for email addresses and keywords, but they are clearly not people, right?).  Personhood is a fundamental aspect of our world, one that arises whenever we talk about life and death, whether it is when personhood begins, or when it ends. It comes up because in a world of scarce resources, where people live and die, ending a life by another person's hand can be construed as compassion, or as murder.

In this blog, I'm not going to consider the personhood of you, your family or your friends. As if life isn't already complicated enough, we soon will face the question of non-human personhood, the arising of artificial intelligences both complex and rich enough in perception that we will bestow upon them the title of person.  And I fear that non-human persons are going to be very, very different from us.

But first, the definitions:

Robots are mechanically-produced machines that can accomplish either a narrow or wide range of tasks, but are distinguished by their lack of conciousness, and their need to be programmed to learn their tasks. Even though there are some fantastic examples of making it easier to program robots (see Rodney Brooks' Ted Talk) a robot is what we call a machine that can't think for itself.  A Roomba is nice example of a robot, and the ones that assemble cars, event when they do something much more creative than that.

Androids are humanoid-shaped mechanical (vs. biological) constructs that are machine-reproduced but have an AI core that is sufficiently advanced to pass the Turing test, i.e. another person would think they are a person too. Data of Star Trek:TNG is a prototypical android, as is David in Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and my most recent favourite android, Dorian in the Fox TV show Almost Human (Canadian link) (US Link).

Cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) are at the core, biologically reproduced people who have surgical enhancements that incorporate electrical and mechanical components integrated with their body and nerves. The Borg in Star Trek:TNG represent the cyborg well. Some might say that anyone with artificial limbs might be a cyborg, but I'd reserve that phrase for enhancements that have some electromechanical elements, and that provide the cyborg with greater capability than they had previously. Oscar Pistorius, the so-called Blade Runner, who won gold at the 2012 Paralympics is by this definition more a cyborg than say Terry Fox, since Terry's artificial leg was clearly an impairment compared to his biological leg, while Oscar's foot replacements were an enhancement. By logical extrapolation, and I'm sure this was a consideration in the debate as to whether he should have been allowed to compete, I predict that the Paralympics will grow into a showcase of enhanced prosthetics where the athletes will eventually break many of the records of the comparable Olympic athletes. One could argue that Canadian Steve Mann and anyone wearing Google Glass might be called a cyborg, but I would restrict the definition to people who cannot remove their cybernetic components without surgery, or a large amount of pain.

In my 35 year engineering career, I have always gravitated to the edges, the boundaries of things. From the edge you can see the whole field, and how one thing connects with another. When two things connect at their boundaries it is called an interface, and whether that interface has been between lego pieces, software libraries, or people interacting with software, I like to work at the interface, at the boundary.

The interesting boundary for this blog is the line between a robot and an android. Here's the thing: Don't be fooled by appearance. Many robot designers, especially in Japan where the effort to create a familiar-looking robot is the most active, are working hard to make robots look like androids. It's amazingly successful. It seems to only take a pair of large eyes that can blink to enable some nurturing people to want to take care of it, and only a hint of curves to make some people want to have sex with it. But developing feelings for a robot doesn't imbue it with the capacity to think or feel.

Still, many people will learn to love their home robots and ascribe to them behaviours and feelings that have all to do with the person's projections. That's not necessarily bad. If a home robot can sense agitation, move over to give a person a hug and tell them they're loved, that might be a pretty good robot, and has many good social contributions. But that alone doesn't make it alive, and it isn't doesn't make it a person.

In the next blog, I'll go more deeply into what a robot needs to become an android, and which the Cylons are.

iWatch is to Exercise Bands as iPod was to MP3 Players

There are many reasons to miss Steve Jobs, one of them being that he seemed to be able to cross all the boundaries of the groups at Apple to ensure the Apple HI team was empowered to achieve his ongoing vision of a unified, seamless, and sometimes pleasantly-surprising user experience. Jony Ive's new iOS7 may have expunged the skeumorphisms of his predecessor, but it's got a few more iterations to go before it unifies a look that isn't either jarring or derivative - like the "lickable" icons of the original OS X.

Even more though, is that despite Phil Schiller's practiced spontaneous line "Can't innovate any more, my a--," Apple actually doesn't seem to be able to innovate anymore, or at least hasn't shown it since Steve passed. The Mac Pro is a revision for sure, but it's actually very much like a resurrected G4 cube - central chimney, cool enclosure, choice design over utility for the pro market.

The two awaited game-changers that Apple is expected to unleash are the Apple Watch and the Apple TV. Steve alluded to the TV watching experience and how he had "nailed it" but leaving us poor readers with only a glimpse into the idea that the interface was key to a better tv surfing.  I'm willing to believe that a gesture-based TV interface will far surpass the frustrating query-and-answer most of us face with our infernal so-called universal remotes. Apple's recent announcement of the acquisition of PrimeSense may be another step along this path, accepting that a gesture-based user interaction might need a partner technology. Still like the iPod and its sister app, the iTunes store, an Apple TV device needs content to be as compelling as the interface to be the one-hdmi connected piece of hardware that Steve probably envisioned. I previously posted that the Apple TV could not be successful until it brought the mainstream cable through it and hence needed an f-connector, but those days are gone. The Jobsian-level Apple TV experience will be simply flicking through snippets of content as easily as we do the set-top boxes, but this time with all digital-streamed content, whether it is from NetFlix or any broadcast network. Negotiating this connectivity will have been far harder than convincing the music labels to put music on the iTunes store, a move they probably took in the glow of the Reality Distortion Field, when they should have used it as a bellwether to develop their own open online stores. As such, it may take a long time given the turmoil of the state of online networks and broadcast to bring the unified gesture-based Apple TV to market. In the mean time it will be far easier for Apple to produce an iWatch.

