Mannerisms

An excellent question was asked at the Silicon South-West meeting last week.

“How many people have got a Bluetooth pairing to work which wasn’t a pairing between an earpiece and a mobile phone?” asked Peter Gardner, technology sector head for wireless communications at 3i, the venture capital house.

Out of the audience of a hundred people involved in the wireless industry, one of which was the CTO of the No.1 Bluetooth player CSR, only five put up their hands, and Gardner seemed surprised it was as many as that.

One of the odd things about life today is that people are so afraid of being thought to be technologically incompetent that they’d rather admit to having a sexually transmitted disease than that they can’t get a consumer electronics product to work.

If only people spoke up more often about the difficulties of getting stuff to work, then manufacturers would be pressured to make products more straightforward, and people like me would stop feeling so ruddy inadequate.