This is the first in what I hope to be a series of blog posts about user interfaces; where we are, where we’re going, and where we’re likely not going.

Yesterday, as I was pondering this blog post, I thought about where we’ve come with user interfaces. Today, PC users often point to the iPad as not being “ready for business”, yet the same thing happened when the PC poked its way into the world of typewriters and mainframes/minicomputers, and surely happened when the typewriter itself first came on scene in the 1800′s.

What we call “the office” today has morphed time and time again over the last 150 or so years, due to new technology coming on the scene, and changing how we work, and how we approach business problems (and computing at home).

Through almost the entirety of the 20th Century, office devices were driven through the use of a keyboard, eventually growing an appendage (the mouse), replacing paper with a digital display (CRT), and replacing the single document interface of the typewriter with overlapping windows in the Mac, then Windows (dismissing the Xerox Star and others which never succeeded in the market).

Several companies have attempted to make digital ink (a stylus/text recognition) or voice first class input mechanisms many times over the last 30 or so years. I’ll likely discuss in a future piece why neither of those have really gone anywhere, and why I doubt they will get adopted – or at least to the level that those companies might have hoped for.

As we look at cell phones, and then smartphones until the iPhone arrived (again, panning the Newton – a device which I owned, yet would still call a failure), the simple keyboard/display/pointer metaphor was pushed to the limit. With Windows CE-based Pocket PCs and RIM Blackberry devices both continuing the trend – the former with a stylus-based pointer, the latter with a trackball. One key device that did anything out of the ordinary was the Palm organizer (with their own unique method of text input). I contend that Palm devices got a huge adoption curve because of what they could do – but they stalled and never reached mainstream use because they required such massive mental reprogramming to take advantage of. I know that’s why I never bought one – it reminded me too much of my Newton, which I had high hopes for, but had such horrible text recognition that you couldn’t ever hope to annotate in any significant volume and be able to use the result later.

With almost 30 years of common mouse-driven computing behind us, we arrive in 2012. Recently, I’ve been watching what Microsoft has been doing with Windows Phone 7, then Xbox, and soon Windows 8 – the great push for “Metro” design language across every platform they offer. I’m not yet certain I’m a fan – of either Metro, or “Metro everywhere”. But that’s the topic of conversation for my next post – so I’ll stay on track.

The iPhone’s arrival 5 years ago changed the way that many of us interact with technology. Instead of multiple windows vying for attention, and a pointing device and keyboard being required to complete tasks, our finger(s) became the implement, the software the mechanism, for getting things done on devices – and a single application interface (harkening back to the typewriter or pen and paper in some senses) became the approach Apple enforced. This was likely done for many reasons; to simplify the interface and focus a user on a single task at a time, as well as to enforce a mechanism where power could be conserved by shutting down all non-critical tasks, thereby making the most of the limited ARM processor and limited battery capacity available.

This stands in stark contrast to even today’s Mac, where overlapping windows are still quite the norm, despite Lion delivering a framework for full-screen applications driven primarily through gestures – but not on-screen gestures. No, the Mac does not support primary gesturing directly to the screen (nor do I hope it ever does), it solely supports trackpad or Magic Mouse-based secondary gestures. The terms primary gesturing and secondary gesturing are not common, but they are terms that I have adapted to suit the scenario where the user is gesturing on the surface displaying the content itself (primary), or secondary being input from a secondary surface such as a trackpad or pseudo-trackpad due to screen distance from the user, as is the case with the Mac and Apple TV – and as I will contend in my next post, with Windows 8.

Consider the table below. I’ve gone through and considered some of the user interface constraints across the principal 4 Apple user interface paradigms. Specifically, note the default orientation for each device, the primary method(s) of input, typical distance from the user, and use of gestures.

We’ve seen Apple slowly, gently, expand gestures from the original two-finger scrolling gesture on Mac OS X and early pinch gestures on iOS to become much much more. But the utility of these gestures is somewhat hampered when the gesture is a secondary gesture as it always is on a Mac or would be on an Apple TV if the device supported gestures. It’s also hampered by simple real estate. There isn’t enough room on an Apple Magic Trackpad for 5 fingers, on a Magic Mouse for 4 fingers, or on an iPhone for even 3 fingers. This is why we see the largest breadth of gestures on the iPad.

But just as important to note is how the Apple TV much more closely mimics the Mac. Devices with secondary gestures must use cursors to represent the location of input on the screen. On the Mac, this is an actual cursor. On the Apple TV, it is a visual highlight around the currently selected element. The Apple TV supports both it’s own (mediocre) remote that is simply an up/down backwards/forwards selector, or the remote app for iOS, which turns your iOS device into a secondary gesture appliance – but there’s a problem here. First, the iOS remote app is always in portrait, and the Apple TV itself is always in landscape – meaning that unless one of them changes, it’s always going to be a weird paradox where secondary gestures beyond backwards/forwards will always be a struggle.

The iPad, in many senses, is Apple’s most accommodating platform. It easily switches both apps and the entire OS shell between landscape or portrait modes, supports many intrinsic gestures for direct manipulation of the shell (task switching, app switching, five-finger home screen access), and most significantly, due to it’s larger gesturing surface, supports the use of more fingers for input simultaneously than the Mac (4 fingers), iPhone (2 fingers) or Apple TV (no fingers, or 2 fingers, depending on which remote you’re using). The iPad is also realistically the smallest screen size that a typical human can place both hands across simultaneously in landscape mode to enable typing (it’s a challenge – and why I still use my Apple Bluetooth keyboard while typing on the iPad).

I’ve seen many people say that Apple TV should use Siri or other voice commands, or Kinect-like “body gesturing”. Both of those have foibles that I’ll talk about in the future. Given the simple tasks that Apple TV will incorporate – even when it does have third-party apps, which I expect it to at some point, the current simple remote, or improvements to the iOS remote app will likely suffice for a long time. Taking this in mind with the continued evolution of AirPlay mirroring, which treats the Apple TV as a dumb terminal, further negating the need for an over-engineered remote, voice commands, or gesturing, and it continues to say that Apple won’t go nuts and build entirely new user interface methods just for the Apple TV.