Just like Apple was not the first to market a mini-hd mp3 player, Apple was just watching when Pebble was Kickstarted. Now even Samsung has legitimized the market with their Note 3 SmartWatch. So when Apple finally emerges from the laboratory with the iWatch it will be curved, and a thing of beauty. And it will work really, really well with iPhone 5's, but not much else.  Don't expect a new App Store for iWatch though - apps will use notifications as they continue to be a growing part of iOS and a key part of the iWatch, as will Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) (vs. the competitive technology to Near Field Communication (NFC) with its awesome range of Blackberry and Microsoft handsets).

Unlike how the iPod took a major chunk out of the sales of MP3 devices like the Diamond Rio and Creative NOMAD, the iWatch won't wipe out the digital watch market. What it will take its toll on, are the exercise wristbands that occupy a large section of the wall at your local Apple store. Their features are not so unique as to justify their existence, except as the status symbol that tells people you want to be seen as someone who exercises enough to care about measuring it. Since an iWatch will  have the same motion sensing accelerometers as most other Apple devices, that capability will migrate.

And once that all happens, maybe this old guy can see a return to a practice long missed - seeing someone check their watch to see what time it is, rather than pull their phone out of the pocket. Just saying...

The Myth of Multitasking

As an engineering summer student, I had some fantastic summer jobs at Glenayre electronics in Vancouver, where 8-bit microprocessors were already changing how telecommunications systems worked. Part of my job was about learning to use, and debug, what were called multitasking operating systems. They had names like MPM and Kadak.  And there I found a secret.

There ain't no such thing as multitasking. All these system do is quickly jump from doing one small part of a task to to another small task, and because these things are so fast compared to we carbon-based life forms, if you squint your eyes a bit you can imagine they are doing those thing at the same time.

Wrong.

Why did developers of so-called multitasking operating systems do it this way? Why didn't they let the computer finish one thing before it started another, like the annoying construction foreman in Tonka Construction? I think it is because since people are so slow compared to computers, that the CPU might as well try to do something useful rather than wait for billions of nanoseconds while a human's fingers hover over a keyboard awaiting inspiration.

Making a computer change from one task to another is surprisingly easy. It's called a "context switch", and for a computer it is a simple, quick task. Most everything the actual CPU does is stored around it, in memory (RAM), or on the hard disk, or flash memory, things that don't change if you leave them alone, like the way you've spread papers around on your desk. The actual information a CPU has to "swap out" to change context is a few hundred bytes. That's because computers are not deep thinkers. They don't pore over ideas, and hold several in their little imaginations, and consider the technical or artistic merit of one over the other. They just move memory around, and compare, add and subtract numbers.

The illusion of multitasking only works if the amount of time you can spend on a task is far greater than the time it takes you to switch from one task to another. If you give a computer so many tasks that it spends all its time switching from one task to another instead of accomplishing anything, it might seem very busy, but it is accomplishing nothing.

Which leads to this obvious but important statement. You are not a computer. You are not as fast as a computer, and for you, a context switch takes anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, and requires millions of neurons.

If you think you are a multitasking machine, guess again. All you can do is switch your attention from one thing to another. Whichever thing you are paying attention to is swapped in, and nothing else is going to get that kind of attention.

Be human. Focus. 

Kodak's Self-Destruction, an Inside Story

I worked for Kodak for four years, but it wasn't by choice.

Kodak purchased a Vancouver company named Creo, as part of their vision to convert Kodak to a digital company before the roof caved in from falling film revenue. The strategy was sound. The execution - a disaster. There are three kinds of mistakes we saw as Creo-ites, mistakes that were an anthema to the values that the founders of Creo sought to avoid, and did so successfully, for the years that led to Creo's phenomenal growth and eventual move to a public company. While speculation runs amok in the popular press about Kodak’s demise, I can tell you what it looked like from the inside.

Kodak executives were not naive about the future of digital cameras, and indeed Kodak was in the best market position to bring out the “brownie” of digital cameras - the one that would have made Kodak the household name in point-and-shoot digital. What was lacking was not vision, but courage. Kodak management just could not bring themselves to take a terrific new camera to market, even though Kodak had the Brownie, Instamatic, and Starmite lines in their DNA. In the end they just could not muster the courage to actively end the reign of film themselves. The camera is dead - long live the camera! should have been the battle cry, but no executive vice-president was prepared to be the person perceived to be the reason for the demise of the film cash-cow. Instead, they handed it to Fuji to decimate the Kodak film business, instead of doing it themselves, and losing the market share of film and future digital cameras to their major competitor.

