kip/bot/blog

Doug Coates (plasticbag.org) did a review of the XO for Icon magazine (with a sexy “air” picture of the machine). He’s ambivalent, to say the least, about doing a review in this context:

There’s something troubling about reviewing Nicholas Negroponte’s XO – the so-called “$100 dollar laptop� – for a design magazine. And that I’m writing the piece on my gas-guzzling SUV of a MacBook Pro can only compound the horror.

The XO has been in the news for a while, but icon is the first magazine to actually get hold of one. The thing is, this is not a machine designed to be evaluated by people like me. In all the ways that matter, it’s not a consumer artefact. It’s not trying to wheedle itself into your living room. It has more in common with a clean water pump than it does with an iPod.

As you might imagine from the text, he’s generally behind the project. His strong feelings prompted him to republish the essay on his blog (without Icon’s editorial cuts) and with an intro, where he explicitly talks about the politics of the XO.

But at least he talks about the design from the perspective of a design critic:

Green and white with a tough, textured plastic body about the same size as a lunch-box, it has been optimised in every way to deal with the extreme conditions of its use. Its astonishingly frugal use of electricity allows it to function in areas where power is sparse or even non-existent. The screen switches into an energy-efficient black and white mode that is also readable in direct–even aggressive–sunlight. The rubberised keyboard seals the device against dust and water. Even the friendly green “ears” of the device serve a triple function – acting as latches, protective shields for USB ports and as antennae designed to extend the range of the distributed wifi networks that will connect children across the planet.

There’s more in his review, and hopefully will be more from others.  I’m still intrigued.

In today’s NYT, an article about Obama’s surge has a quick paragraph summing up what it means:

The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president.

Now perhaps there is more polling data or, more important, tracking data, showing that many voters once thought he was unelectable or unqualified have recently changed their minds and think he is electable and qualified. If that were the case, though, why not say “exit polls in the latest string of victories show voters who had once considered him unelectable or unqualified are seeing him in a different light”? Better yet, why not tell us what caused this change?

Presumably there was no data to support that. Instead, there is a hypothesis that voters’ primary reasons for voting for a candidate are: 1) they have the money, organization, strategy, and personality/character/demographic/skin color to be a strong candidate against the likely Republican nominee (electability); or 2) their previous job experience maps to the skill set needed to be leader of the free world. It follows, then, that a vote for someone is based on these two factors and increased numbers of votes means an increase in these two factors.
This is a classic case of an unvalidated assumption. Ever since Nixon’s sweat glands lost him the 1960 election, we’ve had examples of more emotional, thin slice evaluations of candidates. A trip down memory lane:

Don’t trust him, don’t like him.

Wimp. Artificial.

Tough. He paid for the mike and he’s gonna use it, don’t you dare OReilly him.

Cool? Self-confident? Oh yeah: eminently qualified to be the leader of the free world, and with
a good strategy for getting elected.

Not to mention that people will gladly vote for candidates who represent something other than electability or qualifications — hope, trustworthiness, I want this guy to be president even if he’s not electable (Nader), outsiders can shake things up (Perot) . . .

I’m not unhappy about the results, just the poor thinking masquerading as analysis . . . at the NYT of all places.

The New York Times did a what now seems inevitable article comparing Clinton to a PC and Obama to a Mac. (Not sure a summary of the comparison is even needed, or even the article. It’s pretty obvious where it goes.)

I think the better analogy is that Obama is a 1.0 software release and Clinton a 3.x.y.

Obama 1.0 is full of promise, free of legacy, naive about marketing, and, being untested in the market, quite possibly everything it promises to be (and even what you hope for). While operating Obama 1.0, it has a clean feel, offers ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ moments of fresh surprise, and whatever isn’t working isn’t so bad: it’s 1.0 after all.

Clinton, on the other hand, is 3.x.y: all cruft and spaghetti code and in need of patches and special drivers. There are very features (positions) that you arrive at through a clear path, and when you do get there, they’re so laden with marketing ideas and embellishments that you’re never quite certain it’s what you asked for, want, or need. When you trace the history of any feature, the path is so circuitous and constrained by legacy issues, that you wonder how it all hangs together, or if it hangs together at all.

That’s not as loaded as it sounds – in many ways, it’s a rehash of the generational issue. Obama’s inexperience, like JFK’s, is free of cruft and spaghetti code, while having the added virtue of allowing people to project hopes and dreams onto the candidacy. Clinton’s experience, while showing market strength and durability, has the drawback of grounding a person in reality.