James L Adams—People and Products

Product Quality, Technical Progress, Obsolescence, and Digital Devices

A few weeks ago, the DVD player on our “home entertainment” center failed.  Looking up the symptoms of that particular device on the internet, I found the recommendation that I take the cover off and start the disc spinning with my finger.  It worked. Problem solved, perhaps, except more recently my wife realized that her friends did not have to start their DVD’s with their finger, so I set forth to replace the unit, shown above (note amazing waste space)

 DVD players cost very little these days, thanks to the intrusion of Blu-Ray players, and even the price of Blu-Rray players is dropping rapidly, and to boot they routinely offer compatibility with Wi-FI and such streaming sites as NetFlix, so I bought a relatively low priced one.  But I neglected to examine the display sample in the store – A MISTAKE.  The back of it was naked except for sockets for an HDMI and a USB cable.  Nothing for digital audio.

 Like many (most of my friends) I run the audio from various devices into a mature receiver and thence to a number of speakers that my kids have cast off, thereby creating some sort of surround sound.  The receiver I have is pre-HDMI and I love it (once again like most of my friends).  Being ignorant of HDMI cables, but being an engineer, I figured it would be simple to run the HDMI cable to my newer television, and strip off the audio to my receiver.  In fact, that is exactly what I had done with my old system, by running component cables to the TV and audio cables to the receiver.  But then I went back to the internet to figure out how to do this, and found two things:  HDMI cables have 19 wires in them (not five) and they are not made to be separated, and the internet is full of angry people facing the same problem I had—integrating new and slightly old equipment.

 I took the blu-ray back to Fry’s, a large electronic store in our area, and asked the person I had dealt with what to do.  Obvious, said he, buy a new receiver and a new set of components all wired for HDMI.  Wrong, said I, and bought a low-cost blu-ray player that took not only an HDMI cable, and a bunch of others I did not want, but also a coaxial audio output, fortunately matching a similar input on my receiver—so a temporary victory.

 But while in the store I looked at the backs of all the blu-ray players they had, and found absolutely no standardization at all.  They all had HDMI sockets, but seemed to have random numbers of RCA sockets, optical sound ports, ether net ports, USB ports, and even an S-video socket or two.  Is this perhaps an unconscious (or conscious) attempt to confuse the consumer so that he/she will buy new equipment, most of which is wired for HDMI?  An attempt to apply a subtle form of voluntary obsolescence?  Or are all the venders thinking that their layout is superior?

 Can’t there be standardization in such things as blu-ray players, or is that too much of an impediment to innovation? In fact, this very lack of standardization is a very successful strategy to make people like me increasingly angry at the manufacturers of these no-longer-magic devices. In the future I may buy old equipment from Goodwill.  Like many people I carry grudges like inconvenient cable changes a long time, such as the one I have against Apple for changing projector plugs. 

 But I am temporarily happy with my new blu-ray player plugged into my old sound system, except or course for the fact that the manual control buttons are invisible and barely findable with the fingers (remotes always get sat upon or lost between couch pillows), and my attempts to enter my new player into my “universal” remote have so-far come to naught. I will keep  trying, but if I cannot solve that problem, I will go back to playing the piano.

 

 

Product Quality and the Internet

The Internet is miraculous in the information it contains and makes available, and is growing at an exponential rate.  But in my opinion, it is also decreasing in quality, and I am not sure we are smart enough to know what to do about it. It suffers from some of the very characteristics that make it attractive—in particular that there are very low costs to entering material on it, and very few, if any, punishments for entering misleading, potentially harmful, and junk material.

 Much material on the internet is of very high quality.  As an example, Wikipedia is extremely impressive, and in fact seems to have eclipsed print encyclopedias not only in amount of content, but in accessibility.  And it is generally trustworthy.  But it is picking up an alarming amount of biographical information on individuals that are primarily important in their own minds.  Obviously there is a tremendous amount of quality control involved with running businesses such as Amazon, or any other commercial enterprise that must deliver products on time in good shape for money.  But even here, such things as supportive comments from users are questionable.  As an example, new authors are smart enough to have their friends send five star raves to Amazon.