The second thing we learned about how badly things were in Kodak was the exposure to the incredibly large, self-perpetuating bureaucracy that took us from 4 layers between the CEO and staff to about 12. Executive VPs, VPs, executive assistants reflected the 1950’s model of a happy Kodak family living off 90% gross-margin film and loved by America. We watched competent professionals, who made rational arguments and economic decisions, replaced by Kodak company-bots who made a career out of squeezing the innovation out of one division, showing an increased profitability, then moving onto another group before the other collapsed. The kind of pyramid promotion scheme we had only seen in movies was being played out every day, and the shell-game players rewarded each other with promotions and bonuses. A very abrupt insight into American corporate politics, and a foreshadow of the inevitable time when the music stops and the carefully-planned moves of the survivors ensure their bonuses were safe.

Finally, the last element that destroyed Kodak is that they lost sight of who they are. Antonio tried to remake the company into a digital imaging force in the market, to prove that his ouster from HP was a mistake, but HP executed on the digital imaging strategy far more easily, with their purchase of Indigo, and their active self-cannibalization of the LaserJet by transferring energy to the DeskJet line, in a move that preserved their overall consumables strategy. Kodak was not a digital imaging company any more than it was a film imaging company. By losing sight of who they were, Kodak let the 1984 Olympics torch pass to Fuji, starting Fuji's American ascent at Kodak's expense. Kodak’s retired CMO Carl Gustin I think understood this: Kodak was the memories company. Kodak moments were the true American spirit behind the yellow boxes, not the chemically-treated plastic inside them. Kodak glimpsed that vision with the Gallery - at least the Kodak Gallery that could have been. Once again there was no lack of vision for Gallery, from the digital generation of marketing folk. One could imagine the thousands of images uploaded every minute worldwide, correlated by time and location for shared current events, like a tsunami or a rally; by location over time to build a retrospective of a famous landmark through the years. Instead, while YouTube recklessly let people upload anything without limit, the Gallery threatened users that their precious images would be deleted (deleted from their shoebox!) if they didn't buy stuff. The Kodak Gallery could have been the Story of America, shared, over time, instead of lost in shoe-boxes in the attics of the previous generation.

In the end, being stuck in the previous generation is what did Kodak in. Kodak dies an old man, friendless, having squandered his children’s inheritance on dreams of past glory, instead of investing in that same next generation, and treating digital as a tremendous new opportunity instead of an old threat to be managed.

RIP Kodak, and thanks for the company that invented continuous film, the Brownie camera, the Instamatic, and motion picture film that captured nuance and shadow to tell great stories.

Goodbye Steve, and the deepest of thanks

Steve Jobs brought together a wonderfully diverse set of skills and talents that, combined with some luck, gave him the power to change the world of technology. Those skills: Compassion, Courage, and Good Taste are a rare set, and the convergence of events that led him to create Apple were a syzygy we are not likely to see again in our lifetimes.

Thank you Steve, not for the products, but for the role model. Many of us have been encouraged in our quest to "Think Differerent" by your celebration of doing just that.

Compassion, awareness and peace, Steve. Love, Dave

The (Renewed) Tradition of Making Things

I'm still flying high from the great response and creativity we saw at Vancouver's first Mini Maker Faire on June 25, 26. My friend Tom created some nice metal & wooden stands for our various "less-than-an-hour-of-programming" Arduino demonstration projects.

- The Peak-a-Boo (less correctly called the "I Keeel You!" display) that had a picture of Jeff Dunham's Ahmed character poised to spin around at someone who approached too closely.

- TheRandom Color LEDerizer, which chooses one of 16 Million possible colors an RGB LED can create and used pulse-width modulation to fade it in and out.

- The Ultrasonic Theremin, which coupled a MaxSonar EZ1 sensor, and a Mac running Processing, to translate hand height to frequency.

Maker Faire is a coming-out party for creativity, for people who cross over the illusory creative/technical barrier.

Geeks abound, Athena rejoices.

The Speech That Would Have Won The Canadian Election for the Liberal Party

Here is the speech I would make if I were leader of the Liberal party of Canada. Here it is Mike, it's yours for free.

Canada is liberal. Canada is the Liberal Party.

For most of our 144 years as a nation, Canada has exemplified tolerance, open-ness, and a strong belief that since some of are more fortunate than others, we will choose to share some of what we have with those who do not, in the belief that since we are all more equal than not, helping our neighbour in times of misfortune has the natural consequence of them helping us if and when we should need it. And when it was required, we have gone to war to defend those beliefs.

That is what Canada represents. Our leading bookstore says it best; the World needs more Canada.

Canada is liberal. Canada is the Liberal Party. Centered between socialist and capitalist, centered between giving too much and giving not enough. Centered around ensuring banks can be profitable, but not irresponsible, with Canadians' money. Centered around ensuring Canadians have jobs, but not selling all our natural resources; wood, oil, and water, to the nation with the highest bid.

For most of our 144 years, Canadians have elected the party that represents these ideals. I don't believe that has changed. But we as the party representing Canada have fallen short. We lost the right to govern with integrity, so Canadians told us in the free and fair way we have the grace to live under, the Canadian electoral system.

