I've started adopting a similar soft approach along these lines myself. My wife and I are Ubuntu Linux users at home, but our families know us as simply computer savvy. Often enough someone will call us with Windows-specific questions, which I'll try and answer to the best of my ability; however, when faced with what sounds like a research project I err on the side of stupidity.
"No, I don't know why your new smartphone won't sync with all three of your business accounts as well as your personal email."
So far, this kind of answer has been far better received than spending hours troubleshooting frustrating corner cases from trying to shoehorn off-the-shelf gadgets into situations they probably weren't meant for anyway. At worst, that makes me lazy, but I'm okay with that as long as I'm not known as the ill-tempered son-in-law who won't just help out his aunt and uncle without coping an attitude.
This post demonstrated a sense of humility ("I probably don't know how to solve your problem") and empathy ("I recognize that your problem is not the same as my problem") that are often sorely lacking in the community of software geeks talking about software. Great stuff.
Slightly tangential, but it seems to be popular to assume that fanboyism is universally a bad thing. Which makes sense intuitively, but here's the thing: I _like_ fanboys.
When I meet a fanboy of something I don't tend to use or like, I make a point to talk to them as much as possible. It starts off rocky - after all, I'm coming from a completely different perspective, and to me, everything they're saying is obviously idiotic. But I persist. I try to get them to convince me however they can, that they are right. And very frequently, I learn a whole of new _something_, if I'm not introduced to an entire new way of doing and/or thinking about things. Worst case is I hone my debating skills. Best case, my life significantly improves.
Not that fanboyism is always, or even usually, a good thing. In most cases, it's politest (and easiest!) to stop the argument before it gets to the point of calling into question the other person's expectations (and I find myself doing that alot, especially with relatively nontechnical folk). But for me - I _want_ my expectations to be called into question. And nobody forces me to refine - and trash - my own ideas as well as the most hard-headed of fanboys.
I at least, and I think most people, have a distinction between 'fan of' and 'fanboy'
Where the line is that a fan of a something can talk about its virtues and concede its limits, but a fanboy will gloss over any limitations as irrelevant / wrong "its not a bug its a feature"
I have a real problem with the word fanboy because this distinction is rarely made well in practice. 95% of the time it's hurled as an epithet by someone who simply disagrees. Even worse, the word is disproportionately used by people who do not have particularly well-reasoned opinions. So for me, non-ironic use of the word fanboy flips the bozo bit.
Agreed; I have long since given up caring about being called a fanboy. I like what I like and I make no apologies for it.
That's one reason I prefer Apple kit -- I am no longer fascinated by twiddling with things to get them to work. Apple gear tends to work without twiddling more than the other crap (though not always). I'm not interested in trying to get stuff to work that doesn't.
There's a difference between trying to help a guy solve a specific problem and trying to evangelize him to switch to your preferred platform.
There are tons of resources on the Web devoted to syncing Outlook with the iPhone. Maybe someone more tech savvy (like Marco) could have helped. Instead he said he "couldn't help him". He really meant "I don't want to try to help you".
I think you're misreading the whole thrust of the article. What Marco was getting at was that he can't help him in light of his (Outlook user's) expectations. The article is saying (1) Marco has a use pattern that works well for Marco, (2) that use pattern could be pushed on someone else in a way that fixes the user's problem as Marco sees it, (3) but Marco has come to the realization that the problem lies with the user's personal use pattern combined with his expectations for the technology. I think that's really insightful.
If you let go of the idea that you can change (or that it's worth the effort to change) everyone's use patterns, then you have to accept that some use patterns simply don't have solutions that meet the user's expectations. And in those situations, it's best not to fight the user--let them work it out. Hopefully, in the end, they find something that works for them.
> but Marco has come to the realization that the problem lies with the user's personal use pattern combined with his expectations for the technology. I think that's really insightful.
No, the real problem lies with the technology over-promising and under-delivering.
There is no reason why the problems the user was experiencing should exist, other than that software quality is appalling.
The trade off lies in the amount of effort marco will spend trying to learn Outlook, understand which resource on the web is wrong, misguided, lying or just out of date, and the level of frustration his (father-in-law?) can bear, as opposed to say, going for a drink and a walk on Thanksgiving. At a certain point just saying I dont know how gives the other person a data point on how much effort their choices will involve. I have wasted days before now trying tofix things I should have simply said "I don't know - its R&D from here on in, these are my rates"
You missed the whole point of his post. Marco is saying he has finally come to realize that "tech savvy" doesn't mean "qualified to suggest changes". He's not being lazy. He's talking about humility. Some people's real-life logistical issues transcend technological issues.
