Fragmentation is Evolution, Deal with it.

There has been a lot of talk about Android's "fragmentation" problem since the inception of the OS all those years ago. Initially it was just a negative buzzword used by certain fruit based companies to demerit Android in the eyes of consumers, and was later taken seriously by tech bloggers for the clickbait it provided.

Poor BugDroid

I'm a nerd, and a great big Android fanboy. Putting my loyalties aside, I can honestly say this fragmentation problem does exist, but it's not the consumer adverse malicious marketing tactic that the blogosphere is making it out to be. Instead, it ties right in to the technological evolution that has existed for hundreds of years. Crying about how it sucks is just people being entitled.

Lets clear up some of the background before moving on. Android is an open source mobile operating system produced by Google Inc. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as HTC and Samsung are encouraged to take the Android source code and modify it to their liking (to a degree) for their own devices. Google encourages each OEM to be unique and innovative with their phone to promote beneficial competition in to the market. These phones are sold to the end users alongside a two year phone service contract in the United States.

So Google encourages companies to make their own unique versions of Android phones (software and hardware) with an effective shelf life of two years.

The term fragmentation comes from the fact that new phones and versions of the OS come out on a yearly basis or quicker. The new phones and OS versions come with new features and older models don't always get the newer version of the OS. People are rightfully upset when their phone that is barely a year old is "obsolete" after 6 months. It can get the majority of applications but because it lacks the newest of the new, it is considered obsolete. Journalists use this to throw a hissy fit online to attract more traffic.

This is stupid.

Consider the auto market. Ford releases a Fiesta. Months later they release a new Mustang. Were the Fiesta owner to complain about his car being overshadowed by the Mustang, he would be laughed at. Lets go further though. The next year a new fiesta is released with a new stereo system and a new engine technology boosting gas mileage. If the owner goes in to his dealer and demands that the new features be crammed in to his year old model for free, he would be laughed at. Also, he finds out that his fiesta doesn't have as good gas mileage as a Toyota Prius of the same year. He also can't get more than 120 horsepower out of his engine and he wants to race, so he yells at the dealer. Stupid right?

Look at all that fragmentation. 

A better example is the PC market. Microsoft releases a new version of Windows to many different manufacturers. The OEMs use that windows and install it on different computers with different specifications and different features, few of which are interchangeable past the OS level. If someone buys a low end computer, it might not be compatible with the next version of windows coming out in 4 years. All these different form factors and sizes make web development and game development a pain. Blame fragmentation right?

FRAGMENTATION! BURN IT WITH FIRE!

Here's the point for all the fragmented crybabies out there. You have choices provided by Android. You can buy a phone like a Nexus with a long upgrade path or you can take your chances with the other phones. You can buy a high end phone with a big standard screen size that will probably get an update, or you can buy a cheap no name brand with a weird screen size that will probably never see an update. THE CHOICE IS YOURS! The consequences of your purchase are also yours. As with anything, do your homework before making a purchase.

The Fragmentation complaint is people being completely entitled with their expectations. I DESERVE THIS THING WHICH WILL CAUSE A TON OF WORK FOR NO PROFIT. Companies like Samsung and HTC are only in the market to make a profit. They get no profit from upgrading your phone. They make money from selling devices. 

Crying makes no difference, because they don't care. Heck, most normal non-nerdy people don't even care. They just want to play angry birds on the toilet. It's the app developers responsibility to support the devices they want to support. It's the OEMs responsibility to make a phone with an OS. It's Google's responsibility to update their base OS for the market. It's the Carriers who keep you locked to one phone for 2 years.

Fragmentation is a sign that phones are getting better in hardware and software. If you don't like that, then don't buy in to it. iPhones, Windows Phones, and Blackberry phones have lower degrees of fragmentation, but it still exists. Buy one of those if you don't want to be obsolete soon. They're all very good choices and will offer you some of the same content from Android without the quick paced product life cycle. If you choose to buy in to Android, be prepared for the consequences.

TL;DR -  With great power comes great responsibility. Quit acting like an entitled child.

Monkeys, Binary, and Missing Meaning.

As I look for new employment and the adventures that come along with it, I've been spending a lot of late nights on the computer. Going to bed between 3 and 5 am, sleeping till late afternoon, rinse and repeat. Recently my dad woke up to take a pee one night and asked me what I was doing up so late.