Lion truly began the move to incorporate some of iOS’ best user interface elements into OS X itself. A breadth of gestures, full-screen application capabilities, and a new (improved?) App launcher tried to gently begin assimilating the two user interfaces.

I recently had a journalist ask me if Apple wasn’t going far enough with Mountain Lion, if it wasn’t moving fast enough at combining the user interfaces from iOS and OS X together. I couldn’t really disagree more. iOS on iPhone and iPad is designed for a completely different user experience than the Mac. If you just jam them together, you completely trash the Mac experience just to say you did it (you can probably guess which way my Windows 8 post is likely to go at this point).

The Mac supports multi-windowing because it always has. Because it’s easy. Because there’s an insane amount of real estate to offer. Mac Apps have still generally tended to be pretty cleanly designed, but not in the way iOS apps are. iOS apps on the iPhone/iPod Touch were designed to provide the information you need at a glance, and provide mechanisms to expose more information as you need it. But an iPhone app must be (by design) more focused than an iPad app. iPad apps that are simply up-sized iPhone apps are horrible. They don’t make the most of the platform, and don’t help the user get anything more done than if they just had an iPhone. Conversely, Mac Apps can’t just be shimmed down to the iPad. You must take the iPad into account when designing the application. The fact that real typing can occur, that a user can use it as their primary device in many scenarios, the large amount of screen real-estate available, and the fact that up to 10 fingers (and no mouse) could be involved at once. Finally, when or if we see Apps on the Apple TV, they’ll need different design consideration altogether. Unlike the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the Apple TV is more often than not a multi-user device. Two or more users at a time. It also has no direct gesturing, nor is it likely to. Instead, Apps running natively on the Apple TV will tend to be about direct content consumption, with forward/backward  or up/down gestures being the most logical accepted navigation methods.

The important thing here is that, as I noted recently, each platform presents its own opportunities, and as a result apps on each must be uniquely designed to make the most of the platform they are running on, without compromising the platform or the value proposition that your app was designed to deliver.

Apple may be pooling engineering resources across these four platforms, and it may be taking elements from one and putting them into another. But I believe Apple is doing what it does best (yes, even with the recent much maligned Apple TV launcher redesign), and slowly, considerately, taking these changes into account, not just declaring one user interface paradigm the winner, and trying to make it work across all four platforms. Usually when you do that – when you try to make one size fit all – you wind up with one or two platforms wearing a user interface that doesn’t fit.

When the Nest Learning Thermostat first came out, I went through a couple of different modes of thought. Let me walk you through them.

1. Bewilderment – I read the initial news about the thermostat and thought, “Tony left Apple and made… a thermostat?”
2. Excitement – I realized that the design team had followed what appeared to be an Apple-like philosophy of simplicity and task-based design.
3. Disappointment – I realized that it was $249, which was a little more than I wanted to pay (see below for more on that) and besides, I had brought home an off-the-shelf “smart thermostat” only to have to take it back for a couple of reasons I’ll outline in a bit too. Suffice it to say, my house didn’t have the type of power supply that most smart thermostats (but not the Nest) require.
4. Confusion – I learned that I could in fact use the Nest in my house, even without that dedicated power line.
5. Abandonment – I just decided that, for the time, I couldn’t justify the price.

But fate has a way of changing your mind. In the next two weeks, two important things happened. First, I received my energy bill (electric& gas). Second, my current thermostat (the one I had put back up after I tried to replace it with a WiFi enabled one), broke.

Let’s talk about that bill. We have gas forced air heat and electric A/C. So as the seasons turn, it’s more gas than electric in the winter (and I imagine more electric than gas in the summer, though we likely won’t need the A/C like we used to in Texas – most houses in Washington don’t even have A/C). My wife and I have had the conversations about heat & energy costs many times. She tends to like it warmer, I tend to like it cheaper. That bill, in November for October, if I recall, was abusive (the next few weren’t much better).

So let’s talk about that thermostat that broke. It was a reasonable model, a 7 day “programmable” model. It wasn’t original to our 20 year old house, but wasn’t new. The day it “went”, it decided to keep running and running and running… I went downstairs and even with it set to 71, it was about 86 degrees Fahrenheit in the house. I immediately disconnected it. Looking online, I saw this was a common (fatal) malady to this model.

I swear I hadn’t killed it when I put it back up. Or if I did, I didn’t do it intentionally.

I thought about going back to buy another basic thermostat, but my mind lit up about the Nest again. Maybe it would help reduce our spending by running in a more logical pattern without requiring the ridiculous passive/aggressive “programming” that most 3/5/7 day models do. I talked with my wife, and we decided it might be worth it. That WiFi thermostat I had bought and returned because it didn’t have what is commonly called a “C Wire”, which is just an always available power lead. Normally, the wires to your thermostat are only completing a circuit when the HVAC systems are running – completing the circuit is how the thermostat tells HVAC systems to do something. That unit offered one real bonus, which was WiFi access for programming and logging of temperature. It was over $100, and had the same basic design we’ve come to expect with 20 years of programmable thermostats. Perfectly <meh>. Uninspired, component-driven design.

When I thought about that unit, then, the Nest seemed expensive, but isn’t honestly that bad when you consider how expensive the off the shelf thermostat was, and the fact that I’d have to pay somebody $100+ bucks to pull a C Wire in order to power it – but I wouldn’t if I bought the Nest (guys will go to great lengths to try and justify a gadget).

So I went to order it. Only they were out. Nest stocked briefly at Best Buy, but what had apparently been anticipated to be three months worth of inventory sold out in a little over a week.

