In the 1994 surprise hit Il Postino, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is shown impressing upon the town postman and aspiring poet, Mario, the importance of metaphor in poetry. Good poetry is impossible without clever metaphors, but for more mundane writing the device and its close relative, the analogy, are perhaps best dispensed with. For, more often than not, they seem to do more harm than good, when it comes explicating a concept, plan or analysis. Take the following confusions…
At the large corporation at which I work, an intelligently crafted presentation that I was witness to included nonetheless a strange use of metaphor: to stress the need for the company to react with agility and speed to the demands of the market, the presenter could have used those very terms (“agility and speed”) with sufficient markup or decoration, in his slide(s). Instead, perhaps for greater effect, he chose to use images to depict the difference between the company today and the one it need become to succeed in the future.
The unfortunate images he chose were those of an elephant (to represent the current lumbering giant of a corporation) and a cheetah (to suggest the corporation remake itself in the image of the fastest recorded land animal). This is unfortunate since his metaphors, rather than sealing his point, argue for quite the opposite considerations! For in the game of Darwinian survival, it is the resilient generalist, the elephant, that has won the race, while the over-specialised cheetah is near extinction (having sacrificed much evolutionary opportunity to achieve its impressive speed).
Sometimes, an analogy or metaphor may turn out to be quite dangerous!
Some of those opposing the current US administration’s ambitions and programmes have anointed themselves the “Tea Party” — in doing so they cleverly associate themselves with the founding of the nation, and its libertarian roots as they see it. This self-identification paints a picture of citizens struggling for individual rights against an overbearing government that is intent on collecting and putting to waste their hard-earned money. If their argument or association is valid, the analogy they employ is simple and evocative, just the sort of good purpose a metaphor can serve (on the other hand, if their underlying thesis is invalid, this highlights another danger of metaphors: that they can often mask the real issues and obtain agreement via emotional appeal; that danger is addressed in the next section).
In response, their detractors — the defenders of President Obama and the Democratic Party — have launched their own “party”, the “Coffee Party”. But unlike the shrewd label “Tea Party”, this one presents no ideological picture or emotional appeal to its members or the general public (that they wish to influence). If anything it reinforces the derisive image of liberals painted by their opponents, the image of effete coffeehouse pseudo-intellectuals.
The mathematics and computer science world has been abuzz lately with the announcement of a proof that P ? NP (a very important unsettled question in computer science / complexity theory). Worry not if you are unaware of P, NP, etc., for they are not critical to the point to be made. The claim of a proof was made to a small number of mathematicians and computer scientists, but was rapidly disseminated through the research community, drawing comments from far and wide. Which led to the concern that should the proof turn out to be wrong (or worse frivolous), then the precious time of some very important mathematicians, who were pulled into the verification effort, would have been wasted irredeemably.
To help explain this loss of time, one of the commenters on a popular blog discussion of the proof offered the analogy of a hiker stranded on a mountaintop. The call for rescue, the analogy goes, results in serious mountain climbers “mount[ing] a brilliant coordinated effort … to get the hiker off the mountain”. The analogy purportedly helps us see how the lack of preparation, as well as other errors of the hiker have wasted valuable resources and time.
At first blush the analogy seems to convey in clear terms the terrible consequences of soliciting expert opinion without prior rigorous (and lengthy) individual effort. However, while the problem may be real, the analogy is in fact deeply flawed. As might be evident, the flaw here is that a call for rescue, imposes an ethical imperative that cannot be ignored, is hardly similar to a proof verification request which can be entirely ignored without guilt or treated with a level of importance of one’s choosing.
Metaphors and analogies are dangerous and misleading beasts. It is, I think, time for the surgeon general to opine on them and alert the public on the menace. Until (s)he does, I propose the following rules of usage:
1. Eschew the metaphor when words suffice. Metaphors should clarify or help the reader’s intuition grasp a complex concept in a simple way. If the concept itself can be expressed in a sentence or two, do you really need the metaphor?
2. Ensure your metaphor is “cashable” (as the philosopher Jerry Fodor writes). Given the metaphor, you (and the reader) should be able to produce the more complex paragraph or two that the metaphor aims to neatly summarise. If there is no underlying explication, the metaphor is mere hand-waving.
3. Tickle the brain, not the heart. Getting people to agree with you by appealing to their sentiments is not always cricket. Aim the metaphor not at imparting a good feeling but at clear thinking. Motivational metaphors are best left to the purveyors of inspirational doodads.
Sign up and support my call for this 3-point prescription to be included in the Microsoft PowerPoint license agreement.
