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No piano lesson after all, but it wasn’t because of us.
It’s raining, but Seattle-style rain — on and off drizzle.
The locks thing: I keep thinking about choosing (I initially said picking, which was ambiguous in this context) lock internals, and then locating someone to design the visible metal plates for the inside and outside. I’m concerned this won’t work well on a bunch of the locks I would like to use because of the invisibility of the fasteners, but I also am convinced that it will work fine you just really have to get the internal clips/ridges correct and the metal used as to be within the correct range.
OK, now on to time wasting!
Don’t read the WSJ! With that obligatory distancing of myself from the time and money I spend on that rag, I will now proceed to rag on an article there, or at least, two paragraphs thereof.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/what-i-got-wrong-in-a-decade-of-predicting-the-future-of-tech-06420bba
Don’t read it tho, it’s a waste of time. Mims has been writing about “tech” at WSJ for a decade and has often been wrong and this is a retrospective on the Being Wrong and attempting to find something Right in that retrospective. Whatever.
His number 2 category of errors is about human factors, failure to consider them.
“The challenge of getting people to change their ways is the reason that adoption of new tech is always much slower than it would be if we were all coldly rational utilitarians bent solely on maximizing our productivity or pleasure.
Our tendency to be creatures of habit is why electric-vehicle adoption has slowed, and in a broader sense why we’re still so hooked on cars in general. It’s why the Mac is still here—despite my declaration that Apple should kill it off. And it’s why we’re still eating food.”
That last sentence is what stopped me cold — he’s referring to how he got sucked into the soylent thing. I had been spraining my eyeballs but otherwise continuing, but that one needed a ten-count to get past. What could he possibly mean here?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-food-is-here-finally-1454302860
In this 2016 piece (still don’t read the WSJ!), Mims says:
“A few times a week, I’m faced with a dilemma that is pretty much universal. I’m hungry, but I hardly have time to eat, much less buy something or prepare it. So I wolf down whatever is at hand, and no matter how hard I try to make it healthy, I rarely feel good about it.” And describes Soylent’s pivot “to a brand targeting people who just need something healthy and cheap to tide them over until their next proper meal. [new para] All of us, in other words. [new para] Here’s a typical day for me: Wake up. Catch up on the news. Beaver through a list of personal and family obligations. Get ready to walk out the door, realizing only as I collect my keys that I forgot to eat.“
Basically — and this is the thesis of the 2016 Mims piece — Soylent is like a lot of other convenience foods. Specifically, it is an attempted replacement for the bar — the energy bar, the breakfast bar, the protein bar, whatever. And it’s not dry. He mentions wine, bacon, travel bread, concentrated soup and other historical instances of portable food that can be quickly prepared and consumed. What he does not mention is the bar. I don’t know why he doesn’t mention the bar. It’s a little weird. Because that is probably the definitive competitor for Soylent, the thing people grab as they are heading out the door to chew on while riding, driving or walking to their first scheduled activity of the day because they are too busy to have “real food” for breakfast.
If Mims _had_ realized that Soylent was a bar replacement, I think Mims would have seen more clearly and specifically why Soylent was never going to take off. And the reason it was never going to take off was because what Soylent _really_ is is Ensure, or Adult Formula or any of a number of diet-adjacent meal replacement drinks like Medi-Fast. That’s a market category and it is a well-understood market category. You can probably grow it incrementally, but it isn’t going to replace All Food. And he knew that in 2016:
“But it’s precisely the time in which we find ourselves—when our humble daily bread pales in comparison to the meals we see on social media, and our health and environmental consciousness becomes more acute than ever—that a generic and convenient food replacement like Soylent starts to make sense.”
That’s not “Soylent will replace food”. That’s, “Soylent is when food really is just fuel, and I fucking hate dry stuff, and I need it to be way healthier because I do this a lot” with a sprinkling of “and code it environmentally conscious, please”. And all the other commentators at the time fully recognized that. Soylent hasn’t gone away. They claim they became profitable a few years back, and you can go set up a subscribe and save at their website as I write this.