 But problems abound due to such things as processing the sheer amount of material on the internet,  intrusive and annoying ads that lie, and people who delight in hacking the system.  I just received an excellent example of the latter yesterday, in the form of an e-mail seemingly from a good friend entitled “salutations”.  Maybe you had the honor of receiving the same one.  The message consisted of a link, and my friends often send me amusing links, so I opened it and it presented me with an extraordinarily repulsive and very long promotion for a new miracle diet. It was brilliantly designed to be almost impossible to get off of my computer.  I finally was driven to restart the computer, only to be told the Firefox would not allow me to.  Pulling the plug worked.

 But I did not endure the entire message. It was babbling on as I pulled the plug. If it was a prank from my friend it was a very good one, in that I fell for it, but it was flawed because it lasted too long for me to realize it was a prank. I fear that it was actually an attempt to sell something, and unfortunately for the creator, I hated it so much I do not even remember the details of it. If the message was designed simply to annoy people, it was successful.  It was not only an intrusive ad that lied, but clearly involved a hack that came up with my friend’s name and e-mail address, probably from a social network.

 The major problem with internet quality in the long run is due to the interface between the amount of information on it and our limited brains.  Many people seem to believe that their brain has been amazingly improved by having the material on the internet connected to it.  But they do not allow for the amount of processing their brain must do to sort through the internet.   The situation is way beyond drinking from a fire hose.  Browsers and search engines are amazing, in that they instantly bring sites of interest to ones one’s attention, but they tend to drown one in them, and do not offer much help in evaluating the content in the sites. 

 As an example of a fire hose, no longer are book proposals necessarily sorted by people that we accept as experts before the decision is made to publish the book.  The old system could be criticized because it was heavily influenced by profitability and the biases of those reviewing the proposals. But what are we to do with the hundreds of thousands (and increasing) self-published books each year, most with accompanying web sites and lists of raves? We are told of the astoundingly successful books that emerge from the pile.  But whose comments do we believe?  And since bookstores that made choices on which to stock and enabled browsing are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, do we try to browse hundreds of thousands of books on the internet?  Give me a break!  As Richard Saul Wurman pointed out in his Information Anxiety book years ago, information is data that can be used to accomplish something.  Too much information on the internet is data that accomplishes nothing.  And worrisomely enough, there is no motivation for anyone to delete it.

 

Product Quality, Innovation,and Tradition

Yesterday I went with four friends to the annual antique farm equipment show in Tulare California— an important cultural event.  I drove.  We are all hobbyists at restoring old machinery, particularly vehicles. Two of us are a professor emeritus in the Anesthesiology Department and his grandson, who is about to enter medical school. Two of us are on the faculty of the Design Group of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford. I am a professor emeritus from the Engineering  School with a large amount of experience in design and consulting in industry, including a bit of time in automotive design.  Why do I mention this?  Because I am going to say something about cars, other products of industry, innovation, and standardization in this post and the next, and I want to establish some credibility.

 Since there are five of us, since we were going to drive a bit over 500 miles in a day,  and since we are reasonably large people that did not seem to all fit in any of our family cars, we rented a  2013 SUV with only 1700 miles on it made by a well known and loved U.S. company. The good news was that it was a relative joy to drive, compared with other “big” cars, and quite comfortable with only a few annoyances, such as the requirement of a strange move to kill the turn signals after passing another car, and the need to sacrifice the center of the back seat if coffee cup holders were wanted. But there was some less good news.

 Fortunately I asked the person in the group who has the most experience with cars made by this company, and is very knowledgeable about things technical, to sit in the front seat and be responsible for what is often now called   “the information system”.  Otherwise, I might have killed all of us.

 Happily for we humans, the layout of automotive controls has been quite standardized for some time, due to the mechanical nature of the links between the controls and the device being controlled.  There is less of that as time goes by, because digital electronics have made it possible and in many ways convenient to control various functions electrically.  Steering is still somewhat traditional, although augmented and input by various electrical inputs.  Soon, if not now, it may be possible to steer your car with your nose, movements of your eyes, or your voice.

 I do hope we don’t.  The investment in , for instance, steering a car with a traditional steering wheel is huge, represents billions of years of acquiring automatic responses among members of the human race, and whether the “best way” or not, is somewhat like the QUERTY keyboard system, in that a change would result in a great loss of learned skill.  And if you make a mistake with a keyboard, it is easily repairable.  If you make a mistake steering a car while learning a radical new approach to control, you may not only die, but take a number of innocent people with you.