I think you're missing luigi's point. He's simply remarking that the OP didn't have to advocate a change in use pattern in order to lend his expertise to his friend's father. Instead, the OP made the choice not to use his time assisting someone who doesn't want to "go all Apple". Of course, the OP isn't obligated to offer free tech support, but he certainly could have helped.
Constructive help would've probably helped the user make an informed decision to 'switch'. OP probably means that going a step beyond and even advocating a patch work strategy might have better convinced the user to switch(in time...) rather than advocacy.
Why don't you explain why his help would have "set the guy back?". The closest the article comes to justifying this claim is that (from memory) "[the author] doesn't know shit about outlook or windows architecture". But as luigi and vectorpush have noted, as someone with general tech savvy, he could still have helped.
You can 1) throw in a suggestion, 2) blindly suggest whatever works for you as the best way, 3) learn about the goals, setup, and knowledge of the user as the first step. The point of the article is: 2) is a mistake.
Yep, but that's exactly what you need to stay sane when faced with people who a) don't want to adopt a solution that I know to work, but b) are incapable or unwilling to make the effort to make their own "preferred" solution work.
I've come to the same place as Marco: I just "admit" I can't help them. Yes, it's a white lie, but not one that keeps me awake at night.
I think the point is there are tons of guides online for syncing outlook as long as you follow the basic format. One person's workflow can be quite different from another persons, even in Outlook. People have created rules, special signatures, mailboxes, folders, etc. and this is just in Outlook. Many of the online guides don't cover any of that and this isn't something you can resolve over a beer.
And that is the point, your quick 10-minute fix will only cause more problems down the line. I've also reached the same conclusion even before 30.
Edit: I'm reminded of a friend that makes music. He always burns a CD to play in his stereo. His stereo also has a USB port and will play MP3s from there. So I suggested instead of burning CDs he could just copy it to a USB key. So he does that and he hates it. Why? When he's burning a CD he gets to arrange the tracks in the order he likes. The stereo plays MP3s in alphabetical order. The time saved from not having to burn CDs is now wasted on having to rename MP3s into the proper order.
adding my ten-ish year history of supporting other people (I'm also pushing 30), I've learned this one fact: trying to help other people will frequently result in my taking ownership of ALL of their problems in their eyes.
which seems like a really jerk-like perspective to take, and it is a little bit.
This is why I no longer fix most of my family's computer problems. My dad pays some guy to re-install windows about once every 18 months or so. I don't really know how to help him without becoming his personal IT slave so I just politely say "I don't know"
We are all different. Human life is full of tradeoffs, and some of those tradeoffs lead to exclusions, and some of those exclusions may be untenable to some, etc.
I like and use Apple, Emacs, etc, but I can certainly see why others might choose not to use them. They aren't wrong. They're just different.
My wife's friend recently moved from a large city, where she didn't have a car, to live with her boyfriend in a smaller town. It's a smaller town without much public transit. My wife's friend knows how to drive, but her boyfriend's car has a manual transmission. On a recent visit, the friend is complaining that her boyfriend won't teach her how to drive his car. Being proud of the fact that I (barely) know how to drive a stick, I volunteer to teach her. Her boyfriend doesn't object, so out to the car we go. I drive to a nearby empty parking lot and trade seats with my wife's friend. She's ready to learn.
"The pedal to the left of the brake is the clutch. Push it all the way to the floor," I begin. She takes her left foot off the brake and pushes in the clutch...
Wait, why was her left foot on the brake? Is she a leg amputee? Are you in Ireland or Japan or some other tiny island where everything is on the wrong side?
Are you in Ireland or Japan or some other tiny island where everything is on the wrong side?
Australia is pretty large...
78 countries (28% of the worlds traffic) drive on the left [1]. These include countries like India, Pakistan and Indonesia with fairly significant populations.
That's fine I hope other people adopt this mentality, and I'm talking fanboys for whatever platform. Whatever works for you applies to everything, I use the computer to make music and I know other people who also do the same and use different platforms and I always see people saying "Oh you should use pro-tools to really make good music" Can you believe that?, hehe. The operator is what matters.
I agree, but it is good to notice that many people are simply afraid (and not aware) of alternative solutions. If you can afford to, informing them won't hurt.
The flip side to this is as computer professionals, what we do with a computer and how we have built our workflow significantly accelerates our work with a computer.
E.g., easy file versioning and sync is fundamentally a solved problem, if you are willing to take the initial hit of workflow modification (git, sftp, etc).
So it's okay to teach people how to do it faster and better.
> "So it's okay to teach people how to do it faster and better."
If and when they want to learn, sure. But the article is specifically about how you respond to people who don't want to contemplate change, let alone implement it.
Particularly, it's about the non-trivial cases where it would take hours to unravel the goals, features, problems and dependencies of their current 'system' to make an intelligent recommendation, to say nothing of breaking down time, capital and retraining costs to implement it.
