The Myth Of Fingerprints

Are iPhone users the most active web surfers on smartphones? Two reports, from The Daily Mail and British Gas, say that the majority, by a factor of four, of visitors to their websites "are on an iPhone". The National Lottery recently used similar figures to justify their iPhone-only stance too and a report from Intelligent Environments, while showing that there were more Android devices than iPhones in the UK, admittedly by a slim margin, evidenced that iPhone customers are the heaviest smartphone users with 18% of iPhone users spending more than four hours on their phone each day, compared with just 4% of Android and BlackBerry users.

Now this just doesn't make sense. Given that the figures for the number or iPhone and Android users are level-pegging both in the UK and globally, why are iPhone users surfing websites four times as much as all other smartphone users? Web fixation? Surely there's an app for that?

So I did a little digging in the web stats fingerprint files of a site I run including for the Aston Martin Owners Club, a site with very respectable traffic figures and a predominance of iPhone users in its audience. Turns out my own Galaxy S, until the recent upgrade to Gingerbread, showed in web stats as a non-smartphone, which would explain why sites offering iPhone optimised sites serve me up non-smartphone versions of their site. Looking further at the site stats it became apparent the Android users were just a tad behind the iPhone users at 2.10% and 2.11% respectively.

In addition, Google's Chrome browser shows up in web stats as a webkit, read iPhone, user agent. This means anyone surfing to a website from a PC, laptop or netbook using Chrome is going to show in many webstats as an iPhone.

I also found that by typing in about:useragent to the browser's URL bar on my Galaxy S I could select from a range of user agent options; from native Android, in my case Galaxy S, to iPhone, Nexus 1 and desktop agent, the latter mimicking a PC browser. Not all Android users would do this but it does point to the earlier evidence that Android phones are showing up in web site stats inconsistently at best.

Clearly this needs more investigation and I've posted a question on Quora about this but it does look as though the figures being quoted by British Gas and The Daily Mail may not be as indicative of the smartphone audience for their sites as they presume.

With many companies being led up the garden path to the iPhone's walled garden it's time for some pruning of the statistics orchard so that they can see the Android's for the Apples.

Over the mountain 
Down in the valley 
Lives a former talk-show host 
Everybody knows his name 
He says there's no doubt about it 
It was the myth of fingerprints 
I've seen them all and man 
They're all the same

Paul Simon - All Around The World or The Myth Of Fingerprints.

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Websites: the new bloatware

I have been doing all my browsing on mobile phones lately and it has made me realise just how bloated websites have become. Although most smartphone browsers can cope with pages that are not optimised for mobile phones and zoom in on content features, the sheer amount of page furniture on the average web page today makes those pages slow to load and confusing to navigate.

Some of this bloat is due to bad design: poor information architecture, overly large images, needless use of Flash or animated images and sound and simply loading too much on one page. Much of the bloat comes from online advertising, which usually features all of these bad design "features". All of these things point to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is and how to leverage it most effectively.

I first discovered the internet in one its first incarnations as JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork that is still operational in the UK. This was in the "green screen" days before Berners-Lee had devised the World Wide Web to give us a graphical way of navigating the wealth of content that was already out there. This mine of information was freely available and freely shared, something that enabled me to research papers for the software engineering post-graduate diploma I was studying at the time, empowering me with access to knowledge and advice that was invaluable.

I can still remember when Mixmaster Morris showed me the nascent world wide web on his computer back in 198? Although it was nothing much more than a graphical file management and reading system it certainly sped up the task of searching and navigating through all that content underlining the fundamental aspect of the internet that people so misunderstand, that it is a service, not merely another incarnation of print and audio-visual media. Much of the bloat on current websites stems from this fundamental misunderstanding, attempting to deliver either a televisual experience or push content at people when the web is an information medium that is pulled down by the end user according to their needs.

As more and more businesses develop a mobile presence for their enterprise, understanding of this fundamental difference will determine whether their mobile strategy is successful or not.

If you are contemplating implementing a mobile service, whether via a mobile web site or app and are interested in learning more about how you can ensure you adopt the right approach please contact me via the form below for consultation and advice.

We need a slow thought revolution

In 1989 Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food movement to counteract the fast food and fast life culture that is becoming all too pervasive today. Expounding the principle that pleasure and responsibility should be inseparable and that each should serve to inform the other, Slow Food is a working example of the "less is more" philosophy that would rather leisurely sip a full-bodied demitasse of espresso than gulp down a "bottomless" (sic) cup of bland, watery liquid.

