Fortschritt im Alltag: Die Winterjacke oder doch lieber die leichte?

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On every visit of the CeBIT computer show you are overwhelmed by the number of small manufacturers, most coming somewhere from Asia, presenting their products on a few squaremeters, all of them looking the same. Without much pride they present tons of their products in some glass boxes, one next to each other. Probably none of them is very unique. Anyway, what can one expect from such a company? Probably their development department is not very big, occupied to get the newest thing ready for the market (which is not the same as getting it ready for customer though). Can you expect quality or some kind of support from them?

Anyway, half a year ago I had ordered this nice Bluetooth headset Clip S35. Until today I never really used it. Not that I didn’t want to. It neither worked with a USB Bluetooth dongle (even had contact to the dongle developer. By looking at the Bluetooth stack logs, he claimed that the device does not adhere the standard. Who knows if he is right), nor does it with my Sony mobile. With the latter it pairs and connects correctly, but switches off automatically after a few seconds.
A look into the manual tells the victim owner of the device:

So they sell a Bluetooth device and do not guarantee that it works as such. Great! But fortunately they have a compatibility list of the mobiles that are supported. Strangely they only list one mobile there which works out of the box to use the stereo playback (my primary reason to select the device originally). Also my Sony w800i is listed to work as a (non-stereo) phone headset, although it doesn’t for me.

Great, another gadget that just does not do what it should. Note for myself for the next time: look for quality, for devices from well known brands which are proven to work. A look at the whois entry of http://www.itechdynamic.com/ shows me what I feared already: Registrant: C H Keith, Ho - Level 12, Metroplaza - Tower 2, 223 Hing Fong Road - Kwai Chung NT - Hong Kong, NA na - HK. I am sure they will be in Hannover again next march for the CeBIT, and probably present their newest products again in a big glass vitrine, and I will walk along and will not notice their 3,5m^2 booth, or maybe I remember their logo and stop by. But unfortunately they cannot help me because they already only have the next generation high quality products there, ready for the market, not for the innocent customers who will expect them to work.

People buy Apple products like hell. Everybody wants to have an Apple computer nowadays. But what does make them so sexy? If you show up with a new MacBook people start looking. If you have the newest TakeYourBrand Whatever MP3 player, nobody notices. If you have the newest iPod everybody wants to take a look at it. If you compare the former with the latter, the whatever product will be technically more advanced, will have more memory, bigger display, will be cheaper and so on and so on. But why do Apple products still sell so well? It’s not the design that makes it fundamentally different in people’s eyes. The design is only a visual representation of what is behind many Apple products: it’s the philosophy of products that just work. The world is full of technical devices. Nobody wants anymore to play around with drivers, cables, software, hardware incompatibilities, depend on friends who are technically advanced everytime. Somebody once said that computer graphics is good if you don’t notice it. Technology is good if you don’t notice the complexity behind it anymore. It is this just works ™ experience that people are longing for. No more computer problems, no more hours of tweaking around technical devices to make them work how they should. If I spend hundreds of euro for a product I want it to work, I want it to be well thought-out, I want it to just do its job. Apple seems to fulfill this desire. Certainly also their products are not perfect, need updates sometimes. But it comes nearer to this wish than other brands. And then yes, the elegant and simple, well thought-through design reflects this philosophy and makes people feel (yes, it’s about emotions!) that the technique behind will do what it should: just work.