Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

This is radical stuff. So radical that Cali and Jody rolled ROWE out in several divisions over a couple years before fully briefing CEO Brad Anderson on the program (he’s now an enthusiast). Today, nearly all of the 4,000 headquarters employees are working in ROWE and there are plans for pilots among retail employees this year (which will be interesting to watch).

The results have been spectacular: an average 35% boost in productivity in divisions working in ROWE and a decrease in voluntary turnover by 52-90% depending on department. (Interestingly, involuntary turnover increased among ROWE workers—while it might seem like slacker paradise, shirkers have no place to hide when the only measure of work is results. What’s more, as the number of meetings fell, collaboration and teamwork improved.) Just as important, employee engagement and other “soft” metrics (like energy and hours of sleep and family time) went up significantly.

The basic principle: people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Period. You can come in at 2pm on Tuesday. Leave at 3pm on Friday. Go grocery shopping at 10am on Wednesday. Take a nap or go to the movies anytime. Do your work while following your favorite band around the country. ^{^}

Most of these articles try to blame an external force, like Generation Y-Me coming into the workforce, so that it seems we all must react to it.

Instead, we should just ask ourselves: why not?

Not all jobs will work with ROWE. In fact, most won’t. But for industries where creativity is needed, I think it’s a good idea. It’ll get us out of the rhythm of work at desk, go to meeting, wonder what’s for lunch. It’ll bring a breath of joy into the workplace and make it seem less obligatory, reducing resentment.

But the number one reason for this kind of workplace is a very simple one: it gives people a new way to play, and if work becomes play, it gets done the same as before, but with much of the mind active and seeking innovation.

It’s a tempting idea: for sunny climates, put solar panels on the top of a laptop so it can absorb sunlight as needed. I know it worked well for solar calculators twenty years ago, but these machines are going to need more power. Then again, as hard drives are replaced with SSDs and digital displays get less LED and more like LCD or liquid paper, it’s possible this could work as a partial or complete fueling method for PCs.

ACi has planned a couple of models for the Ultra-mini series PCs. The higher end models are also expected to feature touch screen, 2GB RAM and near 12-hour battery life by trapping solar energy. ^{^}

So far, like many “green” issues, this could fit under one of two pitfalls: first, being marginally green and contributing to no actual practical change; second, being hype that might be vaporhardware, as the article linked above carefully hints.

What I don’t get is why it’s so hard for laptop makers to learn from Apple and Averatec and Asus: people don’t want little black technological machines. The old word for technology was that it was exotic. The new word is that people want it to fit into their lives and be pretty, like a food processor or telephone. How many laptops does Apple have to sell before the laptop industry finally groks that it needs to make white laptops, hide ugly technological seams, and simplify everything it can? Why is it so hard for you people?

In short notes, Apple is rising among the power users who are disgusted by a ream of security failures under Windows XP, and are buying into the (incorrect) hype about how broken Vista is. So more bandwagon-jumpers appear, the most notable being today’s post from developer Peter Bright:

Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it–that’s the argument. The truth is that Windows is hampered by 25-year old design decisions. These decisions mean that it’s clunky to use and absolutely horrible to write applications for. The applications that people do write are almost universally terrible. They’re ugly, they’re inconsistent, they’re disorganized; there’s no finesse, no care lavished on them. Microsoft–surely the company with the greatest interest in making Windows and Windows applications exude quality–is, in fact, one of the worst perpetrators. ^{^}

People are jumping on the bash Windows bandwagon, and like most trends, this is only partially true. It’s a trend to bash Vista, too, but back in real life, many people are enjoying it and using it productively. And it’s an attempt to circumvent some of the problems described in his article.

Maintaining backward compatibility is a beast but it’s essential for business. They predicted the mainframe would die by the early 1990s, but it’s going stronger than any time in the last fifteen years because of legacy applications.

Data portability is expensive, and exponentially so when custom formats are used, and they’re often necessary.

The real problem is that most people are not paying attention to what they’re doing, most managers are clueless, and most customers, oblivious. People are making junk software because they can and get away with it, but there are some excellent applications, although they’re in the minority.

A Honda is no Mercedes but people still buy them because they work for their needs. It’s the same way with most software, and with Windows, there’s the perception that for things like real-time audio drivers, you’ll install a third party one.