This suggests that it's worthwhile to educate the young in not just doing the same things with computers that everybody knows how to do (Office-style and web browsing) but inculcating habits (versioning, say) which will make life much easier in the long run.
This, however, would make the education system not agnostic, and drastically favor some companies.
> This, however, would make the education system not agnostic, and drastically favor some companies.
Why? Perhaps you mean that there is versioning software, like git, that is so prevalent that it may be regarded as having dominated the ecosystem, so that that's what we have to teach; but that seems no different from teaching Java or, for an even more extreme example, the RSA cryptosystem.
(I know that there are objections to teaching Java, but I've never heard—which is not to say it doesn't exist!—the complaint that it favours Oracle.)
Computers are such a broad topic these days that assuming your expertise will simply translate to any problem domain is the height of foolishness.
Easy file versioning and sync are only solved for a very specific use case that corresponds very poorly to most people's lives (photo library?) There's a priceless rant from John Siracusa about his sister ignoring Time Machine's warnings tha the backup device had failed for months because it didn't actually incapacitate her computer.
There's a difference between evangelizing a setup to someone for selfish reasons (to bring more users hoping developers follow, to make it easier to troubleshoot), and for reasons the other person just doesn't know or grasp yet (using POP instead of IMAP is causing your phone and pc to be out of sync)
I've been using OpenBSD or FreeBSD or Linux as my primary desktop OS since about 1996.. As of last week, all my laptop/desktop usage is now Mac OS.
The Linux desktop experience really isn't that much better than it was in the Helix Gnome days and as I get older I want to fiddle less with my OS, and just work on some ideas I have brewing.
I should point out that back then I was a kernel hacker type, and my ideas were kernel based (for work and play). But now they are userland based, and Mac provides an awesome platform for that without getting in the way.
It depends if you are arguing with someone like your parents who want to use Facebook, send email and manage their photos or with someone else who spends all day using an operating system.
Maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but it seems like a pretty simple issue to resolve by syncing outlook to gmail / google calendar along with an android phone... The current email host should be set to forward to gmail and outlook repointed to gmail as well. If the user wants access to email offline, they can just enable POP.
Syncing the calendar is even easier...
It seems like he's more interested in working with his preferred tool set than the best tool set for the job.
Except that syncing anything to Android phones is broken beyond repair (try syncing an repetitive task with hours specified, e.g. "Every Monday, 18:00-20:00" with Google Calendar app...), as will probably be many things on the way.
The point (or at least, one of them) of the post is that sometimes user has constrains coming from his job, personality, or preferred mode of operations, that will make it impossible to use your particular preferred solution in that context. It takes some humility to notice that and not evangelize your particular working habits too much. Also, our technology is broken on that angle; things simply are not expected to work well with each other from the start.
Syncing anything to anything seems to almost be invariably broken beyond repair, specially between products made by different companies.
Interoperativity among syncing systems, even following the myriad of 'standards' for this seems to be hopeless.
> Also, our technology is broken on that angle; things simply are not expected to work well with each other from the start.
I think this is the core root of the problem, which it seems everyone in this discussion is ignoring. If Syncing was not so badly broken we wouldn't have this discussion to begin with (and same goes for most other common problems of this kind, this is simple stuff that should have worked without a hitch for ages).
Maybe I'm just being obtuse, but what exactly is his point? Since he's a developer, I can't imagine that a couple minutes on the web wouldn't net him a solution that'd work for his friend's father.
Maybe it's just me, but I receive very high utility knowing that I help solve someone's problem which maximizes their utility as opposed to throwing my hands in the air because said solution may not agree with my own tastes.
So why can't his friends father spend a couple minutes on the web to find a solution himself? Look, I know about computers, but I don't use Outlook or Android (which seems to be Arment's situation) so rather that wasting a couple of hours of both our lives, I'd tell the truth and say "I don't know about $SOFTWARE. Have you Googled it?" This does lead to another issue; most people don't know how to search. I have found that a quick Google tutorial is far more fruitful than a couple of hours spent trying to understand the individual workflow requirements and offer a fix around that; often having to use products and solutions that I know nothing about because that is what they use. "Give a man a net to fish with and he can feed himself." no pun intended.
In principle, you should be able to make anything work with anything. Failure to do that is the problem of our current technology.
People sometimes have strange syncing needs. Example: I spent some time (and failed, ultimately, due to broken Google Calendar) trying to sync Emacs Org Mode with Android phone. No, I won't switch from Org Mode to anything web-based, Emacs is just too convenient for me. No, I won't switch from SlideScreen to a homescreen with widgets - I love the former and hate the latter. So I need to accept that, right now, I don't have any working solution to sync my phone calendar with Org Mode.
