c|net: women like shiny things, revisited

I’ve blogged before about my infuriation with technology companies who market to “women” as if they are a monolithic group consisting of mommies and fashion junkies. Today, CNET gets into the action with a really condescending article about women and gadgets. Some choice excerpts:

“It’s increasingly not just about having a gadget, but having a functional product that enhances the life of the family,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group. “The idea that people go online to go shopping–that makes the computer (purchase) something of a household decision. It’s not just guys in charge of the gadgets.”
Gadgets for girls

Whether the wallet is being wielded by a stay-at-home mom, a working woman or any of the other countless variations on the 21st century female, gadget makers are taking note. Major companies including Apple Computer, Motorola, Eastman Kodak, Sony and Nintendo are giving products like cell phones, USB flash drives and handheld game devices bursts of color and graceful lines, and featuring women prominently in ads. Some designers, meanwhile, are developing products with an exclusively female audience in mind.

These “countless variations” are still family-oriented. There are just as many married men as there are married women (duh), but you don’t see articles about gadgets singling out that they are for men– that’s by default, I suppose– or mentioning kids or family responsibilities.

If there’s a theme, it seems women are attracted to portable gadgets like cell phones, digital cameras and notebook computers, which, according to NPD’s Baker, “tend to do better with women than big, desktop, stationary kinds of products.”

No way! Like everyone else? I know that all the men I know would much rather have a giant, heavy boom box than an iPod video.

“Women don’t want anything but an iPod,” she said. “Most of them won’t go outside the iPod circle for an MP3 player.”

Part of the appeal has to do with the abundance of iPod accessories, Hughes says. Another factor? Advertising. “The way that Apple advertises…they advertise hip. It doesn’t seem like a nerdy thing. It’s hip. It’s fashion.”

Thanks Hughes. I hope you’re not getting paid the big bucks for your invaluable consulting advice. The article does gently point out that she’s totally wrong and that there’s no evidence that women purchase iPods more than men do. I would also like to point out that the iPod has major market share in all demographics. Overall, this article completely jettisons any discussion of features, or functionality in favor of vague generalizations about style and design.

The trackbacks and comments are way better, pointing out that it might be nice to focus on women users in all articles, rather than run one of these tired pieces every three months. I’d also like to see more on women technologists in general, about sexism in technology culture, and also on use of technology by actual people, rather than these “consultants” who are totally talking out of their ass making major generalizations about how “women” use technology. Women make up the majority of bloggers and the majority of teens using social software are girls.

Women are more than half the population. Can we please stop talking about women as a monolithic group? Thank you.

Technorati Tags: gadgets, women in technology

hot technology roundup

I moved to SF for the summer but should be back on track now, and ready to commence daily blog posts.

A few weeks with low-volume internet access and I got very out of the loop. I’ve been looking over the tech blog roundups to get back in the game.

Towleroad, normally a fun gay news blog, has a weekly tech roundup heavily focused on Things I Think Are Cool. Among the highlights:

- Motorola launches dolce & gabbana razr
- AOL’s new AIM Pages MySpace clone
- Apple / Nike cobranded iPod line :

Coming this July, Apple and Nike will jointly release a new line of products and software geared towards athletes.The campaign is built around a new device: a small receiver attaches to the base of the iPod Nano and receives signals from a small disk that hides in your shoe, allowing the music player to record and respond toyour movements. The Nike Plus shoe conveniently has a special pocket under the inner sole to store the disk. The Nano tracks your distance, pace, and calories burned, and transmits it to your computer so that you can analyze and view your progress over time. You can compare your progress with others over the internet, and even challenge other users to a virtual race. And iTunes, of course, will offer a number of new downloads, such as continuous workout mixes that offer coaching and training tips over-top of the music.

We truly live in a wonderous new age. Favorite new products?

PS current hated jargon: “future-proof”. Been around for ages and totally as garbage as ever. There is no anything that is future-proof!

Watching Obsolescence

Today I got a Bulova watch that I won off eBay in the mail.