I’m belaboring this Soylent thing, because it illustrates the _actual_ error that Mims makes over and over and over again. Mims is doing something I do a lot of: I have a problem, and I try to find a product that will fix the problem. The problem Mims had — shit I haven’t eaten and I’ve got my key fob in my hand already — was fixable with Soylent, sorta, and also once Mims is older and he’s settled into wherever he’s gonna be for the longer haul in his career and his family responsibilities have aged out or up or whatever (I haven’t stalked him enough to know where he was with this in 2016 or now for that matter, but family responsibilities generally evolve over time, and hopefully the kid-ones evolve in a less demanding direction eventually, and while it can take longer with the aging-parent related ones, those, too, generally change as well), Mims won’t have the problem any more, or as acutely, and the appeal of Soylent — and all the other product solutions to “Shit I haven’t eaten and I’ve got my key fob in my hand already” — will also lack appeal.
By speaking generically about “habits”, all of this dynamic is erased, and with it, clarity about the actual TAM, vs. the delusional TAM.
Wanna know the real problem of enthusiastic tech writers like Mims? They are working in a field that does not encourage nuance. Access to hot new companies with hot new products is increased by heavy use of Will Change the World!!! Access to hot new companies with hot new products is sharply curtailed if you say, well, if you hate bars, this at least isn’t as dry, when describing Soylent. And if you say about Soylent that you preferred a particular flavor of Ensure, you might find your next job in Journalism at AARP doing a newsletter and email marketing copy. Which might be a nice job to have right now, if you are a Rolling Stones fan because maybe you’d get tickets or something, too.
As I went on at length last night at FF, true innovation, true world changing ideas and products, become invisible and “Not Tech”. They do this in part by being female-identified and thus unworthy of notice (this really is why the iPad has gotten so little respect over its ludicrously successful existence — middle aged women love the shit out of iPads. Probably because they carry purses already, so it’s not a struggle to bring that iPad with them everywhere they go). But mostly, it’s because really successful ideas and products tend to eliminate job categories by converting them to products. Running water into the home put kids running water back and forth out of a job. They sure didn’t cry; public schooling became a thing instead. Electricity and/or gas lines to the house put kids carrying fuel out of a job. They sure didn’t cry; ditto. Computer used to be a job category; now it’s a product category. Dictation used to be to a human. Life is better and stuff is cheaper because so many jobs are now products (or automated services), which is _why we are always excited about new products_. But most new products don’t succeed to the same degree, and more and more, even the ones that _do_ succeed take much longer to get there. And a bunch of the ecosystem of a successful product is stubbornly resistant to perception as technology. I like to point to fiber as an invention, but it takes a lot of explaining to anyone who doesn’t already have a Yarn Shop Problem. Somewhat easier is the idea of writing surface as technology. We teach the Movable Type Printing Press as a world changing invention, but if we have to say “Movable Type”, we really ought to more clearly see and remember the preceding tech that involved wood block printing, an technological form that was far more able to depict illustrations vs. the “movable type”. What we _don’t_ teach is the invention and evolution of paper (“invented by the Chinese” and then somehow magically transported to Europe). _This_ at least can be made legible to a typical middle-aged person who remembers fan fold paper for printers. If the printer was technology, and it had to have fan fold paper to function, then surely the fan fold paper is also technology. Except somehow, it is not.
I love to talk about papyrus, because we’re all pretty clear that papyrus was pre-paper writing surface, Egypt associated. But just as we don’t talk about how paper got from China to Europe, we also don’t really look at what happened to papyrus, other than “paper happened”. I’ve obviously got a point here (and yes, it involves water mills, but everyone knows water mills are technology), and the point is that Egypt had a millenia-long monopoly on writing surface production that was disrupted as a result of an otherwise no-effect battle between the Chinese and some Islamic armies that resulted in paper production at industrial scale happening across the Islamic empire. And predictably, the Catholic Church, when presented with difficulties acquiring the papyrus they needed to function as an organization, stockpiled it rather than convert to paper.
