Happiness? There's no app for that

One of my favourite parts of the week is my drive to SFO with Tino. During this drive, we've discussed topics as diverse as Tiger Woods, literature, family, public policy, art, and of course technology.

On our last drive, we decided to talk about the iPad, and what a killer app might be. Tino believes that as well as a content consumption, and light content creation device, it might be a killer communication device in the future.

Tino discussed his and Lucy's experiences with Skype. I was intrigued to know that Lucy was put off with Skype very early in her experience. The very unusual symptom of her husband seeming to have "hiccups" while saying something crucially important from Washington DC was enough for her to want to forego a free connection and resort to the trusty telephone. A trusted, expensive-to-use technology with limitations (hiss, faintness, echo) that are well known and accepted to her.

As an early user of VOIP (I'm talking Speak Freely, a command-line VOIP utility that was first run on Unix, then ported to the PC in 1995), I can testify to her frustration. I remember shipping my brother in Mauritius 3.5" floppy discs with the speak freely program on it (downloading 1.2M over modem would have taken him all day and cost hundreds of dollars, at that time), then going through countless "can you hear me" test calls. At which point, my father said "Let's just call him" (for $2/minute). I noticed, too, that my father would still call me for $2 a minute rather than use skype, when there was something important to say. He was, no doubt, trying to save himself from the indignity of hiccups as well.

Skype has made massive improvements, but is still hiccuppy, an artifact more of compression, transmission, lag and the whole mechanism of shipping your packetised voice across country, then re-assembling those packets.

Having tried Dragon Dictate products on the iPad and iPhone, I can empathise with the frustration that causes a new user to abandon a product, no matter how technologically advanced.

Premise: Dragon dictate will free your hands and allow you to input your text faster than with your keyboard!
Facts: At the very best, if you babysit the dictation device, you'll get decent throughput, and if you don't, you might SMS your best friend that you're drinking with his wife, rather than an invitation for drinks at the Y.
To me: Dragon Dictate is a toy. I would prefer to suffer the inconveniences of stopping my car to type an SMS than the mental anguish of dealing with handsfree dictation on the go.

Which led us to talk about what might make Skype easier. Tino, I think found the holy grail, when he said that the conscious act of starting Skype, waiting for a connection to the server, then locating the contact, calling them if they were available, was enough to put many people off.

Here, I'm inclined to think: do people want apps? Or do they want to do things? Apple took a big bet that people don't want programs behind a start menu, super high configurability. They just want to DO things - hence apps.

Do users want a simple command and control experience? Could "Call Tino", issued as a voice command, which would ring either his Blackberry or skype account, WITHOUT even launching Skype, be what might compensate a new Skype user for the uncertainty of a jittery connection? Are apps a thing of the past?

I think that no-apps are a thing of the future.

Much like, when you pick up the phone and dial a number, you are oblivious to the exchanges in between you and the other subscriber, or even that the other subscriber might be on a mobile or satellite phone, or even in another country! At the dawn of the telephone age, placing a phone call required knowledge of the other person's exchange, and manual intervention by an operator. Now, the distances, technology and complexity in between are taken for granted. Because placing a call is so easy. (And almost too easy. I've been woken up by "pocket calls" from friends in other countries in the middle of the night way too many times. That's what you get for having a name that starts with "A".)

My vision of the future is:

"Call Dad for his birthday at 1100 his time and remind me half an hour before"
"Send this document to Rosemary, emphasising the executive summary"
"I'm unreachable until Asia is online again"
"When my boss approves my vacation, let my parents and wife know, and confirm the booking for the hotel and the cruise"

Computers have come a long way. But they are still forcing us to think and act the way they do. They need not.