I went through every video on their site, learning about it, and decided to put my name on a waitlist, and created a Nest account, in anticipation. This is the account you use to interact with your Nest over the Internet from a Web browser, iPhone, or iPad. After a while (I figured it’d be a while, as I surely wasn’t early on the list), I got an email inviting me to order one if I was still interested. I had almost decided against it, but the chintzy $40 5-day programmable that I had bought to run the house in the meantime just looked so awful, and wasn’t doing anything to save us money (as my bill last week can show).

I have to say, Nest’s entire experience is incredibly professional. Prompt emails, fast Twitter responses, reasonably fast shipping, and a nifty, almost idiot-proof, compatibility test page. For a small company, they’re trying really hard to make a big dent.

The Nest arrived yesterday, and against my better judgement, I decided to install it – as the wall needs patching – unfortunately that’s going to often be the case when you’re replacing a rectangular thermostat that has likely been haphazardly installed with a much smaller round unit.

The packaging of the Nest isn’t a complete mirror of an Apple experience, but it’s close. No styrofoam, almost all recyclable packaging, with a thin plastic shipping cover for the thermostat and an Apple-like acetate package with two well-laid-out documents – one for installation, one for use. Unusually, the unit also includes a small, well-designed screwdriver with several replaceable heads. It also includes two optional mounting plates – one square, one rectangular – that you can use to cover up your wall from the damage likely left by your old thermostat if you’d like. I didn’t like how these seemed to spoil the look of the Nest, so I didn’t use one. Instead, we patched the wall a bit, and will patch and paint more in the coming week.

When you get started with an iPhone or iPad, you don’t have to deal with poorly documented household circuitry. Unfortunately, you do when you deal with a thermostat.

The Nest team has done an exceptional job of handling the “wild west” that exists behind thermostats in this country. It’s not perfect, but it’s close. I made two errors as I hooked mine up, and I had an old wire simply labeled “R”, not “Rc” or “Rh” (see the picture of the backplate on the upper right of this page. A little searching on the Web and then on their support site told me that it didn’t matter which I used, Nest would bridge them if it needed to. Awesome.

Once I had the wires hooked up, I connected the main body, and it powered up (cute little Nest boot logo and everything). The setup experience was beautiful. The minimalist user interface is clean and well thought out. I regret that I’ll never need to set up the wireless again, as the neat rotary-dial user interface they’ve built is very iPod-like, and remarkably easy to use. After it connected to the wireless, it asked me if I wanted to associate it with my Nest account (showing it on the screen). No username, no password to enter. How wonderful – somewhere along the way, they had set it up for my account. Surely you could change it, but that it was configured by default was a nice touch. I said yes, and finished initial setup.

Like I said, along the way, I made two errors – once most of setup had completed, it visually showed me a picture on screen what the wires looked like behind. My A/C wasn’t showing up – but because of the picture, I could see I had errantly connected it to the wrong lead. Fixing that quickly, it identified that I had something plugged in to the AUX/W2, but nothing plugged in to W1 – it told me to move that wire to W1. Fixed that, good to go.

I set the temperature I wanted it to be at, then set it again before we went to bed. The idea with the Nest is that for a few days, you treat it like a classic “manual” thermostat, and it learns your heating patterns (it then learns cooling patterns, if applicable, when that time arrives). Eventually, it figures out the optimal temperature and schedule for you and your family. You can manually set it to an “Away” mode, and it features a near and far-mode proximity sensor. The near-mode is to wave your hand over and see the current setting without turning the dial. The far-mode is to watch for activity. If it doesn’t see activity for a period of time, it sets itself to “Auto-Away” mode. All of these things combine to help save energy and money over a manual thermostat that winds up being stuck at one or two settings for a day or days at a time, or even a poorly configured “programmable” thermostat. You can check or change the temperature of your Nest over the Web, or using cleanly designed, native apps for the iPhone and iPad (as well as Android, though I’ve not tried that). You can also set it to Away mode, if you forgot to before you left for a trip, or turn the heat back up if a cold front hits while you’re traveling and your pets are home.

While it has only been up for one day, there are several things I really like about my Nest:

1. Installing it was a breeze – even when I made mistakes
2. The design is beautiful
3. It just works
4. The apps and Web site are easy to use, and do what they say – without trying to be some insane home automation solution

While I’ll have to wait until next month to post any financial analysis as to whether it made a difference or not in our bill, the other thing I’ve already noticed about the Nest is how much less it runs the HVAC equipment. The old thermostats we had seemed to trigger off/on intervals much more frequently than the Nest does – it just seems like it was running the equipment way more often (and today, for the record, was pretty cold – it was down to freezing last night).

One note on the C Wire – while Nest says the device will work without it in almost all cases, it does some interesting tricks to pull enough electricity through to charge the unit’s battery (yes, it’s basically an iPod Touch at some levels) and still run the WiFi. Most HVAC equipment doesn’t mind what it does to do that (it switches off and on at a very fast frequency that doesn’t trigger most HVAC equipment). In a small number of cases, the HVAC equipment won’t  be happy with that, and you’ll need a C Wire to be pulled through. As for me, it worked fine.

I really like the device, and I have to say I’m a fan (pun not intended) of the company. They’ve built a really unique new experience at a cost point that, while still premium and not an easy expense for many to justify, it might be able to earn back in time. Plus, it just looks good and works amazingly well.

I’m not a fan of most home automation because the user experiences are designed by geeks, for geeks, and require an aberrant amount of programming (and brain twisting) to make the most of. Not the case with Nest at all. It just works.

The other day, I was on a panel of 4 pundits where an audience member asked whether we felt Microsoft would approve a Metro app that was data heavy. The visual I got was a data grid application, something perhaps written in Access, VB, FoxPro, or some other visual designer at a time when raw data access was thought to be a good thing.

I spoke pretty candidly about the fact that if you’re making the effort to port to Windows 8 (or to the iPad, for that matter), you’re doing your users a disservice to bring these old apps (as I somewhat theatrically noted) “kicking and screaming from the past onto your tablets”.