I agree Microsoft could do better, and I think it’s great that people are putting pressure on them, but I refuse to buy into the trend, especially since Apple has claimed superiority since 1984 and has been wrong every time.

I agree that Microsoft should emulate their older software, and if you look at the history of what they’ve done, they’ve slowly done this and have done it before with cmd.exe, which is not DOS but acts just like DOS, but better. They’re just more cautious because, unlike Apple, they pay attention to legacy needs and the needs of consumers who aren’t graphic artists who want to spend top dollar on new, pretty hardware.

Bright does mention one area I have harped on for years:

or example, many of the functions in Win32 require the caller to give a buffer to the function to store some data, and often that buffer has a size that’s dynamic. Typically, the API can figure out how big the buffer needs to be, but the caller can’t. A sensible software developer strives to solve the same problem the same way each time. It makes things easier for everyone concerned; it’s easier for the software developer (because he only has to design one approach to doing it), and it’s easier for people using his code (because they only have to learn one approach to doing it). There’s no good reason to do it different ways. Yet Win32… Win32 does it in different ways. ^{^}

But I started harping on it when I was a Macintosh developer, because their interface and APIs were inconsistent. Windows has through accretion over time and some poor corporate decision-making followed that same path, and that’s why it’s time for Vista to leapfrog us away from XP, and for Windows 7 to run a new API with win32 in isolation.

That decision will have massive repercussions. For one, once you’ve got something coded to work with Windows, you can keep updating it with little effort, and it costs you very little. Recoding will cost everyone quite a bit of tasty cash. For another, customers are content with XP and its applications, even if to my mind they look and operate like something out of the 1980s, but faster. It’ll be a fun showdown.

I find it sad that power users migrate to Macintosh instead of Linux or FreeBSD for two reasons. First, what makes the Mac stable at all (absent its flaky backward-compatibility APIs) is the FreeBSD core upon which it’s built. Second, moving to Apple is moving to a shop that’s even more closed and dictatorial than Microsoft. Open source software is often not so great, but a lot of it is quite impressive, and closed source software for UNIX has mostly moved to the point where you can install it on a Linux and/or BSD box.

I remain agnostic about technology. Linux, for all of its greatness, has its flaws and flaws in its business model that make it laborous to use. FreeBSD has a community that sometimes sabotages itself so violently you have to wonder what they’re thinking. Microsoft has its own flaws, and Apple too many to count, starting with its complete lack of direction, its hardware lock-in, its snooty users, its careless attitude toward user rights, and most of all its pompous image.

When I think of returning to the good old days of computing, where the fun of technology came before the marketing decisions designed to appeal to the numb and dumb masses, I think of a new frontier like what Linux and FreeBSD offer. Nothing will be as easy as with a Win XP box, but you get to play, and preserving that sense of joy in work is more important oftentime than finding a boring standard to which we need to conform.

It’s hard to be anything but approving of the tendency toward “green products” that has recently become voguish. However, a lot of these products have dubious positive environmental effect, and seem more like a marketing prank. Too many of them seem to be designed for us to throw all our old stuff into the landfill, buy new stuff that’s carbon-neutral, and then replace it when it breaks in a few years.

Today I’d like to introduce you to a green technology that has existed for centuries, is proven under adverse conditions, and can be a lot of fun. While the average person cycles through disposable ball-point pens, which at best allow you to replace the ink shaft and ball point itself, fountain pens are much less destructive, and can be less expensive, depending on how many ballpoints you buy in a year.

Why fountain pens are green:

I wanted to find an example that for $30 provided a year’s worth of trouble free writing. To figure this out, I had to consult with the online community “Pen Trace” where some helpful people pointed me in the right direction.

Pelikan Pelikano, $18

I picked this sturdy little pen because the Pelikan brand has produced pens that write smoothly and consistently. This is not their cheapest model, because in Europe, fountain pens are not an oddity. This entry-level pen uses a sturdy steel nib, which is the pointy part of the pen that conveys ink to paper, and is made of durable but soft plastic.

