Do you suffer from “techno fear” or bask in “techno joy”?
- posted by Michael Walsh on November 18th, 2008
- (1)
A while ago I came across this wonderful work by Hugh MacLeod. Hugh has become extremely well known for his ability to hit the nail fair and square on the head.
He’s done it again and I hope he doesn’t mind me hijacking the concept for a few seconds.
Take a look at it again and then think of technology. You’ll see something that strikes a chord with everything Acer has tried to achieve (with varying success) over the years.
That’s how Empowering Technology started. OK, so it’s one of the worst-marketed concepts I’ve had the pleasure of working on and public affection to this suite of “simplicity tools” borders on the love reserved for mainstream “crapware”. But blindly dismissing it as “junk” is missing the point.
PC brands are competing for your attention. We throw design at you, technology, mobility, simplicity, complexity, high-end, low-end… you name it we got it.
But you’re not looking for Faster. Deeper. Harder. Further. any more, are you? (yes I did come up with that title)
Your looking for a better experience.
You don’t care how much market share a company has. To be honest, I’m not even sure anyone outside the business really does.
Whatever it is you do with your computer, the experience is supposed to get better with the new one. You need to believe you’re in control and always will be so that when you fire up your latest and greatest, you actually feel the difference.
There are two ends of the spectrum here. Users who know what they’re doing, probably after waaay too many sleepless nights “tinkering“, and the vast majority of the rest of us who are overwhelmed by the Vista start page and if we were to design a web page it would look like this.
So how do you satisfy both sides?
My view is that the product alone isn’t enough. That’s why there’s a small but thriving community here who deep down, believe the same thing. This community is building a very real and very solid bridge between the company and you (the buying public). A meeting point of ideas, problems and discoveries and a hotchpotch of priceless resources.
Enrich and simplify. That’s exactly what we’re doing here. Thanks again for the idea, Hugh.
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Jing Yeow wrote, on November 23rd, 2008:
The empowering tools are far from junk. They are extremely useful, if for instance you don’t wish to explore the mess that is Windows Power Options.
However it’s a little chunky, in that it takes an age to initialise with Windows first starts up. Often the last thing to load. There is no ability to hide it, and it’s impossible to remove it if you wish to use the eRecovery utility that has saved my laptop from being a brick many times.
So in all the functionality is there, albeit some might complain un-neccessarily. However the experience and using it certainly does make it feel like bloatware. For instance the eAudio tool doesn’t even remember the setting it was last on after you restart your laptop. You may as well go straight into Windows Audio settings. Making it something of a redundant feature.
I like the empowering mantra, not enough to use it (I remove the toolbar from my Startup applications) unable to delete it because I do use some of the features from the empowering key such as Acer eLock, ePower and eRecovery. So it’s a catch 22 situation. I use it, but at the same time wish my laptop could do everything it does without the current interface.
I’d be interested to see what others think of it.