I’m in a bit of a ranting mood. That just happens sometimes. Usually it’s on a specific subject, but today, I seem to have mini-rants about a whole bunch of things. Well, maybe 10 things. So here they are, 10 generic things that bug me:
#4: Not listening to customers enough. It’s nice when a company has a good idea and wants to build it, but if they don’t get outside of their own heads for a bit, we consumers end up with UIs that don’t make any sense, features that we’ll never use or products never tested under real-world conditions (see #4).
#4: Test cycles that are too short. “Beta test the world” or “Ship it and fix it later” may get something to market sooner, but at what cost. So many companies seem to think that since “they” do that on the web, everyone should go ahead and operate that way. But what happens when the not fully tested design has a hardware problem? Where’s your field upgrade then? Or what happens when the product is mission critical? Oops, too late …
#4: Listening too much to customers. What??? Yes. That’s what I said. Most customers want way more than they need for way less than you can afford to build. You need to listen to customers a lot and very carefully, but you need to translate for them. You can’t just take raw comments and try to directly put them in as product features.#4: “Half-gallon” containers that aren’t a half gallon any more. It really annoys me to buy a half gallon of ice cream knowing that it’s only 3/8th of a gallon.
#4: Not considering the whole story. This is where the law of unintended consequences comes in. Okay, we want to reduce our consumption of fossil fuel so we subsidize corn ethanol. Fine, except by doing so, we tie a major food staple in developing nations to the volatile price of filling giant SUVs. People go hungry because of it.
#4: Rushed design cycles. Yes, we, ourselves, contribute to this by reducing the turn-times for electronics assembly, but I’m not really talking about the assembly phase. More about the design, layout and kitting. (and test — see #4) We all need to chill a little and take some extra time to run a few more tests, double-check the component footprints and make sure we’ve done a thorough job of it.
#4: More science and less hype. No one can really tell if global warming is man-caused or not. I’m sure the real data is floating around somewhere, but everyone talking about it has a personal agenda. There’s so much pseudo-science and political ranting thrown about that anything that an interested citizen might use to come to an informed conclusion is obscured by all of the exaggerated and faked material.
#4: How about some electronics-targeted legislation that actually makes sense from a technical and social perspective. As with things like global warming in #4, there’s too much hype, too much cash-based lobbying and not enough actual understanding going into some of these laws that affect all of us in the electronics industry.
#4: Allocation. It really annoys me. Related into this is the proliferation of specialized chips. There are a seriously larger number of varieties of every form of chip you might imagine. That’s great for design, You can pick the microcontroller that pretty meets your exact specifications, or just the right buck/boost controller. That’s cool, but I think it also makes forecasting and the allocation of foundry time simply crazy. That can only exacerbate the supply issues that cause parts to go into allocation mode.
#4: Missed opportunities due to personal-agenda based hype. So many people want to replace fossil fuel so they bend reality and call the electric car the green replacement to gas cars. Then everyone is disappointed that they can’t drive 600 miles with just one or two five-minute fill-up stops. They focus on far too far into the future and make everyone dismiss as hype what is otherwise a perfectly viable technology. Market electrics as a second car. It’s not the main car for trips and the ultimate in convenience. It’s the run to get a gallon of milk car, the back and forth to community college car, the “I’m going to a friend’s house” car. Market electric cars like that and they are 100% viable right now.
I’m not sure which of these things bug me more or less than any other, so they all tie at No. 4.
Duane Benson
Have a nice day
As you said in #4, “There’s so much pseudo-science and political ranting thrown about that anything that an interested citizen might use to come to an informed conclusion is obscured by all of the exaggerated and faked material”. There is so much money about with this Global Warming theme that it is natural for people to want, one way or another, to get a slice of it. That makes political and personal agendas (and greed) more prevalent.
Sure, a lot of what is being done around the GW theme is good. More efficient jet engines, reduced particulates in the air, more renewable energy. All good for the world.
The trick will be to keep the science in the works and the political agendas out.
I suspect that given a couple of centuries of hindsight (from now) they will be saying that GW was just noise on a geological timescale (and wishing they could have spent the money better…)