Market behaviour

I've usually been very sceptical that legal action is the best way of getting a company to change its behaviour in the marketplace. Of course, we need laws to regulate and limit behaviour and those laws need some kind of sanction behind them to enable them to be enforced. But somehow, market behaviour and legal structures often don't sit comfortably together.

Part of the reason for this is that business activities can be quite specialised and what might seem good sense to a law maker or enforcer, will often be counter-productive to the needs of society and some objective sense of justice - if it can be said there is such a thing. However, think of the many petty regulations passed by the EU and I can rest my case.

I shall allow myself just one example. I'm literally prevented by EU law from buying chicken prepared ready to be cooked in the way that my mother taught me. And as for the weight of the bird!

Even though it was a long time ago, I grew up in school learning metres, kilograms and so on and am perfectly at home with them, but I strongly object to being forced by diktat to give up the units I've always used domestically.

How sensible is it, when buying food from the counter in my local supermarket, to be told by the assistant: "We have it in pounds and ounces on this side of the counter, because that's what all our customers ask for, but we can't display it on your side"? (This was a few weeks ago.) It's an exaggeration perhaps, but notice her use of the word "all".

The Microsoft monopoly

In the IT world, of course, the legal clash between Microsoft and several government bodies over its monopolistic behaviour has been the top story for some time now. I've had no doubts at all that Microsoft's behaviour was in serious need of reform, but I've had many doubts the legal system was capable of introducing the right measures that would produce the best results for the PC users, which, surely, should be the main criterion.

These doubts have now been strongly reinforced.

There has recently been a proposal from Microsoft to the effect that in part settlement of the legal actions against it in the US, it should donate large amounts of hardware and software to underprivileged schools in the US.

When I first saw this, I thought of some comment along the lines of 'reality proving stranger than fiction' or 'you just couldn't make it up'. After all, you don't normally apply a sanction to a company or individual who's deemed to have done wrong in some way, but actually makes it easier for them to do the same thing in future.

With Microsoft accused of abusing its near monopoly on the PC platform, to give the company the opportunity to familiarise large numbers of future potential customers in the form of students with its products would only tend to strengthen the monopoly. You don't give a speeding driver a faster car.

Kind hearts and marketing

I remember a few years ago, on one of his visits to Europe, Bill Gates talking about giving free or cheap software to schools. This was dressed up as an altruistic act, but was simply skilful marketing.

It does annoy me when people like Gates are portrayed in the press as visionaries, philosophers or philanthropists, when in fact they're just clever salesmen. Good luck to Microsoft in such a mission - my anger is reserved for our press and politicians who seem so readily to be taken in by such offers.

But they're clearly not alone. There has been something of an outcry in the US against this proposal and by the time you read this, it might well have been rejected.

But the fact that after quite a few days this hasn't happened is serious cause for concern.

If he really understood the PC market and the issues involved, the judge hearing this suggestion should have fallen off his bench laughing. But clearly he did not and the suggestion has been taken seriously.

I noticed around the same time that Microsoft's chief lawyer for the last few years, William Neukom, was retiring. I wonder if this school proposal was Neukom's last act and that he was trying to tell us something.

Either that or he was having a laugh at the court's expense.

I think it was the former and it's as clear that if we're to have proper laws to govern modern technology markets, and their enforcement properly fulfils their intentions, then we absolutely need politicians, lawyers and judges trained for the job. It's clearly not good enough having experts explain the niceties of what a browser is and how DLLs work, and so much of this must have gone right over the heads of the court officers in the Microsoft cases.

Training in technology

This isn't to blame those involved themselves. I'm sure they did as good a job as they could have done, but if they're not properly trained, they can't do as good a job as the public needs. As a society, we're increasingly reliant on modern technology, which isn't exactly getting simpler and more easy to understand.

Think of the proposals going around about legislation regarding the internet, data security, biotechnology, cloning and so on. Do we have confidence that our legislators and lawyers are sufficiently well informed on all these issues to make the right judgements and pass the right laws? The Microsoft case makes me think not.

Having written recently about the depressed state of the PC industry, an additional reason for the downturn in PC sales was brought home to me a couple of days ago. A friend had bought a PC two or three years ago and was, in my view, one of a group of people that were encouraged to buy a PC because of falling prices and the possibility of accessing the internet and using email.