We don't believe that Canadians want to live with a polarized, two-party system like we see south of the border. Polarized groups unable to listen to each other, poised to find fault rather than merit, to find error instead of possibility, to find division instead of unity.

Canadians want the Liberal party. They want us to be real. They want us to be strong. They want us to be honest. When we do these things, we will have earned the right to govern this amazing country with the balance and integrity Canadians want.

I am Canadian. I am a Liberal.

Welcome to the Smart Grid

I started work recently at a new company, ironically located just down the hill from the building Creo started in many years ago.

Tantalus is one of the small, fast-growing tech Vancouver companies working to make the smart grid real. Tantalus manufactures radio and software systems read electrical meters by radio. Well, that's half the story. Automated Meter Reading, or AMR, could be seen simply as a cost reduction exercise to reduce employment of the urban university students who jog between houses reading meters, or the more significant carbon footprint of driving trucks around rural areas to read meters of farm-houses. Tantalus' meters alone have saved an estimated 1,000,000 miles of truck travel in the U.S. in 2009. Part of the reason Tantalus' system does so well in these sparse rural regions is the nature of the radio systems they designed years ago, the uses both analog and digital techniques to create a network that allows meters to relay information from any other meter that they can reach by radio, extending the network reach by miles.

The other half of the story is that Tantalus' radio system is two-way. That turns out to be a great innovation because over the next few years, as the smart grid gets overlaid on top of the electrical grid, there will be as much communication going INTO homes and buildings as coming out of them. With radio-connected meters, utilities can have near real-time updates on the actual load on their entire system. We will see utilities imposing highly discriminated pricing regimes called time-of-use, to balance peak power demands to avoid the need to build new power plants. Customers already can sign up for connecting devices to plugs that only go on when power cost is low, or thermostats that can alter the temperature setting to save power to prevent brownouts. As one customer told me, eventually all customers will be on time-of-use, so we will want to have appliances that make good economic choices about when to use power and when not to.

Tantalus has some cool tech, some good basic science, and some good sales folk and customers. I'm glad to have ended up here and help them fuel their next stage growth.

The Lost Opportunities of the 2010 Winter Olympics

It's only a few days into what is going to seem an interminable period of mess and mayhem in Vancouver, but it seems time to open the discussion about the missed opportunities that could have made this event truly world-class, and one to be remembered and appreciated by British Columbians for many years to come.

Missed Opportunity #1 - Green Transport (Olympic Lanes)

It seems that anyone with a white or silver GMC truck or SUV that weighs over a ton can get a door sticker enabling them to sail through traffic in the "Olympic Lanes". Most of us have no problem knowing busses and service trucks can move the various Olympic-related goods and people around. When you look closely though you often see the same thing - large SUVs with one large driver. Sometimes on their non-handsfree cell-phone. Are they late for a pick-up? I especially had to grit my teeth (and slam on my brakes) for the entitled driver who left their privileged lane to cut in front of me to turn left on Cambie street. Perhaps GM could offer an OnStar bumper sticker for 1-800 How's My Driving?

The opportunity to have the early production Chevy Volt electrically cruising along the route along with any bike, board, or electric cycle - that would have been an Olympic lane to capture the world's imagination. Instead we have GM commercials about huge vehicles complaining to each other about being stuck with "airport runs" (instead of using the Canada Line) and airing their huge trunks while apologizing for the smell of hockey equipment, to say nothing of their own gaseous exhausts.

Missed Opportunity #2 - Green Transport (Sea to Sky Train)

After years and billions of dollars Peter Kiewit succeeded in grabbing each end of the Squamish-Whistler highway 99 and pulling it straighter. Better time and fewer fatalities are certainly worth some serious investment. Sadly, most of the benefits have been undone for a month while the IOC cordoned off a lane for exclusive use. Thousands of small orange sticks limit visibility and create narrow lanes that undulate with little or no relation to the white lines of the road or the guardrails. The time we gained from the reconstruction has been more than lost with the poor lane control.

Of course when you consider that the road widening mainly benefits the occasional or tourist driver the decision becomes somewhat baffling. It's painfully clear that our guests should not be driving to Whistler for events. There's nowhere for 20,000 cars to park, a fact we knew would be true even before the decision to widen the highway was made.

The missed opportunity here - affordable, regular passenger railroad service to Whistler. Perhaps the railbed can't accommodate fast trains, but it's still as fast as the bus, and as anyone who was lucky enough to travel the line on the BC Rail train, or has a ticket on the privileged Alberta Train, one of the most beautiful routes in the world. Instead, coming back from Whistler last week, we drove over part of the rail-line south of Brittania that had been PAVED over for cars. What a waste.

Missed Opportunity #3 - Community Signs and Support

A few months ago the City of Vancouver bowed to pressure to pass a bylaw that allowed officials to enter private homes to take down any signs that offended the IOC guidelines. While it probably would not stand up to a court case, Vancouverites are by-and-large not feisty enough to bother getting in an uproar about it. Instead, they display the passive resistance we're known for - there are simply no indications that anyone, anyone at all - school children, families, schools, or businesses, are the least bit enthusiastic about Vancouver 2010, or the Olympics. The occasional "Go Canada Go" banner or Canada flag-as-drapery are all that we can imagine displaying without the fear of hordes of IOC police breaking down the door to tear down the kids' unlawful manilla-and-crayon sketch of 5 circles and a "Welcome to Vancouver 2010" phrase (written with a backwards "r"). Or maybe just a lawsuit from the IOC. Sumi, indeed.