If an organization is investing in tablet hardware (iPad or Windows 8 – it doesn’t matter), and you’re just “porting” your apps over without taking the time to stop and consider how users actually use the applications to get their job done, and how you can make that task more efficient through your redesign, then you need to ask yourself 1) Why are you porting, and 2) Why are you trying to use tablets and touch?

In Windows, it is my belief that data grids and input heavy form-based applications unfortunately became a common go-to UX paradigm. It wasn’t that they were efficient for users (they aren’t), it wasn’t that they helped users get more done fast (they don’t). It was the fact that you had a database on the backend, and a need for users to put data into it. As a result, raw input from forms into a database became the norm.

Stop doing that. Really. Stop it.

Whether your organization is examining the iPad, Windows 8, or even both of them (consider it carefully, as the design approach to apps on each is fundamentally different), take a chance to think (ahem) outside of the box. Take advantage of the design aesthetic of the platform you’re looking at porting to, and follow those design guidelines. Make the most of touch affordances, sensors, and the screen real-estate that you have allotted to your application. Be vary wary of writing your application in a non-native approach. If you don’t design to the platform, it will be very apparent every time a user tries to use the application.

To that end, the touch-first interface of Windows 8 (and the touch-only interface of iOS – there is no mouse) mean that you need to think carefully about design, positioning of UI elements, and workflow in a way that you likely never have before in an internal application.

That’s a good thing.

It shouldn’t have ever been acceptable to give design and workflow – how a user actually performs tasks with the application – the short shrift. But somewhere along the way, it did. In a time where we’re all trying to pinch pennies and make the most of our technology investments, actually taking the time to design an application to save users time can result in literal savings over just “throwing something together”, or pulling forward the application that had been thrown together several years ago.

Wherever your tablet path takes you – take the time to stop and consider design. And don’t try to pull your legacy applications forward. Either make the most of the platform – or stay on your current one instead.

Natural. A harmless word. As someone who grew up in Montana, if you used “natural” in a word-association test, the response I’d give you is probably Glacier National Park.

But natural isn’t a harmless word anymore. Unlike the word organic, which (though overloaded in meaning) has a very explicit definition when it comes to food, the word natural means everything, yet means nothing at the same time.

At a simplistic level, the word natural means “from nature”. However, unless it’s something that fell from outer space (arguably, not nature), even the most twisted chemical or genetic experiments can be construed as “from nature”. And so it is.

I’ve said before, “Products that sell themselves as green seldom are.”

The same is true of natural. “Products that sell themselves as natural seldom are.”

When you see “natural” on a box, it is a ploy. It’s marketing. Nothing more. Whether on food or a consumer packaged good, it is a gimmick to catch your eye, to make you feel better – it’s no different than the use of the words “healthy” or “nutritious”. Without more information, it’s just marketing.

Products that are labeled as natural can contain genetically modified ingredients – and they likely do, given the massive amount of genetically engineered soy and corn used in our nation’s foot system – much of it subsidized by our government. “Natural” products can also contain petrochemicals (or, very commonly, soy processed with petrochemicals - be aware of this, almost all soy protein products in the US that are not organic are processed in this manner, using hexane), insect-derived artificial colorings, pesticides or herbicides, meats that have been raised with antibiotics (both to increase their weight and minimize loss due to animal-borne disease in CAFOs)…

In fact, there is pretty much nothing that “natural” food can’t contain. As Gawker put it so poignantly, “the term “all natural” doesn’t mean jack shit“.

There’s another old saying that, “what you all call organic, we used to just call ‘food’“. That’s true. But what you used to call food wasn’t chock full of chemical goodness as today’s “food” generally is, built from genetically modified seeds intended to lock farmers into an annual subscription of seed/feed/weed intellectual property licensing where the sellers of these technologies were more interested in raising the annual yield of agribusiness than raising the annual yield of crops – or, heaven forbid, delivering the maximum nutrition and sustainability so our farmers can actually keep growing food for centuries, or provide consumers with maximum nutritional value, or minimal cancer risk.

My wife and I have had many conversations, frustrated because we feel so strange about believing that organic is a better way of life, that society has this weird aberrant belief now that it’s not only acceptable, but that it’s normal to eat foods that have been so modified on the way to your mouth that they don’t, in any way, resemble the foods of the past from a nutritional, toxicity, or long-term health risk perspective.

We spend billions as a society trying to find a cure for cancer, on chemotherapy treatments for it, yet don’t take a deep breath, and consider for a second what we are doing to ourselves with the food we eat.

I’m not elated that most of the world elects to make these choices to eat incredibly processed foods. But it’s everyone’s own prerogative to eat how they see fit.

However, I’m sick and tired of the word “natural”, and frankly, I believe that it should be illegal to use on marketing or packaging of any kind of product -be it food or packaged good. It serves no purpose other than to deceive consumers. It is a lie – a farce. Natural means nothing. Manufacturers selling products as “natural” are fakers. Natural fakers.

Privacy. It’s a good idea, right? But what the heck is it?

For quite some time, I was a paranoid nutjob about Google. It irritated the bejeezus out of me that I knew how diligently they tracked everything, aggregated everything, and could really identify me in a digital crowd. Eventually, I rationalized that it wasn’t really a big deal to me that Google knew when I was sick, when I needed repair for my VW (or that it knew what kind of VW I drove), or that it knew where I lived (the origin of many of my maps searches), where I was going (the restaurants, friends, or businesses I visit via Google Maps), what I read (Google Reader), and more. Yes, I was the frog in the boiling pot, comfy at the 190 degree mark as we approach a privacy boiling point and near “the creepy line” as Eric Schmidt might say. It’s gotten even better as Google beats their Google+ drum and works to more closely intertwine their properties, and what each of them knows about you, to refine their advertising.

