Survey Results are Meaningless minus the Methodology

If you're in the survey (or "Marketing Intelligence") business, an easy way to gain lots of free publicity is to publish some results that feed into an ongoing skirmish: For little cost a press release will percolate across the web, bubbling up everywhere, spreading your brand. In all likelihood a newswire writer will have the same motivation, and carefully pick and choose factlets with the goal of making a story more inflammatory.

Given that smartphones are big business now, and the battle (RIM, Nokia, Apple and Google's hordes) is a very public one, smartphones and their operating systems are often the focus.

We've seen this play out quite a few times already: Some survey results come out, usually with a very pro-Apple slant (the Apple enthusiast ecosystem is far more receptive to such material, and is more likely to run with it), and is quoted everywhere.

As always, methodology and details actually come second. It's then that critical, mind-blowing flaws in the survey or its presentation/interpretation are revealed. Of course by then the message was already delivered and has become truth through repeated assertion.

So for all you market research startups out there, I encourage you to post a self-selective survey on the website of an already biased group where they can profess themselves as wealthy, virile, mega-sexed super-humans. Release these extraordinary findings via press release and watch as lazy bloggers and tech columnists run with it.

Remember this ridiculous survey? It was the harbinger of doom for Android. Only it wasn't. It is only one of a long line of terrible surveys, and only one example where the tech press and wire writers misrepresented the already poor survey, or at a minimum didn't bother asking the questions that matter.

So we'll wait for GfK's methodology (never expect tech journalists to care to look this up. As an industry it is rife with incredible ignorance and laziness), and the inevitable correction will be a whimper to the roar of the original release. At a glance it is obvious that all is not as it appears, and it isn't simply that the numbers don't confirm my bias: They just don't add up, and have little correlation with other surveys on the same topic.

RIM Isn't Dead

Many years back I applied to RIM. They never contacted me. Clearly that's the source of all of their travails today.

Really, though, I await great things from RIM: The company had some golden handcuffs to their existing platform — the lucrative enterprise messenger system undermined more innovative initiatives in the same way that Windows and Office hobbles Microsoft — but now that they're seeing some serious attacks that can't be ignored, the battle is underway again. The PlayBook looks like it may be a winner, and I'm willing to sandpaper my fingers to use that 7" tablet if it delivers what it promises. QNX is simply a glorious operating system (it is elegant and close to perfect), so that alone has me interested.

A Brief History of My Antagonism Towards Flash

I was anti-Flash before Steve Jobs made it cool. I have as much anti-Flash credibility as anyone.

For over a decade I've steered organization after organization away from building solutions in Flash, often against great resistance. I was evangelizing SVG — what I saw as the biggest opportunity for a more illuminated, open solution than Flash — back when its strongest corporate sponsor was none other than Adobe.

Aside: Humorously Adobe was leveraging SVG in their battle against Macromedia's Flash/Shockwave empire, before finally giving in and buying 'em out.

I have railed loudly against Flash on many occasions.

The Great Flash of Propriety

Yet Flash is fairly pervasive, despite my valiant attempts.

Up until around 2005 and the birth of YouTube, Flash had very little presence in the video space: That realm was dominated by Real Player, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, among others. Flash fit in the RIA niche where it displaced the short-lived empire of ActiveX and Java Applets. It was the tool for great web entertainment like You Don't Know Jack, the Net Show.

Then YouTube rose with Flash at its presentation core, and the rest is history. Soon Flash was the oddball foundation for video.

If you mention Flash today, however, the topic will immediately veer violently to the great Flash/Apple battle of 2010, where Apple has loudly rejected Flash (where it represents a proxy for "rich applications they don't control"), and Google, perhaps being a bit antagonistic, has embraced it with their Android and Chrome solutions.

Ok, embraced is probably a bit of an overstatement. In reality Google's initiatives have top notch HTML5 support, the best JavaScript performance, and are probably the best mobile/thin platforms for rich HTML5 applications, but they just happen to optionally support Flash as well, perhaps providing a bridge from the past.

A Very Personal Flash Experience

I've been running Flash on my Nexus One for several months now. I have it configured to On Demand so the scourge of animated, CPU-clogging Flash adverts don't destroy my web browsing experience. When there is Flash content that I want to view, I click the little arrow and voila, Flash is running on my mobile phone.

