One of the phenomenons that I’m very interested is the bug in the human psyche that results in the Paradox of Choice. Here’s a snippet from an article that showed up today about it:

So many choices: What to do? What to do? - Yahoo! News

Dozens of drug-prescription plans. More than 8,000 mutual funds. Fixed-rate, interest-only and option ARM mortgages. Regular 401(k) plans vs. Roth 401(k)s. Countless flavors of bank accounts.

Choice is a hallmark of capitalism, and most of us would agree that having too many choices is far better than having no choices. A growing body of research, though, shows Americans have become so besieged by choices that many feel paralyzed and confused. (Advice: Tips on making smart choices)

Having to choose one brand of jam out of 20 brands is one thing. But as Americans bear more responsibility for their own financial lives - from drug coverage to retirement savings - their decisions are looming larger than ever. At stake: their retirement, their health care and their children’s education.

The problem is that many of us aren’t up to making such decisions, says Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.

Click on the link to read the article, let me know what you think!

Paradox of choices (and its cousin, analysis paralysis) comes to my mind a lot when designing software. It’s really easy to say “oh, just let the user decide in the options”, but the reality is that if you do that, you end up with a bazillion checkboxes across 51 tabs in a Preference dialog. And then that’s not useful or fun any more.

The hardest part about software is sometimes saying no.

Towards the end of last year, Mark had the following post:

plaxoed! ? A few sample pictures from my Lumix FX9 [Mark Jen’s life @ Plaxo]

I would’ve been hard pressed to take these shots on my S400… hopefully the FX9 won’t disappoint!

Now, 2005 was a long year for cameras for me. At the beginning of the year, I had a Canon S400. Then, I migrated to a Canon SD300. Immediately afterwards, I changed again to a Canon SD400. Then after visiting my parents, and using my dad’s SD450, I got one of those as a replacement. After I saw this post from Mark though, I immediately got a Panasonic Lumix FX9 to compare it with the SD450 I bought.

I no longer have the SD450.

Thanks Mark! The FX9 with its image stabilization is absolutely fantastic. That said, there are a few things I miss about the SD450:

1. The SD450 had a optical viewfinder - that was great for outdoor shots.
2. The SD450 was slightly smaller.
3. The SD450 looked nice and had a more solid feel.

Nonetheless, I’m sticking with the FX9 - for now anyway.
Ah, thanks to the four letter word of blog I found this camera - were it not, I would never have even considered a Panasonic.

Which reminds me, when I work on new features - I think about how fast word will spread about it in the blogosphere. Especially bad news. Quality and reputation is more important than ever.

Back when I was working on Entourage 2004, one of the things that we did frequently was look through the most frequent tech support call issues. Email account configuration was really high up there - not surprising given all the jargon: IMAP, SMTP, POP, SSL! All the user wanted to do was read and send email… how frustrating that must be.

As a result, I came up with the Auto Account Configure feature in Entourage 2004. And with the dev handy work of Mike, and verification by Rich, this feature became reality.

And now, it looks like Outlook 12 will have this feature as well:

Outlook 12 : Let’s Start Again: Account Configuration

In Outlook 12, we’ve added a feature that will make this easy for the majority of our customers. We’re calling it Auto Account Setup. It comes in a couple of parts:

From what this entry reads, it sounds like what Outlook 12 is doing will be slightly better and worse than Entourage.

You see, one of the problems I found was that people would often sign up for an ISP - and then either forget or not be told what their settings information was. So, with the help of others at Microsoft, I simply hard coded a giant lookup table in Entourage. All you had to do was type in your email address and we would look up what the right settings were for your domain.

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked for the 80% case. The big problem worry was always that some ISP would change its server settings, and our list would fall out of date. It looks like Outlook won’t be doing this, which isn’t as good as Entourage. But it will be trying combinations of well known words with the domain, as well as being able to look for a certain xml file at the domain, which is better than Entourage. Though Entourage does try SSL first as well so as to make your communication more secure.

