Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2000
In my formative years, when I first moved out on my own and got my own apartment, I was curious about how other people solved the little problems of daily life. One of those problems was how to remind yourself of the things you need to do regularly.
My friend Dave was a year older than me and had had his own apartment longer. I still remember his approach to that problem: a wrinkled, yellowing note on the inside of his front door saying, "Lunch in fridge." It was to remind him to get his sack lunch out of the refrigerator to take to work with him.
It didn't work, of course. He had long since stopped seeing the note. Reminders about routine tasks soon become routine themselves, and are ignored. It's a serious and largely unaddressed user-interface issue: How do you nag effectively? One example, how do you remind the user to backup files?
Tricks that work in one context may not work in another. In prose, for example, you can sometimes maintain interest in a boring topic like backup reminders by changing the subject entirely.
Does Microsoft have the smell of failure in its nostrils? I'm not talking about its legal problems, but rather about its ability to dominate markets.
The company screwed up so badly in the post-PC or Internet Appliance or gadget and gizmo or embedded operating system or NC or web terminal or settop web phone pda whatever you call it market that they actually destroyed a brand. The name "CE" is poison, and Microsoft has been forced to rebrand its low-end strategy and tools. This is a major screw up for Microsoft, a company that's normally as on top of its image and as focused on its branding mission as Martha Stewart.
Microsoft famously missed the Internet, but even when Bill grabbed the company by the scruff of the neck and focused it on the Internet with laser-like intent, he screwed up again. Bill concluded that the near-term opportunity was in the consumer space with MSN, IE, and Slate. The truth? Nearly all the top-performing Internet companies are infrastructure companies; for the dominant PC OS company not to get in on the Internet e-commerce infrastructure market was a major blunder. Cisco Systems figured out the Internet; Microsoft didn't.
And now the marketing of Windows 2000 could prove to be another major screw up. Microsoft put plenty of money and effort behind it, but I don't get the sense that they want us to believe that it's important. What's all this talk about what comes after Windows, what's the logic behind letting Bill's resignation overshadow the OS release? Sometimes Microsoft comes across as apologetic about Windows 2000. I think that the company as a whole has lost some of its confidence.
Abruptly changing the subject is one way to get attention, but the real trick is to say something new and, if possible, interesting. It might seem that it's impossible to be fresh and interesting when nagging people to perform routine tasks like backing up their files, but it can be done.
Every Friday, I get a poem in my e-mail. A system administrator who has the job of reminding his users to back up their files at least once a week has come up with a technique that apparently works: the backup poem of the week. He sends it to all the people on his company's network and, by courtesy, to me as well. I must have been getting these reminders for a couple of years now, and I have never asked to be removed from his list because I find that I'm curious. The poems are rarely very good, but they are good enough, and they are a note of novelty. It's one of the great solutions to this nagging (pun intended) problem.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com