Overall it has been a very welcome addition to the device. From restaurant sites, to small videos like Zero Punctuation reviews, to games for my children, to product information pages, I like having the option of engaging Flash when the need arises.

So when I saw entry titled "Just How Bad Is Flash on Android" on Daring Fireball, of course I was drawn in. There Gruber indirectly linked to some demonstrations of Flash failing miserably on several Flash video sites.

To which, I say, no kidding.

Anyone under any illusion that having Flash on their mobile device opened up any and all content is willfully or technically incompetent. That or it's link bait trying to herd in the people who desperately need their biases confirmed, and a lot of people desperately need to believe that Flash isn't necessary on mobiles. I'd probably say it's that second option at play.

Of course not all content will play. This is, after all, a mobile device with a little power-sipping mobile processor. While 1Ghz sounds pretty pimp, the Snapdragon in the Nexus One is in many ways a weakling, particularly in video decoding and 3D graphics tasks where it fell behind even the iPhone 3GS.

On this 1Ghz processor I've had trouble playing local 720x480 h264 videos encoded at 1Mbps, encountering frequent stuttering and dropped frames. Compare that to the iPhone 4 which allows for up to 7Mbps+ videos at 1280x720, which it plays flawlessly, owing to the excellent hardware decoding.

When it comes to video the iPhone 4 simply kicks the Nexus One (and virtually every other HTC Android device, as HTC is addicted to Snapdragons) to the curb. Then again, the Samsung Galaxy S kicks the iPhone 4 around and calls it Sally, while the OMAP in the Droid 2/X offers a fair fight.

Snapdragon processor devices are not the top of the pile by a long measure.

So the Nexus One really isn't a great platform to highlight video prowess anyways.

Enough with the hardware excuses.

Add that Flash is often its own worst enemy: When you enable the plug-in, your enable in the Android browser is browser wide for that page, meaning it simultaneously enables the twelve punch-the-monkey animated ads surrounding it, often destroying the experience.

So there is no surprise at all that a high bitrate 1000x500 video surrounded by Flash adverts — a scenario that clogs a high performance 2.4Ghz core on a modern x86 PC (which would be equal to about a 8Ghz or higher snapdragon) — probably with a layer of DRM adding more demands, doesn't run so great on a mobile device.

"So Steve Jobs Was Right! Flash won't work on mobile!"

Given that I've enjoyed Flash on my smartphone on many occasions, I find such claims — which I keep seeing made by seemingly non-stupid individuals — ludicrous. It is fervent, desperate doublespeak.

Mobile Flash exists. It's far from perfect. The available content usually isn't even aware that it exists. Yet still, it is.

And really, it isn't a fair fight anyways. When sites provide HTML5 video, they do so often specifically for the iPhone/iPad because of the massive namespace territory they conquered. Most sites don't even feature sniff for the functionality — they don't care if you are running Chrome or Safari or IE 9 and can run HTML Video — but will instead refuse to serve up HTML 5 video for anything but those Apple devices. Given that, they encode specifically and only for that platform, with appropriate bitrates and complexity profiles ideal for those devices.

There's no big surprise that it often runs well.

That isn't a very encompassing, scalable solution though. One device family isn't meant to rule, and at some future point HTML5 will start to leave the iOS devices behind. The iPhone lived through a special moment in time where it was handled as a blessed child, getting its own special treatment, however that moment is passing.

Of course the Flash people have a solution for disparate devices, using dynamic streaming that is based upon the consuming device (resolution and bitrate scaling based upon the capabilities of the device, very similar to some technology in Microsoft Silverlight). Not surprisingly there is little use of it yet given that mobile Flash devices just started appearing very recently, and still comprise a tiny market.

"So...Steve Jobs Was Right?"

No.

When I originally thought about how to respond to this, my first idea was to make a video demonstrating a smartphone failing miserably at rendering and interacting with various HTML5 sites. But then I thought better because someone might confuse that as a serious criticism of HTML5 when I love the technology stack and pragmatically realize that it can't (and shouldn't) always be universally accessible.

