Geek Eye for the Average Guy 507
Yxes writes "Fortune designed an experiment: give three geeks US$15,000 and three days to bring a family of four up to date with technology. The average family doesn't know which DVD player to buy or how to setup a wireless network. What happens when even the geeks can't get it to work?"
cool! (Score:2, Insightful)
What's new? I'm always doing this for friends. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same problem would exist for both the "Geek Eye" and it's original "Queer Eye"... given a few months without supervision and the recipient will revert back into low-tech chaos. Maintenance is much harder than configuration.
A waste of $15,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Pathetic. How about a 6 month followup (honestly reported)? After all, what are the odds that most of this equipment will just be gathering dust by then?
Alright, probably not the Tivo... but still...
Re:Some things for most people: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Some things for most people: (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, compatability. We all know and it is obvious to most people that this stuff all becomes 10 times cooler when it works with other stuff. When I buy a new X, it would be totally awesome if it will integrate with my Q, R, S, and V. Well, open standards certainly won't make much money for the manufacturers, so they don't work very well together. Heck, even all my Sony stuff has problems playing nice together. And especially the really cool features will never integrate.
Last, but not least, they kids are gonna ruin it all anyway. So to hell with it. Read a book. Take the $15,000 and put it in the kids' college funds.
If that's geeky, then you can have it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that being geeky is seen a cool trait, marketers are now buslily redefining the label to describe people that spend lots of money on high-fashion electronics.
Why are we letting this happen? Which is more impressive: owning a lot of expensive hardware, or turning outdated junk into useful tools?
It's a sham (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea as a whole is intriguing, but with posers instead of real geeks, it's pretty pointless.
Re:No Fair (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Average Eye for the Geek Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's new? I'm always doing this for friends. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they'll go back to doing grocery lists on paper instead of Grocer XP 2.0 but they won't give up Tivo.
Re:Alright, but only if... (Score:2, Insightful)
40g iPod [amazon.com]
Imposters!!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not real geeks (Score:2, Insightful)
It'd certainly explain... (Score:2, Insightful)
It'd certainly explain why four out of every ten IT guys are unemployeed.
next month, in Fortune (Score:2, Insightful)
Short-sighted approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Throw money at the problem.
Don't think long term. Remain fixated on the short-term.
I've taught basic Internet and computer skills classes to a wide variety of people, all over the US. In doing so I've found that the only way to really make something stick is to actually sit them in front of the computer and have them learn by doing. The "three geeks and $15k" method is like a Microsoft Windows wizard. It may help you with the problem at hand, but it's not revealing anything about the hows and whys behind the problem.
In short, the end user isn't learning. They're still beholden to the geeks, because as soon as the carefully orchestrated setup hits a snafu, Abbie Normal won't know how to fix that problem.
Immersive, hands-on teaching works. It takes time and patience. Unfortunately neither are in ample supply these days, so everyone keeps on looking for silver bullet "solutions". This attitude is everywhere, even in large corporations, where managers want the latest shiny packaged product, because they actually believe that they can get results without having to learn anything first.
The computer industry is a victim of its own hype. Or rather, society is a victim of the industry hype. If we actually acknowledged the value of learning, we might collectively be able to harness the power of computers instead of spending huge chunks of time dealing with trivial annoyances.
Utter failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahh...and the remotes. This is the kind of stuff that has ALWAYS needed a lot of work. Check out this Cooper article [cooper.com] on an elegant solution.
Re:Requirements? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If that's geeky, then you can have it. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a good thing. If the marketers make it look sexy, more people will buy high tech stuff which pours more money into the tech sector which leads to lower prices of current items and the introduction of newer tech.
Segfault
Re:why it doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
No. The conclusion is that you shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that you're the final arbiter of what kind of toys other people deserve. If I want to watch Friends and listen to Celine Dion, you bet your ass I want to be able to enjoy it full-size, full-color, with high dynamic range. It's not your place to stop me.
Re:No Fair (Score:2, Insightful)
(Of course I protected myself of the evil QT/KDE dependencies...)
This is a message for the Gentoo Advocacy movement.
Re:"But why..." (Score:1, Insightful)
They were almost there. (Score:4, Insightful)
They should have gone one way or the other (I'd have gone Mac myself), but introducing a mixed system to non-tech people is not a good plan. They basically demonstrated no degree of ability to interconnect systems, where all the REALLY cool features you could have nowadays come from.
The interesting thing to me is that these guys, being geeks, must read
Linksys Wireless Ethernet Bridge?? (Score:2, Insightful)
What average family needs all this? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean they get this fancy music system. screw that, take the money and give them a normal cd player. Chances are they can actually use it.
Give them DSL, can they afford it? is sending email instantly really that important to someone who can't figure out how to program a VCR?
Buy them a new computer... once something breaks their going to be calling tech support having the conversation: "Can you open Internet Explorer please?" "ok... now internet explorer... what is that... I don't think i have it, i'm on 2000XPME." (acutal response i've recieved lately)
If you can get along without downloading the newest strongbad email within 5 seconds, or God forbid having to get out of bed to check your email, WHY DO YOU NEED IT NOW?
I'm all for getting new high tech toys, but if a tech guy has a hard time figuring it out to get it set up, what happens when it breaks?
I consider my parents to be relatively average with technical things, they put their computer togeather without help, but when it come to trading in 5 remotes for one, the concept of pushing the TV button before controlling the TV is sometimes hard to grasp. Some people are better off keeping the 5 remotes knowing the Black on means TV, the White one means VCR and the Grey one means DVD player.
Setting up is not really the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It's when you say goodbye and leave the house that the problems start happining. Computer drivers become muddled. Wifi networks magically stop connecting. Stereo settings become off.
And you end up dreding answering your phone because you're going to have to do tech support.
To the average person, keeping a hi tech setup in good working order is difficult. (My stereo doesn't work. After hours of troubleshooting over the phone, you discover it's because they hit the 'a' speaker button while cleaning the recevier).
Keeping a computer system in top condition is even harder. "Of course I clicked on that attachment. It said it was from microsoft and it would clean the virus out of my computer".
Geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Buy expensive things based on the brochures,
2. Yell when the standard lack any due diligence or research left them in a jam,
3. Demand a bonus for staying on the sinking ship! / Get the geeks to come up with a workable interim kludge. -- omitted
However, in this case, they didn't have actual geeks to pick up any slack. And, they also were forced to omit their core competency of writing memos "We are excited to announce the strategic alliance with $VENDOR! We will be rolling out $BROKEN_PRODUCT beginning next month!"