 Admittedly, my problems with this car were somewhat due to the fact that it was a rental.  If  I owned it, I would have had the time to learn to communicate with it. But I often rent cars and more and more people are sharing cars.  And I spent a day and 500 miles with it. My problems began when I brought it home one evening in the dark in order to be able to leave on our trip very early in the morning.  Starting it at the rental agency was straight forward, but of course I couldn’t just turn the lights off when I arrived home.  Failing to turn them off made me begin to worry about the state of the battery in the morning, but I wisely decided that the car would turn them off when it was good and ready, went upstairs and watched it, and sure enough after a while (the programmed delay), it did so.  I figured I should learn a bit more about the car, and of course there was no owner’s manual in the car (usually the case with rental cars), so I went on the internet and after passing up several opportunities to buy a manual for $30 I finally found an online copy I could read for free.  It had some 450 pages, of which many had to do with the “information system”, including how to program the delay in the lights (not straight forward) and such things.

 Now realizing that the car was going to obey basic inputs from me, and I had no hope of learning to control the bells and whistles on the car before we left, I accepted the fact that it would insist on making many decisions itself, so slightly before dawn we left for our trip, and I happily watched my information officer buried in the information system— this being the case even though the rental car had minimal features.  I kept imagining him not only having to do with things such as trip meters, mileage estimates, the interior “climate”  and telling me where the hell the odometer was, but the nature of his job if we had faced a complicated route and had a navigation system he had never seen, and all our cell phones were hooked to the car.    And then of course, I entertained myself thinking about the fantasy of doing what he was doing and also trying to drive.

 Car manufacturers are well aware of the “diversion” problem.  Cars are supposed to keep people safe, but the very same people are demanding things ranging from on-board cell phone service to information on the state of the vehicle, to music and TV, as well as the time-honored right to interact with each other and offer leaking sandwiches to the driver.  But vehicles are not the only products under attack.  Standardization and control/display simplification, time honored ways of improving the ability to perform tasks, especially in the case where multiple operators of the same equipment are involved, are being destroyed by the present wave of worship for creativity and innovation.  There used to be a very active field called human engineering that dealt with such things.  The publications still exist, and subsets of technical societies still exist, but human engineering matured as a field, and although it left very reasonable and one-time agreed upon rules about the interaction between controls, displays, and human operators, many designers seem to have no knowledge of this.   It was once agreed upon that once a reasonably optimal solution was reached, standardization was extremely valuable (older radios and automobile controls and displays). Ålthough is to some extent still the case in such products as airplanes and military vehicles, the wide application of this philosophy to a wide range of products was before the days of apps, gigabytes, and electronic chips that offered almost free electronic components.

 The argument goes that standardization stands in the way of creativity, innovation, and change.  Nuts!  Industrial products are supposed to improve the quality of our life, not confuse us as we try to use radios in strange cars and set the wake-up alarm in strange hotels. We are too good to have to figure out such things.  I don’t want to have to figure out whether the red line  under the seat symbol means I am controlling the seat warmer or telling me how warm it is.  I have a knob on the  dashboard of my 2011 Toyota (not that old) that has a  diagram of a fan on it.  Happily if I turn it to the right, the fan blows harder. I am beginning to love that knob.  In our rental car, after one found the “climate” screen, there was indeed a tiny diagram of a fan (among a very large number of tiny diagrams), but it was not clear how one varied the strange bar chart next to it, or if in fact that bar chart had anything at all to do with the fan.

 As you can guess I view this apparent forgetfulness of what we once believed as a cause for a decrease in the human fit in technical products, ranging from computers to dish washers to hand guns to fork lifts to bottle caps.  Maybe you are a product designer that has an unusually brilliant and creative idea for how to control a product, but are you sure that the brilliance is universally obvious?  And do we all have to learn it if we have reduced the present idea to adequately rapid unconscious response?