Yet still, contemplate the failings of HTML5 on mobile devices:

• Layout can be ill suited for the screen dimensions and resolution of a smartphone.
• Functionality can be overwrought and too heavy for a smartphone.
• Input techniques might not work on smartphone.
• etc.

Anyone who has browsed on their smartphone or tablet has experienced all of those. If someone were looking to go out of their way to act shocked that such an experience exists, source material can be found everywhere.

Which is of course why many sites, like the atrocious script pig TechCrunch (seriously, load it up in Firefox with Firebug and check the net tab), created special mobile pages that they force you to, against your will, when you try to visit on a mobile device.

The next time you see a TOP 10 CANVAS DEMOS on your social news site of choice, pull them up on your tablet or smartphone and check out how well they work. Chances are overwhelmingly that they will fail miserably. Almost every HTML5 game demands that you use a keyboard to control it, if they aren't simply too resource demanding for a little mobile device.

So do we write off web browsers on mobile devices? Do we say, in a tut-tut-tut fashion, "No mobile browser exists. WAP is the world for portable devices!" I hope not.

Punching Monkeys Coming in HTML5 Soon To You

One trend that is accelerating is the movement of many ads to HTML5 and away from Flash. That short period where iOS devices came with an almost intrinsic AdBlock+ in the form of the lack of Flash capabilities is rapidly disappearing. Soon every page you visit is going to be a mishmash of computationally demanding canvas renders and DOM manipulations, and it's going to become much more difficult to avoid their cost.

Closing Notes

For those who are on the fence about the whole Flash thing — whether they care about it on their mobile or tablet — take a look a the quick video I put up above. The videos did not run perfectly, the auto configurator didn't provide a seamless, perfect experience...yet if the option is that or nothing, I think most reasonable people would agree that it's better than nothing.

No, not really.

What a thoroughly boring discussion that has distracted the entire tech industry. So many incredible innovations happening, yet everyone's talking this minor bit of errata. Move on!

It is further evidence that smartphones dominate the technology discussion now, with desktop technology fading into the noise. Intel is quickly preparing their very competent assault on the field with the Moorestown processor. It promises some exciting times ahead.

Backtracking on 802.11n with the N1

On the topics of product issues, in a prior entry I noted that I had been enjoying the fruits of 802.11n with the Froyo update on the Nexus One. Shortly after that entry, another update was pushed, FRF91, and my connectivity has become almost unusable unless I disable 802.11n on my wireless router (which was actually the case when I first got the phone, but FRF85 had provided salvation). So now I run two WAPs, with one to serve the 802.11n devices so I needn't cripple it for the N1, and a 802.11g one just to service the smartphone.

On High Density Smartphone Screens

With all of the talk about very high pixel density phones, and the downside of larger-screen phones, the focus of most discussions seems to be purely on the visual clarity of the screen. The actual usability of the on-screen content seems to be ignored.

On the Nexus One I'm dealing with a 252dpi (there is some fakery with the pentile pixel arrangement, but ignoring that), 3.7" screen. A site like the New York Times looks fantastic in landscape mode, with a fully readable presentation of the entire real-web contents. Yet the downside of that high-density, small screen becomes evident when I actually want to interact with the content on the screen. Something as simple as clicking on the category links down the left hand side is an exercise of extreme precision: Each link is approximately the size of a single fingerprint ridge, and they're so densely packed that a mm this way or that way yields the annoyance of a wrongly followed link. Zooming and unzooming just to interact with the screen isn't very enjoyable, and it erases many of the advantages of the pixel density.

Screensize is important, and smaller isn't better when you're talking about a device that doubles as a mini-web appliance. There is a balance to be achieved or the experience is compromised.

While a number of beta releases of Android 2.2 (AKA Froyo) have made the rounds since the Google I/O public unveiling over a month ago, all of the prior releases targeted the T-Mobile variants, leaving my EPE54b-based "AT&T" model on the outside longingly looking in.

Sure, there are methods of rooting and rolling back and then forward to get it working, but I wasn't interested in them simply because this phone is too useful for me to bother: It is already a very decent phone, and I was willing to bide my time until Google refined the final bits and pushed it officially, at least when the alternative started with rooting.

