Corvus Consulting

Evolution is a funny thing, and by funny I mean like religion: easily grasped in the way that suits the dispositions of the reader. We often think that evolution produces the optimal, even the perfect, but this is nowhere near the truth. Rather than travel in a straight and rational line, evolution pushes design iterations along winding roads that can double back on themselves as easily as they can curve and veer in new directions.

This is true for technological evolution as much as biological, where what we end up with isn’t a matter of the perfect design, but rather the good enough for now, or provisional design.

Exhibit A: Bee-powered Pollination

Bees rock: colourful, a little dangerous (or a lot if you’re allergic), and steadfast survivors. So dependable is the bee that many species of plant have come to rely on them to carry pollen as a critical reproductive link. If the bees don’t show up to the party during the flowering seasons, there’s no next year for that species of plant unless another agent fills the niche. That, aside from great

This reproductive strategy just sorta happened; it worked, so it kept being used. It’s not perfect because it makes the bee a single point of failure for plants that rely on them to reproduce. It doesn’t make the process any less wonderful, but most conscious designers wouldn’t allow this system to go forward without a failsafe. It works as long as it works, and as such is provisional.

Exhibit B: The Human Appendix

In humans, the appendix is a leftover piece of an earlier herbivore biology. It has no known function (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one), and causes nothing but trouble when irritated. Where conscious design would remove the appendix, nature leaves it there in the absence of pressure to remove it. In this sense the appendix in modern humans is an example of provisional design, remaining in the absence of pressure to remove it. It lasts because nothing works hard enough against it.

Exhibit C: The QWERTY Keyboard

The keyboard layout that dominates our computing lives was consciously designed to slow down typing speeds in the days of early typewriters to prevent the mechanism from getting stuck. A more efficient layout, [wikipop]DVORAK[/wikipop], should be the standard in our age where computers can keep up with our typing. But even though you’re operating system supports the layout, you’d have a hard time buying a DVORAK keyboard, because [wikipop]QWERTY[/wikipop] is good enough. It’s provisional, and even in the world of consciously designed products, the unconscious pressures of evolution still rules.

And Then There’s the Kindle

From day one the Kindle has straddled extraordinarily good and bad ideas. The good ideas are easy winners:

• mobile connectivity to a trusted online vendor, with wireless fees bundled
• a smooth purchase and delivery method that reproduced the core of the iTunes-iPod success model
• great battery life

The bad ideas are deal-breakers:

• laugh-out-loud ugly industrial design, improved in version two
• the physical keyboard, surely used less than 5% of the time but taking up nearly 30% of the device surface
• the grayscale [wikipop]e-ink[/wikipop] display, with awkwardly slow refreshes despite sharp character rendering
• venemous business decisions, from the 70% cut that Amazon takes from each sale of a Kindle title to the infamous 1984 retraction, wherein Amazon remotely removed copies without notice from Kindles along with the intellectual property of customers who had used the device to write their own notes on the title.

Because the business model is as important as the industrial and software design to the overall product, I consider Amazon’s current Kindle service terms poor design.

Given my uppity opinion, imagine my surprise when I kept hearing how much people liked their Kindles. Surprise, until I realized that e-book readers were sliding down the slope of ‘good enough’. If the Kindle were to reign unchallenged (Sony’s offering still seems like a dead-end) the future of e-readers would be pretty bleak: colour could no longer be counted on for expressive power, writing commodified to compete with the price of sweatshop labour, wrapped up in a rather clunky form that denied an already-unfolding period of converged media devices. This dinosaur seemed poised to lock up the next ten years of reading in technology that felt like the revenge of the 80s instead of the promise of the future.

Boom (Soon)?

What may well be the next Boom! from Steve Jobs could be the asteroid that saves reading from the Kindle dinosaur that currently rules. (You really should follow that Boom link; like Sideshow Bob and the rakes, it gets funnier as it goes along). Many signs are pointing to Apple releasing a tablet form-factor device this month that will include a robust e-reader strategy for newspapers, magazines and maybe even books. It will also be in colour, play video, games, run applications. It would also likely embrace its App Store revenue split that takes only 30%, leaving 70% for authors.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a fan of Apple’s product designs, and if I had to sum up why it’s because they design comprehensively and they design for the future. They push the envelope on every aspect of their products instead of settling for good enough, settling for the refinement of a few things rather than doing a lot of them in mediocrity. There are many times when we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but reading is a pillar of culture that’s too important to leave in the hands of provisional design attitudes that would be content to stick us with the QWERTY keyboard of e-readers.

At its heart, the Kindle lost me in trying to re-create the experience of an older media rather than trying to re-invent the format to fit the new class of platform. Does the Kindle solve the problem of reading a lot on the go? Yes. Is it the right solution for the long term? Absolutely not, and that’s why I so dread this product becoming stuck as the standard for e-readers.

I respect a lot of what Amazon does: I buy my books there (7 in the last 2 months), I see EC2 and S3 as prime movers in cloud computing, and respect Bezos’s ability to stick with a vision. But in the Kindle I see only a transitional form, moving the imaginations of bookstore customers into the digital age, but not being enough to really open the door or to thrive in that new environment.

The Kindle might well respond to an Apple tablet by changing and surviving, optimally as a multi-device service. But, if the tablet pans out as I’ve thought it will since iPhone OS 3 debuted with in-app purchasing, I think this ipod from hell will soon see the dustbin and take Amazon out of the hardware business and back to what it does best: online retail and computing services.