A recent New York Times article (link at the end of this post) addresses the puzzlement that has occupied many, about the flimsy reasoning behind the dismissal of HP CEO Mark Hurd. The article sheds much necessary light on the larger reasons for this action, but what also caught my attention in the piece was this section:
Charles House, a former longtime H.P. engineer who now runs a research program at Stanford University, openly rejoiced when he heard that Mr. Hurd was leaving. “I think the sexual harassment charge was a total red herring,” Mr. House told me. He didn’t care. “I was delighted,” he said. Mr. House’s brief against Mr. Hurd went well beyond his outsize compensation and penchant for cost-cutting. As Mr. House saw it — indeed, as many H.P. old-timers saw it — Mr. Hurd was systematically destroying what had always made H.P. great. The way H.P. made its numbers, Mr. House said, was not just cutting any old costs, but by “chopping R.&D.,” which had always been sacred at H.P. The research and development budget used to be 9 percent of revenue, Mr. House told me; now it was closer to 2 percent. “In the personal computer group, it is seven-tenths of 1 percent,” he added. “That’s why H.P. had no response to the iPad.”
Charles House, a former longtime H.P. engineer who now runs a research program at Stanford University, openly rejoiced when he heard that Mr. Hurd was leaving. “I think the sexual harassment charge was a total red herring,” Mr. House told me. He didn’t care. “I was delighted,” he said.
Mr. House’s brief against Mr. Hurd went well beyond his outsize compensation and penchant for cost-cutting. As Mr. House saw it — indeed, as many H.P. old-timers saw it — Mr. Hurd was systematically destroying what had always made H.P. great. The way H.P. made its numbers, Mr. House said, was not just cutting any old costs, but by “chopping R.&D.,” which had always been sacred at H.P. The research and development budget used to be 9 percent of revenue, Mr. House told me; now it was closer to 2 percent. “In the personal computer group, it is seven-tenths of 1 percent,” he added. “That’s why H.P. had no response to the iPad.”
I am always bemused when I hear this “HP great, but failing to compete now” argument. My questions arise on two fronts:
Without doubt HP is a tremendously successful company. It dominates its field, ranks #1 in mark share for certain products, and can boast a few firsts as well. I have no particular beef against the company (despite HP/UX) and I think they were, as claimed on their web site, ahead of their times in some of the human resources practices, such as offering flex time, employee profit sharing and stock options, and employee health insurance. But what is also noticeable on the HP timeline web site is that what has flowed from HP Labs is a steady stream of evolutionary advances, not breakthrough inventions or innovation.
Compare the HP time line to That of AT&T’s Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs is (or was) the home of seven Nobel Laureates, the birthplace of the transistor, the Unix operating system, the C and C++ programming languages, information theory, the laser, as also significant advances in diverse fields such as photonics, astronomy, cryptography and digital music encoding.
My intent here is not to “diss” HP or HP Labs. HP’s ability to productise its advances, and in turn to target productive fields of research, is made apparent by the same comparison with AT&T (Bell Laboratories), and the current status of each: HP continues to be a successful and healthy company while AT&T and its spin-off Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent) are languishing with little to show for their pioneering achievements.
When HP acquired Compaq, the latter had already lost a good bit of its standing as a top consumer computer systems manufacturer. Nimbler outfits like Dell had stolen the mantle from Compaq, and though HP leads the pack today in US and global desktop and laptop sales, I suspect this leadership is a result of corporate and government contracts, rather than consumer purchases (unfortunately I could not find any reliable data online that breaks down computer sales into consumer and corporate/governmental categories).
News and data are available for other forays by HP into consumer devices, and that news doesn’t speak well. For example, in 2007, HP abandoned the digital camera market, having shrunk from a meagre 7% market share in 2006 to 4% in 2007. HP’s acquisition of Palm and it’s possible entry into the mobile communication space and reentry into the tablet space will provide another data point. But even there, with the dominance of Apple and Google’s Android based systems, we can somewhat safely predict that HP would be lucky to gain a double-digit market share.
In summary, (once again) my wish is not to trash talk about HP. A company that has demonstrated some level of decency towards it’s workers is commendable for that action alone. What I would like is for the media and bloggers to give the rest of us some insights into what they mean when they talk about HP’s greatness and innovation. For, it seems to me, HP’s lack of an answer to the iPad has nothing to do with lack of R&D, but likely more to do with the very strategy that makes HP successful: creating or leveraging relationships that facilitate volume sales. That works for netting multi-million dollar orders from the US Government, but, among other things, being in bed with Microsoft and at their mercy, rules out any chance of their developing something like the iPad (by the way, I think the iPad is over-hyped, but that’s another post). What am I missing?
Okay fine, he is talking about a particular kind of tennis trainee, but it seems worrisomely applicable to those (like me) who are unable to part ways with Perl:
You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still — his whole game is based on the plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile[.]
