“It seems to me that the people in the video largely think with their guts, and not their brains. I’m not making a judgment about their intelligence, only recognizing that they seem to evaluate the world from a different perspective than I do.”

Sounds to me like you have a slightly inflated view of yourself, Chris. Perhaps it was unintentional. You seem to be careful often, and caring. After all, you give the appropriate caveat. But I don’t think the caveat works in this case.

Look, I’m not so much upset over your apparent political differences — you’ve made your loyalties clear from time to time — I really think this has little to do with politics and personality in that sense. (After all, I live in Boston, so there’s plenty else for a semi-conservative soul like mine to get frustrated with.) I just think you probably owe *those* “people in the video” a little more due: perhaps they think more with their brains than you understand. (Sometimes, for that matter, you seem to speak from your gut far more than you might admit to yourself.)

Not everyone is afforded the opportunity to live in the Bay Area and work for major pioneering computer companies, or evangelize the future of open source standards and distributed social networking, and fly to the moon.

Not everyone is afforded the opportunity to be put on the spot, say, like you are. You have a lot of opportunity to practice saying polished, smart things in front of lots of nifty people. But your reaction to these folks opinions has been exhibitive and from the gut.

It would have been much more understandable and you probably would have sounded a little more humble if you had just stated something along the lines of “these are people I just don’t understand.” Perhaps that would have been more honest. And what’s to disagree with there?

Because from my point of view, they were very rational, smart people.

This was a very good read. your last posts regarding the “death of the URL” are very intriguing (Even watched the entire Palin interviews, heh) . I recently saw this
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefoxs_plan_to_kick_the_logins_butt.php
you probably have seen it already.

It seems to me that this road Firefox is taking (expecting to take?) might not play well side by side with what you are suggesting… more strange new UI’s, more engagement with technology. clearly a new ground for more viruses/phishing. As an technical user, this new development by Mozilla is a step forward, but while users like me represent mere 10% (20?) of everybody… what does it mean for all the rest?

It’s no surprise OpenID goes through such a long journey… it deals with a very delicate subject, who are we, how are we representing ourselves, one can argue it’s more philosophical than technical. Here in this article you’re trying to tackle both issues as equal parts (are they?). I’m trying to understand how this move might take place – the move to an identity-centric web. After reading your article it seems impossible than ever.

If you haven’t heard of the Jobs, Outcomes, Constraints model, you should check that out. It is premised on the idea that customers “hire” a product or service to help them achieve specific outcomes relative to constraints that they face (here’s a post on the topic if interested: http://bit.ly/8jEz1B), whereas so much of product design/management falls into the trap of attribute orientation.

In any event, the Palin bit captures the second corollary of this; namely, that it is not enough to ask people what they want but to watch what they do, see how they think, and above all, come at them with a well-formed model that can be iterated, derived from (relative to said jobs/outcomes/constraints).

It’s the distinction between, “you can do ‘anything’ with it” and being designed to perform a specific task supported by a clear workflow really well.

Keep up the good work.

Mark

This and your piece on the social web with Jyri are major elements: I’m still trying to digest the later, so please give me a few days — but I guess my gut feeling would be:

> the web must seem incredibly scary if you’re also one of those people that’s had a virus destroy your files, or use a computer that’s still infected and runs really slow.

Wow, that sounds a lot like “Chrome OS will have a massive market share.” Think about it: flashing boot, no virus, no distinction between the OS and the browser, no file system… Add some HTML5-based simplicity, a working hybrid protocol for authentification-based transactions, and that’s the ideal computer for my mom.

Your comment feed, picking from Twitter and Louis Gray’s, plus the automated, working OpenID authentification… I’m loving my job a lot right now.

When people sit down to choose what identity to wear before browsing, how should that be managed, do you think? I can see a world where you browse the internet with a Facebook frame around it, with the “raw” HTML of the internet scrubbed for safety similar to how FBML is today. Yes, I mean this ironically.

I mean, instead of the client-side databases of HTML5, why not have an intermediary be my information bank, with identity management baked into the bargain? Also, assuming we got to choose who our intermediary was…Facebook, Google, some open-source alternative…would this be a bad thing?

I often feel like the heads of many industries that still run archaic technology (health care, banks, Office Depot, etc..) suffer from a “legacy gut” experience- as they were early adopters of tech and many had terrible experiences trying to adopt that technology. Development was slow, very expensive, and prone to crashes, training their staff was a job in and of itself, and customer usability was either non existent or dreadful- all of which is why they haven’t upgraded yet.

Many small businesses still run custom applications written in DOS or 8 bit graphics and are yet to move on as they see the task of rebuilding their infrastructure as something so daunting it’s better to not even bother.

We all have guts- they’re what holds us together and must be paid attention to. Thanks for reminding me