All Things

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Jane Quigley has posted on her blog Setting Contexts a quite positive report of her first two weeks with an iPhone, declaring that her 8GB iPhone has exceeded all her expectations. In particular, she notes “iPod sound is … a definite step ahead”; “While the keyboard was a little challenging at first, I was a pro after just a couple of days”; and that “battery life … has been great”.

While there are apparently already well over 100 iphone apps available, she lists some of her early favorites, as well as some other resources. The ones Quigley recommends include Mockdock, PocketTweets, gOffice, Meebo, and Ta-Da. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s already a new GTD (Getting Things Done) app for the iPhone, iNozbe, as well.

The iPhone launched to a tremendous amount of anticipation, and even a funny video by long-time Mac & Palm author (and tech journalist) David Pogue. Despite the hype, it seemed that most all the initial user feedback was, indeed, similarly positive.

Now we’re starting to see some detracting reports. Some think usability issues will make the iPhone unsuitable for business. That raises one of my own questions - how good is the iPhone, actually, as a phone? It’s one thing to just try calling, but what happens when you’re busy - can you use it easily one-handed, or while driving, or is using the iPhone about as bad as texting while driving?

There’s also the question of whether the iPhone (without physical keys) will satisfy teens, young adults and anyone else who’s a texting addict. I’m certainly curious about the practical usefulness of the keyboard, probably what I most miss in my current Palm handheld. If Apple does succeed in making a good (not barely adequate) touch-screen keyboard, it will be a major step forward in interface design.

Now to my own impressions. I’m not in a hurry to jump to the iPhone, but have spent maybe 10-15 minutes on it a couple of times. It’s clear that I’m getting a little better on the keyboard, but am not yet convinced I’ll really get good at it. It was really surprising, though, that the horizontal keyboard isn’t available for all the applications.

That said, I’m sure there are a number of improvements Apple will continue to find to better the keyboard experience. This is where thinking about the little details, an area where Apple excels, can really pay off. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of such features are already there waiting to be discovered. GeekSugar has already noted one tip for speeding up punctuation.

The second time I used the iPhone, it slowly dawned on me that what I really miss isn’t so much the keyboard, but the mouse. Just editing URLs in Safari was quite annoying. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but the keyboard layout didn’t seem to help much for editing, either. On the other hand, the multi-touch screen works quite well for navigation, but you can’t really get the full benefit of it when browsing the web on the slow Edge network.

One thing that surprises me is how little discussion there’s been of basic Palm functionality on the iPhone. Does the iPhone come with apps that can replace the basic Palm Datebook, Address, To-Do and Memo functions, and import their .pdb files?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the iPhone will run OS X applications (and presumably Mac apps like Excel). Right now the answer is apparently no, but I don’t see why Apple couldn’t set up some kind of partitioning or something on the iPhone that would make that work, while still protecting the reliability of the phone and connectivity functions.

Perhaps the real hold-up in such a scheme for running OS X apps is memory, and with more flash memory will come OS X as well. Certainly, 4 or even 8GB seems to be an awful limited amount of memory for a multi-function device that’s also supposed to be a media player. With the way flash memory prices have been falling, waiting for a bump up to 16GB (at least) would probably be a good idea. Apple has a long history of introducing computers without enough memory, and I suspect the iPhone is the latest example!

Obviously, the Palm and Mac compatibility are important issues for current Palm and Mac users like myself, who are looking for a handheld device that really moves forward the “handheld computing” part of the equation as an important part of moving to one unified device. I expect the iPhone will satisfy these needs, as well, given time.

While the iPhone as a beautiful gadget and interface is itself rather compelling, perhaps the main question, really, is how long will it be before there is an equally-compelling must-have application that drives the second wave of its sales?

After using a Mac for nearly 22 years and enduring Apple’s long decline in the late ’80s to 90s, it’s not possible to look at Palm without wondering if it’s deja vu all over again. The PDA maker has made so many questionable and even seemingly bizarre moves (such as buying the BeOS) that its survivability is certainly now in question.

As with Apple and the Mac in the 90’s, Palm still has a lot of enthusiastic and even loyal users, but the platform hasn’t thrived in years. The simplicity and reliability of the Palm OS and hardware (at least until recent years) is likely even more of an advantage in the handheld space than in PCs, yet Palm has failed to capture a lot of new users lately, despite its lower-cost Zire line. The Palm OS has been steadily losing ground to Pocket PCs and now, increasingly, to the Blackberry as well, which seems to be evolving rapidly.

In other Words, Palm (or PalmOne, or whatever they call themselves these days) is a company, like Apple in the mid 90s, that had a lot going for it, but has pretty nearly blown that advantage, and desperately needs to home back in on their core market and competencies before it’s too late.