 On my trip yesterday, since it would begin and end in the dark, I took along a flashlight, as I have learned one is useful in trying to find and read “creatively” designed controls in a rental car at night. The flashlight was not one I usually use in the house. I am not even sure where it came from. It was a nice looking flashlight— bright, LED’s, rugged, impact-resistant case with particularly resilient material on the bottom end.  By groping around in the dark, I finally discovered that to turn it on you pushed on the resilient bottom end.  On looking at it later in the light, I realized the switch symbol for “on” was worked nicely into the resilient material — black on black. 

 Maybe an obvious place for a switch.  But I have spent my whole life finding flashlight switches (slider, button, etc) on the side where my thumb is.  And the bottom position is not reachable by the hand holding the flashlight in the normal way  —a bit annoying if one is carrying something in the other hand.  Creativity?  I’ve got enough to worry about in life without trying to find a switch in the dark that is subtly integrated into the case of a flashlight in a position the hand holding the flashlight cannot easily reach. I’ll sure never buy one like it.  

 I’ll call my next post Quality and the Internet.  We have to start thinking harder about our expectations of our brains, since they are not doubling their neurons at the same rate as digital hardware and software are doubling their capability.

 

 

MANIAC and the History of Computers

I just finished reading Turing’s Cathedral, by George Dyson (Random House, 2012, New York, N.Y.) and found it fascinating.  The history of the digital computer as a practical machine is both recent and explosive, and this extremely well written and researched book, although it traces the early general history of computers, focuses on a machine developed at the Institute of Advanced studies (the MANIAC)—an early stored program and powerful computer used at Los Alamos to do the massive calculations involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb.  The project began in 1945 and the lead players were John Von Neumann and Julian Bigelow, a lesser-known person who was the engineer that in many people’s mind “made it happen”.

 One of the reasons I liked the book is that for many years I used a book entitled The Starship and the Canoe, written by Kenneth Brower, in classes I taught.  The book is a double biography of George Dyson and his father Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist, and is a short and entertaining read.  At the time the book was written (1983), Freeman was involved with Project Orion, a proposed giant spacecraft to be propelled by the explosions of atomic bombs, and George was living in a tree in Canada studying and building Umiaks (native canoes) from modern materials.  The two were a fascinating study, because there were similarities in their thinking and passion, but George was clearly on a much different path socially.  This book by George shows amazing convergence.  George grew up on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where his father was a faculty member, and is now an historian of technology, and is at home with advanced scientific and technological material.  Since his sister, Esther, is famous as first a pundit and now an investor in the computer world, the Dysons are clearly an outstanding family.

 This background gave George Dyson great insight into the Institute for Advanced Study, and an unusual opportunity to access people and archives.  The book contains a large cast of fascinating characters and portrays them much more intimately than is usually the case when scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are tossed into a book about a major breakthrough.  The result is an enjoyable read.  It is also a terrific insight into the interaction between mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the nature of ambitious technical projects, and the role that government, and in particular the military, plays in technical developments that later play a major role in civilian life.  The implication in the book is that the development of the hydrogen bomb, and the related need for massive calculations, played a major role in the influence that computers now have in our lives, for better or worse.

 And in fact, he ends with some worries – one being whether we will continually assign thinking to computers until we reach the point where machines think, but humans no longer do.  More details on the book can be found by clicking on the Amazon icon to the right.

Product Quality and Nostalgia.

Looking at the automobile page in the Sunday April 7^th New York times, I read an article by Jim Koscs about how a 1966 Cadillac was left to a 17 year old boy named Ray Knox in 1976 by an elderly lady who he helped in life and who in return treated him like an adopted grandson. He still has it, it is in great shape, and he obviously loves it deeply.  I am sure it reminds him of wonderful times and a wonderful woman. 

 My wife and I are reminded of past pleasures by objects, and seem to have surrounded ourselves with them.  My shop is full of old hand tools I don’t use, my office with things I have collected in various travels, and my basement with products that I no longer use, but that have served me well, or that I am fond of for other reasons. 

  This photograph is of a couple of Apple computers I used to use, that I keep because they are visually interesting.  I don’t have any fond memories of using them.  But today’s computers although elegant in appearance, are not very interesting in appearance.  These two were, and are, fun to look at, although I will never use them again.