Alas, a version has finally been unviled for my version of Android. I downloaded it, did the manual update, and initial impressions are incredibly positive.

I've complained numerous times before about the stuttering, seemingly overwhelmed feel of the platform, at least relative to the buttery smoothness of an iPhone, and I can happily say that most of those complaints are no longer true.

One possible facet of the Froyo update that has been debated back and forth as myth has been support for 802.11n. I can gladly say that FRF85b does indeed enable 802.11n on my handset.

Taken after switching the WAP to 802.11n only, though it establishes the same connection in mixed g/n. Yes, I named my WAP "dlink", even though it isn't a dlink.

While much has been made about 802.11n's higher theoretical speed, how often is greater than 54Mbps really needed on a smartphone? Is the max 54Mbps of 802.11g just too constrained?

Hardly. The increased max theoretical throughput is a non-issue for this usage.

Instead the real benefit of 802.11n is that it maintains a decent throughput at the edges of the connection, where 802.11g would stutter and disconnect. I can already say that testing this throughout the house and the yard has demonstrated a more consistent, more usable experience. With the WAP in the basement, connectivity in the bedroom was often more hit and miss, whereas now it appears to be rock solid and ever so speedy.

The latest Mac Mini is a slick little device. What really makes it stand apart – in the world of PCs, where it’s a very competent entrant – is the shocking power efficiency of the device.

Viewing a static web page, one reviewer found the device used a miniscule 6W of power.

The PC that I’m typing this entry on – a very typical example of ordinary PCs – is wasting some 40W of power in power supply inefficiency alone at idle. Yet the Mac Mini is managing to provide a good computing experience with 1/6^th that, under a load using 1/6^th the power a typical PC consumes under a load.

Amazing.

The Mac Mini isn’t the first to move us in the right environmental direction, after years of escalating power demands (just look at the power consumption of current generation consoles to see how gluttonous devices have become. Watching a movie on an Xbox 360 could literally cost you $0.20 in electricity alone, not to mention the environmental impact).

The more powerful my smartphones have become, for instance, the more often my PCs are frozen in S3 Sleep. The effect is amplified as people move to very low power devices like the iPad, doing many of the tasks that they would have powered up the home PC for (or worse, kept it running around the clock to have it available) instead on that ultra-low power device.

The impact is measurable. The financial impact is significant (leaving a PC on around the clock costs some $20 a month). The environmental impact – or reduced impact – is invaluable.

“Fragmentation? What Fragmentation?”

The Android Developer’s Blog ignited a firestorm recently by publishing an entry on the purported fragmentation of the Android ecosystem.

It’s worth a read. Too bad the same can’t be said to most of the responses to it.

When the topic concerns either Android or the iPhone, and the arguable failings of each platform, it’s seldom debated by people genuinely interested in seeing the target of their criticisms improve in any meaningful way. Instead it’s pundits (less generously called fanboys) hoisting their flag, pushing in for their chance to line drive some talking points.

Rabble rabble rabble, Steve Jobs will eat your firstborn

Rabble rabble rabble, Android is fragmented and anarchist.

It is noise that seldom inspires or enlightens.

On Android Fragmentation

We have a problem, Mountain View.

Some handset vendors are lagging on upgrading their devices, if they do at all. There is a wide disparity in performance and functionality among devices, leading to unpredictable user experiences.

It parallels the dark days of Windows Mobile, when unloved devices were shat onto the market and promptly forgotten, the vendors more interested in prepping you for the next iteration that, they assure you, will fix all of the problems of the last.

For those writing application targeting Android, such as myself, there is a need to carefully consider the current version breakdown, choosing the target that offers the minimum functionality you need without restricting your market too much. You need to perform the same analysis on the target hardware capabilities, as the simple reality is that a rich graphical 3D application won’t run acceptably on a wide range of deployed Android devices. A high-end game might run well on a Samsung Galaxy S, for instance, while being unusable on every other Android device.

Do you target 2.1 and take advantage of Quick Contacts, for instance, and limit yourself to 45% of the potential customer base, maybe preparing yourself for the future? Or do you target 1.6 and simply go without those refinements? Do you build a 3D rendering interface that will choke on all but the latest handset, or do you cater to the lower common denominator?

