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Daily Archives: May 24, 2007

HP helping to increase HDTV FUD

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History has shown that when it comes to technology, the fastest method to hamper consumer adoption is to have FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).  In my limited lifespan, this dates back to the VHS-Betamax duel back in the 80s, and continues today in the BluRay-HD battles.  Nobody wants to buy the wrong thing, and consumers will often sit around and wait for a victor to emerge.

HP, a company I’ve liked over the years (and one where I have a lot of friends), decided that they wanted to get involved and, for lack of a more perfect phrase, screw with the HDTV industry by using the term “HDTV 2.0”. Shame on you, HP, for such an ill-timed, inappropriate, and unnecessary move.

Consumers today have enough trouble differentiating between 720p, 1080i, and 1080p when they try to buy a set (answer: the first two are effectively the same, 1080p is the ‘better one’ that you should be looking for if you are spending more than about $1500 on a set). 

They have enough issues trying to figure out if they should buy an upscaling DVD player or an actual high-definition player (answer: unless you have a very good set, you probably won’t really notice the difference, plus I wouldn’t buy until the format is settled). 

They have to figure out if they should buy DVI or HDMI or component cables (answer: it’s gotta be HDMI, no debate here), and once they’ve picked, have to then assess how much to spend on those cables (answer: now that I’ve learned a bit more about the cabling and the future of HD, if you are looking at a long-term investment in your HD setup, buy the expensive cables, there will be a difference).

Shame on you, HP. It’s not like a debate on what Web 2.0 (or 3.0) really is, where end-users can happily ignore the topic and just enjoy trying out cool new Web sites/services as they launch.  For a marketing organization to intentionally go out and cause additional FUD in an already confusing space is pure and simple a bad move.  Your job is to answer questions, not create them, and your job is to grow the overall pie, not try to cut out some small piece with such short-term thinking.  

Shame on you, HP!

The Internet in 2007: just as bad as in 1997!

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Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?  There was a time when you’d send off an email, and not have complete confidence it would reach it’s destination properly intact.  Web site developers/managers used to have to build multiple versions of their sites just to make sure the presentation was as desired.  Also, you may recall hearing about some new cool Internet company, but by the time you got home, can’t recall it’s somewhat goofy name.  Quick check, is it 10 years ago, or yesterday?

I really can’t believe how bad the state of email is.  There’s so much anti-spam safeguards in place that it’s now “the norm” to see an email from a very trusted source sitting in the junk box, or worse yet, killed by the ISP.  This problem is exacerbated for people like myself who have independent domain names, which inevitably get taken over by automatic spam “bots”.  I use the mass-BCC trick for sending my geek dinner emails, and each month one or two people send me a note telling me it got stuck in the trash.  It is absolutely pathetic that there is no way to guarantee emails between trusted relationships.  Shame on everyone from Barracuda to Microsoft to Google for not having a solution in place, or even on the horizon.  I especially don’t understand the 28 percent of users who say “spam is not a problem” in their worlds!

Next up: Web browsers.  There’s no doubt that Internet Explorer versions 4, 5, and 6’s near-complete dominance of the browser market had its down side.  But other than lackluster performance and a weak, outdated feature set, I’m not sure what it was.  The Web, for lack of a better phrase, just worked!  Now we have IE6 and 7 on the market, we have Safari (terrible), and Firefox, all with a distributed share of users.  Sure this sounds good – Democracy In Action, yay! – but all I know is I see more and more Web sites broken for one or more browsers, all the time.  I don’t know exactly whose fault it is, but at least when Microsoft ran the show building Web sites was straightforward and reliable.

Okay, that’s enough ranting for the day, but seriously – why are we (we being the technology industry as a whole) allowing the basics to drop into such a deplorable state?  Maybe we need a little less attention on the AJAX and Wikis, and a little more on the things that impact core productivity.  It’s analogous to the cell phone industry, building really pretty-looking phones that can capture and stream TV-quality video, but still drop calls and have terrible battery life. 

But I do have hope that by 2017 it’ll be a little better.  Not much, mind you, but a little.