 Some of these pleasures are vicarious. The photo below is os a 1975 Alfa Romeo that was my oldest son’s first major purchase upon graduating from college, and then became the entree to my wife's sport car period.  I have never driven it much because I don't really fit into it but it is fun, and  I keep it because  it reminds me of my son’s happiness to be on his own in Colorado with a new job and of my wife’s pleasure at zipping around in something Italian with the top down.  Beside, it will make a great car for a grandkid some day—maybe for the daughter of the very same son.

 Nostalgia for products can definitely cause one to fill up a lot of space.  But there are advantages to doing so.  Old products definitely remind one of past good times and experiences, which are usually even better in memory than they were when experienced.  My yard full of tractors is an example (one to the left).  It reminds me of the pleasure of growing up on a farm, even though I obviously didn’t want to be a farmer. To stay with vehicles as an example, older products also can furnish old-time luxury (the 1966 Cadillac), thrills (my 1970’s motorcycles), novelty (there is a similarity among modern automobiles), a culture (collectors of antique cars), and even be good investments (my XKE Jaguar if I restored it).

 But in order for products to produce nostalgia, they must be of noteworthy quality.  One tends to bond with such products over long periods of time, during which they serve one and one serves them.  Many products I am nostalgic about both required maintenance, and were straightforward to maintain.  My first car was a 1941 Chevrolet, and I drove it for many years, during which I repaired it many times. We became one, I loved it, and I should have kept it. 

 I do not feel strongly about throw-away products.  I am not nostalgic about computers for instance.  I don’t keep them long enough to become attached to them, and hate them when they cease working and I can’t fix them or they are no longer competitive and become e-trash (except for the two above).  But I still use the hammer I used to put an addition on my parent’s house while in high school, and have lovingly replaced the handle and de-rusted it several times.

 

 

 

Product Quality, Driving and Distractions

I mentioned in a previous post having heard a talk by Nancy Gioia, one of our alumni who is a senior manager at Ford, concerning the difficulty of balancing automobile safety with the many digital entertainment and communication devices being demanded by drivers.  In the Sunday edition of the New York Times, there was an article entitled “When Drivers are Overwhelmed, Their Cars May Intervene”.  It is here.  Incidentally, it was directly below an article on VW’s new hybrid and planned electric cars, which contained the amazing and I hope erroneous news that their new eGolf will contain a speaker in the dash that emits an artificial engine sound that gets louder as the car accelerates at low speed, cutting off at 20 mph when the road noise takes over.  Are we that set in our ways?

 The article in the above link predicts that as more driver distractions are added to cars, more features will necessarily be added to the cars to help the driver.  This sounds like a bonanza for the economy, mechanics, manufacturers, and other people who feed on increasing the complexity of cars.  But unfortunately, complexity begets failures, and if one is dependent on features that are essential to avoid accidents, we should worry.

 Driver distractions do cause accidents, which result in deaths, but do we really trust technology to protect us against them?  Traffic accidents in the U.S. cause about 30,000 deaths per year.  In the last ten years there have been only 150 fatalities resulting from commercial airplane accidents.  Interesting that some of us worry more about flying than driving.

 In commercial airlines, the pilot and other crew members are isolated from the passengers and other distractions.  There is more complexity to flying an airplane than driving a car, but the pilots are highly trained and have a great deal of experience, and great care is taken in designing airplane cockpits to simplify the task of the pilot, neither especially true of automobiles and their cars.

 It seems that if we are truly seeking safety, we should train drivers better, and isolate them from distractions, such as passengers in the car, cell phone conversations, TV screens, computer games, and other such fun activities.  Physically easy to do.  But of course doing so is not consistent with being re-elected to political office, nor with traditional automotive travel habits.  We feel so secure driving a car that we seem to not be overly concerned with this death toll, unless it happens to us or someone we are close to.  But what if distractions continue to increase?

 Will such things as biometrics (measuring the state of the driver, warning them if they are overloaded, and intercepting incoming distractions if they are) help?  Or will people invent ways to circumvent the system, as people now do with cell phones and various noxious warning sounds and subtle symbols on the dash board, or ignore the law, such as they do with cell phones and texting.  And how about reliability of these systems?  My computers often need re-booting, and occasionally fail without warning.  Can electronic systems be made fail-safe in an automobile?  I must admit I am impressed that accidental inflation of air bags is so rare, but relatively simple and well-known devices such as solenoids and ignition coils do fail, and rodents do seem to like dining on cable harnesses.  At present, the result of such things is automatic doors that won’t open, and engines that won’t run well, not death.

