Guillaume Lerouge's blog

27 Dec 2011

One Feature Phone To Rule Them All

(download)

8 Dec 2011

Siri isn't how Jobs cracked the TV nut

Evidence suggests that Jobs had other ideas in minds when he referred to TV saying he had "finally cracked it".

It seems to me that the following passage in Steve Jobs' biography should cast serious doubts as to whether Siri is the idea Jobs had in mind:

At one point Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see if he could confuse it. “What’s the weather in Palo Alto?” he asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs challenged it: “Are you a man or a woman?” Amazingly, the app answered in its robotic voice, “They did not assign me a gender.” For a moment the mood lightened.

This is taking place on August 24, 2011. Contrast this with this other passage, that I assume took place some time earlier in 2011:

And he very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Simply put, this is completely inconsistent with the idea that Siri would be the aforementioned interface:

From this story in Pen Computing Magazine, we learn that ""Jobs doesn't believe in handwriting recognition," observed Steve Capps, Newton's principal designer." This and his reaction to the voice recognition interface seem to indicate that automated recognition of interaction was not Jobs' favored mode of interaction.

Earlier in the book, we're introduced to Jobs' focus on shipping real, usable products. Jobs also discussed the TV business at length back in 2010 at the D8 conference, noting the various issues with shipping a TV. He thought about the issue a lot.

Given that Jobs doesn't seem to have known much about Siri before his resignation, it seems weird to think that he would consider having "cracked" TV by simply having thought about using voice recognition technology to build a new interface for TVs.

This casts serious doubts on Siri being the answer to Jobs' TV interface woes. I'm leaning much more in favor of John Gruber's theory that the future of TV is apps:

An Apple-built TV would run some version of iOS
iOS already features many easy-to-use TV apps. Airplay gives a good idea of how an iDevice could be used to easily control a TV
The main issue with Airplay is bandwidth and processor performance: sending high-definition video over the air through WiFi and rendering it perfectly on a 1080 display without any latency nor resolution problem
However, it would be very easy for the AppleTV to directly access a video stream selected from your device through its own ethernet connexion, using credentials stored on the device
This way, users benefit from yearly upgrades in their device while being able to use the TV as a great, longer-lasting content consumption tool

PS: as an aside, this fits with Fred Wilson's theory that cheap will be smart.

5 Dec 2011

London - Winter 2011

I was in London last week for the Online Information 2011 conference. I took the opportunity to stay there for the week-end. The progress made on the The Shard since my last time there were pretty amazing! I also discovered St Katharine Docks, definitely a great location. I highly recommend going to the Starbucks overlooking the basin!

(download)

30 Nov 2011

Software - On making the possible easy

Right now at XWiki we're hard at work on building a new feature that we think will change the way people will interact with our software. It's a wizard called "Application Within Minutes" which aim is to let users take advantage of XWiki's structured documents functionality much more easily than it is possible now. It will look like this:

This feature has been available almost since the beginning of XWiki, more than 7 years ago. However, until today it hasn't been easy to use. It was merely possible, using a complex number of steps in order to build a simple application.

This recent article by Jason Fried nails it:

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

We're going to try to make the possible, easy. Obvious is next on the list.

25 Nov 2011

Address is Approximate - Amazing video

Very cool - thanks @jvelo !

25 Nov 2011

Why making technology easy matters

I'm at my mum's this week-end. She missed one of her favorite shows yesterday evening and she wants to watch it today. She tried accessing the TV channel website in order to watch it from her netbook, to no avail. Not a good experience.

So I got my ipad out, downloaded the TV channel's app and immediately found a replay of the show she missed. She's now sitting in the living room, enjoying her series.

Not only might the future of TV indeed be apps, but experiences like this show -again- why making technology truly easy to use matters so much. That's how you change people's lives for the better.

12 Nov 2011

Article: Why Startups Should Pay Attention to Herman Cain’s 9-9-9

Hi was reading this article by Mark Suster:

But here’s the magic. With Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul all in the race nobody should even be talking about Herman Cain. You have the fringe candidate in Ron Paul. You have the red meat social candidate in Michelle Bachman. You have the groomed and polished candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. You have the “anybody but Mitt” candidate Rick Perry. You even have the old guard Newt Gingrich.
But we’re all talking about Herman Cain.

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BothSidesOfTheTable/~3/qRM3MEb2EMA/

He makes the point that software companies have a hard time articulating their value proposition to potential customers in a clear and understandable way. That's an issue I'm faced with daily as a software sales guy: how do you convey both the breadth and depth of your offering while at the same time keeping your prospects interested and engaged in the conversation? You have to walk a fine line between oversimplifying and showing the value for your potential customer's specific use case.

The key takeover from Mark's article, though, is that if you want to get to stage 2 ("here's why my product is great for you") you have to start by a simple message that you'll repeat over and over again. It might sound boring or inefficient to you, but you have to keep in mind that your prospects are coming from an different perspective entirely. They do not have your experience nor your domain knowledge - that's why they're coming to see you in the first place!

I have a tendency to forget this again and again and the post was a nice reminder to keep it simple.

12 Nov 2011

Article: THE TWEAKER - The real genius of Steve Jobs.

Great article. The geist of it: "It's not over until it's been done right."

(THE TWEAKER - The real genius of Steve Jobs. (Malcolm Gladwell/New Yorker))
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

(via Instapaper)

5 Nov 2011

My New (Experimental) Setup

After reading an article recently on a developer using his iPad as his only machine for a full week, I felt tempted to revive my old Apple Bluetooth Keyboard.

After a trip to the local convenience store to pick-up new batteries and some fiddling with pairing and keyboard locale, I'm all set!

First impressions:
* Being able to type on a keyboard is a real plus for longer-form posts such as this one
* The screen interaction feels a bit weird - having to touch the screen to perform actions such as sending a message is an unnecessary distraction, but I couldn't find a keyboard shortcut yet
* I'm missing tabbed navigation between apps - cmd-tab refuses to do anything :-)

Although this is a nice add-on to the iPad experience, it also makes me understand why Apple is unlikely to release a touch-enabled iMac until it figures out how best to combine the keyboard/mouse and touch-based modes of interaction with the machine.

Now off to selecting a great iPad editor!

24 Oct 2011

A Sales Guy: Good Speaks for Itself

Well, go read it by yourself:

We spend a lot of time these days telling everyone how good our products are, or how good our service is. I can’t help but wonder if we’d be better off is we spent that time and money on just being really good; — good speaks for itself.

http://asalesguy.com/2011/10/24/good-speaks-for-itself/