Some people are born beautiful. Others become beautiful. The rest visit cosmetic surgeons as they wage a holy war against Father Time and their own genetic limitations. And when those people eventually choose the wrong surgeon, they’re disfigured for life, turned into freakish mutants who are a strange and distracting parody of beauty.
That’s what’s happening now with mobile phones.
I’ve been thinking about polish a lot lately. I started overusing the word as part of my standard investor pitch but lately I’ve found myself thinking about it much more broadly.
Let’s start with a little about me. I’m a geek. I love geeky things. I’m unnaturally comfortable with a UNIX command line prompt and seeing the numbers “20 45” still make me think “this is the start of an IP header”. To this day, my wife would like it if I could remember trash day and free() the neurons associated with 6502 assembler and the Apple II memory map. You would think that pretty GUIs and end user experience aren’t top of mind issues for me.
But they are. They have been for a long time. I was fortunate enough to land a job as a tech in a medical billing outfit straight out of highschool where I was exposed to very smart people (doctors and nurses) who didn’t give a rat’s ass about electronic medical records, EDI, and managing billing systems that could integrate to electronic billing for insurance providers. They in turn threw my attitute into whack — their primary goal was taking care of patients and as far as they were concerned, the technology would have to come to them on their terms.
If you look around the Internet, you’ll find all kinds of software that claim they can make you an instant-DJ. All you have to is toss the songs into a digital blender and it’ll take care of doing all the hard work of synchronizing the beats. Some of them are automated enough to even take care of picking songs out of your collection and gluing them together. Really, they are true DJ’s in a box.
So why do we still have DJs? Why do clubs announce that some big name DJ is coming to town? Really, a computer can do this all automatically and save everyone the trouble! Hasn’t Google taught us the power of algorithms?
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