Complex technology...better?

At my old school, the administration once had a brilliant idea. All the clocks were frequently unsynchronized, and so people didn't know what time the bell was actually going to ring. So they decided to buy atomic clocks for every room, naturally assuming that such clocks would always be right. Great idea, you say? Not quite. They bought all the clocks, put them up, and followed the directions to synchronize them. Unfortunately, the time that they synchronized to was simply incorrect. They ultimately had to put all the old clocks back up and were left with a huge stack of non-working atomic clocks that they apparently couldn't return.

Why is it that complex technology invariably just doesn't work as well? Of course, the easy answer is that there's simply much more to go wrong. But, even if you assume that everything works perfectly, simpler stuff tends to work better anyway. I've tried numerous methods of keeping calendars, lists, and reminding myself to do various things. Ultimately, I always find something new, think it's a great idea, and then I end up missing things anyway. The only method I've found that actually works nearly every time is putting a sticky note on my monitor.

Why does this work? First of all, I look at the monitor whenever I turn on my computer and while I'm working on it, which is fairly often. Also, the computer is in the middle of my room and on a desk where I keep other assorted objects, so I end up looking at it anyway. In contrast to a computerized calendar like the one included in Microsoft Outlook, it simply works better. With Outlook, my computer may make a noise at the right time or send me an email, but sticky notes can't accidentally be turned off, nor can a bug prevent them from working. They may fall off, but that's a small chance compared to the possibility of me accidentally deleting the event or having the program closed. Besides, it's much harder to miss a sticky note that is in your line of sight than a window buried under your 60 tabs of internet work or an email in your 150 unread messages. I have even tried my cell phone. For some people, this works okay, but besides the hassle of inputting an event using your phone keypad, I don't always have mine with me. When I go out, I usually do, but it's frequently turned off because I'm in school or something similar. In the rare instances when I actually get the notice, I do, in fact, remember, but this happens so rarely that it doesn't actually help. All this just goes to show that, despite the fact that there are plenty of complex organization systems that work, if you do something extremely simple and get in the habit of looking at it, you'll be very well off. (I once read a story about a professional attending a conference about cutting-edge mobile technology who was using a paper planner.)

This same thing came into my head when we recently learned about the accelerator issue in certain Toyota cars. If you're reading this far in the future or never picked up on it, accelerator pedals were simply getting stuck, which had been an occuring issue on those cars (nobody apparently saw fit to fix the problem earlier). The bigger problem, however, was that the brake pedal was not designed to override the accelerator, since it was computer-controlled. (Of course, here, a possibly more relevant question is "What idiot decided that going faster was more important than stopping?") In fact, if you held down the brake and then stepped on the accelerator pedal, your car would still move. In certain cars which recover power when braking, having the brake electronically is a necessity. But in most of them, a mechanical brake would have worked just as well, and the problem would have been simply annoying, rather than life-threatening, when one could actually stop. What's the point of adding another unnecessary layer of complexity?

I've come to the conclusion that simpler things are nearly always better. Don't let the crazy marketing fool you.
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Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad
http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com

Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
The answer is "No."