Baby Products and Product Quality

The first photo is of two of my grand daughters being pushed around by their very pleased grandmother.  The vehicle in which they are riding is called a jogger, specifically designed for parents who run, and is a wonder of technology.  The second photo shows its Indianapolis 500 personality,  The kids will clearly become race drivers, and I have already requested the vehicle when they are done with it so I can install the proper engine. It is a large device, but can be collapsed onto its frame (providing one knows the proper controls to do so –it helps to be an engineer) to fit into a car (the larger the better). All in all it is an impressive device. It is comfortable, smoothly running, complete with convertible top, seat belts, water bottle and miscellaneous equipment holders, rugged, and light weight for its size. The photo on the left below shows one of its brakes (?) and its general high quality of craftsmanship. The frame is almost bicycle like in appearance.

  I am almost ashamed to include the photo on the right, which shows me at the age of 5 months in my stroller.  No spoke wheels, no bright colors, no comfortable seat, no roof, no brakes, no seat belts—it wasn’t even very big.  I didn’t understand what a deprived childhood I had.  Mothers and fathers could not jog very rapidly with this machine.   Fortunately that was not a problem, because when I was a baby, any adult seen running for exercise would have been suspected  of fleeing the scene of a crime they had committed. 

 But wait!  My stroller had a tray that would hold small toys and beads to push around, and a handle I could pretend I was steering with.  I could either sit or stand in it, and the foot plate could be removed when I became larger so that it became a “walker”.  In fact, eventually the front wheels could be replaced with a steerable single wheel, the enclosure could be removed, and I had a tricycle I could kick around with my feet.  It had rubber-coated bumpers and was a combination stroller and play pen.  It was light in weight, low in cost, sturdy, and with a single obvious fold of the handle, extremely portable.  And since I was unable to get into trouble inside it at an early age, I required less monitoring.  Maybe some things have been lost over time.

 In a post some time ago, I complained about the inexorable growth of pick-up trucks.  Baby equipment shows the same tendency.  Strollers are approaching golf carts in size and car seats approaching the size of the seats already in the automobile.  Meanwhile in the recent past automobiles have approached vans in size and vans have approached busses, perhaps partly to haul this equipment around.  There are some signs of reversal in this, as smaller efficient cars are now in vogue, and perhaps baby equipment will follow the trend, But over long periods of time we seem to think that generally bigger is always better, except for digital devices.  I am not convinced. Bigger seems to be often accompanied by higher cost, more unnecessary features, more difficulty in operation, and the need for more space and materials. 

 But perhaps if baby equipment continues to grow, there will be a backlash because parents will have increasing difficulty finding their babies in the midst of their equipment, and require trailers to haul it around with their smaller more efficient automobiles.

 

 

 

 

 

The Oxy-Acetylene Tank Set—A Good Product

The  photo shows my now classic middle-sized gas welding equipment.  Big enough to cover my needs, but also small enough to lift into the back of my pick-up.  It consists of the usual — Victor torch with cutting head and heating and welding tips, hose, tanks of oxygen and of acetylene, pressure regulators, and assorted related stuff (goggles, torch cleaning tips, spark igniter, cart, etc.) The equipment is sometimes loosely called a tank set.  I recommend that all households have one.

I use it not only for welding, brazing, and soldering, but also for a broad range of usages requiring controlled heat.  I have even occasionally used it to reheat my coffee on cold days when I am working out of doors.

The rusty mechanism on the table next to it on the old wagon is part of a very vintage McCormick Reaper (the one in the  history books) that I am restoring.  It is a crucial part, since it contains the shaft that rotates the arms that sweep the grain into the cutter and then onto the ground, and all sorts of pivoting parts that allow the arms to move up and down as they swing. The reaper is probably 130 years old, and has spent a good bit of that time outside, so when I acquired it the shaft had rusted quite firmly to the castings in which they turn.  I soaked the whole mess first in penetrating oil, then in old diesel oil, and even in used brake fluid, but the parts remained rusted together.  So I used the ultimate answer in such cases, which is to heat the castings red hot with my torch.  Since heat weakens rust and expands holes, the rust gave up with the result that the shaft now rotates happily and the arms go through their motion.  One of many uses for my tank set .