It concerned me around the time that the industry was trying to push PCs into non-technical homes before it was really ready - if ever it will be. Considering how difficult PCs were - and still are - for many people to use, the experience could actually turn some against PCs for good.

I'm assuming here that people using PCs at work have at least minimal help and training available to them, but no doubt a similar effect might be obtained in the workplace, but on a smaller scale.

Question time

My friend had the experience (within a few days) of first losing all the icons on his desktop, then being told he'd been sent an attachment of a birthday card. He told me that on trying to access this, after getting at his browser through the Start menu, "I clicked on it, but was told I had to download a new video player. Why? I can already watch videos on my PC quite well.

"But I went ahead anyway and all sorts of questions came up about downloading to my desktop or somewhere else and then lots of other technical questions. None of this means anything to me, so I just gave up.

"If I can't get this fixed easily, I can't go on. I enjoy using email, but it's all just too difficult. I think I'll just go back to writing letters."

The voice that told me this was truly fed up. It's easy for those of us who've been involved with this technology for many years to forget just how frustrating the experience can be for non-technical users.

This particular example struck me because I was more sympathetic than perhaps I'd normally have been, as the phone call came after I'd spent well over an hour trying to get a relatively new PC to acknowledge that I had attached a modem to it and that it might be a good idea to try dialling. Considering how frustrated and annoyed I was, how must this friend have felt, I wondered?

The fading gee-whiz factor

I'm sure there are plenty of people with similar stories and it's vital the industry learns certain lessons from the current drop in PC-buying enthusiasm.

The gee-whizz factor, particularly related to performance, is no longer good enough to drive most sales. The focus of attention must be on ease of use and productivity - perhaps not the word that would come first to the mind of most home users, but they also simply want to get certain things done, with the least hassle.

As a general piece of equipment for the non-technical user, the PC isn't good enough. I'd say it's off by a wide margin, indeed.

I recently borrowed a Sony PlayStation 2 with DVD decoder and set it up at home. I put aside quite a bit of time for this process, but it was all over in a matter of minutes and the whole setup worked first time - immediately. For a Windows user, this is a truly novel experience. The one criticism I'd have is that the Sony controller is a very bad way of controlling a DVD system, but this isn't what it was originally designed for.

Now I know that it might be unrealistic to expect a general purpose PC to be this straightforward to set up and get started, but for most non-technical users, they certainly want or need whatever it is they want to get done with a PC to be just that easy. These people represent a very large proportion of the market, so vendors will eventually have to address their concerns, which will affect all of us in the way we use PCs.

Key solutions

I think these concerns will be addressed in two ways. For a start, many more dedicated devices will evolve that perform just one or two functions, but do them well. A good example are the telephones with keyboards that access an email service in addition to providing phone calls. These are excellent for people who want to do email, but either can't afford a PC or be bothered with the hassle of one. A not much more complicated device would also be able to browse the internet.

The other way will be with real improvements in the ease of use of PCs.

Microsoft has made something of a start with Windows XP, although it's still complex. We need radical changes to the design of both hardware and software. There are so many features of modern PCs that are legacies of innovation that might have seemed useful at the time - PCs come with a lot of baggage.

A couple of examples have annoyed me for many years. One is keyboard design. I often joke that I hanker after the original design with the function keys on the left end, but this did have one major advantage over the design we're currently stuck with.

Current keyboards were designed for data entry clerks and the extra keys on the right-hand end mean if you're going to type comfortably, with the home keys dead centre in front of you, then the right-hand edge of the keyboard is several inches further to the right than it should. This can't be healthy, to my mind, and yet PC manufacturers simply don't address the issue properly - if at all. Ease of use will not be at the top of the agenda, I suppose, until we users insist it goes there.

Rough and smooth

The other example that comes to mind is the digital push-button controls of modern monitors. I recently had to let go of an old monitor with simple-to-use knobs on the front and the contrast is really quite remarkable. I have, from time to time, raised this issue with monitor vendors, but none have tried to argue the case that button-accessed menus are easier to use than simple knobs. The most common objection they have to such analogue technology is that it would spoil the smooth contours of the front of a monitor.

Well, if any good is to come from the current state of the industry, it'll have to focus vendors' minds to let go of some of the old ways of doing things and properly address the ease of use issues surrounding PCs today.

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