It’s a serious concern. There are brand new Android devices that are hitting shelves today with Android 1.5 on them. There are new devices with mediocre processors, limited memory, and barely functional GPUs.

Isn’t that weird? It isn’t optimal.

Add that there are all of the various skins that the vendors put on their devices to differentiate: HTC’s SenseUI, Motorola’s MotoBlur, Sony’s Rachael, among others.

Android devices come in all sizes and capabilities: There are big screens and little screens; devices with keyboards and those without; cutting-edge super phones and feature phones on steroids; tablets and netbooks; processors with NEON instruction sets and without; with SSE or without.

An Android device is not a homogenous experience for either users or developers.

Crazy isn’t it? Anarchy reigns! Contrast this to the land of iPhone where there is a very strong uniformity and development consistency among experiences and development and devices.

Shouldn’t Android be more like the iPhone? Shouldn’t Google lay the hammer down and demand that vendors refrain from customizing, they upgrade in lockstep, they build a consistent, uniform platform, and nothing deviates from the reference implementation? Everyone building a Nexus One with a vendor label on it?

No way.

Fragmentation is the Reason the Android Platform Has Succeeded

The progress of Android over the past year, or even just the past 6 months, has been nothing short of extraordinary.

From being a marginal wannabe, largely adopted by those ideological few willing to turn a blind eye to its many, many faults, Android is now a very serious competitor among mainstream consumers.

It’s an accomplishment that Google could never have pulled off alone. They needed a lot of help from a lot of very capable partners, and their strategy with the Android platform and the Open Handset Alliance is entirely the reason we got to where we are today.

HTC, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Sony, nVidia, Intel, ARM, among a slew of others…a lot of very smart, very capable companies working to make their own success story, pulling up the Android platform at the same time.

Motorola wants to sell you a Droid, yet by investing so much into making their devices a success they’ve build an ecosystem where you benefit from their success even if you choose another vendor’s phone.

Fragmentation is progress.

Instead of releasing a single iteration yearly, a single lockstep uniform device and experience, a Darwinist battle is taking place, the best choices and experiences triumphing. The Evo 4G is hitting shelves today, yet already we’re hearing about the next superstar, a purported HTC Scorpion device with a 1.5Ghz processor coming soon.

When people argue that Android should be more like the iPhone, they lose sight of this very beneficial side effect of the so-called fragmentation.

If Google ran the Android platform like Apple, it would have been a Buzzesque flop. It would have failed miserably.

But they didn’t, and it wasn’t. We are where we are.

So where are we?

Well firstly, most of what you’ve read about Android fragmentation is bunk. Horror stories about incompatible apps and terrifying development processes are largely exaggerated.

But there are some issues.

Google Earth, Google Goggles and the official Android Twitter application (an excellent application that was built with Google’s help) all require Android 2.1 or above. It’s fairly obvious that Google intentionally limits the best to a recent version in efforts to motivate vendors to hasten their upgrades, and to showcase the most recent platform additions, such as the animated backgrounds in the Twitter applications.

Those are the reason that customers demand that vendors update their phone, and it helps keep them motivated to push out upgrades. Motorola just released the Backflip on 1.5, and Sony released the X10 on 1.6. Both of them have gotten a lot of criticisms in reviews for this choice, and they both will pay for lagging behind. Their motivation to get upgrades to the market quickly is very strong.

As a developer, when you develop an application you need to target a given version knowing that you’re cutting out anyone running something older (thus cutting out some prospective customers). In a subset of cases you can target an old version and optionally target newer features using runtime reflection and feature sniffing.

And there are compatibility quirks. In developing an app that integrates the camera I’ve encountered a number of issues, including devices that invert the preview output, some that only return greatly scaled down pictures when a picture is taken, among a variety of other little variations and surprises, and that’s just among the devices I’ve tested with.

There are known issues when dealing with OpenGL where some devices demand a certain magic quadrant of environment conditions to operate at their peak.

All in all, though, it is an absolute walk in the park compared to most other development efforts I have pursued. The Android SDK abstracts most everything to a shockingly effective degree, and the very clever, HTML-like (and thus XAML-like) layout manager allows you to very effectively run your application on a huge variety of displays.

