Before the BOFH came out of the closet and system admin became hip for a while, I used to hang out in online conferences for IT support staff. I didn't work in IT support but I do enjoy funny stories, and these people had some crackers to tell about their hapless users. Some of their tales later toured the Internet as the early viral email joke entitled 'If PCs were cars'. "My car ran fine for a week and now it won't go anywhere," complains the user. "Is the petrol tank empty?" asks the support guy. "What?" yells the indignant user, "I already paid for this car and now you're telling me that I have to keep buying more components!"
 Featured on Canadian Content Technology. |
These days, users are a little more savvy about computers. The irony is that now it's the support staff who are getting caught in this petrol trap. Obvious examples include upgrade favourites such as RAM and disk space, not to mention the printer consumables treadmill. You think you have specified the hardware correctly and bought all the supplies you need, but there's always something missing or the supplies run out twice as fast as you expected. Perhaps users should distribute some email jokes about IT support insisting that they employ SMS-style English in their business documents because it saves on toner.
Taking a leaf from Mattel's mythical Book of Barbie, hardware manufacturers like to surround their products with optional extra-cost accessories. This leads to the slippery marketing slope of hyping a product's potential rather than its actual feature set. But while it's quite obvious that Ken is an optional extra for Barbie and is purchased separately, computing gear's specifications are often obscure and even deliberately misleading. It's bad enough that printer engine speeds are never achievable in real life, but I've read brochures which claim a printer outputs on both sides of each sheet when in fact it can't unless you buy an extra-cost duplexing unit.
This is reminiscent of the 'Bluetooth-ready' specification on so many notebooks and peripherals over the past couple of years. Using this logic, Barbie is 'Ken-ready'. The word 'ready' here means 'not included'.
A recent offender in this respect was the marketing material for PalmOne's Zire 72 and Zire 31 Handheld devices launched this week. The Zire 72 gives you audio/video capture and playback (the footnote reveals: "requires the use of an expansion card, sold separately") and MP3 stereo playback ("stereo headphones optional, sold separately"). The Zire 31 supports MP3 functionality too ("requires the use of an expansion card, sold separately") and a choice of 20,000 applications ("some must be purchased separately"). I am reminded of Handspring which used to refer to its products as the "most connected" palmtops you could buy, even though none of them came with any communications hardware unless -- guess what -- you bought it separately.
Things are clearly getting out of hand: we've now reached the stage where a product specification has evolved into a checklist of things you don't get with the product. It is no longer a list of what's included but a description of everything that's missing.
How much further this trend will go is impossible to predict but it looks like it has plenty of mileage left, assuming of course it's not riding in a 'petrol-ready' car. One way or another, it will all end in tears. Yours, probably.