But still, how is it possible to easily bid adieu to an unpretentious language that provides a construction as tight as: $x ||= 5;
$x ||= 5;
You know that old saw: “first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win”? It occurred to me that it applies quite well — except for the ‘then you win’ part — when it comes to technology and the attitude of business jocks. Every bit of technology created and embraced by geeks is ridiculed by men in suits as, well, geeky, upto a point where it’s value becomes apparent to them; shortly after which they turn ridiculous in their addiction to it. This second point (of addiction) in the life of that technology, almost always identifiable by the near-hysterical adoption of a totemic device, we refer to as the BlackBerry Apex.
The chart below depicts this finding for one technology: electronic mail or e-mail.
Corollary: not every BlackBerry Apex has a corresponding iPhone Recovery.
Disclaimer: I attempt to kid! Some of my best friends wear suits!
And so another great Google experiment comes to an end. CNN reports that Google Wave is on its deathbed:
Google is pulling the plug on Google Wave. Google intended the messaging program, launched in 2009, to be a near-replacement for e-mail, which it said had grown tired. But on Wednesday, the company announced that it is shuttering the project by the end of the year because it didn’t have traction with consumers. “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” Urs Hölzle, a Google senior vice president, writes on the company’s official blog.
Google is pulling the plug on Google Wave.
Google intended the messaging program, launched in 2009, to be a near-replacement for e-mail, which it said had grown tired.
But on Wednesday, the company announced that it is shuttering the project by the end of the year because it didn’t have traction with consumers.
“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” Urs Hölzle, a Google senior vice president, writes on the company’s official blog.
The real experts in the blogistan will be weighing in shortly with acute analysis on the cause of this sad outcome. But before they do, I figured I would get some shots in.
Google Wave was the one Google product that excited me after Google Maps. Google Earth – cute but what’s the point? Google Checkout – less icky than Paypal but how far can that go? Google Apps – little, though not too late. So on. But Google Wave was an attempt to solve a problem that faces anyone who uses email and messaging in a serious way i.e., anyone who predates the arrival of Blackberry. Keeping track of conversations, action items within conversations, expanding conversations to a larger group, and a host of other needs were the very target of Wave (though it had other goals as well).
Why then the failure?
I can offer no more than agreement with the consensus that it was altogether too complicated and complex a tool — and productive use of it required that one’s collaborators use it as well — but the one deficiency that applies to so many of Google’s products (such as the Gmail and Google Reader web interfaces) was ironically missing in Wave: Google’s arguably poor UI aesthetics. I am not going to once again link to the “41 shades of blue” New York Times article; suffice to say that Wave refreshingly abandoned that Google norm of HTML 1.0 styling, stark colours, and crowded elements co-existing with chunks of empty space. Widgetized boxes with drop shadows, pleasing shades of blue and green, a nifty scrollbar, clearly demarcated buttons and menus, and other sophisticated elements set Wave’s UI apart (let us ignore, out of respect for the dying, the use of Arial over Helvetica).
Google has noted that bits of Wave will be reused in other products. I hope they start with the user interface.
There is an unfortunate class of jobs, the need for which are noticed only at times of failure. System administration, the hidden art of keeping the computing universe humming along, is one such. When all systems and services are operating smoothly, the role of – or at times even the need for – a system administrator is little understood. Should the smallest problem arise however, in one’s ability to surf the net or email gigabyte sized files to fellow suits, cries of anguish abound for the nearest IT professional to be strung up in retribution.
Below is Apple explaining an important feature — FaceTime — of the new iPhone 4:
These, they are saying, are the many ways in which this feature might be useful to the public. Straightforward, if a bit cloying.
And below are Google/Verizon/Motorola informing us of their mobile phone called the Droid:
In case the bizarre imagery and geek-fi sounds do not make it clear (how could they not?), leaving you wondering what exactly they are talking about, the voice over makes it clear: “It’s a robot”. Ah, yes, a robot, of course.
There are other Droid ads that are worse, and others that are better. But generally speaking, what is depressing on average is the unwritten marketing mantra that the user (“consumer” if you prefer that label) has to be treated as if she were an idiot. That is indeed a requisite if you are trying to sell her something she does not need, like gasoline or “high-definition” television sets. But so ingrained is this instinct that even when given a decent product (such as an Android phone) the mentality remains.
In his translation of Apple PR speak to human language, John Gruber offers an interpretation, of Apple’s placing blame on the bars calculation formula, that I too have strongly suspected to be the case.
Apple writes:
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars.
Gruber interprets (and I agree):
We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as it “gets more bars”. That decision has now bit us on our ass.
I think this and a few other recent events point to a state of above-the-law hubris on the part of Steve Jobs’s Apple. A distinctly unpleasant turn.