I wouldnt count on it. My experience with outlook is that it doesn't really integrate properly with anything. I'm sure if you're running an exchange server it will sync, but vanilla outlook maybe not.
Recently, I had an argument with my father about uploading photos efficiently: He got an iPhone4s and took pictures with it. Now my father uses Windows and does not know much about transferring pictures the right way, instead he does what he knows–email the picture to yourself. My mother who uses a mac, but still computer illiterate, wanted to get pictures off his iPhone so she can post it to her Facebook album. So he goes to his iPhone, selects the picture and emails it to her gmail account, and does this same process per picture. After that mom, logs in to her email, clicks on the new message, clicks on view, then drags the picture from the browser to the desktop. She does this same process to the rest of the messages.
Now I was there, watching in agony (–_–") (I was called up earlier to find out how to transfer photos from her cellphone using bluetooth to the Mac. But unfortunately the cellphone did not allow file transfer using internal memory unless using a microSD card.)
So back to mom, she noticed that the pics were too small to edit (about 30kb 200x200px). So my dad was about to do the same process again on his iPhone. Me=Facepalm
To my reaction I said "You are using iCloud are you? Then why don't you just use Photostream? Whatever pictures you taken automatically syncs with the computer, no fussing with files/transfers, just select the picture in iPhoto, edit exposure, then upload to Facebook." I'm not sure if my father was listening, as he was still selecting and emailing the photos.
I proceeded with setting up with iCloud syncing on the Mac to activate Photostream, asked for the password, (he didn't say anything, but mom knew what it was). I then launched iPhoto, clicked on Photostream and pictures started to come in. "See, isn't that easy. Now mom, pick what picture you want. You can drag the picture out to the desktop like you always do, or just use the upload to Facebook button in iPhoto.
Then the internet just halted for a bit, and the 19 of 72 some photos were only downloaded. My dad said: "I don't like this, you are overcomplicating this simple task." I was like "WHAT! How on earth am I complicating this, I am making this simple for you, its less repetitive and more time efficient than what you are both doing!"
Then I go on about the benefits of Photostream to talking about analogies regarding data capture/logging pool, Film/Photographer's DSLR workflow, to data pool auditing workflow.
He said: "What you find simple, is complicated for us. We can work in a linear fashion however long it can take, and you can work autonomously. Anyway, this is only a one time thing, I don't need to use Photostream. If I need to use this everyday, maybe I might but today its not necessary."
~~~
So lesson learned. You can't just force anyone using your methods. It may or may not work for them even if it sounds stupid to you.
Marco Arment is from my understanding a leading iOS developer, and a paragon of what it means to be an iOS developer (His app, Instapaper, has tasteful design, is easy to use despite offering many features over multiple platforms, it just works, etc). He also releases a lot of information about instapaper which yields insights into the iOS market in general (versions of iOS used, sales by device).
He's become an important tech blogger, too, with several recent front page HN posts (recently, his review of the Kindle Fire). Given his general support for Apple products, this post represents an important shift in his perspective. Maybe its not front-page HN worthy, but you should probably know him.
The point is that it's important to realise that not everyone has the same priorities, or the same constraints, as you do. Marco says he's happy to relinquish some control in order to have things work the way they're supposed to, but he recognises that other people may not have the freedom or the desire to make the same trade-off.
This recognition is called empathy, and it's a useful trait for people involved in product design, online discussions &c.
And I'd buy it more if his actions followed his words. I listened to his podcast once, and the Android/Google bashing was so pervasive it continued even to the point they were making fun of it during an ad that mentioned a company had an Android app (something to the effect of "They even have an Android app, if you are stuck with an Android"). An ad! People paid money to his show to have their work/customers belittled.
> People paid money to his show to have their work/customers belittled.
From another perspective, people paid money to his show to hear his opinions. If he said something you didn't like, I'd hope you decided to stop listening (or take his opinions into account when choosing technology).
Are you really saying people should not criticize their sponsors? So you like articles and reviews raving about some product just because it was given to the author for free?
(I hate those podcasts, by the way, not defending them, just this one point)
I also believe the best summary for the post is its title: "Whatever works for you", and a slightly longer version might be "Use whatever works for you, my advice is meaningless because we're different people". This was more about people than it is about a specific brand.
"No, I don't know why your new smartphone won't sync with all three of your business accounts as well as your personal email."
So far, this kind of answer has been far better received than spending hours troubleshooting frustrating corner cases from trying to shoehorn off-the-shelf gadgets into situations they probably weren't meant for anyway. At worst, that makes me lazy, but I'm okay with that as long as I'm not known as the ill-tempered son-in-law who won't just help out his aunt and uncle without coping an attitude.