There is a valiant effort that some are fighting for on the Internet today, a noble cause. The idea? “Do Not Track”, also sometimes referred to as “DNT”. Earlier today a study made the rounds that said most consumers have no idea what DNT is. No kidding. I’ve worked in/around the Internet and security for years, and I can’t define it – at least not as the name stands today. More importantly, I can tell you (and I’ve said for a while) that DNT can’t ever work. At least not the way a consumer would think it would.

Why? To begin with, the Web itself is stateless. HTTP, the protocol underlying the Web, has no idea who you are from pageview to pageview. The whole idea behind cookies (sometimes called “magic cookies” by some) as Netscape first created them was to try and glue some state to a stateless protocol/medium. By allowing sites to stick small nuggets of identifying info to your system, it allowed sites to identify you from page to page (so you can conduct e-commerce transactions like checkout) or from visit to visit (so you don’t have to log in every time. Handy, eh? If cookies were all there was to tracking anymore, we could just say “Do Not Track” by disabling cookies on a site-by-site basis, or disabling them altogether. But that’s not it anymore.

As the Internet moved from this wild and crazy world where people didn’t care about losing money to one where they at least needed to feign a business strategy, advertising (for better or worse) became a key mechanism to make revenue. Funny thing about ads, though. They suck as a money-making mechanism if they’re not targeted accurately. Google, criticized early on (ironically as Twitter is today) for not having a clear business plan, latched on to advertising and is inarguably an advertising, not a search company today. The data you provide to Google in your searches helps them tune the advertising. As does every visit you make to a site hosting Google Analytics. (You didn’t think Google gave that away to other Web sites in order to be altruistic, did you?) A benign little cookie or two helps Google track you as you skip across the Internet.

But this isn’t just Google. Everybody does it. Yahoo. Microsoft. Facebook. Adobe. Countless companies have tools to track you where you go. Think “tossing your cookies” will make you safe? Nope. Panopticlick, from the EFF should demonstrate how impossibly unique your system is among the millions it has tested. Trust me. You’re trackable, even if you opt out of cookies. Combine the identifiers that Panopticlick uses and your IP address (whether uniquely yours, that of your home network router, or your corporate edge) and there’s plenty to identify you.

It’s naive to ever refer to any effort to mediate privacy on the Internet as “do not track”. While we may be able to coerce some large Internet players into actually letting us opt out of tracking to a degree, it won’t happen everywhere, and it won’t ever be clear enough for a non-technical user to understand. This is the privacy equivalent of the dancing pigs problem. A novice user is not clear on what sites they should, or should not, enter personally identifiable information (PII) on, or why they should, or should not, let sites track their activity. With enough work, any site on the Internet (just like Facebook and Google) can tell whether or not you’re a dog (and more).

Rather than driving efforts like DNT, which fundamentally cannot occur (in the manner users think those words mean “do not track”), we’d do a lot better as an industry to drive standards that delineate what types of information a specific site or tracking engine like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture products can collect on you. But even if you throw those back at users, they’ll be overwhelmed. Perhaps the best angle is to reinforce that no activity on the Internet is totally anonymous, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot ever completely prevent being tracked.

Growing up in Montana, “the backpacker’s credo” was gospel. This saying, “pack it in, pack it out”, applies to how important it is to take anything you bring with you to a campsite back out with you. Nobody wants to take a 15 mile hike to a gorgeous lake hidden in the mountains only to see someone’s beer six-pack ring or Snickers wrapper on the ground. Not only does it spoil the scene, but litter is far from ideal for the wildlife.

I think that growing up where I did also instilled a respect for nature that it seems unfortunately too many Americans – especially those in charge of energy companies today, really never established.

When humankind first discovered petroleum, and refined it in to gasoline, diesel, and all the other yummy byproducts you can derive from it, petroleum was easy to find and extract. However, the amount of energy stored in our planet as extractable petroleum is finite, no matter how hard we wish it to be otherwise. So, like a child looking for hidden eggs at Easter, the process gets harder and harder, and the energy required to extract it becomes closer and closer to the amount of energy you can extract. Like older boys looking for those last eggs, the process can also get a bit rough. While extracting petroleum has never really been as easy as the opening scene of the Beverly Hillbillies alluded to, it’s getting harder and harder, and it’s getting more and more awkward for the US to depend on oil from countries that we have political interests in not supporting. As a result, we’ve turned to some processes that I believe are fine if shortsightedness is alright, and you don’t care what they do to the planet for future generations.

Extracting petroleum and natural gas has often meant not only pollution from burned hydrocarbons, but pollution during the extraction, refinement, and transport processes. As we’ve turned to fuels derived from shales, and processes such as hydraulic fracturing “fracking”, which involves the injection of obscene amounts of water, “fracking fluid” (a substance so bad that the companies involved won’t tell anyone what’s actually in it) and additional components into the ground repeatedly to generate tectonic events (or larger, as people in Ohio are learning). This process allows natural gas and other fuels to be released for use. Thing is, though – this process isn’t permanent, and these toxic cocktails don’t stay where you put them. They leak, leach, and spill. Combined with the amount of water that they use – and often regurgitate in a toxic cocktail form to be “stored” in retention ponds, as well as the energy involved, it’s not hard to take issues with the natural gas industry’s claim of providing “clean” natural gas. It may be cleaner than some fuels when you burn it, but like petroleum extracted from the tar sands of Canada, or when our government used to turn a blind eye to mining pollution, it’s a very dirty, costly process, with long-term consequences as it is extracted. Rivers in several locations have become so toxic that fish and other wildlife can’t survive – yet fracking isn’t stopped since it has all but gotten federal blessing to excrete all over the Clean Water Act.

I’m no fan of fracturing, or of high-risk deep water drilling, or even burning coal. But our culture (American, in particular) has become so deluded that “the energy fairy will save us” that we keep buying more and more fossil fuels, disregarding the cost to our planet, and how ugly this process is going to get before we’re screwed. We’ve gone numb to how gasoline arrives in our cars, natural gas arrives in our homes, or food arrives on our plates.