 The tank set qualifies as a very good product according to the criteria in my Good Products Bad Products book.  Costs are low for the capability it gives me, and it has never failed to do what I want it to do.  It is easy to use and fits me well, is nicely made, and fills me with positive emotions, ranging from nostalgia to an instant sense of accomplishment whenever I use it.  It is elegant in its simplicity, and lets me mingle with the welding culture. Environment?  One generally uses a so-called neutral flame (no particulates) with this device, I am stingy in my  use of acetylene, and I don’t use it that often.  It certainly is not in the league of my furnace, water heater, or gas stove.

 Also it is fun to weld.  It never ceases to amaze me how easy to turn two pieces of metal into one with a simple flame. I must admit I generally use electrical equipment to weld these days, since it is fast, more easily controlled, and allows one to avoid oxidation by using an inert gas.  But welding with a gas flame strikes me as a somehow purer experience. It's just me and the fire!

 

 

 

 

Contagious: Why Things Catch On, by Jonah Berger

I have just finished an very enjoyable and useful book entitled Contagious: “Why Things Catch On”, by Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  Further details on the book are at the right of the page under recommended reading.  I don’t usually write about marketing, partly because there are so many good books and papers on marketing, and I am not a marketing expert, although there was a time I talked about creativity in marketing executive programs and am constantly running up against marketing in my low-pressure crusade for improved product quality.  Design, manufacturing, and marketing are hopefully tightly integrated when products are involved, so I follow what is going on.

 Marketing in business schools has changed greatly since I joined the Stanford Engineering school faculty, and in universities continues to differentiate itself from sales.  This is less true outside of schools, and in fact looking at the dictionary  in the Dashboard on my Apple (clearly a business) computer I see that it is defined as “the action or business of promoting and selling products and services, including market research and advertising”.  Not much differentiation there.  The marketing professors I know and have worked with have been wonderful people, but the continuum above continues to contain people who still use classic tricks to sell people low quality products they don’t need.

 Certainly marketing continues to become more sophisticated and now embraces quantitative methods as well as the best that psychology has to offer.  I am all for it when it matches people with products that fill their needs and help their growth.  I am less for it when it causes stores I enter to push opportunities to join their club so I can acquire points toward certificates that qualify me for discounts on things I don’t want, when people place ads on my computer screen that become increasingly difficult to make go away, or when they place large signs beside the road in beautiful scenery.

 But this book is about spreading the word on almost anything—a vital and increasingly difficult task, as more information seems to clog up communication channels.  The author feels that the most efficient way to get people’s attention about a product or service (and I think almost anything else) is through word of mouth, since a certainly credibility is attached, as opposed to communication from the producer, who obviously is going to say the product is wonderful.  In addition he quotes impressive numbers to show that we rely heavily on word of mouth in our decisions.  I must admit I also like the book because he points out that studies have shown that only 7% of communications on such things as products and services come from the internet—no born- again internet hawk here. Word of mouth is clearly a powerful marketing force, as it comes from people one has some reason to trust who are simply commenting on their own experience.  But how to get this powerful word of mouth to happen?

 The book discusses six factors which Berger claims causes it to spread rapidly and consistently over time.  These are social currency (is it “in?), triggers (are you reminded of it over time?) emotion (does it arouse you?), public (are you aware of it?) practicality (is it useful?) and finally stories (can it be put in various contexts that are memorable?}  He has great arguments and stories about each.  And they are in general consistent with product quality, although in keeping with the present interest in illogical actions, he also treats common trickery that works, like special offers with time limits, and meaningless “normal” prices. 

 One of my all-time favorite books is “influence”, by Robert Cialdini (Harper Business, 2008), which discusses a number of common methods of influencing people, even so far as getting them to do things they might not think they want to.  It is fun to read, because one realizes that one is often a victim of such methods.  Berger’s book is similar, but in a very positive way, in that it lists effective and believable approaches that obviously work to spread the word on good things.