The “Test Your Account” settings before you leave account configuration is also something that it looks like both products have.

I’m glad to see Outlook 12 have this feature. This will make the lives of many many many many many customers much much much much more happy.

This showed up in my inbox today:

Not very timely.
Lately I’ve shipped a few things via DHL (formerly Airborne Express). I must say that I’ve found their notification and tracking system to be a bit on the weak side. They seem to recycle tracking numbers from time to time, and the status isn’t always up to date.

Which is all ironic considering that their current advertising campaign focuses on their customer service.

My friend John has posted some nice photos that he took during a trip to India:

jrc Blog: I’m back!

I’m back from my trip to the world’s largest democracy. Here’s a photo book…
Download jrc-India2006.pdf (3.8 MB)

In a post I had recently, Gene made the following comment:

Avoid Doubletree Bellevue Hotel room 530 (A review)

There really is no such thing as a quiet hotel room, I’m convinced.

Well, to be clear, I’m not exactly the most sensitive sleeper out there. For 3 years, I lived within the vicinity of an ER ambulence bay, or the main route for ambulences heading towards the ER.

In fact, one of my best nights of sleep was actually at a place where there was some mild road noise and police sirens. I once stayed at the Marriott World Trade Center (courtesy of Lehman Bros). My room had a great view over West St, and even though it was high up, there was still a fair bit of road noise. I’ve also stayed at a variety of other urban hotels without quibble: Sheraton NY, W Union Square, W San Francisco, Marriott San Francisco, Westin St. Francis San Francisco, etc.

It’s just that Doubletree had so much big rig noise at night. Yipes!

So here’s the twist: I once stayed at hotel that was so quiet that I was actually slightly unnerved, and had trouble falling asleep. It was in the Fall of 1999, when IBM took me out to interview for a position at their Global Services division. They paid for a room at the Bethesda Marriott Suites. Here’s a picture of it from Windows Live Local:

Out there in the middle of a corporate park, surrounded by nowhere, it was unbelievably quiet. Also, the rooms there are suites, so they are enormous - and equally quiet. If you’re looking for insanely quiet, try going there on a Saturday.

(BTW, if you’re looking for a place to stay where you’ll see people puking and people shouting all night long, try the Travelodge South Strip. Great location, great prices, but oh so shady!)

This is an interesting, though not very scientific, study about where people are moving from and to:

United Van Lines Migration Study | Press Releases

Movement into the mountain West increased in 2005, with Oregon (63.6%) continuing its 18-year, high-inbound trend and having the highest inbound migration of all states in the study. While still a high-inbound state, Nevada (60.1% inbound) witnessed the fewest moves coming in since 1998. Idaho (61.9% inbound), classified as high inbound for the past 18 years, saw its highest inbound year since 1998; and Arizona (60.1% inbound) saw its highest inbound since 1996.

Although not considered “high inbound,” the other mountain West states also welcomed the arrival of new residents. Colorado (53.5% inbound) continued its three-year inbound trend and had nearly 2% more moves into the state as compared to last year. New Mexico (54.2% inbound) and Montana (54.4% inbound) retained their four-year inbound status. Utah (50.1% inbound) and Wyoming (50.1% inbound) boasted a more than 2% increase in moves as compared to 2004.

In addition to the West seeing an inbound migration influx, the Southeastern states also were a top migration spot. North Carolina (61.3%) and South Carolina (59.0%) continued their 12-year inbound tradition, while Alabama (58.9%) continued its three-year, high-inbound trend. Two southeastern states saw their highest arrival percentage in years: Georgia (55.2%, highest percentage since 1982); and Tennessee (58.0%, highest percentage since 1995). Kentucky (55.3%) welcomed its first year as a high-inbound state since the inception of the study.

Rounding out the list of high-inbound states is Washington, D.C. (61.4%), which has remained inbound since the first year of the study.

