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July 1-15, 1999 My CT Almanac Column |
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END-USER View from The Desktop The truth is that in spite of all the wonderful things which technology held out the promise of, as a consumer, I must say I continued to be at the receiving end of improperly designed and inadequately maintained systems. Sarita Agarwal May you live in interesting times," goes an ancient Chinese curse. Well, the past 12 months have been interesting all right! The Web broke news that traditional media hesitated over (Clinton's shenanigans in the Oval Office), and the Starr report and Clinton testimony video strained bandwidth, but lost out in popularity to Victoria's Secret's online lingerie show, which garnered audience figures, the likes of which have only been associated with prime time television programming. As new "problem dates" crept out of the woodwork, Y2K fever assumed hysterical proportions, especially in the American media. Advice was typically along the lines of stock-up-on-cans-of-food-and-bottled-water-and-head-to-the-hills. The Linux bandwagon rolled and every almost every major hardware and software vendor (except for Microsoft) announced support for the platform. Viruses staged a comeback in the public eye, with Internet worms like Melissa and Happy99 playing havoc with corporate E-mail systems. Some 300 of the Fortune 500 companies were reported to have been hit by Melissa. Search engines sparked off a portal mania. Each day saw the dawn of a new free Web-based E-mail service. Once again the Net shook up established business models. This year, the music labels panicked at the prospect of music distribution via the MP3 format. A name-your-price E-commerce system (Priceline) gave consumers the chance to travel almost anywhere at the price they were willing to pay. And E- became the universal prefix, from E-commerce to E-diot. As someone who, five years ago, wanted to do technical writing full-time and found no takers, it was surprising to discover I finally could. In fact, some software companies I know insist it is more difficult to get good technical writers than it is to get good programmers. One would have thought that recent "user-friendly" software would have eliminated the need for documentation, but we're still a long, long way off from that happy day. Soft Shooting The demand for Net stocks was insatiable in the US, and the trend was echoed in India too. Out-of-favour NBFCs added the magic I(nfotech)-word to their name and found their market cap rising again. Software companies were trend-setters on the bourses. Infosys Technologies became the first Indian firm to flash on the NASDAQ tickers. Wipro split its Rs 10 share into five Rs 2 shares, becoming the first company to take advantage of new laws that allowed companies to issue shares with a face value other than Rs 10 or Rs 100. And as the events of the year demonstrated if an Indian finance minister wants to be perceived as progressive, he better be liberal with incentives for the software industry. There was plenty for the hardware junkie. ZIP drives became common as backup and transfer media. 4 GB hard disks were brought down to entry level (and no sooner had you put one in than you needed to upgrade capacity, since bloatware got no slimmer). Aspiring PC owners had something to dream about: free PC offers. According to this business model, consumers receive free computers and Internet access in exchange for completing demographic surveys that permit advertisers to deliver targeted messages. More than 3,00,000 people applied to try to get one of the 10,000 free PCs to be shipped. Advertisers included Citibank, Amazon and Preview Travel. But before you run off, clapping, get this-the offers were in America, the UK, and if I remember right, Turkey. The great nation of India awaits. Aspiring entrepreneurs had plenty of role models. A host of IIT-ians-made-good began appearing on magazine covers. In an attempt to increase volumes of business without adding to overheads, banks moved towards "branchless banking", ie, telebanking, ATM banking and eventually Internet banking. Citibank's Suvidha scheme in Bangalore actually charges you for visiting a branch and dealing with a human. Is this the way things will be? I'm not so sure I like it. Already a memory-challenged person like me finds it difficult to handle the number of identification codes I'm supposed to remember! Delicate Touches A huge portion of the world's computers are not in the 3-box form we tend to think of as being computers. They're microprocessors embedded in a wide variety of things from toys to ovens. We saw more of this in India, from intelligent washing machines to "smart" building automation systems that use microprocessor based control systems. Many organisations now give employees swipe cards to enter sensitive areas. Biometric identification systems that use the body as password made an appearance. As far as the 'Net goes, the year was another "dog year", i.e. equivalent to seven calendar years. Private ISPs came into being. Connect time continued to be inflation-resistant. TV set-top boxes made an appearance. Cybercafes proliferated. Indian sites finally moved beyond brochureware to being genuinely useful (NSE/BSE) or being fun (Contests2win). The Wockhardt hospital in Bangalore started putting patient post-operation status information on their Web site. VSNL warned users to desist from using the Net for telephony, and blocked access to sites of developers offering Internet telephony software packages, but caved in meekly when activist Arun Mehta challenged them in Court to show where the Indian Telegraph Act said such activities were illegal. 17222 access codes connect subscribers to the nearest ISP node at local call charges, but the service remains far from satisfactory. I still know users who prefer to dial up over STD for access. And yes, my E-mail address got shorter. So, if the times were so interesting, where's the curse in this? The truth is, in spite of all the wonderful things technology held out the promise of, as a consumer I continued to be at the receiving end of improperly designed and inadequately maintained systems. Passbook (non) printers that made me long for the days of handwritten passbooks, links that were more down than up, new medical equipment (worth crores) that kept packing up. As the French say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose-the more they change, the more they stay the same. An observant and articulate onliner, the writer is a regular columinist of Computers Today |
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