Missed Opportunity #4 - Trust

Hundreds of pedestrians trek from the Waterfront station on a pilgrimage to the Jack Poole Square to see the Olympic cauldron set alight by the Great One on opening night. When they get there, they are jailed, like protesters, locked out by a huge fence. "How could this be?" we ask, to be told it is for the security of the International Press. Security. Its presence is everywhere, a silent, ominous reminder that we are captives in our own city.

Thankfully, bright hope exists. When a guy like Alex Bilodeau can exhibit skill, then top it off with Canadian humility, and the heartfelt love he has for his brother and family, even the harshest critic has to be thankful for those rare moments. It's just sad that so many other amazingly wonderful things that could have been, were not, lost because of overzealous protectionism, and lack of political vision.

Does Adobe Have a Future?

I've long been an admirer of Adobe, and over my prepress career with Creo and Kodak I saw them go through a number of difficult transformations. The core of Adobe's difficulties is not the migration of paper media to electronic, it's that the founding CEO John Warnock, has not been replaced, and Adobe is still coasting on his innovation.

My first encounter with Adobe was through PostScript, when the company I was working for at the time bought a DEC LN03 LaserPrinter that came with the fabled "Red Book" (now online) on the PostScript language. Up to that point, the only languages that dot-matrix printing devices understood were "choose one of the 6 built-in fonts" and "print this letter at the next position." Even with the advent of the far-superior laser printer, the same protocol was supported, limiting these technical marvels' capability to seeing letters that were not just punched out of a 5x7 array of dots.

PostScript brought singular benefits to the laser printers, which had 300 dpi resolution and the capability to draw anywhere on the million bits of 8.5 x 11 paper. After a couple hours of reading that book, I was printing satellite images and marking annotations at precise latitudes, all computed in the printer by PostScript's programming power.

PostScript was a programming language based John Warnock's work at Xerox PARC. PARC is now known as the textbook model of a company that encouraged and achieved some of the finest innovation in technology, then failed to commercialize it, seeing it instead make other companies a fortune.

I had the fortunate connection to join with Stephen Herron, an independent consultant on printing technologies, who was teaching a course for Illustrator designers to "reach under the hood" of the new LaserWriter and learn tricks that Illustrator '88 was still holding back. Illustrator itself was another John Warnock invention. Having put the controls for smooth Beziér curves into PostScript, only font designers were using them. John's wife asked him how she could create curved objects and lines, so John had some developers create essentially a PostScript editing and creation tool. The user interface for Illustrator was a beautiful mapping from the elegance and power of the PostScript programming language into a visual metaphor. Even the abstract control points of bezier curves found a simple analogy in the tangent controls that adorn every Illustrator curve.

Stephen and I developed an application that let users design custom halftone dot shapes in PostScript. He now teaches at Emily Carr.

With PageMaker, Illustrator, and PostScript enabled by a partnership with Apple, Adobe's fortunes grew. Sadly, QuarkXPress displaced PageMaker as the professional tool for page layout, mainly because the then-CEO Tim Cook, spent many hours at a Denver prepress shop with the Nies family, learning how to coax correct CMYK separations out of a Linotronic 330. This effort cemented QuarkXPress' dominant position for almost 20 years.

John's next major invention was outlined in a paper now referred to as "Camelot." It explores the idea that since PostScript is a programming language, one could replace all the drawing operations, like LineTo, CurveTo, etc. with a command that simply writes them out to another file. The output file would not have all the subroutines and algorithms in it, it would just be a long string of commands to draw stuff. The advantages were clear over PostScript: No long programming chains, no infinite loops, fast execution, and a much simpler reader. This output format became to core of PDF - the Portable Document Format.

While John expected this to make RIPs much simpler, of course Acrobat and PDF have found a whole new market in document archiving and portability. Adobe's Acrobat division now accounts for a significant proportion of their revenue, and PDF is part of the core U.S. government infrastructure, from tax forms to archiving of electronic documents.

All this from one paper.

Look at Adobe now, several years after John's retirement. Bruce Chizen understood business and helped PDF's commercial success. The acquisition of Macromedia was a step towards bringing the print and online worlds together, but much of that effort seems to be lost on internal friction and the difficulty of bringing together two worlds each with its own history.

Adobe still has the potential to be the unifying agent for electronic and print publishing, but without the innovation from the top, new ideas only add incremental features to the product line, and it would be difficult for the Narayen-led version of Adobe to embrace the paradigm shifting ideas of its founder, John Warnock.Without that, it will either take a long time for Adobe to enable true multiplatform publishing, or someone else may do it.

Saying Goodbye to Prinergy

The news came in a 9:00 mandatory meeting. You are no longer needed. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

After 15 years of living and thinking about print and prepress workflows, it's over. Kodak is moving the software development to Israel. There will be a transition period. I'm not on the transition team.

