In this day and age where large-scale corporate mergers are happening every couple of months, The Corporation is splitting up. Here’s the skinny from the press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced a realignment of the company into three newly formed divisions, each of which will be led by its own president.

The three new spinoffs will each have their own stock options and their own names, although the full transition to the smaller, more agile units will take well over a year to complete. The big chunk is obviously the Operating-System division, which will continue development of both the upcoming Vista edition of Windows and the current Media Center and PocketPC platforms. The second chunk will handle Microsoft’s Business Products, which includes Office, Visual Studio and all their productivity tools. The third and final chunk will be Entertainment & Devices, which basically means the XBox, and additionally their keyboards, mice and media services such as PlaysForSure.

This is one interesting development and kinda echoes what happened to Palm two years ago when they spun-off their OS division (although that move turned out to be ill-advised given that PalmSource is currently languishing in obscurity). We won’t really find out until about 2007 just how bad a move MS’s split-up actually is though.

Complaints have begun to circle on both Web logs and Apple’s own support forums surrounding an issue with the polycarbonate plastic that covers the front of the iPod Nano. Some users claim the player scratches extremely easily, enough that it makes the screen difficult to read.

The problems have even led one anonymous Nano owner to set up a Web site to gather complaints of defects surrounding the diminutive player. flawedmusicplayer.com, was registered September 21 by Matthew Peterson of Hazel Park, Michigan.

(via betanews)

It’s a testament to the power of the Apple brand, that they can get away with practically any crap product that they produce. Remember the similarly-cracked G4 Cube? Or how they rushed OSX to market too early and it ended up not being able to read DVDs, couldn’t run Photoshop and had to come bundled with OS9 so that people could actually use software on it?

These are the kind of mistakes that would have run other companies into the ground, but Apple’s power isn’t that they make the best hardware in the world, it’s that they’ve convinced everyone that they make the best hardware in the world. Which in most cases, is more than enough.

(Please note that I am not writing this because I’m bitter or I resent Apple’s position. I lick the dirt off Steve Jobs’ boots, but it behooves me to point out that in the business world, perception is simply more powerful than reality.)

[ UPDATE: Macworld reports that Apple is now offering to replace all the scratched nanos for free, and claims that the scratching was a vendor-related problem and not a design issue. This may be one of the reasons why Apple has managed to weather these bouts of bad-publicity; they’re pretty up-front with their customers and if their product has a tendency to suck (even in "1/10 of 1%" of the cases), at least they don’t lie about it. ]

So I didn’t sleep over the last weekend. I threw together about 40% of Highfiber’s 6th version, uploaded it, and got the first round of feedback from the community and my peers.

It’s interesting how the people who don’t really like it much are designers themselves, whereas the people who do are average users. It’s interesting because it illustrates this funny schism in modern web design, i.e., designers have no idea what makes the average user happy.

I think the main reason for this is that most designers (at least in this country) weren’t "born into" web design, i.e., they crossed over from other media. Mostly that means print, because if you were a motion graphics designer, web design would arguably be a step down … at least in terms of hardware investment.

Anyway, you can always tell if a designer comes from a print background because the first thing they want to do when they’re given a website layout to fiddle with is to clean everything up. Pick out the main sections and hide everything else by pushing them into subpages or floating DHTML menus, or cramming them into iframes. Why? Because that’s the one thing you can’t do with print. You can jump-page all you want, but in the end, you’re still stuck with a very specific amount of space to work with, and your copy only expands and shrinks as much as your letter-spacing rules will allow.

So your first impulse is to clean up. It’s probably also because the single most successful website to date is made up of little more than a logo and a textfield. The thing is, that approach actually only works if you’re building the next Google. Otherwise, you’re just hassling the crap out of your users. Nobody wants to have to mouse-over a button just to see the rest of the site’s sections, and nobody wants to have to scroll a tiny-ass iframe to view your news. And certainly no one wants to have to click twice when they could’ve clicked just once to get to where they wanted to go … especially if they’re visiting your site every day to get to that one particular section.

