"You hate people!"
"But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?"
-Clerks, 1994

I think I am "technology siloed" with an emphasis on my office and business related life. I have a few computers (a Tablet PC and a PowerBook), Voice over IP Telephone from Vonage, a sleek little Blackberry phone, a small audio setup for podcasting (why I needed 2 microphones, I'll never know), a 2-line phone, a wireless (and wired) router (yes connected and secure), and a networked laser printer. That's all I can see from here.

However, just yards away languishes my 15-channel deep analog (non-digital) cable, a CD player, I did get a DVD player last fall from Target for $29… Oh yes and not to be left out my 19" Zenith tube TV I bought in 1994.

The "Digital Divide?" My friends, I am the Digital Divide.

I didn't realize I had this problem until i was thinking through my cancellation of Netflix. Yes, I got it an it got bad. First, 1 movie a month, then 2 and then 4 at a time… I was in heavy rotation. I knew I had a problem when I began to run out of movies to watch, when I caught myself debating the high points of this movie...

I mean I got it because I didn't watch enough TV to "get" TiVo, so I had to have something hip to at least talk about. Then, it got old so I went and cancelled it. Cold Turkey. Its nice, I feel back in balance again, divided but in balance.

Funny thing is…I watched more than half the movie on my laptop PC in my office.

I am so pathetic.

This, believe it or not is not an exercise in self-abuse, its more a thinking of how we use technology and how we use it and don't even know we do. I mean I had to go out, in outfitting my office technology, fit the device to the purpose and see if it really worked. I did tons of research by provider and by product (I even bring in all the software to bridge the technology to get it to work for me).

TiVo is an exceptional blend of hard drive technology, networked subscription, and broadband "piggybacking". Yet to most people, research wasn't done. They wanted TiVo, and they went out and watched it and get this: IT JUST WORKS.

Why doesnt most enterprise technology work like this? What is the big hassle? Where is the "better answer" for which everyone is looking? It's in there. Don't get me wrong, but the average buyer, either during a sales cylce or as its being implemented, has to not only get that better answer, they need to understand how. The Problem is the soup of details is often so thick for the average buyer they might as well scream "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" to their enterprise software vendors.Network

You try it.

Go to your window (or your blog) and say it.

What's that you hear?

Crickets?

Yes and that's not just because of the vendors (they don't help things), but there are a lot of companies that make things a bit more complicated than they need to; and no vendor would want to miss that one customer that wanted that "one feature"…so they muck it up with complexity.

In a way, the enterprise market (vendors and customers) are "technology siloed" a bit like me (are you scared now?).

A C-level team will license and implement the most complex software schemes possible for their businesses without issue. Those self-same executives will zip home, flop down in front of their flat panel televisions watch a bit of TiVo (or their DVD from Netflix), and possibly work out at the gym on their digital treadmill while listening to their iPods. These things all "just work."

How can we look at the stuff that "just works" in one place and accept, almost without question things that just dont elsewhere?

"I thought you wanted the software simple?"
"I do want it simple, but I love the things the complex stuff promises. Ironic, isn't it?"

Later.

-V

UPDATE: This just in. I found an example of something that "just works" see Andrew McAfee's blog at Paragraph 7 of his April 10 blog posting