After driving through the well-known early stages of grieving, anger and denial, I'm moving into acceptance, but not without a deep sense of sadness, and of loss, for Prinergy. I know Prinergy like I know my own kids - in fact they have spent their entire lives living with me envisioning, talking, travelling, selling, presenting, architecting, and tweaking Prinergy. It is part of our lives. It has been a singular focus since the fabled train trip in 1995 where I set out with Amos and Tim the top ten things it would have to do to change the prepress world.

While I am often referred to as the father of it, I never really liked the name Prinergy. Even the Creo CEO kept calling it "Printergy". Maybe I never let go of its original code-name, Araxi, which still adorns the code in various places. Even so, Prinergy has been the most significant project of my career (so far!) and I'm very proud to know that it has enhanced the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of prepress operators and managers, and generated over $1B of revenue for Creo and Kodak over its lifetime.

For me, there will be many things lost. I am sad to lose the contact with the many customers I listened to, and sometimes argued with, but whose time and energy resulted in new features and priority of bug fixes, educating us as to their business problems. I'm sad to lose the breadth of knowledge I have gathered with my colleagues here in Burnaby, that we have built up. I am sad that I won't see the completion of what we expected to be a renewed Prinergy 6 vision at Ipex in 2010 - one that brings high speed digital and offset workflows together. And I will be sad to not come into the office each day with my second family: developers, engineers, testers and subject-matter experts who I have worked with for many years, meeting and sometimes exceeding our customers' expectations.

I'm not sure what the next thing to do will be, but as my Dad says, each time the universe closes one door, another opens.

My gratitude to our thousands of customers worldwide. My life is better for our partnership, I hope you can say the same.

/dave

Edna Mode - Product Manager Extraordinaire

While I love all the Pixar movies, I am especially fond of The Incredibles for the amazing lighting, and for the huge orchestral score, and for Edna Mode. Edna is the diminutive Euro-Japanese fashion designer who bemoans the fact that while she used to "design for gods" she is now relegated to designing clothes for super-models "Nothing super about them... spoiled, stupid little stick figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves" but then realizes her ambition of again designing suits capable of being burned, stretched, and tortured on the bodies of most of the world's then-many super heroes.

But I digress.

Why is Edna Mode, a wacky made-up character for a cartoon, my favorite candidate role-model for a product manager (or as some ex-Microsoft dude calls them, Program Managers)?

It all has to do with the cape sequence. Or should I say, the "No Capes!" sequence.

The "No Capes!" sequence points out some of the most important but least understood aspects of product management.

1. A great product manager abstracts from market samples to identify trends.

2. A great product manager doesn't just do what the customer asks.

3. A great product manager has the market data to back up her projections.

Let's look at these in more detail.

Abstracts from Samples

This is sometimes called "trendspotting", but at the core it is looking at lots of things or listening to a bunch, and finding emerging themes. If you're not careful this can increase paranoia, but otherwise it can be lucrative. Identifying market trends before competitors can put you in a key early market position.

Bob opines "You can't generalize about these things..." but is completely shut down by Edna's fastidious market research and machine-gun delivery, proving that yes, indeed, clear insight and the power to recognize emergent themes is exactly what a great designer does.

Doesn't Do What Customers Ask For

Bob Parr says to Edna regarding her "No capes!" statement, "Isn't that my decision?" Clearly not, as she goes on to prove in step 3 -

Using Market Data To Make the Point

Edna points out in dazzling chronological order (aided by great visuals) of the details of every case in which a cape caused the wearer's untimely demise. She quotes them, hero and date, at a time when she is clearly not had time to prepare for seeing Mr. Incredible. She must have had these facts rolling around in her head for a long time before she finally needed them.

So there you have it - three reasons why Edna Mode is my favorite fictional product manager. Now go away and design something phenomenal, and call me when you get back - I love our little chats...

Operations Vs. Vision, or Why Tim Cook Can't Replace Steve Jobs

I've had a terrific career in high tech looking back at the last 20 years. I learned tube theory in high school but got to play with the new TTL logic chips. I wrote software for one of the first digital telephone switches, played with an Apple Lisa beside the VPs' office, and designed the file system for one of the first voicemail systems from the disk sectors, up. I worked on a network management system where we had to unpack tcp, udp and ip packets, which are the corpuscles of the internet. And I got to be part of a startup that accelerated the move from film to digital workflows in the printing industry.

Over that time, I've received a lot of positive feedback for a role I like to take on, that of a product visionary. It seems to be a simple but unusual set of skills. You have to be able to listen well, have a feel for industry and human trends, you have to be up on the latest trends in technology, and be able to accumulate enough data points to extrapolate a bit into the future with decent accuracy. But that's not enough. If seeing the future were all you needed, Cassandra would have been a happy person. Seeing the future is just the beginning, and the only times that the vision work I've been part of has come to fruition is when I had the courage, energy, and a great management team, to persevere against the myriad compromises that arise to prevent the vision from being achieved.

Sadly it is the compromises that keep many great products from shipping, becoming only "good", or even "mediocre," in the process. What's important to know is that none of these compromises, in and of themselves, seem bad. But accumulated together, one after another, without someone seeing where it is going to lead, and you end up with products like Microsoft Vista, the Blackberry Storm, and non-RPN calculators. There is no one person to blame, just a series of little things that turn into Cortlandt Homes. This is also refered to as the Death by a Thousand Cuts.