[Note: I think the phrase "won off eBay" does a lot to cement eBay's reputation as something positive and fun. You don't say "I went to the mall and won a Tech Vest from Old Navy," because that doesn't make sense. But "winning" has universally fun, exciting connotations, so even if you overpay the seller or get something half-crappy, the "winning" part sort of makes up for it. Thoughts?]

Anyway, it’s a very cute 1940’s silver watch that has to be wound every day. My first watch when I was about six or seven was a gift from my grandparents. They taught me how to wind it and I did, every day. Now, of course, this is a completely obselete technology. I’m sure I have plenty of friends, not to mention students, who wouldn’t have a clue what “winding a watch” is and would think of it as something horrifically old-fashioned. But digital watches, and analog watches that don’t have to be wound, are relatively recent inventions. (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy makes several early 80’s referents to “digital watches as a pretty neat idea”.) Now we think it’s “neat” if our devices update themselves for daylight savings time automatically; I get frustrated that my battered CVS alarm clock isn’t as smart as my cellphone. Our expectations for technology change very, very quickly.

My mother was telling me that she has a co-worker who was shocked to find out that my mother grew up (in 1950’s postwar England) in a house with outdoor plumbing. We universalize our experiences, and not just our experiences but our current experiences, and then we have a hard time imagining the world that we used to live in. I expect that many of my 19 year old students would find it hard to believe that I, only 10 years older than them, grew up in a house without a microwave, VCR, call-waiting, or cable television, that I didn’t get a CD player until my senior year of high school, and that I spent several years post-college socializing before cellphones became popular. (I did, however, have access to a personal computer growing up, and I had email starting in 1988. My parents weren’t Luddites, just picky about the technologies they allowed into their home. I grew up with a single 12″ television in the house, for example.) Technologies become necessities very, very quickly.

I’m happy with my charming old watch, although I probably will forget to wind it. Just like in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

RIP Infinium Labs, 2003 - 2005

Kevin Bacchus resigns as Infinium CEO after 14 weeks on the job.

That’s not good. I worked in Infinium’s Seattle office (where Kevin was based) and was, like, employee #5 there. The company’s been running on empty for about a year now, still trying to scare up investors with Kevin as figurehead, but this I think has got to be the final nail in the coffin. It’s really too bad as the product idea is fantastic, and the development team was amazing; we were saddled with a legacy executive team though (who Kevin took over from) and let’s just say the decision making wasn’t always the most bestest evar.

For those of you who are like “what???” Infinium was developing this thing called the Phantom Gaming Service, which was a console-like system that allowed users to play PC games in the living room environment. It was a games-on-demand service that required broadband internet. The Phantom gets a lot of hate due to the broad and mostly ridiculous claims made by the early executive teams, but the actual product idea would really have benefitted the game industry. It would have provided an alternative publishing platform for PC game developers who can no longer sell their games in Electronics Boutique and Gamespot due to decreased shelf space and console game domination. It would have allowed independent game developers to get distribution, it would have provided another revenue stream for older games, and it would have let PC gamers play in a more social, fun environment than just hunched over a desk.

If you read the comment boards on any gaming site about Infinium, you’ll see a whole lot of conspiracy theories about how Infinium is some sort of fake company to drum up investors, a big scam, etc. (It’s totally not.) The reality is that Infinium is a great company with a great product ideas but deservingly terrible PR. It’s hard to come back from missing multiple carved-in-stone ship dates, especially with a history of grandiose press releases and over-the-top claims. I’d like to say I hope Infinium has another chance for the sake of my friends who still work there… but I’m not that delusional.

Freeware of the day

1. TVTAD: TV torrent RSS reader

If you’re a Torrent freak like I am, you’ve probably tried and discarded a bunch of applications that claim to let you automatically download torrents of your favorite shows once they’re released. I’ve found most of them horribly designed and very difficult to use. TVTAD is billed as “The easiest TV feed reader ever developed!” and it took me all of five minutes to configure. Then, when I got up this morning, new episodes of Veronica Mars and LOST were waiting for me! Highly recommended. (Requires Bittorrent, Windows only, free.)

