Is It Cold In Here, or Is It Just Me?

If you were scheduled for surgery a couple of weeks ago, or if you're a Chilean miner, you may have missed the whole story. A skillion-dollar retail chain decided what they needed to do was update their tired old logo.

Sounds like someone ascended to a new position, doesn't it? Everything was fine, and then Jerry was elevated to Grand High Communications Pooh-Baah. And how are you going to keep a job like that, if you can't point to something You Have Done? So the gears were engaged that resulted in a new, hip, groovy logo for the Gap. This kind of thing happens fairly often in Biddness, and it scares me.

I took a Marketing class a couple of years ago and it was full of these kinds of misadventures. Volkswagen, sixty years of dependable, economical, modest transportation, a brand that clearly communicated its products. Someone sitting in the Big Chair there decided they would move up-market to take on mighty Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. They brought to market a Volkswagen that cost as much as two. These are much prized on the used-car market, today. The original 2004 sold modestly, but you have to give these things a chance. After 2006, it was clear that people who wanted to spend Mercedes money on cars wanted… Mercedes. You cannot today buy a new Volkswagen Phaeton.

The New Coke story was interesting. Pepsi was kicking their hiney on TV urging people to "Take the Pepsi Challenge!" Most people who did found they preferred the taste of Pepsi to the taste of Coke. They were buying Coke more out of habit. So, Coke developed a formula that tasted great a paper cup mouthful at a time. In test after test, it beat Pepsi and it beat Coca-Cola. But in 12oz quantities it was almost awful. Coke beat a hasty retreat from the formula after weeks, in those pre-internet days.

So it made me wonder about Marketing. How valid a field of study is it, if you can get so much so wrong? It's hard to imagine Coke or Gap or Volkswagen really deciding to change a logo, to enter a new market or to burn down the secret recipe that had brought it so much success on a whim. There must have been studies, there must have been spreadsheets that comforted people and led them to believe that what they were doing was A Good Thing.

Sure, there may have been problems with the methodology. Our most-recent Web site was tested in several settings, including an audience of tractor buyers and quilt judgers at the state fair, and a great hue and cry went up when some percentage could not locate the huge "Enroll Now!" button at the top of the screen, which led to the enrollment Web page, of course. The case they made was that we were losing enrollment, I guess. Based on the actions of their parents, college kids were thought to be unable to figure out how to sign-up and sign-on and become future alumni and send Large Checks to the school for years to come. I was mildly worried, at first. And then I remembered: Enrollment was up, this year and last. Hmm….

Gap had a box that identified the store and the clothing, everywhere except on the radio. A darkish medium-blue field, square, with all capitals spelling G A P in the center, in a tall, skinny, serifed font ( Spire Regular ) cast in white. Beautiful? Maybe not, but certainly elegant.

As things happened, the Gap folks backed down almost immediately, and abandoned the Helvetica capital-G, lower-cased a and p, dark against an indistinct white background, with an odd smudge of dark blue gradient offset behind and above the p. Helvetica is great for signage, and there was a wonderful movie about it a few years ago. But it's not the visible face of the Gap.

But shouldn't someone have known this? Shouldn't someone have stopped them?

It Won't Always Be Like This

"It won't always be like it is, now". That's what a teacher once told me was the First Rule of Money. He said you could apply this to any area of study with a dollar sign in front of it. Business, finance, economics, investing. It didn't matter. The first thing you have to know is that it won't always be like it is, now.

This was some comfort to me, because things at the time were pretty awful. Unemployment was up. Inflation was up. The general mood in the country was bad for the first time in many peoples' lives. Kids born in the early '50s grew up in a world where things got better every year and people just accepted that the American Way was the best. But nothing lasts forever.

If you still handle your money today the way it was popular in 1974 or 1982 you don't have much money left. Back then, interest rates were high and you could lock-in a great return, risk-free, by buying a CD. Stocks? They were cheap for a reason, though nobody could agree on what the reason was. And then one day in 1982 The Market took off. And nobody saw it coming, and nobody could agree on why, but nobody wanted to miss out on it, either. The same thing happened with real estate.

Political polling is slipping because they depend almost entirely upon land-line telephones. This was fine for a hundred years, but today a lot of households have cell phones only. Today there are noticeably fewer young people and low-income people around to pick up a wired phone and answer questions. This tends to overstate some advantages and understate others.