In any case, this is the perspective I’ve had in mind as I’ve pondered the events of the past few days. It all started when my wife mentioned she wanted to get the new Zire 22. I was both glad and somewhat surprised, because she had had a frustrating experience with her first handheld, the Zire 21, and had finally returned it.

Susan is the kind of person who would probably be happy just running her life out of a shoebox of records (perhaps you have encountered the type), except there’s way too much information to keep track of nowadays, and even one shoebox would be too much to carry around. Though she had given me a Palm several years ago, she didn’t show much interest in getting one for herself until about a year ago.

She was working as a drapery designer and just had so many people, numbers, and project notes to keep track of that it was getting impossible to keep everything with her all the time. Increasingly phone numbers and other things would be at work or someplace else when she needed them, so she finally went for it and got a Zire 21 last spring.

At first, she was delighted with the 21, and its design was good even though it was a pretty basic PDA. If you haven’t used a PDA but have been considering it, the biggest gain comes from having all your information in one place, and being able to carry it with you (and back it up). It’s just a different experience when you can be working, shopping, travelling or whatever and pull out your notes right then and there from projects, Consumer Reports, past trips, etc.

Unfortunately, after a few days the 21 started having hard resets every so often. I looked it up on the web and was dismayed to find that this was a well-known problem linked to certain kinds of phones (she had a Motorola Nextel phone at the time). Apparently whoever designed the 21 failed to include shielding at a critical point, and so some phones cause a reset when going off close to the Zire (and, of course, she needed to carry them both in her purse).

Most perplexing was that the problem had been known for a year or so and as far as we could tell, PalmOne had not made any design changes. We tried to work around it for a week or so, but after losing her day’s data for the third or fourth time, Susan had had enough. Palm lost an enthusiastic customer, perhaps (I thought) for good. Interestingly, despite their return policy, OfficeMax took it back without a question. Apparently we weren’t the first to have a problem with it.

Anyway, fast forward to the other night when, Christmas money in hand, Susan and I walk into several stores looking for the new, improved Zire 22 (with color screen and flash memory). It turns out that no retailers around us seem to have any left, for either of two reasons, one ominous, one promising. First, the bad news. A lot of the mass merchandisers have dropped the Palm line, most recently Target (Best Buy’s selection has seemed pretty meager lately, too). It would seem the strategy of using the Zire line to penetrate these distribution points hasn’t worked out.

On the positive side, stores that do still carry the Palm brand were apparently uniformly out of Zire 22s in our area. This includes OfficeMax, Office Depot, and at least two nearby Radio Shack stores. While I heard lots of news coverage of how the iPod was selling well this Christmas, I wonder if the Zire 22 was selling as well in other places as it was here. Perhaps this will be a harbinger of better things to come.

While there are an unlimited number of features a PDA maker could supposedly try to cram into a handheld, I hope Palm will re-focus on the basic PDA functions and make sure these remain simple to use and the hardware rock-solid. I have heard enough stories of Palm users who loved their PDAs that I remain convinced there are still millions of potential customers out there if Palm will just get the basics right.

The industrial design of the Zire line seems quite good, but I hope the engineering has improved. As for Susan, she ended up instead buying a Kodak camera yesterday at OfficeMax (we’ve loved the other one we have). She says maybe she’ll still buy a Zire eventually. I wonder if Palm will still be trying to win her business.

One thought that keeps turning up again and again in reading about businesses and individuals alike is the need to recognize and compensate for weaknesses. Anyone who has read various of the excellent books on this subject coming out of the Gallup organization (Soar With Your Strengths; First, Break All the Rules; etc.) will know what I am talking about.

As Peter Drucker noted in The Effective Executive (Chs. 3-4), managers must capitalize on an individual’s strengths in order to make him productive. Drucker goes so far as to declare that “Organization is the specific instrument to make human strengths redound to performance while human weakness is neutralized and largely rendered harmless.” (Ch. 4, p. 75)

In other words, as Drucker clarified and the Gallup books have backed up with extensive studies of top performers, part of the essence of management is using strengths to advantage while compensating for weaknesses. This practice of compensating for weaknesses applies at a lot of different levels, and the need to do so persists over time, yet I keep running across examples of this having been forgotten.

Perhaps the latest example is Dell Computer. Computer Reseller News had a good cover story on Dell last week, highlighting the serious service and quality problems that seem to be plaguing the vendor. Never well-liked at CRN, especially when Dell would run down the role of value-added resellers and the channel, these quality problems are certainly not news to CRN readers. Yet it seemed to take Dell management a long time to get the message.

What makes the situation interesting is this article notes how many buyers are now aware of the problems and taking their business elsewhere. Since this has been going on for some time now, and months have passed since the DellHell fuss, I can’t help wondering why Dell is only finally starting to make some changes.