Whether you believe in global warming or not, I have to wonder how anyone can ignore this kind of pollution. It’s not good for us today, it’s not good for our environment in the future, and frankly, like the blind eye that our government has turned to the genetic modification of food and the biological consequences of relying on a single source for seeds, it is something that we should honestly consider a national security issue. During World War II, during the energy crisis of the 1970′s, we sucked it up, and as a nation, adjusted how we consume energy. Throwing cash at potential renewables is one option, sure. But those have to be executed better than most that this administration has tried so far. More importantly, we need to figure out a conscious approach to reducing our fuel use as individuals, and as a nation. Like an unwatched 6-year old with a box of Twinkies, it’s a dangerous situation. Keep burning it at the rate we are today, tolerating the increasingly dirty and dangerous processes energy companies are using to extract it, and it won’t matter what we do tomorrow.

Whether you believe that our presence on this planet today is divine, or a statistical quirk, it doesn’t matter. We’re here. But unless we take that first step to reduce our energy use, and stop letting energy companies extract fuels at whatever financial or ecological cost they are willing to gamble on, things will get worse, and we’re pretty much SOL. More deep-water ocean spills. More pipeline explosions. More river die-offs. Significant drinking water source compromise (as water becomes more scarce as petroleum before it).

Be the change you want to see in the world. For me, I’m beginning to work from home more often, and find every other way I can to reduce our energy use as a family. It seems futile at the moment, but if we all do nothing, we’ll wish we had before it was too late.

Aron Ralston. You may not know the name, but you probably heard of his amazing story. Mountaineering by himself in Utah in 2003, his forearm and right hand became trapped for four days by a boulder that had slipped down on them. Finally out of water, he amputated his own hand with a multitool, to save his own life.

For months – long before last October’s SharePoint Conference where gossip and dreams of Office for the iPad were a common subject during analyst debate and questioning of Office executives, people have been asking me, “Will we ever see Office for the iPad? If so, when?”

A recent inquiry asked me, “It’s sort of a no-brainer, right?”

The answer is, unfortunately, “it depends on who you ask, and how you look at it.” I’ve been stating for more than a year that Microsoft needs to do something to better the experience of Office document editing on the iPad. Let’s dismiss the iPhone and Android completely for a second – those are totally different. Let’s just focus in on the iPad.

For 22 years, Office and Windows have done incredibly well as partners. Ironically though, people often forget that Office for the Mac predates Office for Windows by one year. It wasn’t always about Windows – but “better together” has made these two a strong buddy package. If we look at what Microsoft has to lose by building Office for the iPad, it’s easy to overlook what could happen – depending on the feature fidelity of Office on the iPad – to Windows, Office’s best friend for the last two decades.

On the converse side, by not shipping it, you can say “they’re walking away from revenue that could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.” That’s true too.

What does Microsoft have to lose by building Office for the iPad? What does Microsoft have to lose to not build Office for the iPad? Let’s break it down:

What does Microsoft lose by building Office for the iPad?

Can you think of other wins/losses I’ve missed? If so, put them in the comments and I’ll update the list accordingly.

I don’t think Office on the iPad is a “no-brainer”, necessarily. It’s quite a complex question if you consider both the short game and the long game.

On to some of my thoughts of what to expect:
Q: Will we see Office for the iPad?
A: My money has been on yes for quite some time, and I still suspect so.

Q: When would we see it?
A: Later rather than sooner would be my guess. Personally, I can’t see why a company who has been keeping information so close to the fold lately would ship Office for the iPad before this fall – say around, or maybe even after Office 15 and Windows 8 ship. A key tenet of avoiding the Osborne Effect – minimize showing your cards until you are ready to show them all.

Q: How much would it sell for?
A:I still think Microsoft will shoot for a price close to or matching iWork ($29). Maybe more – but too much more, and they’ll cede the market to more affordable competitors.

Q: Will Microsoft try to end-run the App Store 30% vig?
A: Not unless they engineer something custom with Apple. They’d be insane to think they could outrun Apple by trying to charge for the app outside of the App Store and not have sales of their apps shut down.

Q: Will Microsoft be on stage at Apple’s iPad vNext announcement?
A: My money says no. I can’t see why Apple would want to validate Office. It’s the iPad’s day in the sun. Could be wrong, so we’ll see – but that’s my guess.

Q: Will we see Office for the iPhone too? How about Android/Fire?
A: Frankly, I don’t care. The Office viewers on the iPhone are pretty good; and for short-form editing, the competitors on the iPhone are already good enough. The sales revenue from iPhones will be, I believe, significantly lower than the iPad version if both were supported, though there are admittedly significantly more iPhones in existence – higher number of devices could conceivably counter a lower percentage of attach (and possibly put that revenue figure above the $500M number I always felt Microsoft liked to have as a bottom-end validator of  market). Android tablets other than the Fire have done horribly in the market, and the owners have show a tendency to buy apps sparingly. Would these people pay thirty bucks for Office? I doubt it – not in volume. While Office on the Fire could make sense, and might sell, if I were the product manager over these versions, I’d prioritize anything Android based just below the iPhone, and iPhone below the iPad. If you’re going to do it, focus on the iPad first – and get it out the door.

Q: What Apps will be in Office for the iPad?
A: We’ve already got OneNote. I’d expect the same collection as WOA gets, personally. So just like iWork, QuickOffice, and Documents to Go, you’d get a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. No more, no less. That said, Microsoft needs to put “Visio for iPad” development into Ludicrous Speed, or competitors like iDesk and TouchDraw (or even the insanely expensive OmniGraffle) could earn their way into a lead position over Visio, with their touch-based diagramming approaches.