"Just messing around. Like usual"

He kind of chuckled and said that I looked like I was really looking hard for something. Trying to figure something out or find something I lost. I didn't really give it much thought until I finally went to bed for the night several hours later.

His words got me thinking. I don't exactly stare at myself in mirrors so I don't know what I look like while "internetting". I'm never searching for anything in particular either, with exceptions to the times I'm actually working on a project. Am I searching for something without even realizing it?

By now we've all heard of the infinite monkey theorem. You know, the one that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with infinite time and infinite typewriters, the monkeys would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Taking that and combining it with a technological perspective, binary has a similar possibility. Everything computers do these days, be it playing a song or rendering a full length video game, is all done at the very basic level by binary code. The higher level code is translated to code that tells the processor which of its trillions of transistors to turn on or off. Everything that can be rendered digitally can be expressed using a bunch of zeroes and ones. Taking that further, if you have an infinitely large hard drive, and fill it endlessly with every binary combination possible, you could create a digital representation of anything ever. The best movie ever made, the future version of windows, or a treasured family memory that never existed. Everything can be made possible through the right combination of those two oddly significant numbers.

Recent numbers have shown that approximately 1/3 of the world's population is now active on the internet. Each one contributing their own strings of zeroes and ones to the massive pot we call the world wide web. Assuming 7 billion total people on earth, that means about 2.3 billion people are active on the internet (and increasing rapidly).

Usually humans can communicate ideas face to face, but the digital age has made this infinitely easier. Ideas now transcend time and space and you can access an idea from someone you never met that was created several years in the past. You can also collaborate instantaneously with anybody nearly anywhere through this connection and contribute. The internet is the complete aggregate of all human knowledge, and can be accessed anywhere at any time. Nearly every idea, every fact, every thing ever. If a human has said it, thought it, heard it, recorded it, or crossed paths with it in any way, its probably somewhere on the internet in some form. I realized this fact a while ago and it has never ceased amazing me since.

So keeping that idea in mind, is it so far fetched that some part of my brain is searching for meaning without me even realizing? What makes humanity so significant is our inherent curiosity. We don't want to just sit on earth and fly through space at a million miles an hour. We want to know why things work the way they do. We want to control our surroundings to our liking. Its evolution on steroids. Maybe all of us, up until the wee hours of the morning on the computer, are all subconsciously looking for something. For meaning perhaps? For inspiration? For motivation? Companionship? Justification? Something that we don't quite know how to express? Maybe this is the next stage in our intellectual evolution.

Or maybe the internet is just a place for cat pictures and we're all just cursed with ADD. I'm okay with that too.

Websites Are Just Hi-Tech Children...

SEO and SEM (specifically AdWords) is basically easy. It just requires a LOT of babysitting. You have to watch your campaigns and traffic like a hawk, keep tabs on EVERY action relating to your site and tweak things with a light touch as appropriate. I honestly feel like I'm raising a child. Actually it's closer to playing a game like Starcraft, but you get the point. The more constructive attention and micro management you give it, the more successful it ends up being.

Why am I bringing this up? Well because I am in the process of reworking my job's website for the umpteenth time.

I end up reworking this website once every month or so. Tweaking copy, adjusting the layout, etc. To date since I've been affiliated, there has been a total of 3 major iterations with hundreds of small ones in between.

The upcoming Version 4 will be a major redesign but will be largely influenced by Version 3. The major difference this time around is that it will be almost entirely designed and structured SPECIFICALLY FOR SEO AND ADWORDS! The manager decided he wants to make an aggressive grab for new clients and wants me to spearhead their online marketing campaign.

I immediately started researching the ins and outs of AdWords and found out that, like I stated above, it's like raising someone from childhood to adulthood and then some. I know exactly how I should run the campaigns but as it stands, the website is not even remotely satisfactory in SEO. Off the top of my head, I know I'm going to have to delete at least 2 pages, add 7 more, and rework the rest to be very AdWords friendly

I guess continuing with the metaphor of raising children, the rebuild is going to be Myself and the site's mother (Google? The internet? I don't exactly know.) actually conceiving and birthing the child. This will be the 4th trimester of the pregnancy. (off topic but....it wouldn't be trimester would it? More like quadmester or something. I plan on this being the last stage before the whole campaign rollout).