Here's the thing. None of the changes suggested along the path of dumbing a visionary product down to a me-too, unsatisfying object, are arguable on a solely rational basis. Each one seems "reasonable" - it will save 5 cents per machine, the competitors have one, and the famous - "we don't have time." You have to be driven to overcome all these setbacks, you have to persevere against the small rationalism in favor of the big picture, and you have to have the authority to say "no." You have to inspire and drive the vision into the people building it so they defend it themselves. You have to create a visionary army.

This is why Steve Jobs could create a company capable of creating, developing, and delivering great products. As CEO, he built the company around the core dna of product beauty, integrity and ease-of-use. He is crazy, and that is how we get insanely great products.

That this should be self-evident is in the examples of yesterday and today. When Steve was kicked out of Apple, the Mac lineup turned into a myriad of beige, functional boxes with hundreds of incremental new features and looked pretty well the same for years. Spindler and Amelio were decent operations guys, but they did not understand the core Apple values of design passion, and of pricing at the premium brand level. You can see the opposite this week when Jon Rubinstein, who was well-schooled in the Apple way, unveiled the most beautifully designed Palm product since the Palm V.

Yet, companies love to have an operational leader. The COO at a company I worked for explained it to me; if you put an operational person in charge, you can be sure that the budgets will get done, the numbers will get tracked, and all the action items will be completed. If you put a vision person in charge, you might get something amazing but you won't know when it will ship. An operation person, he argued, will go find vision if that's what they need to succeed. Sadly, that has never been my experience. Everyone falls back to their comfort zone, and when the going gets tough, the ops people cut back, trim budgets, get conservative, efficiently tracking the shrinking revenue and laying people off, right into bankruptcy. They never believe they need vision. They don't get it. They don't respect it. "We have plenty of vision," one manager told me, "we have more things we want to do then we have people, so vision is not our problem". That product went on to several versions, each with hundreds of new features, without a comprehensive theme, difficult to use, and looking almost exactly the same after years of development.

You have to have the madman at the helm. The person who wants to drive the crew to the edge of the world to do what has never been done before. The same thing that inspires the visionary makes the operations person quake in their boots and run back into the cabin to count things. Operations people join the navy. The visionaries want to be pirates.

So it's fine for Tim to cover daily operations while Steve recuperates, hopefully returning in time for a standing ovation and newly-unveiled innovation at WWDC 2009, but the next CEO of Apple has to be someone who knows how to get the best from Apple, and that means pushing innovation and passion to the forefront, and having the team behind him, sure - sometimes shaking their heads, but nonetheless on board, and making it happen. From what I've seen, that person might be already there.

Pilot to Copilot...

Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software (or some mailbot) asked me for my experience with Copilot. This was my reply.

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It's a fact. I am a Mac user. My Dad, who lives in a far-off city has a PC, because his friends all told him they can help him fix his PC when it breaks, but if he gets a Mac, he will be exiled and left alone on an iceberg of cold-shouldered hatred and loneliness to die while futilely clicking on icons that look like backlit ju-jubes. Who knew? But while I enjoy working on my little pretty Mac, I know all the tips and tricks to make sure that Windows users never really know that I am on the same network as them, sharing their DHCP service, and printing directly to the printers instead of going through the Windows printer queue. They always look at me funny when my printout comes out first. Don't tell them.

Since my Dad does little other than run Eudora and IE on his PC, his needs are few, until his Windows buddy told him he should switch from IE to FireFox to avoid all those nasty viri that would email his bank account to Russia and send him 500lbs. of unwanted caviar while extracting several thousand dollars from his chequing account. (We spell it that way in Canada - cheque, not check, 'cause we like the French people). But when I directed him to our new family web site with animated pictures of nerdy grandchildren, the website informed him that he was an idiot, and would probably be happier being exiled to go sit on an iceberg. Or at least that he needed a newer version of Firefox.

No problem, he thought, "I can do this. I don't have to call in a favor from my tech-savvy coffee buddies, surely I can download my own copy of the latest Firefox." So my Dad, confident and in full possession of his faculties, who has written copy for hundreds of radio and tv commercials, and narration for dozens of award-winning documentary films, simply typed www.firefox.com into internet explorer and downloaded the newest version of Firefox. What could be simpler?

But, lo and behold, the web site complained AGAIN? How could that be? The son (that would be me, aren't you following?) then received a cryptic email - can't see images of grandchildren, web site bad. must not be windows-compatible. you are a bad son for putting your pictures on a web site that only your elite and stuck-up mac-friends can see and leaving your poor pc-using parents without a way to see our own grandchildren - what kind of son are you? (Actually I am embellishing a bit, perhaps it's just what I imagine was between-the-pixels)

By this time, sweat is emerging on my brow, and my hands are shaky. I tested the site on Mac Safari and Firefox, and Windows IE 7 and Firefox just to avoid that problem. How could I have failed at so basic a task?