Pelikan converter, $5

Normally, these little pens use disposable plastic cartridges, but those are about as green as SUVs, so instead, you can get it to take ink directly from a bottle by using this little gadget. It fits in place of the cartridge, and by using vacuum pressure when the knob is turned, can load up several days’ worth of ink. It also allows you to easily clean the pen.

Pelikan Royal Blue ink, $7

This ink is what you put into the pen. The color is attractive and because it is water-based, it’s easier to clean up and biodegrade than the paintlike ink they put in ballpoint pens.

You might not be able to turn your lifestyle green overnight, but a good way to start is to replace badly designed objects, like disposable pens, with more durable ones that require fewer resource refreshes as a result. Pens are one area we can all improve, since they are a ubiquitous technology and others will imitate what they see us doing.

While the Eee will be perfectly capable at handling older games, we found that anything newer tended to fall flat on its face for several reasons. First and foremost is the Intel GMA900 graphics chip -– second is the fact that the Eee’s processor is actually running at 630MHz instead of the alleged 900MHz that has been such a popular number until this point.

The Eee’s shipping BIOS –- and the recently updated version -– both lock the front-side bus to only 70MHz, bringing the processor and memory clocks down with it. There is a “leaked” BIOS floating around from ASUS’s international site, but it caused the Eee to become unstable to the point where tests would not reliably complete. ^{^}

Ouch! That’s an ugly glitch to an otherwise enthralling machine. With the motherboard technology we have in proven state today, I see no reason not to have a faster bus and possibly even 1 GHz processor. It won’t consume that much more memory. The one area Asus does get to play around is with internal design within its specification, and a little more creative engineering here could make this machine far more usable.

In terms of price, performance, and features the Asus Eee PC hits the trifecta and could be a game-changer in the mobile market. Thanks to its combination of Intel hardware and a non-bloated Linux install, reviewers found that Asus’s little laptop performs just as well as much larger and more expensive Windows notebooks.

The device does support Windows XP, but Linux seems to be the OS of choice of reviewers for performance and ease-of-use reasons. In this respect, Microsoft has well and truly blown it, because this device is poised to introduce a few million Best Buy shoppers to a pleasantly usable, non-embedded Linux distro.^{^}

Linux is far from perfect (BSD is more fun and more stable, especially in a server environment). Windows is not only good, but getting better. However, there are also many advantages to Linux. Among other things, it encourages people to buy white boxes instead of Macs, Dells and HPs.

For some years people have wondered when Linux would make inroads to desktop computing. After all, it is free. However, it doesn’t work on all hardware, and often takes hours of tedious work to make simple changes to the operating system. Also, it does not have the broad software base that Windows has.

What has made Windows predominant is the convergence of several factors: it’s cheap, because most people burn a CD-R from a friend. It works very intuitively, more so than the Mac, although you won’t see this mentioned in the computer media. It is backward compatible with a giant library of software. Simple changes occur quickly, and the operating system gives a lot of power to its users, even if more than they should have sometimes.

The recent rash of viruses, trojans and other Windows problems gave Microsoft a chance to step up to the plate. Their response was to hurry Vista along, because they do not believe that the older versions of Windows can be safe and still support marketing objectives, like pushing ActiveX and BHOs and other Microsofty standards on the rest of us. In the meantime, Apple is selling more machines, but the pretentious, smug and combative users have made more than one ex-user flee in disgust.

Wal-Mart just began selling its $200 PC which uses a relatively non-bloated Linux installation called gOS and online apps from Google. The future of Linux, like that of Intel competitor AMD, is in being cheaper or free and starting out on the lower-end machines. It’s interesting that the machine to do this might be both lower-end and luxury, in that it gives its users the cheap, durable, uncomplicated laptop users have always said they have wanted.

The last time this happened, around 1988, was when Toshiba brought out the T-1000 laptop. It had no hard drive. It had an ugly, simple screen and a squishy, simple keyboard. But it sold for about $700 discount or used, could take a few hours of battery charge, and if you used shareware word processors and telecommunications software, could do everything a $2500 laptop could do and often could do it longer.

Toshiba promptly forgot these lessons, and maybe Asus will as well, but the users have yet again spoken: they want technology that’s durable, cheap, simple and doesn’t get in the way, and if Windows and HP don’t offer it, they’ll rush to whatever savvy marketer rises up with all the dunces in confederacy against him/her and offers it.