{"id":255,"date":"2008-05-19T16:30:39","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T16:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/?p=250"},"modified":"2008-05-19T16:30:39","modified_gmt":"2008-05-19T16:30:39","slug":"technology-ideas-i-thought-were-stupid-until-i-tried-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/technology-ideas-i-thought-were-stupid-until-i-tried-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology ideas I thought were stupid&#8230; until I tried them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have consumer&#8217;s arrogance. I&#8217;ll admit it. <\/p>\n<p> While innovators, inventors, businesspeople, and artists are busy working to make money (and art, too, if they&#8217;re lucky), I&#8217;m comfortably sitting back, relaxing, and critiquing them from my little soapbox of a blog. It&#8217;s easy once something has tanked to balk at it, &#8220;What were they thinking?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p> Sometimes they weren&#8217;t. Sometimes they had a good idea in theory, but in practice it was terrible. Sometimes it just didn&#8217;t get implemented properly, or it worked for test groups but not consumers at large. <\/p>\n<p> Well, sometimes&#8230; sometimes, it actually works! <\/p>\n<p> Here are three products I balked at wrongly. I thought they were stupid until I realized they were brilliant. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>The iPod&#8217;s Scroll Wheel<\/b>. Yes, I understood the appeal of the iPod. Yes, I knew Apple made slick-looking products. But the scroll wheel baffled me. I thought about the CD players of old. <i>Wouldn&#8217;t I just want to click to the next song right or left? Why would I want to go in a circle?<\/i> Apple knew, though. They knew that people either already had or would soon amass music collections with songs numbering in the thousands, and scrolling through thousands of songs without a scroll wheel is tiring for your fingers. Even though I&#8217;ve long since grown disillusioned with iPods and iTunes (I use Sandisk players with Linux now), I do miss the scroll wheel and appreciate it for the brilliant invention it was.\n<li><b>The Wii<\/b>. When I first heard about the Wii, I thought Nintendo was crazy. The name sounded stupid, like a kid peeing. The system&#8217;s graphics weren&#8217;t in the same class as the PS3. You used the remote to make motions with? What is this&mdash;Tron? Well, apparently it is. Gamers and non-gamers, children and adults alike love the Wii. I&#8217;m not much of a gamer myself, but I enjoy the Wii, too. It&#8217;s like a video game console for non-video-game-players. I even know someone who claims that Wii bowling practice leads to better real-life bowling performance. Not sure about that, but if it&#8217;s true, then cool!\n<li><b>The Eee PC<\/b>. Okay. It has a 4 GB hard drive, a crappy webcam, no optical drive, 800&#215;480 screen resolution, a child-size keyboard, and only a 3-hour battery life? Why do I want that? I guess it&#8217;s at least cheaper than the Macbook Air by US$1400. If someone had pitched that to me, I would have said, &#8220;You must be on crack!&#8221; But the Eee PC has been selling quite well for Asus, spawning competition from HP, Acer, Dell, and others, and keeping Asus itself on its toes with a new release with better specs. It&#8217;s gotten rave reviews, too. I was intrigued by this little giant and read literally hundreds of reviews before taking the dive and buying one myself, and it&#8217;s lived up to the hype even though it isn&#8217;t perfect. Asus just realized that these days most of what people use computers for is the internet, and that&#8217;s all the Eee really is, an internet appliance that can do a few other cool things, too.<\/ul>\n<p> So, hats off to you CEOs who, on rare occasion, know better than I do what will be successful or a good idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have consumer&#8217;s arrogance. I&#8217;ll admit it. While innovators, inventors, businesspeople, and artists are busy working to make money (and art, too, if they&#8217;re lucky), I&#8217;m comfortably sitting back, relaxing, and critiquing them from my little soapbox of a blog. It&#8217;s easy once something has tanked to balk at it, &#8220;What were they thinking?&#8221; Sometimes&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/technology-ideas-i-thought-were-stupid-until-i-tried-them\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Technology ideas I thought were stupid&#8230; until I tried them<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[909,168,324,366],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asus-eee-pc","category-computers","tag-eee-pc","tag-ipod","tag-technology","tag-wii","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}