Huge need to make technology simpler - a scandal

Yesterday I asked an audience of CIOs and other technology people to put their hands up if they had experienced serious problems getting their personal organisers (PDAs) to communicate with their computers, problems with synchronisation etc.

 

The majority put their hands up.  I always find the same – even when speaking at events organised by computer or software companies for their own people. 

 

It is a real scandal:  I have had huge problems myself, and I also consider myself computer literate, have been consulting in IT and speaking to IT audiences for over 25 years.

 

If we can’t get these PDAs and computers to talk, who can?  It is a scandal that these kinds of products and solutions are sold when they are so unreliable.  It is a complete and utter waste of executive time to sell these things when the only way to make them work is to spend 10 hours on helplines…without certainty of a solution.

 

My own problem?  I have over 6500 outlook contacts and there is not a single PDA on the market that can cope because of internal memory limitations which are pathetically small despite the fact that I have external memory card of a gigabyte.  The system becomes unstable and has to be constantly reset,

 

The external card cannot be accessed by Outlook on Windows Mobile, and the alternative Symbian operating system used by Nokia is also unable to cope.

 

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