All right, back to Mims and his coldly rational utilitarian nonsense. We haven’t given up food because duh, no one was going to give up food. This was just jockeying for position in the portable breakfast market category and similar competition within the eat-at-your-desk category, with a tiny additional fragment of the I have weird sensory issues market. But what’s up with the EV adoption thing? It’s hard to be sure, but what it _looks_ like to me is confusion. I don’t mean confusion by potential customers. I mean, the bigger your base, the harder it is to make large percentage increases to it. If you have 1 customer, you just need 1 more customer to have 100% growth. But to get 100% growth on 2 customers, you need 2 more customers. If you have 100 million customers, 100% growth requires 100 million more customers. You can see how it gets harder as you go along and eventually becomes impossible (on 4 billion customers, 100% growth will require 4 billion more customers. Not right now, that’s not gonna happen).
There’s all kinds of analysis about _why_ it’s harder to add more EV customers, and obviously people who made policy statements are walking them back. One of the problems is that with any bright, shiny new thing that has a virtue component is that people will just try to bully customers into ignoring problems with the product. It’s bright! It’s shiny! And it’s Good For You/the Planet! But that shit never sticks. If your EV range in cold weather is less than your commute, you will not keep that EV and you will probably _trash_ talk anyone else out of buying it. The more pressure applied to customers to override their concerns, the more you create marketing headwinds in the future.
I bought my i3 and I got the rex because I knew there would be days in winter where unless I charged in Mayberry during book group, I wouldn’t make it all the way home. I _tried_ to have a charger installed at the library in Mayberry, but gave up when I got resistance. Book group is now entirely on zoom, and my i4 has way more range, but charging infrastructure really does matter. (That rex caused a ton of problems, btw, but that’s neither here nor there.)
If our response to people’s resistance to product adoption is “oh well habits”, then we are missing a lot of opportunities to adjust the product (and associated services) to fit with people’s habits. If our response to product adoption is “oh, you’ll change your habit!!!” then we are busy creating our future Resistance. It would be so nice to see a tech reviewer retrospective that engaged with -any of this at all-.
I’m gonna die frosty about this topic. I’ll be old, probably, and in bed, hopefully. But I don’t see this changing.
It’s raining, but Seattle-style rain — on and off drizzle.
The locks thing: I keep thinking about choosing (I initially said picking, which was ambiguous in this context) lock internals, and then locating someone to design the visible metal plates for the inside and outside. I’m concerned this won’t work well on a bunch of the locks I would like to use because of the invisibility of the fasteners, but I also am convinced that it will work fine you just really have to get the internal clips/ridges correct and the metal used as to be within the correct range.
OK, now on to time wasting!
Don’t read the WSJ! With that obligatory distancing of myself from the time and money I spend on that rag, I will now proceed to rag on an article there, or at least, two paragraphs thereof.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/what-i-got-wrong-in-a-decade-of-predicting-the-future-of-tech-06420bba
Don’t read it tho, it’s a waste of time. Mims has been writing about “tech” at WSJ for a decade and has often been wrong and this is a retrospective on the Being Wrong and attempting to find something Right in that retrospective. Whatever.
His number 2 category of errors is about human factors, failure to consider them.
“The challenge of getting people to change their ways is the reason that adoption of new tech is always much slower than it would be if we were all coldly rational utilitarians bent solely on maximizing our productivity or pleasure.
Our tendency to be creatures of habit is why electric-vehicle adoption has slowed, and in a broader sense why we’re still so hooked on cars in general. It’s why the Mac is still here—despite my declaration that Apple should kill it off. And it’s why we’re still eating food.”
