from the editor of aseidman.com

Poetic Justice

Innovation at the expense of laziness and old-minded dogma

• Ford Motors pumps billions into upgrades of its Ford F-150 pickup truck (i.e. gas guzzler)
• Ford Motors loses $15.3 billion in 2006 and 2007 and more to come.
• Ford Motors shuts down its Menlo Park, CA car dealership
• Tesla Motors (an electric car manufacturer) opens up a new car dealership in Menlo Park on the same site as the old Ford dealership.

250 Milliseconds

…is the maximum time that software can elapse without doing anything before the user thinks something has gone wrong.

I looked this up after trying to move my cable service from one location to another on comcast.com — while ostensibly a helpful service I never actually made it thru the process.   I was attempting to do this while eating lunch at my desk and listening to my voicemail.  Whenever I submitted or requested information I thought the site was down as it never displayed a processing icon and I simply thought the site was down and hit refresh — multiple times.  Now I could have just glanced over at the status bar on the lower left hand corner of the browser, but while eating lunch and checking v-mail this was not something I thought of at the time and I imagine that millions of users actually have no idea where the status bar on a browser sits or what it does.  So, after multiple failed attempts I ended up calling the Comcast call-center costing them about $5+ to handle my call. While $5 may not seem like much the fact that such a simple user interface fix cost them real dollars is unfortunate.

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