Back when people ridiculed the idea of selling PCs direct, the argument was that Dell was asking the buyer to trust it an awful lot to buy sight unseen and without a local dealer available for service. Back then, it was clear where Dell’s weakness was - without a local presence they needed some way to demonstrate to the buyer that they would be there for them, both at the time of sale with initial quality and support and later for service.

In other words, perceived trustworthiness was Dell’s weak spot, and a good reputation was key to compensating for it. Back then PCs cost quite a bit more, which cut both ways since there was more money to be saved, but also more risked on a relatively unknown vendor. In Direct From Dell, Michael Dell observed (p. 24), “One of the biggest barriers to selling direct was that many potential customers had a perfectly understandable fear of shelling out $4,000 to a company they’d never heard of without a physical store … Quality was another big differentiator. … So we dedicated more resources toward designing PCs that were compatible with IBM’s and had the highest-quality components.”

The point I’m trying to make here is that every person, every business, every product has weaknesses, and we must always keep these in mind and watch them closely, the way North Korea watches the DMZ or NATO watched the Fulda Gap (or Europe today ought to be watching demographics). Somewhere along the way Dell obviously stopped watching their weak point and now they are paying for it.

Another example from the area of technology is the PDA. Interest in PDAs is supposedly drying up, as cell phones become more capable. I don’t buy it. The real problem is that Palm, the prior leader in the field, has lost sight of the product’s natural weaknesses.

Back when Palm was introducing the first viable PDAs, it was clear that the small screen and lack of keyboard were serious drawbacks. To compensate for the lack of screen real estate, Palm made a simple operating system and easy-to-use applications that required a minimum number of taps to do something. Unlike Apple’s Newton, Palm used Graffiti handwriting recognition that was much more reliable.

Somewhere along the way Palm, while spawning Handspring and spinning off PalmSource and then gobbling up Handspring, lost sight of these weaknesses. They were slow to improve screen quality, and keyboards have been put on only a few of their models. In the meantime Blackberry, which put a priority on a usable keyboard, has taken much of their market. Even the relatively simple Sidekick, with a wider screen and a keyboard, has done well.

The cameras and other stuff Palm has put in their PDAs are nice, I guess, but there’s been little progress on addressing the weaknesses of the form factor. Even though screens have improved, most still only show the same dozen lines as the early ones. At the same time, quality of Palm’s PDAs, especially the Zire line, has really declined, whereas before that was a strong point.

To sum up, whenever someone’s in charge of something, it’s key that they determine where the weaknesses are and apply some generosity in those areas. The weaknesses must be identified, and then a commitment made to apply substantial, ongoing resources to compensating for that weakness and bringing it up to at least an adequate level. Once accomplished, a manager must never presume that things are fine, but always keep clear in their mind where those weak spots are, and keep watching to catch problems early when they arise.

Mitch Wagner had an interesting article on his blog at InformationWeek recently about David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and using PDAs to manage to-do lists, etc.

Wagner is right that “GTD has spawned a thriving subculture online.” In reading others’ blogs, etc., I find myself frequently drawn to sites whose author either uses a Mac and/or who’s written about GTD. I guess that’s sort of the intersection of my interests with a lot of others, i.e. personal productivity and creativity.

I’m not quite sure what Wagner meant when he wrote, “the popularity of GTD and related productivity philosophies has spawned a sort of backlash against Palm Pilots and other PDAs”. The PDA is still a great concept, though I think Palm has forgotten the form factor’s obvious weaknesses, i.e. a very small screen and lack of keyboard.

If Palm would put more emphasis on a better/slightly bigger screen and put decent keyboards on more models, I think they’d be moving forward again. While connectivity is certainly helpful, they seem stuck on adding more multimedia features, but I don’t see many teens buying Palms, anyway, and what I really want is for them to keep advancing the productivity software.

Anyway, here’s the comment I left on Wagner’s blog:

I read GTD a couple of years ago and now am reading Allen’s newer book, Ready for Anything. It is a discussion of many nitty-gritty productivity issues with a lot of useful tips and will be helpful to many who are having trouble implementing the GTD approach.

I’m amazed how this bandwagon of opinion has arisen that PCs are dying and PDAs as well. PDAs will become increasingly connected, I suppose, but that’s just a semantics issue in compiling statistics. I use my Palm constantly. At the same time, one of my biggest frustrations is not having enough time to really take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available on my Mac. These are both very useful tools for me.

What hasn’t worked for me (and apparently for a lot of others) are all the to-do list tools. The to-do list is the only part of my Palm that I really don’t use much. I think there’s some kind of problem with to-do lists that no one’s figured out yet. Lists are very helpful for planning and breaking down complex activities but unless we pretty much get everything done each day, the lists just start to grow to where they’re no longer of much help.

David Allen’s approach is basically to write everything down and review it on a regular basis, not to work off a to-do list. Instead, by clearing things out of your head, you can effectively keep the day’s list in your active memory, and actually concentrate on one thing at a time.