The Politics of Design

Last weekend I was reminded of 3 things:

1. If you tell a determined 11 year old that something is “not possible” using your reference model of technology, you’ll likely be proven wrong.
2. Streaming media rocks!
3. Product integration between devices we use is the critical success factor in market share for Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Some background:
My 11 year old decides he wants to make a slideshow “DVD” …but he doesn’t tell anyone, including me, of his plans. He set’s about his work and barks at anyone who dare get near the family computer to discover his epic production.

Of course, I know something is going on and I have a feeling on how this is going to turn out: hours of effort ending in great frustration when Dad tells him…”that is not possible” just like the time he wanted to make a teleporter or attach a zip-line to the roof of our house or create a race car game that would take a game studio a million dollars to write.

I knew the disappointment horizon was near when he asked me how to copy 6,000 photos between PC and Mac. The kid had spent several hours of time assembling 6,000 photos for a slideshow DVD. I kept coaching to cut out the unnecessary pictures, to “go for the 80/20” to not get too far in this process only to be stopped by the limitations of physical media.

6,000 photos!!! At 5-10 seconds screen time for each photo that would be 8-16 hours worth of DVD!!

With the determination of a pit bull (a.k.a. his mother) he tries to find alternatives on how we could accomplish the mammoth task. Lower quality DVD? Removing some of the photos? Creating multiple DVDs instead one? Just, click on any button on the screen and see if that works!

His determination inspired me to consider alternatives. How COULD we accomplish this impossible task? I’ll skip the failed ideas but it finally hit me that my Apple TV can show a slideshow of pictures sitting on another computer. You can also configure it to play background music from a specific playlist. Viola! Solution!!! A very beautiful and simple one. He was able to create the playlist himself and play the “movie” throughout the day.

Lessons Learned:
One: You can call me stupid for not realizing this was the best solution from the beginning but I was thinking about the primary requirement – making a DVD so other solutions did not occur to me. I was constraining my self with my reference model of how creating a DVD worked. My generation, the generation that is defining the Internet and Mobile and running companies like Facebook and Google and Apple are all somewhat blinded by our reference models. This was a good wake up call that the next generation is tech savvy and isn’t bound by the same virtual limitations.

Two:
I won’t dwell on this point but local physical storage is so 2000 and eight. I can’t wait until someone provides a good solution to store all my purchased media (music, movies, etc) and allows me to store my personal media in the same place. We are closer to this than you may realize. Apple, Amazon and others are already moving in this direction.

Three:
Point two brings me to point three. He who integrates well, will win. Apple, Google, Microsoft – here is my media manifesto: You will win my loyalty as a customer if you can:

• Allow me to make purchases of music, movies and other media content directly from the devices I own.
• Allow me to view any of the content I own from any of the other device.
• Provide me with cloud storage for all of my purchased content so I don’t have to worry about backing it up ever again. BTW, this will make my loyalty sticky because if I have that much content stored in your cloud, I will probably be a customer for a long time…which brings me to the next bullet.
• Allow me to export my content in a standard format and port to another platform (e.g. Apple to Google, Google to Microsoft). I know you don’t want to do this.
• I also need to ability to store the content I create in your cloud. E.g. my photos and movies.
• I want to be able to view my personally created content on and of the devices I own as well.
• A final one on my wish list would be the ability to combine my content and share it with others. Home movies, slide shows set to music, etc. I would buy an Apple TV for everyone in my family if there were a “Family channel” my relatives could easily turn on get the latest media created by me.

Apple is close to many of these items but there are still barriers on cloud storage and personal content. I am not asking for cross-platform integration here, yet. That would be nice but I am OK with keeping this within one device / OS platform as long as it works well. So, Microsoft, Google, Apple, shoot me an email when you get this done, please!