That last sentence is what stopped me cold — he’s referring to how he got sucked into the soylent thing. I had been spraining my eyeballs but otherwise continuing, but that one needed a ten-count to get past. What could he possibly mean here?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-end-of-food-is-here-finally-1454302860
In this 2016 piece (still don’t read the WSJ!), Mims says:
“A few times a week, I’m faced with a dilemma that is pretty much universal. I’m hungry, but I hardly have time to eat, much less buy something or prepare it. So I wolf down whatever is at hand, and no matter how hard I try to make it healthy, I rarely feel good about it.” And describes Soylent’s pivot “to a brand targeting people who just need something healthy and cheap to tide them over until their next proper meal. [new para] All of us, in other words. [new para] Here’s a typical day for me: Wake up. Catch up on the news. Beaver through a list of personal and family obligations. Get ready to walk out the door, realizing only as I collect my keys that I forgot to eat.“
Basically — and this is the thesis of the 2016 Mims piece — Soylent is like a lot of other convenience foods. Specifically, it is an attempted replacement for the bar — the energy bar, the breakfast bar, the protein bar, whatever. And it’s not dry. He mentions wine, bacon, travel bread, concentrated soup and other historical instances of portable food that can be quickly prepared and consumed. What he does not mention is the bar. I don’t know why he doesn’t mention the bar. It’s a little weird. Because that is probably the definitive competitor for Soylent, the thing people grab as they are heading out the door to chew on while riding, driving or walking to their first scheduled activity of the day because they are too busy to have “real food” for breakfast.
If Mims _had_ realized that Soylent was a bar replacement, I think Mims would have seen more clearly and specifically why Soylent was never going to take off. And the reason it was never going to take off was because what Soylent _really_ is is Ensure, or Adult Formula or any of a number of diet-adjacent meal replacement drinks like Medi-Fast. That’s a market category and it is a well-understood market category. You can probably grow it incrementally, but it isn’t going to replace All Food. And he knew that in 2016:
“But it’s precisely the time in which we find ourselves—when our humble daily bread pales in comparison to the meals we see on social media, and our health and environmental consciousness becomes more acute than ever—that a generic and convenient food replacement like Soylent starts to make sense.”
That’s not “Soylent will replace food”. That’s, “Soylent is when food really is just fuel, and I fucking hate dry stuff, and I need it to be way healthier because I do this a lot” with a sprinkling of “and code it environmentally conscious, please”. And all the other commentators at the time fully recognized that. Soylent hasn’t gone away. They claim they became profitable a few years back, and you can go set up a subscribe and save at their website as I write this.
I’m belaboring this Soylent thing, because it illustrates the _actual_ error that Mims makes over and over and over again. Mims is doing something I do a lot of: I have a problem, and I try to find a product that will fix the problem. The problem Mims had — shit I haven’t eaten and I’ve got my key fob in my hand already — was fixable with Soylent, sorta, and also once Mims is older and he’s settled into wherever he’s gonna be for the longer haul in his career and his family responsibilities have aged out or up or whatever (I haven’t stalked him enough to know where he was with this in 2016 or now for that matter, but family responsibilities generally evolve over time, and hopefully the kid-ones evolve in a less demanding direction eventually, and while it can take longer with the aging-parent related ones, those, too, generally change as well), Mims won’t have the problem any more, or as acutely, and the appeal of Soylent — and all the other product solutions to “Shit I haven’t eaten and I’ve got my key fob in my hand already” — will also lack appeal.
By speaking generically about “habits”, all of this dynamic is erased, and with it, clarity about the actual TAM, vs. the delusional TAM.
Wanna know the real problem of enthusiastic tech writers like Mims? They are working in a field that does not encourage nuance. Access to hot new companies with hot new products is increased by heavy use of Will Change the World!!! Access to hot new companies with hot new products is sharply curtailed if you say, well, if you hate bars, this at least isn’t as dry, when describing Soylent. And if you say about Soylent that you preferred a particular flavor of Ensure, you might find your next job in Journalism at AARP doing a newsletter and email marketing copy. Which might be a nice job to have right now, if you are a Rolling Stones fan because maybe you’d get tickets or something, too.