When the interweb first began to pervade our daily lives the first thing I noticed was that the culture of immediacy embraced this new form of communication without thinking, which is symptomatic of the microwave generation, who desire immediate gratification and are constantly unsatisfied as a consequence. I myself fell victim to this; in a series of email exchanges with my publisher of the time, we both become more and more agitated as each successive missive from the other party failed to address the queries we had raised, only aggravating each of us with the terse comments whose intent, if not their very meaning, was often unclear and wide open to misinterpretation. We both became increasingly angered by these exchanges, firing off responses ever more rapidly in a spiral of fulmination. Eventually we recovered our equilibrium when the realisation struck us both that firing off shots in haste was causing the problem, neither of us was taking the time to read the other's email messages properly, nor pausing long enough to compose a considered reply.

It seems ironic that a medium that removes the requirement to respond immediately to a query engendered by a face-to-face dialogue, by inserting both space and time between the correspondents, should itself breed more impatience rather than less: to the point where that very impatience seems to permeate real-time discussions as well in a not-so-perfect example of a negative feedback loop.

Several years ago I was involved in a global project to build an intranet for a large automotive manufacturer who had centres in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Paris. The group running the project held huge workshops, where all the stakeholders were assembled to thrash out the requirements. The consultancy group running these had assembled a series of intranet "experts", myself amongst them, who were supposed to be there to "add value" by contributing advice on the topic under discussion. Adding value seemed to consist of adding complication in the form of immediate and convoluted responses to questions and topics that frequently baffled both me and the client by their obtuseness. My tactic was only to speak when I had something to say and could offer advice based on the benefit of my own experience. This approach seemed to be the right one to me as my interjections frequently led to the resolution of a conundrum or the adoption of an approach based on my input.

Part way through the project, which was beginning to take very much longer than planned and to frustrate me due to the amount of time wasted wandering up the blind alleys of the obtuse advice proffered with increasing frequency by the battery of experts, I was called aside by the lead executive of the consultancy group and criticised for not adding enough value. When I responded that the quality of my input was such that it had contributed positively to the dialogue every time, the response was that I didn't offer enough input.

"I've been told you sometimes don't speak at all during a workshop." reported the executive. It was true, as the quantity of pointless comment had increased, the level of debate had strayed so far from the task at hand and was so wearying I increasingly found the only value I could add was to try and pull the workshops back on track. This became an increasingly futile exercise as the frequency and level of noise became both bewildering and wearying in equal measure. The executive's upbraiding of my efforts made me realise it wasn't the quality of advice offered that was seen as adding value, it was the quantity and so I asked to be removed from the project. The project rattled on for another year after I left, three times as long as originally estimated, and failed to deliver to such an extent that the client successfully sued the consultancy firm for this failure to meet the terms and conditions of their own contract.

While this episode is emblematic of the modus operandi of many consultancy firms, whose business model is to sell time while paying lip service to providing advice, it is also endemic in a society that values immediacy and profligacy of response over measured and thoughtful advice.

Texting, email and social media, from forums to Twitter, have proven to be very popular in the Nordic countries. I have heard the opinion expressed that this is because the people in these counties are socially challenged and prefer indirect communication rather than face-to-face dialogue. Nothing could be further from the truth. People in the Nordics as just socially gregarious as the inhabitants of other countries. The difference is that a thoughtful, measured response is valued more than an immediate, ill-considered one there. The first time I encountered this it was slightly disconcerting. I hosted a workshop in Copenhagen, with members from Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Every question I put to this audience seemed to meet with a blank response and I wondered if they were having problems following my English or simply found my content of little worth or interest. I retired to my hotel room tired and dispirited.

The group assembled the next day and began to vigourously respond to my questions of the day before. Questioning this delay in response I was informed that they considered my questions very good indeed, such that they all wanted to take time to think about the issues before responding. The quality of their responses was outstanding and we resolved most of the issues in that follow-up meeting. What a contrast to the LA summits, where continual knee-jerk responses only led to days, months and years of fruitless meetings.
This, I realised was why social media was a valued form of communication in the Nordics, because it allowed time for consideration before replying. Seen thus it became an important adjunct to human dialogue, not a replacement for it.

As well as the Slow Food movement there is also the Long Now movement, dedicated to building a 1,000,000 year clock, like the Slow Food movement, focusing on a longer term view of life. If we could bring the perspective embodied by these movements to consulting and the use of IT perhaps we could begin to really add value.