// From Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple’s Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the ‘Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4’
A strange thing happened on the way to Safari Extensions. I lost interest in (or the need for) extensions of any sort. I still love Firefox. I still think the cornucopia of Firefox extensions is a wonderful thing. But since I switched to using Safari (mainly because of the Web Inspector), I seem to have learnt to toe the Apple line, living off of the crumbs that Jobs is willing to throw at his users in all his infinite wisdom.
Safari 5, and Extensions in particular, were to me the coolest unannounced feature (at the recent WWDC). If I didn’t quite exactly jump in joy, in consideration of my advancing years, it would not be an exaggeration to say I had erotic flashbacks of life with Firefox and my myriad extensions, now with Safari. And off I ran to the various unofficial extension galleries where the fine efforts of various developers are listed. Each extension sounded better than the previous one. I even installed a few. But admit I must: I use none!
Apple has won. I have been assimilated.
There are two unrelated success stories that I wish to tie together in this bit, and if I am successful and justified in doing so, then you too might worry as I do about the future of software.
First, I must clear the air: I am a staunch Free Software advocate. And specifically, I take the Richard Stallman position when it comes to Free vs Open Software. And towards the end of this post, I will try to reconcile that position with the worries raised below.
Now back to the story of the two successes. The first, MacHeist, is small, but only in comparison. MacHeist is an affair that occurs a few times a year where users solve puzzles on their way to a booty of fire sale priced Mac software. The operation is run by a few clever lads (and ladies?), sells software worth hundreds of dollars for as low as $50 in total, and nets a handsome profit (reputed to run into the hundreds of thousands) for the organisers.
When the MacHeist gets going (and I admit to having “participated” in one or two) one criticism that is often heard is that the developers of the software are not getting quite the fair shake, and that selling software at such unsustainably low rates devalues the effort that goes into their creation. I think both criticisms are legitimate.
The second success story is a big one: Google. A company that hires brilliant engineers to turn out complex software products, but then turns around and gives most of these away for free, preferring instead to make money by selling advertising. So much so that the reliable purveyors of quotable statements are wont to note that Google is not a search technology company, but an advertising one.
As a Free Software fanatic, you might think that all this would warm my heart, but it does not. To understand why, I will refer to the difference that Stallman draws between Free Software (“free as in free speech”), and Open Software which is “free as in beer”. Whereas Free Software, through the terms of the GNU Public License, fosters a culture of public ownership and ubiquitous contribution, Open Software in its paradoxical naive pragmatism (of gaining usage by adopting a more “liberal” license) undervalues the act of development making it no more than a form of cheap labour.
The claims in the previous paragraph are arguable, and argue about it we should. The point of this post however is to consider the impact of this cheap or free software on users.
Consider my recent experience with a remote file access application called Flow. Flow is a very useful application with an impressive set of features and a more than decent interface. Flow retails for $25, a fair price for the functionality it promises, but it was also recently given away as part of a MacHeist “nanobundle”, the popularity of which has led to a warning from the makers of Flow, ExtendMac, that they are swamped with feedback and that all users (including ones like me who did not acquire it through MacHeist) should exercise a bit of patience while we await a response.
Patience, we have been told, is the virtue of an ass, and my experience with contacting ExtendMac tends to justify the comparison (of me) with the maligned beast! More than two months ago I submitted a report of a problem with Flow that was making it close to unusable: the application would hang mid-way through a file transfer and provide me no means to recover from it. Not even an option to cancel the transfer. This is just one of many issues. Here’s another: the application hangs upon encountering a symbolic link on the remote host. I have since reported these problems two more times and promptly received a canned response. But ExtendMac has been reticent to communicate further on this matter.
If indeed the MacHeist fire sale and ensuing volume of users makes it impossible for ExtendMac to address the issues of its users, then there is a good bit of legitimacy to the criticism that such sales both shortchange the developer and ultimately harm the end user.
The other, larger point of the matter is learnt from the example of Google. Having separated the source of their income (advertising) and their source of value (software), they are now wedded to “web apps”, applications that often coerce (though to Google’s credit, not always) you to using Google supplied browser based interfaces (so that money-making advertising can be targeted at you) irrespective of how well suited they are to your needs (recently I wrote about Google Voice, where the lack of a desktop client severely hampers the usability of the product). Better, I think, a choice between: software as a public good as envisioned by Stallman; or software as a valuable product solving a user’s needs in the best possible way, and hence worthy of charging a fee, as seen by Apple.
Update: in the spirit of the philosopher Peter Singer, who follows up his meditations on ethical eating with practical recipes, a recommendation: for a powerful GPL licensed free alternative to Flow, take a look at CyberDuck.
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