As I went on at length last night at FF, true innovation, true world changing ideas and products, become invisible and “Not Tech”. They do this in part by being female-identified and thus unworthy of notice (this really is why the iPad has gotten so little respect over its ludicrously successful existence — middle aged women love the shit out of iPads. Probably because they carry purses already, so it’s not a struggle to bring that iPad with them everywhere they go). But mostly, it’s because really successful ideas and products tend to eliminate job categories by converting them to products. Running water into the home put kids running water back and forth out of a job. They sure didn’t cry; public schooling became a thing instead. Electricity and/or gas lines to the house put kids carrying fuel out of a job. They sure didn’t cry; ditto. Computer used to be a job category; now it’s a product category. Dictation used to be to a human. Life is better and stuff is cheaper because so many jobs are now products (or automated services), which is _why we are always excited about new products_. But most new products don’t succeed to the same degree, and more and more, even the ones that _do_ succeed take much longer to get there. And a bunch of the ecosystem of a successful product is stubbornly resistant to perception as technology. I like to point to fiber as an invention, but it takes a lot of explaining to anyone who doesn’t already have a Yarn Shop Problem. Somewhat easier is the idea of writing surface as technology. We teach the Movable Type Printing Press as a world changing invention, but if we have to say “Movable Type”, we really ought to more clearly see and remember the preceding tech that involved wood block printing, an technological form that was far more able to depict illustrations vs. the “movable type”. What we _don’t_ teach is the invention and evolution of paper (“invented by the Chinese” and then somehow magically transported to Europe). _This_ at least can be made legible to a typical middle-aged person who remembers fan fold paper for printers. If the printer was technology, and it had to have fan fold paper to function, then surely the fan fold paper is also technology. Except somehow, it is not.
I love to talk about papyrus, because we’re all pretty clear that papyrus was pre-paper writing surface, Egypt associated. But just as we don’t talk about how paper got from China to Europe, we also don’t really look at what happened to papyrus, other than “paper happened”. I’ve obviously got a point here (and yes, it involves water mills, but everyone knows water mills are technology), and the point is that Egypt had a millenia-long monopoly on writing surface production that was disrupted as a result of an otherwise no-effect battle between the Chinese and some Islamic armies that resulted in paper production at industrial scale happening across the Islamic empire. And predictably, the Catholic Church, when presented with difficulties acquiring the papyrus they needed to function as an organization, stockpiled it rather than convert to paper.
All right, back to Mims and his coldly rational utilitarian nonsense. We haven’t given up food because duh, no one was going to give up food. This was just jockeying for position in the portable breakfast market category and similar competition within the eat-at-your-desk category, with a tiny additional fragment of the I have weird sensory issues market. But what’s up with the EV adoption thing? It’s hard to be sure, but what it _looks_ like to me is confusion. I don’t mean confusion by potential customers. I mean, the bigger your base, the harder it is to make large percentage increases to it. If you have 1 customer, you just need 1 more customer to have 100% growth. But to get 100% growth on 2 customers, you need 2 more customers. If you have 100 million customers, 100% growth requires 100 million more customers. You can see how it gets harder as you go along and eventually becomes impossible (on 4 billion customers, 100% growth will require 4 billion more customers. Not right now, that’s not gonna happen).
There’s all kinds of analysis about _why_ it’s harder to add more EV customers, and obviously people who made policy statements are walking them back. One of the problems is that with any bright, shiny new thing that has a virtue component is that people will just try to bully customers into ignoring problems with the product. It’s bright! It’s shiny! And it’s Good For You/the Planet! But that shit never sticks. If your EV range in cold weather is less than your commute, you will not keep that EV and you will probably _trash_ talk anyone else out of buying it. The more pressure applied to customers to override their concerns, the more you create marketing headwinds in the future.
I bought my i3 and I got the rex because I knew there would be days in winter where unless I charged in Mayberry during book group, I wouldn’t make it all the way home. I _tried_ to have a charger installed at the library in Mayberry, but gave up when I got resistance. Book group is now entirely on zoom, and my i4 has way more range, but charging infrastructure really does matter. (That rex caused a ton of problems, btw, but that’s neither here nor there.)
If our response to people’s resistance to product adoption is “oh well habits”, then we are missing a lot of opportunities to adjust the product (and associated services) to fit with people’s habits. If our response to product adoption is “oh, you’ll change your habit!!!” then we are busy creating our future Resistance. It would be so nice to see a tech reviewer retrospective that engaged with -any of this at all-.
I’m gonna die frosty about this topic. I’ll be old, probably, and in bed, hopefully. But I don’t see this changing.