There are some days when I'm glad I'm so lazy that I can’t
even get up from the sofa where I'm typing this whilst watching Mythbusters
blow something up for the three millionth time to find my wallet. Otherwise, if
I were more go getting and active, I might have got up, found my wallet and
dropped £200 on this pile of geek-crack.
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| Pay attention 007, just in case your presentation is too big to email... |
Yup, wifi cufflinks. Utterly pointless and utterly useless but also great in a kind of super cyber spy/ultimate consultant kind of way. They have a wee dongle thing which you can plug into your laptop to make it a wifi hotspot (possibly redundant to share your laptop wifi no?) and a mildly parsimonious 2Gb USB stick in the other. You know, total cobblers but sneakily wonderful. “has anyone got a USB drive?” Why yesh money-penny” and watch as the nearest “choose-your-gender-I-can’t-be-arsed-with-sexist-assumptions-today” hottie faints at your awesome geek powers as you whip it out from your cufflinks.
I can’t explain it, I know these are utter, utter crap and
very expensive utter crap as well, but part of me, the part we don’t talk about
part of me, the one all of us who work in technology share to one degree or
another, wants these.
In fact selling to the technology community is a piece of
piss if you can work this out. It’s the lure of basic functionality mixed with a
“shiney-thing” veneer of classy design with perhaps a soupçon of exclusivity
and panache. This explains much, from the success of Apple’s kit to much of the
buzz around various social media venues. Let’s face it, there is a lot of so
called cool kit out there which adds very little to our lives yet we lust after
its combination of exclusivity and supposed sex appeal to the point where we
turn off large parts of our critical and analytical facilities to justify our purchase. Too easily we
become rabid fanboys/fangirls, slave to which ever purveyor of tat we have
persuaded ourselves is wonderful beyond belief.
This is mildly harmless when applied to consumer goods. The choice
of which phone is better doesn’t really matter much* but when we bring our
technology prejudices to play in the enterprise arena then mistakes can start
to cost money and even, at worst case, lives. There are a lot of people out
there who will only recommend technology camp X or enterprise stack Y, even
when it’s wrong for the customer, unworkable in that scenario, poor value
or an unwinnable sale. I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone else in the past and had to learn painful and expensive lessons as to why I was wrong. This is why
we teach consultants and systems designers architecture. So that they
can analyse a customer’s requirements, produce a functional specification and
map that to the capabilities of various technologies and recommend the right
one for the customers needs. That or use it to justify their shonky “same as
always” technology choice in a weasely pseudo scientific way of course. Either
way systems architecture is important, the method of getting to the solution and working out exactly what it is you are supposed to be delivering is the best place to start work, even if you have to wear wifi cufflinks
to really be one.
Incidentally you can buy those cufflinks from here:wifi cufflinks... if you really have to.
* well apart from the fact it’s obviously my phone, your
phone is for doofuses, my phone makes me into a latter day James Bond/astronaut/billionaire.
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