You can build high-performance code in the NDK, including hand-crafted ARM assembly, but you can do it in a way that will only optionally be used if the right conditions are available (e.g. an ARM processor with NEON instructions), otherwise falling backed to a managed version.

In many ways writing to Android is a bit like writing an HTML5 application. There are quirks that you have to deal with on some clients, but they’re mostly known and documented and fade away as the clients move closer to the specification, without restricting the innovation and uniqueness of the individual clients.

Everything about Android is built to abstract from the device, from the virtual machine runtime to the density-independent pixels to the layout manager’s multi-dot-pitch resource utilization (I would have preferred that they used vector graphics, such as SVG, but it’s better than nothing).

If Android is HTML5, then the iPhone is ActiveX

When you develop for the iPhone, you develop for the iPhone. With the iPad there’s one additional form factor, but the universe of clients is extremely limited and of little variance. With the new iPhone there are rumors that it will see a simple doubling of each axis’ pixel count, allowing the system to simply pixel double previous applications.

It’s a bit like developing for Internet Explorer back in the early 90s: Everything was grand and entirely consistent and uniform, and in many cases you could just target an ActiveX control because you could make so many assumptions about your target.

There is limited variability build into the iPhone SDK or development process, and those hurdles are crossed when they are encountered. When the iPad came out, they updated the SDK to deal with the second screen size. The new iPhone SDK added the ability to deal with the new pixel density.

It makes a developer’s life simple. But it also seriously hobbles the rate of innovation and the ability to adapt to change.

It’s a Long Term Strategy

In the short run the single-target approach – the ActiveX approach – wins. In the longer run those early gains disappear, especially when you’re moving uniformly (“non-fragmented”) against many speedy opponents.

Just take a gander at the comments on any Android market share story. Just a few months ago it was gloating damnation as the iPhone ecosystem dominated the Android platform. Now it has subtly shifted, and the argument has moved from "iPhone dominates!" to “You can’t compare the many Android makers against just Apple! Apple still beats HTC!” It’s quite a shocking adaptation, and of dubious merit: As a developer I completely care about the platform saturation, not whether a phone is a Motorola or an LG.

And of course Apple does as well. There are millions of iTouch and iPad devices that don’t get counted in smartphone surveys, and they give iPhone targeting developers a staggering lead still, but we’ll see for how long.

Videos showing young children using the iPad have been making the rounds, cited as proof of the intuitive nature of the product. They’ve been referenced in articles with titles like “Apple iPad easy enough for a child to use”.

Similar videos made the rounds for kids and the iPhone, kids and the iPod, all the ways back to kids and the original Mac.

If you want to show that something is easy to use, the thinking goes, record a child exploring it and post the results on YouTube.

It’s entirely backwards.

Children Are Uninhibited Explorers

Kids engage in active, uninhibited exploration to discover the functionality of a system, often through trial and error. They do this without self-doubt, prejudice or assumption.

Deviations from behaviours and interfaces that they already know don’t make them doubt their intelligence, or make them feel angry that their existing knowledge is obsolete.

While parents love to show off their children doing clever things, bragging about the superior essence of their DNA or parenting, the reality is that most children are shockingly clever.

I have three young children. They’ve had computers since each was a toddler. They have often seen me using computers. They watch each other using computers.

My youngest has, since well before his second birthday, gone to the office, turned on his computer, and logged into his account.

He launches Firefox and decides which site amongst his bookmarks that he wants to visit. There he explores the site-specific UI, picks the activity he wants to play, and masters its nuances.

There is little consistency among the sites or individual games, and they frequently change it up and add and remove content, yet that never discourages him or throws him off, but instead offers more opportunity for exploration. It plays a part in the enjoyment.

When he gets bored he goes to the next game or site.

If I’m at the office and I see him appear online through Skype, I can make a call to him and he’ll answer. He often exclaims “DADDY!”, then abruptly (how rude!) hanging up to get back to his game.

He figured out most of this on his own. There was no computer training course or bootcamp learning series.