So here we are, building Web pages, with HTML. For a while, they told us we were using the last version of HTML we would ever have to learn. We could learn it all, at last. Once you figured out the nuances of the data definition tag, you were done and could go out and play. And build Web pages. And so we did.

Cascading Style Sheets came along, got better for a while and then stalled, similar to the path HTML had been on. So "this" was how HTML worked, and "that" is how CSS worked. Kewl. We got down to having only to learn the subtle differences between releases of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver MX 2004 to Dreamweaver 8? Take a week or so and you'll be golden. Creative Suite 3? Sure! Creative Suite 4? You bet!

After a while it starts to look like these are the tools you're going to use for the rest of your career. People ask "Should I upgrade?" They never seem to ask "Should I buy Dreamweaver at all?" Maybe it's time to start asking.

Look, this is a priesthood that not everyone is interested in joining. And in truth, not everyone needs this much horsepower, anyway. You could run a small or even a medium-sized business quite easily with Dreamweaver. But if your needs are simple you don't require the kinds of features and benefits Dreamweaver is packed with. You don't need the support for various scripting interfaces, you don't need the programmy features. What you need is about where Dreamweaver was at Version 5ive! But all of those Dreamweaver developers still have jobs and the odds are good we will one day have shelves full of Dreamweaver CS9.

Is this a Good Idea? Is it necessary? In these troubled economic times (drink), should we just blindly upgrade every several months or could that money be better used in some other way, like getting you an extra cable channel or two, or maybe putting you into the V6 model, instead of the four-cylinder?

Computers were supposed to make our lives easier. We were supposed to be better off, for having them and mastering them. Can't we use some of their horsepower and intelligence and apply it to the task of building Web pages?

Well, yeah. As it turns out, we can. And it may signal the end of the need for Dreamweaver, for most people. There will still be some folks who have to have the kinds of gee-whiz features that are part of the baked-in goodness in every box. And they will still need training (I hope) in HTML and CSS and Dreamweaver, itself.

But there may be a tool that will be Good Enough for most others. A tool that's free, except for the frictional expense of training.

Learning. Or, Not.

It's been said often enough there must be some truth to it: You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks. I may be proof of this, myself.

I'm taking a math class, this semester. Math for Dummies, I call it. Math 095 isn't even in the catalog. That's how elemental it is. This is basic Algebra. The kind most of us learned in high school. Hi, I'm the kid in the back of the class who drew pictures of airplanes and wondered what a boob felt like.

I know the feeling of frustration that comes when you struggle with learning. That's what motivates me to find different ways to illustrate an issue, and to keep asking during class if everyone is getting this or not. Some respond well to theory. Others need a more practical example. Some can hear it and know it forever, while others need to see it before they can believe it. I try to do whatever it takes to get that germ of an idea to take hold and there is no better thrill than seeing that "lightbulb moment" when someone's eyes light up and their facial expression changes and you know—they get it.

I don't get it. I have never been friendly with math. I can fly airplanes and I've done my taxes for thirty years. But I don't get a lot of math. When I started back to school to finish my degree, I knew I would need a few math classes and the Math department cheerfully provided a Math Placement Exam, to find out where my level was. I think I got my name right. Some of the equations they sketched out made no sense at all to me, but I remember some were kind of pretty, design-wise. Brackets and parenthesis and lines here and there. The kid who graded me told me I'd tested-out at Forrest Gump levels, meaning I could not even start with their 100-level classes, I would have to take Math 095 to get myself tuned-up for even Math 100.

This I did, in fulfillment of a promise I made to my father that I would finish my degree. And you know what? I did pretty well in that class, scoring enough points to not even need to take the final exam. I was ready to move on, except I had Things To Do that next semester and the one after that, and, well, it seems this class "expires" after a year. They may or may not have said something about that, I don't remember.

At any rate, I'm back. Going over the same ground I covered two years ago. Only this time I am struggling. I sit in the front row of class, just like last time. And I pay attention and I ask questions and I nod. But when I get home and crack open the books, they may as well be written in hieroglyphics. I am actually, provably, stupider this October than I was in October of 2008. Same teacher, same book, same chair. The only difference is me.

