So Google may (or may not) be buying Twitter.
Some will consider this as yet another seamless step in Google's attempt not to dominate the world, but merely to own it. Others will be fascinated to see whether, in Google's hands, Twitter would lose its cachet, becoming drool rather than cool.
And then there's Douglas Bowman.
He left Google just a couple of weeks ago, baring his frustration as he went, in a blog.
"I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data," he wrote.
Right now, he appears to be the creative director of Twitter. He went there, presumably, to live or die by a slightly more tasteful and subjective saber. Now he may be faced with a return to those philosophies that seemed to have sucked the spit out of his soul.
You might think that Google would have exhibited some chastened emotions after his departure. You might think that the company would have considered whether their data-driven mania was, indeed, mania.
You might also think that grass is blue, the sky is black, and cow dung smells like the finest olive oil.
You see, last Sunday morning, I was bereft of Premier League soccer. And my television forced itself upon some local NBC channel, where there appeared a show called "Press Here."
I am sure it is a fine show. Just not, for me, for a Sunday morning. Anyway, before I could even slap myself awake, there appeared Google person Marissa Mayer. She was explaining to a couple of chaps (I'm sorry, I didn't catch who they were) how data can prove anything. And everything.
Here is a sample from her sermon: "Every design starts with an instinct. It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five, the data will support the change."
This was said with such astonishingly smug certainty that my butter croissant involuntarily twirled around my mouth before attempting to exit between my two front teeth.
This one short segment suggested why Douglas Bowman might have gone slightly loopy at the thought of 41 shades of blue being subjected to Google's infallible data test.
Of course, in moving to Twitter, Mr. Bowman may have negotiated such fine terms of employment that the only data that will matter to him, in the event of a sale to Google, would be the data remitted by his bank.
Still, can you imagine his first meeting post-sale when a know-all face looks upon him benignly and says, in a know-all voice: "That little blue birdy. The data just doesn't support it"?
It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google's visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.
In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: "I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data."
He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or the hair bang length of a brand manager.
Well, he didn't mention that last one, but I am prepared to believe it might be possible.
I know that there are some engineers out there who will delight in yet another triumph for alleged data over some subjective, sniffy, superior artist. I also know that there will be many, many artists and other sentient human beings who wish that they would just take a run and jump.
The artists wouldn't be sure, having seen Steve Wozniak's dancing exploits, that the engineers would all be able to coordinate the running and the jumping, but they would happily examine the living, breathing data.
I know we're all supposed to be heading into a rationalist phase, in which science dominates and judgment ruminates. But surely, there is (at least) one company that has proved that it is possible to marry engineering and something that might be described (by humans with no pixels to grind) as taste.
That company is Apple.
If Apple had been a purely data-driven company, would its products have ever looked as they do? And would its products ever have sold as they have?
(Credit:
CC David G Steadman)
I wouldn't even dream of attempting to compare the technical quality, brain power, or even dress sense of engineers at Apple and Google, though I have my subjective suspicions. But can anyone dispute that someone, somewhere along the line at Apple, made a judgment--a human, instinctive judgment--about what looks good and what doesn't?
Someone said, "I think," or "I feel," rather than, "The numbers tell me." And though I know it annoys some, Apple proved that people would pay more to be part of that tasteful world.
The fact is that human beings are astoundingly, depressingly, maddeningly human. Which makes them irrational, contradictory, capricious and, sometimes, just plain nuts.
These aspects are the hardest for engineers to get their talents around because, one hopes, they are impossible for engineers to get their talents around.
Apple recognized this from the beginning. The company understood that technology had to recognize humanity's irrationality and emotionality, with all the risk and subjectivity that entailed.
Apple managed to make it work. Google could too. If only it had a little more confidence in its own sense of taste, rather than in its apparent knee-jerk need to place a numerical value on every aspect of life, never mind business.
I suspect that Google wasn't quite so data-dependent at the company's inception. Do you really think that if the company used the same research methods then as it uses now to, for example, name itself, that "Google" would have been the winner?
My subjective feeling is that the company would have been called "SearchThis." Or, perhaps, "FindOut." How many of us would be searchthising or findouting today?
- prev
- 1
- next