At the heart of all this is the fact that designers don’t think like users. They put in icons without titles and expect users to understand what they are, or color-code sections and assume that people will remember what each color represents. They remove the underline from linked text, change the color to dark gray, and wonder why no one seems to click. Or they come up with kooky horizontal layouts, because it just "looks different."

I built the first 5 versions of highfiber with this kind of wankery, so I can honestly say that I know what I’m talking about here.

I’m hoping to end that line of thinking with version 6, by building something that hopefully makes sense to the people who use it, instead of pandering to the critics, so to speak. I know I’ve still got a long way to go, but I think that if I listen closely enough to the users I’ll end up with something really, really worthwhile. I’m already getting lots of good feedback.

Clickety-click. (Version 6 is in the early stages of development, so be kind.) 

"I sat behind the wheel and watched the raindrops
As they gathered on the windshield
And raced down into the humming motor
And she folded up her fears like paper airplanes
And lost them in the trees."

"[…] my heart
Spills awkward and embarrasing blood
Onto white golden streets
And I am unashamed of the stains my steps leave"

- from Mineral’s "If I Could" and "Take the Picture Now"
both from their debut release The Power of Failing, 1995,
which is I believe, the archetypal emo album

I’ve been an avid listener of ITConversations this past week and I came across a wonderful interview with Graham Hawkes, a deep-sea explorer, who’s attempting to build a manned submersible that they can take all the way down the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, a depth of about 35,000 feet. What’s cool about Hawkes’ approach is that he’s taken to redesigning the wheel so to speak, by ignoring previous submersible designs and building vehicles that look more airplane-like, with the latest one dubbed Deep Flight II:

Hawke’s underwater flying machines use the "same math that the Wright Brothers a hundred years ago […] from a mathematical point of view, if you’re going at less than the speed of sound, you treat air as if it’s a fluid. It’s the same hydrodynamics, the same principles."

Not only do they have one of the most visually-apt band websites I’ve ever seen, but they’ve also got that whole post-emo emo feel that I love so much. "A Slow Descent" is tres cool, check it out.

I forgot my wallet at home again today. I left the house at 630 this morning and drove all the way to a meeting in Makati with no money, no credit or ATM cards and no driver’s license. I couldn’t even afford to buy myself a cup of coffee (although I had had the foresight to pack my cigarettes and lighter the night before).

I went through both of my morning meetings debating whether or not I should try to borrow money from one or more of my clients. I could go the entire morning without food or drink, but I couldn’t leave unless I could pay the friggin’ parking fees.

Ultimately, common sense was superseded by pride (and my obstinate refusal to swallow it). And so, as I prepared to leave the building, I began scrounging around the car for enough loose change to pay for my parking. I was able to get 50 pesos from my car’s ashtray cum piggy bank, which I held nervously in one sweaty palm as I maneuvered my way to the ticket booth.

And because life wanted to teach me a really good lesson this time around, the total fee turned out to be 60 pesos, 10 more than I had. I must have held up the line for 10 minutes while I rooted around my backpack and the underneaths of each seat. Somehow, I was able to get it together.

When I got home, I found my wallet sitting beside my keyboard, exactly where I left it this morning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’ve been walking around the house for the past five hours with it in my back pocket.

[1] Generally the term Screamo refers to a branch of hardcore popularised in the 1990’s by bands such as City of Caterpillar, Envy, Orchid, Saetia et al. Often features dischordant riffs, high-pitched screams, some spoken-word vocals (Saetia were known to utilize this technique quite often), and quite often the recordings were very lo-fi, and grainy.

However the term has been heavily popularised by MTV as a reference to the pop-punk/emo bands of the new century (Finch, Story of the Year etc).

[2] screamo is a term that refers to recent bands that play old style emo. Most pinpoint the first use of the term to Saetia. When the media started to label pop punk and indie rock bands emo, people needed a new word to describe the style of music that used to be characterized with emo. Some say screamo is a little more artsy and pretentious than older emo, but that’s arguable.