Q: Will Office on the iPad have <insert variable>?
A: I doubt it. You look at what Office 15 on Windows 8 can do, and the (likely narrower) list of what Office 15 on WOA can do (losing some aspects of programmability, PowerPivot, etc) or even Office 2011 on the Mac, then Office on the iPad will be minimalist. Think “Office goes to Ikea”. Compromises will be made, and I’d bet that there’s a rather large feature delta between what Office 15 on WOA can do that Office for iPad won’t be able to do. If you compare OneNote on Windows to OneNote on the iPad, you should get some idea of what I’m saying here.

Q: Will it be the Office Web Apps shimmed on to the iPad?
A: Oh man, I hope not. Because unless the next version of the Web Apps are massively advanced over the current versions, that will hurt – and would honestly only drive native app competitors on iPad farther into the lead.

As I said – it’s not a no-brainer – hardly. Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Time will tell what, if anything, they do to extricate themselves (and what it costs).

Update: As I halfheartedly expected, some of the feedback has been around OnLive Desktop. Like CloudOn which came earlier, it strives to shim Office 2010, hosted remotely on Windows, into the limited real estate on the iPad. Between the Ribbon, the Navigation Pane and the Review Pane, I present the following metaphor. Imagine a 4-year old child, hopped up on sugar, asked to sit quietly in a Pack-n-Play. It might work for a few minutes, but after a brief period, they’re going to want to break out. OnLive, CloudOn, and other hosted Microsoft Offerings are handy, but only if you:

1. have a persistent, good Internet connection – frequently not the case when traveling! 
2. don’t mind the limited real-estate available for editing, limited further by the Office 2010 UX which was not designed with that display resolution in mind, 
3. are able to deal with the user-interface of Office which is not designed for touch (try using the Find | Replace functionality with your finger)
4. don’t mind having no way to extract that document and manipulate it anywhere else on your iPad (sending to a SharePoint app such as Coaxion or SharePlus, for example)
5. don’t mind storing your documents in the cloud on a service that’s free (if you’re not paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product)

As a child, my parents took my brother and I on several vacations. My dad’s a history buff, though – specifically the Civil War timeframe – so many of our vacations had a historical angle to them. One I remember best was a trip to the Washington, D.C. area when I was almost 10. In particular, we went to Colonial Williamsburg.

I never would have imagined it then, but one thing that I saw there has stuck with me to this day. That was the first, and only time, I’ve ever seen a cooper at work.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of a cooper. That’s sort of my point – a cooper makes barrels, casks, butter churns, etc. Cutting and soaking wood, bending it, and making a barrel with two or more iron bands.

When Williamsburg was more a functional town, and less of a museum, coopers were likely to be common. Probably not unlike muffler or radiator repair shops today – you were likely to see them in major cities, possibly even a few of them, and some in smaller towns that could justify them. Like blacksmiths and many other tasks that today we might view as “artisanal” because only specialists practice the art, these roles at one time were crucial to society, and you could start as a tradesman and likely spend your entire life perfecting your art, possibly moving into furniture, or who knows…

Though now retired, my dad was a physician for his entire professional career. As a kid, I never imagined him doing anything else. I think that was common with a lot of my friends – their parents picked a role, and did that same role for their entire lives. I think that was common for the time – and frankly for probably most of the last several hundred years at least.

Times change – and I believe that, in general, the notion of being a practitioner of a single role for your entire career is getting less and less common. Working around technology for the  last 18 years, the one constant is change – and the velocity of that change (despite the growing use of ARM processors that may be antithetical to it) is increasing along the lines of Moore’s law, with technology, and in particular, development tools, iterating incredibly fast.

During the 4 years I went to college (1991-1995), the Internet went from being a specialist tool to something that almost anyone in a university setting could get access to. From managing and working with development teams over the last several years, I can tell you that the same is true today of development tools and frameworks – only the speed is significantly faster.

I’ve often drawn an analogy between today’s personal computing industry (arguably, about 35 years old, though Windows really didn’t take off until Windows 3.1, 20 years ago this year) and the automobile industry when it was in its infancy. Dismissing some earlier pioneers, the timeframe of about 1885 is when the auto industry really began – but 20 years afterwards, people were still being killed by crank-starters that kicked back on them. It wasn’t until a friend of Henry Leland (founder of Cadillac and later Lincoln ) was killed that Leland pushed to get electronic starters on Cadillacs. Dangerous times. While computers today are generally not fatal in the wrong hands, the analogy plays out pretty well. If it holds, we’re entering a time when computing technology will begin evolving at speeds we can’t possibly imagine.

Today’s developers graduate with a set of skills that, unless specifically targeted by their university, are already outdated. Developers, in particular must learn how to multitask – that is, building phenomenal applications on top of sometimes: liquid frameworks that they must constantly stay up to date with. They are highly technical, but the best developers are students for the entirety of their career.

But it isn’t just developers. Understanding how to market and sell anything in a rapidly morphing, increasingly customer-driven world means that graduates with foresight likely stand just as much chance of kicking ass and taking names than a graduate with an MBA – again, unless that MBA program is incredibly aggressive and focuses on real-world practitioning, and either will still need to keep up with a constantly morphing sales and marketing model.

Even when we look at relatively slow-moving industries such as dentistry, medicine, and law, I believe we’ll see (especially smaller practices of each) using technology to their advantage faster and faster, allowing them to do a better and faster job than competitors who are (generally larger and) not fighting to stay ahead.

Another analyst I talk with on Twitter recently asked something akin to, “Do you think the advent of VMware and server virtualization added jobs from the market, removed jobs from the market, or was net-neutral?” I replied and said if anything, it added. You can look at the advent of virtualization as a major functional shift in the industry. It didn’t fundamentally change what we do, but instead, how we do it. As with the cooper in days of old, tasks that were high-touch and manual (shepherding a cadre of servers – one for every distinct server job that needed to be performed, their potentially high-maintenance storage systems), the roles could be centralized, hosted “vertically” on a stack of more powerful servers – minimizing the frailty of physical systems. Yet it didn’t really simplify management – it just centralized it to a set of servers that was generally smaller in count than your last set. Tasks that were highly manual (barrel building) were now largely automated. Great! Unless your only skill is making barrels by hand.

