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Filed under Thoughts on June 5, 2008 by Jen Epting

Dreaming the Right Dreams

In the world of technology, progress is king. Every morning I ride the elevator up 30 floors to a bunch of people who are interested in finding solutions for the world, making it better, stronger, more efficient. They are innovators, they are optimists; there is no gap in technology that they don't want to fill with some snazzy code and a slick interface.

It's refreshing as hell.

I'm new to this world. I spent my first week gawking at my computer screen, discovering application after application that solved problems for me: Money management! Whiteboard scanning!. I had no idea people were even thinking about making these areas of my life better, let alone providing them for free on the Internet. Judge if you want, but I'm a pretty normal prototype of what Geoffrey Moore refers to as the "Pragmatists" (not super tech-savvy, but willing to get excited about using it when it fits just right). And as a social 20-something professional living in New York, I'm splat in the middle of the consumer group that software products want to court.

Which is why I bring a different perspective to the making of software. I'm surrounded by people who dream up big ideas on a daily basis, who notice the collaborative instinct we have here at Arc90 and write applications to harness that energy. And though I'm incredibly impressed by the ways people could use technology to evolve what they deem unsuitable, I'm also in a unique position to wonder about whether we should.

One of the issues I seem to keep stubbing my toe against is that of information storage. As members of this industry, we're getting so much better about storing and sorting, recording and re-finding information that we come across, that we're afraid to let anything go. In recent planning meetings for a new Arc product, we've discussed the extent to which users or ideas should be deleted- as in, gone. FOREVER. Everyone gets a little uneasy when that part of the conversation comes up- we're afraid that our users are going to accidentally do something undoable that they regret. We want to protect them, either because we're very sweet and we don't want to see them scrape their knees, or because we're cynical about the idea of being inundated with emails from people who never quite learned to read directions.

A recent tour of the web-application Evernote, whose insane motto is "Remember Everything," sticks out as a prime example. Essentially, it has the capacity to store EVERY possible thing for later use---notes on a napkin, a photo of your favorite bottle of sake, information on a web page. Everything you encounter in your life can be saved, tagged, and stored in your Evernote account. It's searchable and it's sexy (in the tour video, a search for a hotel results in images of a hand-written post-it labeled "The Venetian" stuck to the dude's old airplane tickets). But come on. Who has the time to invest in it all?

The whole scenario screams the question: are we living in the age of narcissism (in which we think everything we doodle on a napkin is worth keeping) or the age of progress (in which we become uber-efficient because we never waste time searching for anything, from our car keys to the genius invention you scribbled on a Post-it in 1998)?

The more I learn about the technology universe, the more I realize how crowded it is and how over-extended our potential users are. Applications like Evernote appeal to the control-freak within us, but won't ever reach broad consumption. Given the choice between scanning her old airline tickets into Evernote and spending a few minutes window-shopping, I think we know what the average Jane is going to pick. For that reason, if we want the Pragmatists as clients, we have to create software that's flashy enough for the technologists, but fulfills the true needs of the average consumer.

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