2. iTunes Companion: Widget that displays album covers, iTunes remote controls, etc.

I just discovered widgets (I’m slow). Those of you who are similiarly ignorant might like to know that widgets are basically fancy little desktop applications that do all types of things, pulling data from hither and thither (your music player, your blog site, a weather site, Flickr) to display, say, the weather, your current wireless strength, or a talking werewolf. Konfabulator.com is a good aggregate source for all things widget.

Anyway, iTunes companion is basically a remote for iTunes, but I love it because it pulls album cover data from Amazon or Google whenever a song is played that doesn’t have cover art associated with it. (You can drag-and-drop the correct cover art if the application gets it wrong or your mp3 is mistagged, and once the correct art is associated with the music, it’ll publish it back to iTunes or even to an external file). Since I download all my music, and I never even bother to look at physical “albums” any more, it’s really nice to have that visual data associated with songs again. Plus, it gives you something to look at when you’re working on day five of revising the Paper That Will Never End.
(Cross-platform, free)

Wifi enabled digicam: the future is, uh, soonish

Glenn Fleishman reviews Kodak’s EasyShare digicam, a 1.0 product that allows you to send pictures to either Kodak’s proprietary online gallery site or an email address. You can’t post to Flickr from this, though: you upload the photo to the gallery, and then your email contact is sent a mail with the gallery address appended. Glenn notes quite a few shortcomings, but points out that a) Kodak’s good about modifying product in accordance w/ customer feedback and b) the shortcomings are all in the firmware/software rather than the technology.

Putting aside that this is a 1.0 product, what’s the impact of having immediately-publishable high-quality photos?

Obviously we can instantly publish photos now from camphones. I have a textamerica moblog, I send picturemail to my 1 or 2 friends for whom it actually works (Sprint: bite me) and I have lots of friends who post Sidekick/camphone pix to their Lj’s or Flickr accounts. But the quality is so terrible that this awesome list of things to use your phonecam for from 43 things (take pictures of movie times to show to your friends, subway maps to refer to when travelling, books to add to your wishlist, slips of paper you have on your desk) is pretty much unusable for me. A picture of a subway map would look like a big ass blur on my phone. I do use my digital camera for similar things: graffiti and street signs and dresses in stores that I like.

Basically, though, I think I just need a higher megapixel camphone with more storage than a wifi-enabled digital camera. I’m in an unimaginative mood today (it’s been spitting pouring rain in dark, gloomy NYC for the last several days straight).

Girls Just Wanna Have Tech

So the digitallife trade show is this weekend - basically a preview of gadgets, games, etc. to get people all excited about buying them for the holidays. My friend’s company and the marketing drones surrounding NYU have been giving out mass free tickets, so of course I am going so I can geek out publicly and maybe get to meet Carmen Electra!!! After going to E3 two years ago, I know what to expect: mostly dudes, lots of scantily clad “models” wandering around, and very few events that even pretend to be targeted at anyone but guys.

Anyway, here’s the blurb for the “Girls Just Want to Have Tech” event:

Men buy technology for two reasons: because “it’s cool” or “it makes them look cool” but women are much more complicated creatures. What technologies do women really want? What’s the must-have product for the handbag? The favorite game? The product they would vote to take to that “desert island”? Where do they love to hi-tech shop the most? Would they rather date a guy who carries an iPod or a Pocket Protector? These and other secrets will be revealed as we report on the results of a nationwide survey and an on-the-show floor reality check of what women are talking about.

See demonstrations of the Top Five favorite products for women. Win prizes and catch a high tech fashion show. All sexes welcome!

HMMM SEXIST MUCH? Let’s rephrase the genders and see what we think:

Women buy technology for two reasons: because “it’s cool” or “it makes them look cool” but men are much more complicated creatures. What technologies do men really want? What’s the must-have product for the briefcase? The favorite game? The product they would vote to take to that “desert island”? Where do they love to hi-tech shop the most? Would they rather date a girl who carries an iPod or a Pocket Protector? These and other secrets will be revealed as we report on the results of a nationwide survey and an on-the-show floor [sic] reality check of what men are talking about. See demonstrations of the Top Five favorite products for men. Win prizes and catch a high-tech fashion show. All sexes welcome!