So while virtualization itself did not add jobs, and may have actually negated or focused some jobs (hardware IT management, for example), what it did do was open up an entirely new economic model, and made server hosting more affordable, potentially more reliable, and created a new world of opportunity for smaller, more dynamic organizations that couldn’t invest in their own datacenter. The model changed, and the economy and practitioners (who wanted to continue to participate) evolved with it. Technological Darwinism, if you will.

Regardless of what you do, the reality is, the thing you do after college (if you elect to go to college) may not be the thing you thought you would in high school (that role may not even exist anymore), and the role you have before you retire may well not be what you started out doing after college.

Success, both in terms of financial and career joy (yes, there is such a thing) will come to those who show themselves to be adaptable (and in fact welcoming) to change. Because what we’ve seen in the past several years is nothing – we’re going to see computing transform in fundamental ways, and require constant updating of your tools and skills to keep up, keep competitive, and keep (and grow) the personal value that you bring to your employer(s).

Yes, I said it. Windows 8 should completely, blatantly steal a feature from OS X “Mountain Lion”. Issue certs for ISVs outside (not just inside) the store, lock Windows down to them by default, and revoke them when they go rogue.

The reality is that Windows 8 on x86/x64 needs Gatekeeper (signature-based whitelisting) far more than the Mac does.

I’ve seen huge cry from the open-source crowd about Windows 8 boot security, Mac App Store apps having to live within the sandbox, and now, Gatekeeper. It’s always the same, “they’re taking away our freedoms, one by one!!!”

You have the freedom to run an old operating system, on older hardware. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade.

When I was a kid, my elementary school had two wooden playsets. They gave us splinters, had nominal safety considerations, certainly no safety ratings, and frankly, I think they were made of pressure-treated wood that was probably soaked in arsenic or something equally toxic.

Today, you don’t see playsets built like that. Why? Because it’s crazy!

People howl when “rights” are taken away when features like secure boot or Gatekeeper come along. Cars didn’t used to have doors, seatbelts, airbags either. Today they’re faster, safer, and less likely to kill you. I think we’d do well to make Windows run the same.

It is time we moved from considering “computing” as a hobby and instead to be a consumer electronics experience that focused on reliability and ease of use – not just flexibility and “power”. The era of the digital flivver is coming to a close. Sorry to break it to the geeks – but most consumers (those crazy people who keep buying devices from Apple en masse) don’t want hackability. They want reliability. Consumers don’t want the bleeding edge. They want edges that don’t cut them. You know what Dave? There are actually lots of people that actually like Disneyland.

In many ways, it’s wonderful that WoA doesn’t include Win32 support beyond the desktop and Office. I think it’ll be a much more secure platform – and much closer to an experience, and less of a computer – exactly what most consumers want. But I think going one step further, and putting a Gatekeeper-type approach in Windows 8 would not only be a good thing, but the right thing. Put in a mechanism for the hobbyists to turn it off – fine. Even turn it off by default on upgrades – but man, for new systems? There’s never been a better chance to take out cybercriminals before they even have a chance to run code on millions of computers.

I spent three days this week with a rather intense migraine. Hovering between pain and vertigo, I had an idea for a blog post I wanted to write. I blathered into Dragon Dictation on my iPad, only to realize I was rambling on about a subject that needed simplicity.  So I waited to write when I was cogent.

I believe that Ken Segall’s upcoming book likely covers some of the same area I’m about to – albeit in more depth, and from an experienced Apple veteran’s point of view. We’ll see after it ships.

Last October, I had a really incredible insight while talking with two Microsoft customers who have done amazing things with a product – with SharePoint, in fact. They’ve made their businesses work better by taking the needs of their users to heart. Not throwing technology at them – but building solutions. But this was deeper. It was something I had completely missed about simplicity and end users for years. It’s something that I had to think is key to Apple’s present success.

Here is a 3 step process that I believe exposes the simple process to build technology experiences that people fall in love with.

1. Understand the task a user wants to get done. Not 2 tasks. Not 3. A single task.
2. Build functionality to get that task done. No more, no less.
3. Ship it.

As I was thinking about this while driving earlier today, this idea came to mind:

It’s better to do one thing really well instead of two things half-assed.

Before the iPhone, we had phones that tried to do 1,001 things, none of them particularly well. Honestly, they weren’t designed for us – for the end user. They were designed by carriers, for carriers. Many centralized most tasks around the contacts in your address book. But this is all wrong.

People rarely want to “contact”. Contact isn’t a verb. They want to place a phone call. They want to send a text message. They want to send an email. They want to surf the Web or use Twitter. The apps to accomplish those tasks on the iPhone are simple, logically named, and perform, generally that single task.

iOS is simple enough for a child to use without any experience because it breaks down the fundamental verbs – the tasks that users ever want to get done, and melds them into distinct apps for each task. The single modal app design of iOS feels limited to some, and yet is  inviting to many who feel overwhelmed with innumerable app windows vying for their attention, or for those struggling to focus on a single task at a time.

Doug McIlroy, the creator of Unix pipes, once wrote, “Write programs that do one thing and do it well.” While one can assume McIlroy was probably speaking of the command-line at the time, the adage translates even better to the GUI, where you can, and often should, assume a user who may not be comfortable with technology.

Don’t add bells and whistles. Don’t offer two ways to do something when one way will do. Instead, understand the distinct tasks your end users are trying to accomplish, and build experiences (not software) that help them accomplish those tasks.

Don’t make the user learn how to use your software. Learn how they want to get things done. Help them do those things. Watch. Learn. Build. Iterate.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.