Anyways, silly analogies aside, I'm actually excited to get back in to internet and search engine marketing. I've been out of the game for a while but when I finish this site with the new copy and awesome landing pages, I feel like I can almost guarantee success with AdWords. You can almost hear the customers calling in.

Now, about that budget...That's the true struggle.

Opening doors and Windows

If you keep up with me on various social networking sites, you'll know I'm not exactly the biggest fan of Windows 8. I feel like it has a clunky, schizophrenic UI / UX that makes it nearly impossible for PEOPLE to use. Notice I'm not specifying the "average folk". I mean PEOPLE. Everyone from seasoned computing veterans to computer newbies have a hard time navigating Windows 8.

The majority of this difficulty, I won't lie, comes from the UI and UX choices made by Microsoft. There's a lot that I would have done differently and that fact should not be swept under the rug.

However, accepting the inevitability of a launched OS, a new problem manifests in the form of inadequate instruction. Windows 8, as complicated as it is, CAN BE LEARNED! I managed to get comfortable with it in a few days of playing around with it (or as comfortable as I could possibly get). I had to TEACH MYSELF all of the navigation tricks. The only instruction given was a very vague screen on first boot:

Sorry bro, but that's just not going to cut it. 

Even with Windows 8.1, which did a LOT to fix usability issues that launched with 8.0, still has the same terrible tutorial. This is simply far too vague to be useful, especially to users familiar with the old way things worked. 

Instead, Microsoft should have included a more in depth tutorial, similar to what Ubuntu presents to users during the install procedure. 

The Ubuntu procedure gives a number of very informative screens laying out important OS details while the OS itself installs. 

I propose that Microsoft goes one step further and provides an interactive tutorial during the first boot procedure. As it stands, the user is presented with a very boring screen that says things like "we're getting things set up. Hang tight". I applaud their use of a casual tone, but this is wasted Time and space. It would be a great time to give users the option to learn more about their new OS while they wait. Demonstrate how to use things like the charms bar, the multitasking menu, desktop mode, the people app, and other things users might open often. Even a quick demonstration might ease the transition and stop some of the rage at usability of the new system. 

It's obvious Windows 8 was the result of a lot of usability research on Microsoft's part but they now see that it doesn't always translate to how things will be used in real life. Especially with people who are VERY set in the way things used to be. They need to be eased in to new things. Since the time for easing is long gone, this is a great compromise. 

I think Windows 8.1 has potential that Windows 8 lacked. I think it's a massive step in the right direction and with the inclusion of a few things, it could really shine with people. After all, it's PEOPLE who are their customers, and people very rarely fit a pre-determined mold. They can, however, be taught to adapt. 

What lies beneath the Surface?

With the release of Windows 8, most of the tech world has come to the conclusion that touch interfaces and tablets are here to stay.

The next stage of Microsoft's Windows evolution was the line of Surface branded tablet PCs. This was their hero device for their new OS and it was released with this ad:

Well, that sucked.

Why? Well it didn't actually TELL me anything about the device they were selling. Why should I care about this thing? Will it teach me to dance and twerk like the hip young kids are doing? Probably not.

No, this is a computer and computers are devices to help make your life easier. How will this new device differ from my current aging Dell laptop? Furthermore, how does this differ from the huge variety of released Windows 8 touch laptops? The ad fails to tell me. It grabbed my attention but at the end of the day I'm still clueless as to what they're selling. Actually, that's wrong. I'm a nerd and keep up with this. When my grandmother saw this, she simply commented on the funny dancing and went back to watching Dancing with the Stars or something. 

THAT particular advertisement was followed up with this one: 

This one is for their "Pro" line of Surface devices. This one is a bit more focused on the capabilities of the device showing it being used to do something with spreadsheets and charts and I'm fairly sure I saw a flash of the mail app in there.

Again, same overall problem. Too much dancing. Not enough persuasion. How does this dancemachine outrank dell's latest plastic computer? I don't know!

I understand Microsoft is trying to appeal to a more youthful audience with these things. I guess you can call them the iPad generation. However, this is not the way to do it. Apple commercials always make it a point to show you what you can DO with the devices. They show how these devices can take the mundane things you do daily and make them FUN AND INNOVATIVE. 

Microsoft needs to take a hint from that approach. Sure, make it cool and dancetastic, but also show how this thing can be used in day to day activities. So many companies have a difficult time doing this and I've always felt that it results in decreased sales. Finding that fine line between functionality and entertainment is the key to successful marketing.