Knowledge is power, not wisdom

I’ve just been watching IBM’s smarter planet team’s Internet of Things video on what they think a smarter planet should be. In a Matrixy, Neuromancer kind of way they try to paint a rosy picture of a utopian future where everything is interconnected, which to their way of thinking makes the planet smarter. This is at odds with the dystopian future painted in The Matrix and Neuromancer and equally at odds with reality.

Even if the intelligent connection between systems painted in the video becomes reality that doesn’t make the planet smarter, it makes the systems devised by humans smarter, which is exactly the premise behind those systems taking over the planet as envisaged in science fiction works such as The Terminator and The Matrix.

When the internet first began a mantra was born that said “information wants to be free”. This is often misunderstood as meaning that information should be available to all at no cost. What it really means is that information was finally freeing itself from the tethers of books and libraries to become available to all via the internet. The mobile revolution, which is just beginning, is finally witnessing that becoming a reality as information frees itself from the tether of the desktop PC and becomes available to us where and when we need it.

All of this comes at a price of course, both in setting up the systems to store and deliver this information but even more importantly in our human capacity to digest and understand it. The IBM team proffer the DIKW paradigm as a truism; saying that Data becomes Information then Knowledge and this leads to Wisdom, by what magical osmosis they fail to specify.

Wisdom is borne out of experience and that comes at a cost. The development of understanding cannot happen magically, which is why the nightmare scenarios painted by the afore-mentioned science fiction stories is as much a piece of empty romanticism as IBM’s vision. The planet, or indeed the universe, isn’t talking to us through matrices of data and systems it speaks to our soul. The planet doesn’t need to get any smarter but human beings do.

Suits you sir!

Are companies being "tucked up" with ill-fitting software?

When I took a post-graduate diploma in Software Engineering in 1984 I was fascinated by the way the flows of information within a company were analysed to produce a model for software development. This was in the days when most enterprise software was bespoke, designed and built to fit the aforementioned analysis. I immediately questioned why this analysis couldn’t be used to highlight areas of duplication and wastage and thence to find ways to improve the company’s efficiency and reduce their cost base. Then, and only then, could you apply the judicious use of technology to achieve cost savings and productivity gains. This approach just met with blank looks from my tutors, they couldn’t conceive of their role as being to offer advice on how to run a business.

Fast forward to 1999 and I was offered a job as a consultant in a global IT company. At that time I was advising two of the world’s largest publishing companies on the use of internet technology within their companies. I was identified as a consultant working in an area the IT company wanted to get into and so I was approached. My perception of them as a hardware and software company led me to challenge them on how meaningful my contribution could be. To my concern that I did not want to be a proxy salesman for their hardware and software the response was, “You won’t be doing that. Your role will be to analyse a company’s process and information flows and advise them on the best use of technology to improve productivity and increase efficiency within that company. That technology doesn’t have to be ours, your role will be to identify the best tools for the job, which may or may not be our tools.”

Although I was sceptical about the latter half of this assurance I was heartened by the first half. Wasn’t this just what I had been trying to impress upon my tutors more than a decade ago? It would appear that, while I was busily engaged in helping companies take advantage of the dot com boom (a boom I could see was over), consulting had grown from a simple time and motion study to a process destined to take a far more proactive role in reshaping companies, just as I had identified it should all those years ago.

Another decade on and we have come full circle but not where we should be, helping companies to improve efficiency and productivity. The reason is that software has moved from a bespoke model to an off-the-peg model, where companies are asked to accept an-off-the shelf package as the answer to their needs. This is done by forcing the company to change to fit the software, a not-so-neat reversal of the paradigm my tutors were using two decades ago.

Analysis of the company’s information flows and requirements has degenerated into a simple measurement exercise, just like buying an off-the-peg suit. Sir measures 39 inches on the chest, 33 inches at the waist and has an inside leg measurement of 31.5 inches. This 40/34/32 suit will therefore be the one that fits you. Maybe a little shortening of the trousers and if you just let me stand behind you and hold in the jacket at the waist you can see how it suits you. Don’t worry, the sleeves will ride up with wear.

No real consultancy is taking place, the “consultancy” firms are merely implementing software packages, forcing the customer to fit the design of that package, nipping and tucking here and there to make the fit appear right. Sadly it never is right and the result is a costly exercise that fails to deliver the promised process and productivity improvements. Suits you sir? I don't think so.