Then I made a crucial mistake. I picked up the phone. Never do this. Repeat after me. Never, ever pick up the phone to call someone less tech-savvy than yourself to engage them in dialog as to how to fix a technical problem. Why not? Because voice communication is to technical problem solving what megaphones are to trench warfare. Wrong tool. Many deaths and sore throats will ensue.

Nonetheless, I picked up the phone and called my Dad. I asked him to tell me the version of Firefox he was running. He said it was the latest. "Dad, do me a favor, find the menu item Help, and pull it down to see "About..." and tell me what it says". "Version 2.1. but I don't understand, I downloaded the newest version a week ago?" "Dad, is there an icon on the desktop that says Setup.exe" "Well, there are a lot of things on the desktop, do you mean the Firefox logo with the little arrow?" "No. Hang on. Let me think about this."

So you know Joel, because you are the CEO of a major respected technical organization, and have been in the geek trenches for years, what happened. Everyone reading this knows what happened. If you don't have a plausible theory as to what happened you have to turn in your geek cred badge and you will never, ever be asked to work at Fog Creek. But it doesn't matter. I sat on the long distance phone call, ticking off minutes, while I calculated how long and how likely I was to succeed at getting my Dad to:

a) understand the Windows Download Run/Save dialog
b) find the location on disk that the installer got saved to
c) run the installer
d) ensure that the desktop icon pointed to the newest install, not an old one, or be some orphaned phantom, stuck on an iceberg

Too long, and too frightening to consider. It's time to pull out the big guns. "Dad, I want to try something, and need your help. There is this program called Copilot written by this company I respect that is made for exactly this purpose, and I'd like to try it out 'cause I think that will be simpler than trying to explain to you the things you need to do to install the Firefox upgrade." "Why do you have to do that, I've already downloaded the latest version?" "Because you not only have to download it, you also have to install it, although since you already have an older copy, it should upgrade it instead - see what I mean?" "Why didn't it upgrade it by itself?" "Dad, it's software - never ask why" "Well, OK, what do I have to do?"

And now, dear Joel, having had the patience to wade through all that preliminary bio-fluff we will come to the question you so innocently asked me today, "How is it (Copilot) working for you?" Because, your 15-day free trial is almost over and you might want to subscribe, (going on my own thoughts here) so that we can have a nice annuity stream and g-d knows - once you've fixed your Dad's PC, you'll probably want to take control of his machine what, 3 or 4 times a day! No, just kidding. The pricing policy is very nice, and the DayPass option will be perfect for the occasional times he gets into a pickle.

But the problem we had with Copilot is that is is too symmetric. Face it, there is big imbalance of power here, and I am ok with the fact that I want to do this mitzvah, this good-deed, and will pony up some time and $ to do it, but I want my experience to be powerful but fast, while I need my Dad's experience to be simple and painless.

Sadly Joel, it was not.

Now I can't even recall all the details of what happened, but that should be a pretty good indicator itself that there is work to do here. My side worked as I'd expect. I download a little app, ok the java stuff that happens, approve its install, and choose a license option. I took the 2-minute free-drive cause I thought it would involve less effort and time - true.

Not so smooth on Dad's side. To start, he really appreciated the big buttons at copilot.com - Receive Help or Help Someone. That was good. He typed in the code I told him into the field, blithely accepting the terms of service (I'm sure they're fine Dad, I trust Joel), and installing the application (Do you really trust these guys? Are you sure this isn't a virus? - It's all good Dad, I've met the guy, Joel. He's Jewish and kind of chubby. I trust him. "Ok, it's on your head if this kills my computer.") But then - the pause. "Do I want a free 15-day trial of Copilot? yes!"

NOOOOO! See, I didn't really want to have him have to do that. 'Cause then he has to go back to Eudora, and wait for an email and click on a link or type a code, or whatever. I wanted his side to be seamless - once he says "Yes, I trust whatever applet you are about to install on my one PC that is my gateway to the world and if you screw it up I will be upset but my son-who-vouches-for-you said I should do it" is done, he should just sit back and watch me move the cursor from afar. I want to pay for us both, or why does the person receiving help need think they need to have a license at all? I'm used to dealing with this stuff, it's exactly that that I'm trying to save him from, and here copilot is making getting help more complicated instead of easier.

Any way he got his email, clicked the link, got his license, and my copilot screen lit and changed from "waiting for connection" to seeing his desktop in full remote-access glory.

"See, I can move your cursor around, isn't that cool? then proceed to minimize some windows so I can see what's going on. "Uh huh. Wait - I see this icon "FirefoxSetup.exe" should I click on that?" YES! So he clicked it himself, and we watched Firefox install, properly replace the old version, and remove or replace the desktop icon, just like a good installer should. Tried the photo website again. There it is! "Am I seeing your website now with all those pictures?" "Yes, Dad, that's our family photo website" "Nice. What, did you gain a little weight over Chanukah?" "Ya, ok, you're up and running, talk to ya later," and hung up the phone. Then Copilot told me my 2-minute trial was up.

So, I think you could improve the user experience of Copilot by making it even simpler for the person on the receiving-help side to be talked through a simple install of the help app, even if that simplicity costs more, and puts a greater burden on the giving-help side to do techy things.

I'm going to visit my Dad in a couple weeks. I'm thinking I'll install Copilot OneClick....