The same technology aptitude certainly holds true for my other two. My daughter was beta testing a page when she was two. She had no problem quickly discovering how the elements interacted.

My children play videos from the network-attached storage. They take pictures of themselves with superimposed hats using the webcam. They scan their drawings for digital enhancements.

A year back I discovered my middle son, then a preschooler, on YouTube doing searches for Star Wars videos. I was sitting behind him on another PC and got curious when he asked how to spell Darth Vader.

Now that I’m onto my third Android phone – having gone through the HTC Dream, to the HTC Magic+, now onto the Nexus One, all over the course of less than six months – the Dream has been relegated as a portable media and internet access device for them, and again they figured out how to do almost everything it is capable of doing on their own, even on stodgy old Android 1.5.

Taking pictures, playing videos, navigating the market and installing and running applications (no pay account is associated, so thankfully they aren’t running up charges).

And it isn’t even an Apple product.

Children are brilliant. Of course I think my kids are especially awesome (as every parent does about their own sprogs), but most kids are capable of these feats if given the freedom to explore with the confidence that there are few negative ramifications of their actions.

Adults Are Dumb In Comparison

Adults, in contrast, usually approach anything new with self-doubt, biases, and prejudices. They have preconceived notions of how something should behave, and deviations from that leads them to grow angry and irritated that the subject is, essentially, making them feel stupid, while making their previously acquired knowledge obsolete.

If Facebook moves a button, there is mass outrage.

Linux desktops are generally considered deficient unless they closely mirror the behaviour of the Windows desktop that people are accustomed to. Individualizing, even where it is demonstrably superior, is almost always a negative return activity.

Just copy what people are accustomed to. Most adults actively avoid learning anything new, so the less “new” the better, generally.

Humanity suffered a decade of jokes about programming the VCR.

We’re seeing the same behaviour now in the smartphone ecosystem where Apple is held as the benchmark, and the way things should be done. While many bemoan everyone “copying” Apple, they need to keep in mind this people-are-dumb effect.

Of course this leads to a chicken-egg debate: how does Apple get away with doing things “Different”? How do they manage to get away with, and be heralded for, creating entirely new and different experiences? How do they manage to “make” markets?

Apple Treats Users like Children

Many users approach Apple devices as if they are children, just as the products are delivered as if to Children.

Watch Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad and seriously question whether that sort of presentation would have been tolerable from, say, Steve Ballmer or Eric Schmidt.

Listen as he soothingly delivers the goods like he’s a children’s author giving a reading from “Why Goombas Go Bananas”.

While that sounds like a negative statement about Apple, it is actually incredibly positive.

Given that there is a widespread expectation that there is a reward that will come from acclimation – they have been told that Steve Jobs has the Midas touch and Apple designers are the world’s best – people often approach Apple products with a wonderful child-like open-mindedness, willing to accept differences. There is knowledge that it will be a rewarding experience.

The same thing happened with the Nintendo Wii: Given positive press and a friendly impression of the company, many had an unexpectedly child-like response to it, and were willing to give it a chance.

This is seldom the case. Whether it’s a simple change of a web page, the use of the Ribbon bar in Office, a switch to Firefox – people have a strong gravity to things that they already know, and a powerful aversion to change.

It takes a lot of hype to overcome that friction.

Whether Apple products are really as intuitive and brilliant as claimed is debateable, but the belief that they are is enough to get them over that hump, yielding the same benefits.

On Acting like a Child and Letting a Child (or Adult) Act like a Child

One important note about children (or adults acting like a child) and exploration: To work there has to be an environment where there are few negatives to simple actions.

In the case above my kids use PCs running Windows 7 and limited user accounts, coupled with reasonable (but not overbearing) supervision, so there is little to no damage they could cause with a mouse and a keyboard.

Worst case I’d just wipe and reinstall.

They can’t accidentally order things on a credit card. They can’t install root kits. They can’t delete system files.

Having that freedom to try things risk free is critical to exploration.

It’s just important for adults who are learning a system, and perhaps a part of how we got to where we are was an ecosystem where simple exploration could be a destructive, damaging experience. Where an accidental keystroke launches a complete changed interface, for instance, with no obvious way to get back.

It destroys the user’s sense of adventure, probably forever.