It bugs me when I hear an executive talk about 'doubling down' on an initiative. It's most often used to indicate that someone is redoubling their efforts in order to win, or that they're otherwise entering a 'make or break' period.

At the blackjack table, doubling down means to reduce your chances of success when you're in a good position in exchange for the ability to increase your bet. Doubling down when you're behind in order to catch up is a rookie move.

I wrote a thing about what I feel are some recent Google UX missteps and I published it on Google+. I like to think of Fury as my soapbox and Google+ as a place for conversation so I posted those thoughts there because it felt more like a conversation than a soapbox, but if you read Fury then the post is definitely worth a read. For the full Kevin experience it's probably worth following me on Google+ and on Twitter.

• OS X 10.9 - Leopard Seal
• OS X 10.10 - Sea Lion
• OS X 10.11 - Nyan Cat
• OS X 10.12 - Keyboard Cat
• OS X 10.13 - Ceiling Cat
• OS X 10.14 - Basement Cat
• OS X 10.15 - Bob Cat

(hat tip to @municode for Nyan Cat and inspiration)

It was supposed to be a breakthrough in travel efficiency. People go to the airport and board the nearest plane. The computers calculated the optimal destination for the sum of passengers and planes took off at once. The problem became immediately clear when every plane landed in Las Vegas, including the planes leaving Las Vegas.

Reading about Samsung's newly announced effort to combine their 'Bada' mobile OS with Intel's 'Tizen' mobile OS in an effort to reduce their dependency on Android, I was reminded of Taligent, Apple and IBM's joint venture in the mid-90s to create an alternative to Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP. The situations aren't really the same, but Wikipedia offered up a real gem of how Taligent came to be in the first place. It's something all software developers should keep in mind:

During the initial planning for the operating system to follow System 4.1, new ideas were written down on index cards. Ideas that were simple and could be included in a new version of the existing software were written on blue colored cards, those that were more advanced or took longer to implement were written on pink cards. A new operating system, code-named Pink, was planned based on the ideas written on the pink index cards. … In addition to running programs written for Pink, the system was to be capable of running existing Mac OS programs.

Sounds like a good idea, except:

The problem was that System 7 was so large in memory terms that it would barely fit onto existing Macintosh models, meaning that if Pink were going to run Mac OS programs by emulating System 7, it would have no room left over for itself.

And inevitably:

Meanwhile, corporate infighting at Apple doomed Pink. To those working on Blue, Pink was seen as a project that might steal mind share from their own work. As the turf war grew, engineers started to abandon Pink to work on Blue, and whole projects were brought into one group or another in a flurry of empire-building.

The whole project was eventually spun off as Taligent, an OS with a completely different purpose, and no longer part of the evolution of MacOS at all. So much for the pink cards. Go ahead and read the whole Wikipedia entry though, and think about the dangers of equating 'easy' and 'hard' with 'now' and 'later'. Also, apologies to those of you who read this during Wikipedia's SOPA blackout.

Motorola Mobility's CEO says Android handset manufacturers skin Android with their own UIs because the carriers demand it. Apparently it gives the illusion of a broader OS product offering than if they all ran stock Android. If this is true though, wouldn't the carriers embrace Windows Mobile phones as a truly differentiated OS choice? Apparently they aren't, because Microsoft is just launching a $200million program to pay salespeople a bounty for each Windows Mobile phone they sell, in an effort to get them to actually show the phones to prospective customers.

Update (11/4): Google has politely declined my offer. I spoke with the director of product management who oversees Reader and, while they do plan on making repairs to the UI, they don't feel that I would be a good fit at this time. I'm fine with this, and am happy that they're putting some resources into fixing some of the UX problems. Like many others, I was curious when Google announced that it would be revamping the Google Reader UI and refactor its social components into Google Plus. To that end, I wrote a brief blog post about what I felt would be a better alternative to stripping out Google Reader's social functionality. Now that the Google Reader redesign has gone live, it seems clear that the stripping of social functionality is only one of many significant problems that have come from repainting the product with the broad brush of Google's new visual style guide. Affordances have gone awry, the relative implied importance of use cases (such as subscribing) have fallen out of balance, and visual grouping of related items has been whitewashed away, to name a few problems. I believe this has happened because Google Reader was held to a mandate of refreshing Google products under a common style guide, but from what I've been told it had no full-time user experience resource to apply that guide in a way that made sense for the nuances and needs of that particular product. This product is important to me, and for many it fulfills the need for a source-centric news consumption product that has been overshadowed by the overwhelming push of 'social stream' products such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. While those products are important, they don't meet the same needs that Google Reader was designed to, and Reader should not fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion. And so I put my resources where my mouth is. As the former lead designer for Google Reader, I offer my services to Google, rejoining for a three month contract in order to restore and enhance the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google's new visual standards requirements. I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.

So the buzz is that Google Reader is going to lose its social sharing aspects in deference to Google Plus. Some people are raising a fuss about this, and with good reason. I can see Google's desire to consolidate its social sharing strategy, but there's a simple solution. Rebuild Google Reader's social sharing using the Google Plus API as a foundation. You make existing Google Reader users happy, you broaden their reach by extending the shares seamlessly into Google Plus, and you make a showcase for third-party developers on the kinds of products and services that can be built to enhance and extend Google Plus. * I helped design Google Reader and have opinions about it.

Today Google told the Telegraph that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) can't be installed on the Nexus One:

Owners of the first official Google phone, the Nexus One, will not be getting the upgrade, however. Barra said the hardware was simply too old to run the new operating system.

The troubling thing here is that the Nexus One only started going on sale 21 months ago, and it continued to be sold as Google's flagship Android device until last December, just 10 months ago. Since most users buy Nexus phones on a 2-year carrier contract, those who purchased Nexus Ones simply can't use the latest version of the operating system until they wait out their contracts, pay an early termination fee and change carriers, or spend a $300 premium for an unsubsidized replacement phone. I admire how quickly the Android platform continues to evolve, but it seems to be at the expense of its users. Note that I didn't say 'early adopters'. Those people only have to wait a few months for their contracts to expire. Those who waited and bought the Nexus One a year later are left with an obsolete phone that's still under contract for a year or more.

(or, The Problem with Anthropomorphizing Software in Blog Post Titles) Back in the early 1990s Apple introduced a voice recognition technology called 'PlainTalk' in the Centris 660AV and Quadra 840AV PowerPC Macintoshes. Like the iPhone 4s, at launch those were the only computers that could handle PlainTalk because of the computing power required. One of the cool bits about PlainTalk is that it was always listening, but would only take action when you addressed it. By default, you would address it by saying 'Computer', but this was a preference that could be changed to whatever you like. Eighteen years later, Siri has a name and won't let you change it, but she's happy to call you whatever you like.

She's a great assistant, but how discreet is she? It turns out that when you ask Siri to call you a pet name, it gets added to your contact card, and that pet name nickname will be attached to your contact card when you pass it along to anyone else. Here's a text dump of a vCard I sent via email:

At least I didn't ask her to call me 'Asshole'.