It's Simple Math

Every now and again I will see a new product hit the market that is designed to make people's lives easier. While this is good in theory, too often I feel like rather than taking a tough task and make it simpler these inventions just take an already easy task and make it idiot-proof. Basically, they are selling to the lowest common denominator and rewarding people for being dumb. Infomercials are notorious for selling just this kind of product. I offer as an example the spatula that doubles as tongs - it is a spatula that comes equipped with a top piece of plastic to clamp down on your food, making flipping that food easier. I'm sorry, but if you can't handle all the physics that go into flipping a burger using a spatula then perhaps you shouldn't be allowed near a grill. (Please note I am saying this a person who has not only received this utensil as a gift, but used it before.) This is why I believe the US patent office should not only judge whether a product is unique, but also whether or not it is necessary. To make it even easier for them, I have come up with a very simple formula to determine a product's usefulness: time of production per unit made, divided by time saved using the product, times 1,000. So, let's just say it takes two hours to make 1,000 units of a product. By my math, using that product had better save the world two hundred thousand man hours a year. Anything less than that and it is declared unnecessary.

I, as I always do, have a reason for bringing this up. As a guy who gets emailed various links all day long, I'm all for shortening URLs. There is no need to have these long, drawn-out addresses to cut and paste when all I'm trying to do is forward some embarrassing video of a soccer player I have never met missing a wide-open net. Now, usually those web pages are embedded deep into another website and that is what makes for those long URLs, so while I understand their existence, any way to have make it easier to get directly to them is good with me. It's why I think URL-shortening sites are a great product, but it appears we have gone too far with them. Recently, I saw a commercial for Overstock.com, bragging that they have a new shortcut, O.co. Now you just have to type that and it will take you directly to the company homepage. I'm sorry if I missed it as I've been out of it for a couple of days, but was this a big problem facing the Internet world? Since when has 12 letters been too much of a burden for people to handle? It takes about five seconds to type Overstock.com and about two to type O.co. Even if Overstock.com hired the best programmer they could find, I bet him it still took a few hours to create the shortcut and register it. That means by my math a couple million people need to use that shortcut by the end of the year to make it worth it. I doubt they are going to hit that mark. Good try, Overstock.com, but your time would be better spent trying to find more deals for people to buy.

-Another place people need to use my formula of time spent in development versus time it will actually save the world is in the App Store. Since I don't have an iPhone, I don't have any apps. However, I have been around enough people that do to have seen them in action, which is why I know that many of them are unnecessary. The one that I keep seeing (and therefore is fresh in my mind) is the app which allows you to pay for coffee by simply registering your credit card and then scanning your phone at the register. Allegedly, it is much safer and faster for both the store and the consumer. First off, if you're financing your morning coffee, you're an idiot. Secondly, if you honestly think it is wildly faster to open an app and then scan your iPhone through the register versus taking out a debit card and swiping it, I really think you have lost touch with reality. Even if it was faster by a second or two, that is still not enough time saved to have made the hours the programmer used to come up with that formula worth it. Rather than using their time so the line at the coffee shop is ten seconds shorter, perhaps that guy should have developed an app which would allow me to call someone on an iPhone without them being dropped by their cell carrier four times in ten minutes. Now, that would be an app worth having.