Nice bit of explanation spotted on an emotorrents.com discussion thread. Now if I could only figure what emo is …

Just a short review, for those who are thinking of watching this film. Like most John Le Carre novels, The Constant Gardener unfolds like a cat stretching, indulging itself in its scenery, its actors and most of all, its socio-political commentary. Its languid pacing is as deliberate and controlled as the exceedingly civilized diplomat that Ralph Fiennes plays. I won’t bother commenting on things I know nothing about, so let’s just say this movie does a lot to open its viewers’ collective eyes on what’s going on in the dark continent.

What struck me about The Constant Gardener is that director Fernando Meirelles seems to care more about the journey than the actual destination. We already know halfway through the second act that the evil pharmaceutical corporations are using Africa as their testing grounds for new drugs, but it takes Fiennes’ character an entire other hour to put the pieces together. But I suppose, the mystery here wasn’t really the point.

It’s a contemplative kind of story, beautifully shot in gloriously-grained film. We see the African shanties in brilliant, high-contrast color, set against an impossibly blue sky. The sun blazes and the music swells like its coming right out of the ground that the characters are standing on. It’s not the sort of thing you’ll want to see with a large group of friends, but it’s great for an intimate post-game kind of analysis.

Another week, another bout of insanity.

Today’s seizure-inducing episode has to do with one of our smaller clients, and their stubborn refusal to admit that they have no idea what they are doing.

An example, to illustrate: their corporate website gets fewer visitors a day than my blog, and yet they insist on selling advertising space to their peers. A month ago, they had me build a newsletter engine to promote their site, which they then populated with email addresses from their own inboxes. Every couple of weeks, they have a new batch of email addresses that they have harvested without the knowledge of the owners, and every time, I try to explain to them that that is a really bad idea.

Now, normally this is the kind of thing I’d just laugh off. It doesn’t matter what I say to these people, they just go and do it anyway, so I figure, I should just let them discover for themselves why they aren’t ready to push their business online.

Every now and then though, they pull a stunt that just throws me into uncontrollable convulsions.

Case in point: they’re not really happy with the newsletter engine I wrote for them. Their thinking is that if they could send out really nice-looking newsletters, the recipients would be more likely to visit their site. Now I’d agree with this notion if I believed for a second that the recipients they were spamming had any interest whatsoever in what these guys were selling, but well, that’s the problem isn’t it. Shotgun marketing only works if you have millions of targets, and I already told them that engine will only support about 10,000 (beyond that, they need to get a dedicated third-party provider).

So, their tech guy, a fresh grad from some IT school, set about designing a nicer-looking newsletter. He reported that he was designing their new template in CorelDraw and that he would be sending it to a test batch of 50 recipients. I said, sure whatever, add me to the batch so I can see what it looks like.

The next morning, he called me up and complained about some Outlook problem I couldn’t quite understand. He said that he was able to successfully send out his newly-designed newsletter template to all 50 recipients, but that some of them were having problems viewing it. It was taking forever to open. Still bleary-eyed, I checked Outlook and found a 5-fucking-megabyte email clogging up my inbox. A trickle of saliva dripped from the corner of my mouth. The genius had attached the friggin’ CDR file to the test email.

I said, "Dude, you designed this in CorelDraw right."

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "Dude, do you know what a JPEG is?"

He said, "Yeah, that’s a type of file right."

"Uh, yeah … sorta … Hmm. Ok. Let’s talk tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to help you with this."

I mean, come on, I don’t even know where to begin with this guy. I know I shouldn’t really be pissed off at him. What I am pissed off about is that the client just hired some random kid without even bothering to see if he had any skills that were relevant to their business. I mean, I get that they’re trying to save money by hiring someone without any work-experience, but maybe that isn’t the best move when you’ve got an office full of technologically-challenged people and one of your core businesses is a website. I don’t know, I could be wrong, but it sure seems to make sense from where I’m sitting.

Christ!