Ignoring the copy editing, which is uh non-existent (spelling the same term in the same blurb differently is usually considered bad form), what have we learned from our gender switch? First, doesn’t it seem really stupid to make huge generalizations about “what men want”? Wouldn’t we think that different kinds of men, or men in different industries, or of different ages, or with different interests would be looking for different things? Treating women as a monolithic and homogeneous target group (of 51% of the population!) who can be persuaded to buy something by slapping a pink coat of paint on it and maybe some bling is condescending, insulting, and a good way to end up with a warehouse full of pink cellphones. Instead of gender-marketing, maybe we should consider niche marketing based on, um, anything else? Do we think that, say, a 28 year old urban grad student and a 60 year old suburban soon-to-be-retired soccer mom are going to be purchasing the same thing? Let’s go with NO on that.

Second, see anything weird about some of the questions? Why on earth do we care where men shop or what women are looking for in a guy? We don’t, because “men” isn’t usually a group reduced to omg shopping!! and romance!! cosmo-style crappery. This information is irrelevant to product planners and it’s irrelevant to female-identified customers. Women shop online and at Best Buy for gadgets like everyone else. Also, what does what women want in a MAN (another enormous, ridiculous generalization, as if all women are a) looking for a boyfriend and b) looking for the same type of boyfriend — let’s ignore the general heterosexism of this discourse) have to do with planning products for WOMEN? It all comes back to consumer discourse defining female identity in terms of men.

Third, high-tech fashion shows are now and have always been complete garbage. Unless you’re showing me something super fucking cool like that knife-resistant fabric the US Army’s Objective Force Warrior initiative is working on, I have no desire to see models trussed up in PVC with iPod shuffles worn as necklaces. WIRED? TIRED. This isn’t Hackers. Let’s try something new.

This whole discourse totally mystifies me as I know so many girls into gadgets - not even talking about tech, just basic customer gadgets. Just as many girls as boys have iPods, cellphones, Treos, Sidekicks, digital cameras, laptops.. so why all this befuddlement over how to appeal to the female audience? Build a hot product that’s sexy cross-genders (exhibit A: Apple, exhibit B: Razr) and people will buy it. Build something fugly that looks like it’s designed for a 12 year old girl on uppers and a few girly girls will buy it, some girls will buy it ironically BUT if the functionality isn’t there nobody’s going to buy it.

And I’m so glad they specified that “all sexes are welcome”. The rest of the panels, which, since this is the only one targeted to women are presumably targeted to men, do not have such a disclaimer. Why? Because once again, men are the default and male environments are the default. An environment designed “for women” needs a disclaimer so nobody thinks it’s one of those super-weird, exclusive, creepy “women’s” environments filled with man-hating feminazis.

….

I’m still stoked for this show and I can’t WAIT to get my hands on the Xbox 360 marketroids and ask them lots and lots of questions about how the gamertags work.

wireless ipod headphones

I’m liking these Logitech’s new Bluetooth wireless iPod headphones.. well, they’re sort of new, they launched in July.

For $150 these are a bit much for my sad-ass budget but the features are groovy - I love the built-in volume & track controllers on the right headphone. There’s a black pair for non-Apple branded mp3 players.

(Speaking of which, why can’t anyone else seem to enter the market competitively? Apple’s products really aren’t that great. I guess at this point the iPod is such a status symbol and has such a high percentage that even if you have a cooler product with more features and more storage space it’s still perceived as an iPod knockoff.)

customer service, part i

I have this thing about customer service: when I’m spending a lot of money on something, like, say, cable, internet, electronics, or takeout pizza, I expect to get treated a certain way. That is, with courtesy and with logical, customer-friendly policies. The fact that almost no large US corporation has sane, customer-friendly policies means that I end up writing a lot of letters and complaining a lot. Sprint and Time Warner Cable both really hate me; Sprint has me locked into two more years of an endless contract due to all the free phones I’ve gotten from complaining and Time Warner has gotten to the point where I get put through to Level 3 tech support regardless of my complaint (because I wouldn’t, you know, spent 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (!!) on hold with a tech support line unless I had already restarted my computer, unplugged and replugged in the modem, and all the other bullshit that the unbelievably annoying and frustrating automated menus make you go through before you can actually talk to a human being).