Some other noteworthy inbound-migration states in 2005:

While Florida (54.2%) has been inbound since the survey commenced, this year marked the lowest number of relocations to the state since 2000.

Texas (53.9%) continued inbound movement since 1989 and saw slightly (1.3%) more people move in as compared to last year.

As compared with 2004, Washington (53.4%) became the destination for 2.7% more residents.

States in the Northeast and Midwest generally showed an outbound trend, according to United’s records. New York (59.8%) has been an outbound state since the survey was established, but after eight years as a balanced state, Rhode Island (57.0%) jumped to the high-outbound list this year. Continuing their outbound tradition, New Jersey (60.4%, outbound since 1997) and Pennsylvania (56.0%, high outbound for the past two years) also saw residents depart.

Not identified as “high outbound,” but following the outbound trend in the Northeastern part of the country, Connecticut (53.5%) saw its third successive year of out-migration and Maryland (53.5%) continued its 13-year outbound tradition. Maine (51.2%) observed 3% more relocations leave in 2005 than 2004, and Massachusetts (54.1%) lost residents for the 18th year straight.

Toward the middle of the country, Midwestern states also experienced outbound migration. Although considered high outbound, two states had less people leaving than they did last year: Indiana (59.9% outbound; 4.2% less than 2004) and Illinois (58.4% outbound; 2.1% less than 2004). Other states in the Midwest also showed an outbound trend: Missouri (50.8%, but this year marked the fewest people leaving since 1995); Nebraska (50.7%, after two years of inbound migration, Nebraska saw the departure of residents) and Kansas (52.6%, continued nine-year outbound trend).

The other “high-outbound” states in this year’s study were:

California (55.7%) – 2005 marks the first time the state has seen a high outbound number since 1995.

Louisiana (57.9%) – With many difficult challenges throughout the year, the state saw 4.5% more outgoing moves after being classified as a balanced state for the past four years.

North Dakota (67.8%) – This year marked the highest outbound migration since 2001 for the state.

Michigan (63.9%) – From the inception of the study, Michigan has been an outbound state.

Omar had a nifty comment today:

shahine.com/omar/ - Junkware

Ed calls it Junkware. I call it crapware. Either way it’s evil and does much harm. I doubt we’ll see a solution to this soon.

Hm, what is it that Ed said?

Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise ? Why do new PCs come with so much junkware?

Dwight Silverman links to an excellent post today by Claus Valca, who explains why it takes 4.5 hours to make a new PC usable. Part of the burden is updating drivers, part is installing third-party security software, but at least an hour of it is cleaning up bundled software that comes preinstalled on new consumer PCs, with users having no choice over whether to get this stuff.

I don’t think this includes the time it takes to remove all those stickers - like the ones I talked about in this post earlier.

Coming from the Mac World (and the MacWorld, heh) I must say that I was very shocked by this common practice of PC vendors. You definitely don’t see Apple doing this.

The worst part is that, in my opinion, a lot of times, this “value-added” software tends to cause problems. And this degrades the general experience of Windows - giving Microsoft a black eye. Even worse are some of the drivers out there - bad drivers can lead to general OS instability.

You might wonder, why doesn’t Microsoft do something about this? After all, doesn’t Microsoft care about the end-user? Well… Microsoft does! But, these are the OEMs - the hardware vendors. Microsoft can’t tell them what to do legally.

So, therein lies the even worse part: I don’t see any cure to this problem until Microsoft starts building and selling PC’s. Otherwise, Dell is simply competing with Gateway vs Lenovo vs Joe Schmo PC. PCs, in particular, Desktop PCs are basically commodities - and that’s a tough business to be in! They can only differentiate by reducing prices, providing better support, or adding more. And the cheapest, and sometimes most profitable thing to do is add the crapware/junkware that Omar and Ed are talking about. If they don’t get a revenue stream, at the very least, they have another checkbox feature to differentiate their commodity product.

Until some major change happens, Apple will continue to be in a class of their own, delighting computer users - while PC users battle amongst themselves and customers suffer.