isabel wang's blog

The one-way web, or Microsoft Office vs the Internet

A friend of a friend who's organizing a hike made a route map in Google Maps. He then took a screen shot, put the image on a PowerPoint slide, and attached the file to his email invite. Wouldn't it have been easier to leave the map online and give out the URL? More convenient for recipients, too, to be able to zoom in/out on the map.

David will point out that not everyone feels comfortable publishing their whereabouts for the whole world to see, but I don't think Map Guy's selective use of the web was driven by privacy concerns. Instead, for him and many, many others, the Internet is more readily accepted as an information source than authoring tool.

A while back, for instance, I did some freelance writing for an ad agency. I started the project in Google Docs, and my contact and I worked on it together over the web. In the end, he asked for the document in Word, so he could "format it for production". The text was destined for someone's website though, and (as so many of my non-tech friends have complained) Word formatting isn't always consistently transferable into content management systems.

Non-tech folks aren't the only ones under the Microsoft Office spell. I've gotten more Excel spreadsheets than I can count from people who (a) are in the business of selling online storage and (b) agree they'd be better off if the info were kept in an online database. But I guess Word/Excel/PowerPoint create the magical feeling of having composed an actual document. And somehow users choose this sense of completion over productivity and convenience.

It doesn't have to be this way, does it? I think the first step towards widespread SaaS adoption is helping people shake off their irrational MS Office dependence.

Dogs, cats and SaaS

I've been terrorizing friends, relatives, stores I shop at, etc, trying to convince them to do more online. I can't help it when I see someone collect event RSVPs by phone or manage group schedules using printed forms.

Last week I told Jeff that I feel like I spent the last decade in a bubble. People in the outside world have so much less contact with technology than I realized. I'm still trying to digest his response - that yes, people spend much more money on their pets.

Because I've also been meeting a lot of soon-to-be pet owners. While volunteering at the animal shelter, I've noticed there tends to be clear dividing lines between dog people and cat people, not to mention fans of Beagles vs Poodles, Boxers vs Labs, etc. I was surprised when a woman spent ages gazing at a ferocious Pomeranian with matted hair. She wanted a Pomeranian; she's always been a Pomeranian person.

Maybe the same kind of self-identification explains why my friend Tara was initially hesitant to post photos on the Flickr account I set up for her non-profit? She said she's just not a social networking person. But since she does see herself as a media person, Flickr/YouTube/etc became acceptable tools after I brought up Richard Rosenblatt's notion of ChannelMe.

My mom, too, put off building a website for her research group until I signed her up for TypePad. She insisted that HTML = computer programming and she's not a computer person. I reminded her that back in 1990, she was one of the first professors at her university to get on their email system - via Gnus/Emacs! We aren't always rational in choosing labels for ourselves.

I guess the moral of the story is, people *don't* want easy, affordable technology solutions. Or dogs. They won't adopt what they can't relate to, no matter how many seemingly logical reasons you give them. Last Saturday I took a class on improving shelter dogs' communication skills. Could the same tricks improve adoption rates for technology tools? Maybe I'll find out once I try them out.