Anyway, in early summer I noticed that my iPod battery life wasn’t that great, but I didn’t really think about it until a friend of mine posted on her LJ that she had gotten her boyfriend’s iPod battery replaced and its life was back up to 8 hours. After I drove cross-country this summer with the Monster iCarPlay iPod cable device (I loved this thing, by the way - it charges your iPod while it’s playing, so you never have to worry about remembering to charge it at night. Worked awesome. Spencer and I would have gone crazy without it), the battery life was just terrible, like an hour. This made my iPod no longer really usable for the subway or my marathon grad student reading sessions.

So I sucked it up and called the Apple Store for directions. Then we start a really fun ass process. Let me outline the steps:

1. Call Apple Store. Customer service rep tells me I have to bring the unit in to the Genius Bar. Need to make an appointment online to get a Genius Bar timeslot.
2. Make appointment online to get a Genius Bar timeslot. They give me a time that I am in class/a meeting. (Unless you have an AppleCare agreement, you can’t specify a time. At all. Not even a vague time.) Repeat this three times.
3. Call Apple Store again and complain about Genius Bar. Employee tells me I have two options: a) come in at 7 a.m., or b) go to depot.apple.com and they’ll send me packing materials to ship it off.
4. Pick choice b.
5. Go to depot.apple.com and am unable to find any option where packing materials are sent to me. Sign up for repair service anyway. Am confused as Apple Store rep said nothing about having to pay for repairs up front, but figure I will get my $50 credit from the iPod Settlement forms so is no big.
6. Go to FedEx and ship iPod exactly as told.
7. Wait a week. Have heard nothing from anyone.
8. Go to Apple support site and check on support request. Only message is “Dispatch Sent.” There is a list of Apple’s support codes and what they mean, as Apple recognizes that most of them are internal-focused and therefore somewhat abstruse to the average owner. “Dispatch Sent” does not appear on this list.
9. Try to send Apple a message asking what “Dispatch Sent” means. Only way to do this is through email form. They promise response in 24 hours.
10. Send form. Get email back saying Apple has an “unusually large volume of emails” and will not be able to get back to me in 24 hours.
11. 96 hours later, go back to support site and see that status message has been changed to “Replacement Unit Ordered”, which even I can figure out.

Overall I’m not horrified by this experience, which should tell you something about how low our expectations of service from companies have gotten. I have a 40gb 3G iPod which, if you’ll recall back to the long-ago days of 2003, is a $500 product. Now of course the price point for even the most expensive iPod is $400 and that’s for a 60GB color. Also, battery failure on the 3G’s is a “known issue” (I’m not sure that I agree with Cory Doctorow that it’s planned obsolescence, but it certainly is annoying), hence the class-action suit. My point is that I spent a lot of money on this device, and I expect better service than an 11-step process which still hasn’t resulted in me actually holding a fixed iPod in my hand.

I guess I don’t really see why Apple gets so much love. My dad is an IBMer, and I grew up using 8086 architecture; I’m never going to make the switch as I’m too much of a Windows power user to bother. (Everyone says now that Macs are running Linux it’s time to switch, but I can just never make Macs do what I want them to. I’m lazy about software learning curves, which is why after six years of using Photoshop my skillz are still mad rudimentary). I’m just saying that their customer experience, beyond buying pretty stuff, pretty much blows. There are 8 million people in NYC and one Apple Store; I understand why they require you to sign up for Genius Bar slots, but Christ, I shouldn’t have to pay for the basics of customer service, which in my opinion include talking to someone at the store.

Maybe I’ll feel differently about this if they send me a radder iPod than the one I sent them.

Listening: new Ladytron (fucking awesome)