One of the things we learn in pilot training is to never give up. We listen to a recording of an air traffic controller as he deals with a young pilot who has screwed up, but somehow can't bring himself to do anything but scream into the microphone "MayDay! MayDay!" over and over as if that was going to save him. It didn't. We watch videotape that a thoughtful pilot provided of his own demise with a little video camera bracketed into the cockpit to record flights. You can actually feel the energy drain from a roomful of pilots as the guy on tape says "Hey, watch this!" and proceeds to ride it in.

Compare and contrast that with airline Captains Sully and Haynes. Sully put his gleaming jet down in the river next to one of the biggest cities in the world and lost not a single life. Haynes experienced an in-flight engine failure that took out his hydraulic system. "What's the procedure for loss of hydraulics?" he asked his flight engineer. "There isn't one" came the reply. But Al Haynes didn't give up. And though some didn't make it as his giant jet cartwheeled across the Sioux City airport, an awful lot of people lived through that crash. He kept trying things the whole time, and managed to keep the airplane away from the city and any buildings, steering it onto a closed runway.

My hat is off to those guys. I have never wanted to give up on anything so much as Math 095 in my life. This week.

Help!

When do you know when you have crossed the line from a problem you can handle yourself to a problem you need assistance with?

This comes up often, or at least I hope it does, as we are all constantly bumping up against the limits of our comfort zones. Maybe the issue is with something you have read about, or remember hearing of in some blog or meeting, somewhere. But maybe it's something you just have no experience with at all. What do you do, then? No, I mean after the crying?

There is a deep and wide river of testosterone that runs through the middle of this. Two or three times in any given year, someone will tell me about the time they took a problem, threw it to the ground and beat it senseless, wrestling with it for seven hours before they finally figured out a solution. This is a point of pride for many people, but it always makes me shake my head. You blew a whole day on this? When you could have gotten an answer by calling or writing anyone in the Web Developer Network and ended up five or six hours ahead, productivity-wise? And you're proud of this?

But there is something to the Do It Yourself aspect. It's a great help in learning your craft. In a former life as a mainframe computer operator, I would encounter various situations where the computer would stop, issue some cryptic message and require some assurance or comforting before it would continue. The first week or so, it went like this: The computer would crash. I would call the Systems Analyst on duty, who would then guide me step-by-step to some resolution. But about a week into my new job, all of the Systems guys were away on vacation and I had to call their boss.

"Hi, it's Mark. The Cyber crashed again" I told a frustrated manager. "What does the error message say?" he replied. I dutifully read it off, over the phone. Now, understand that these big machines don't just stop and throw up a little box on the screen with an "Okay" and "Reset" button. You would get error messages that themselves were clues as to what kind of problem you were having. Every conceivable error was cataloged and cross-referenced in huge manuals kept in a cart near the main console. CO411 might be a core, or memory problem—the programmer was asking a program to think about more than he had given it room to comfortably work in. Or it might be IO234, a problem with the Input/Output area of the big machine. Some trouble with a tape drive or a printer. Before, when I would call, the programmer would walk me through fixing the problem and I would move on, thinking my involvement was done. I was just a clerk, running a big machine.

But with their boss taught me how to learn about the machine, and what it was expecting. He wanted to teach me how to learn (what he really wanted was to get back to watching M*A*S*H on TV), so I would be less likely to call back. Soon enough, I was calling analysts with one of the giant manuals opened in my lap, my finger already on the reference for the error message I'd gotten. I would suggest a way to fix things and they would approve it and we'd move on. Within a few weeks, I wasn't calling people and interrupting their evenings, I was sending them e-mails explaining what had gone wrong and how I had fixed things. That's about the time they started bringing in pizza for me, in the evenings.

Many things in life seem to work in three's and this is where I draw the line, myself. If I discover a problem I will try three ways to fix it myself but at that point it's probably easier, cheaper and faster to call in an expert opinion. This has served me well in technology and even working on things around the house. I'll fiddle with it, I'll monkey with it and then I'll futz with it. But if it's not fixed after my fiddling, monkeying and futzing, then damnit, it's time to call a plumber.

Know what you know, and learn what you don't. And don't be afraid to ask for help.