I Don&#39;t Much Like My iPod

As blasphemous as this might sound, I don’t much like my iPod. That’s not to say that it isn’t one of the coolest pieces of technology that I own, nor that it’s practically a miracle that I can fit five times the music I owned in college in the palm of my hand instead of in boxes in the back seat of my old Toyota.

And it’s not saying I’m ready to give it up, either.

But, if the essential purpose of my iPod is to deliver quality music to my ear, it just isn’t that good. Everything sounds—and I’m struggling to find the right word—hard, or flat, or grating, or cold. Most of it I can tolerate, especially in small doses, but some selections I really cannot abide, and some give me a headache.

I’ve tried Bose and Sennheiser and a variety of styles of headphones. It ain’t that.

It’s more a demographic problem, I think: I grew up listening to music on vinyl, and despite its limitations, vinyl was warmer and offered a fuller spectrum of frequencies.

Smashing music into an MP3 format, as convenient as that might be, changes the music in a way that tends to make it distressingly amusical.

In fact, I was reading the other day that Metallica’s new release (not in my demo, exactly, speaking of demographics) went on sale September 12 as a two-LP set. Recent releases from Madonna and Coldplay are also on vinyl, while U2 and Van Morrison are re-releasing their back catalog in vinyl.

Overall, it’s a trend worth watching: Worldwide sales of LP records doubled from 3 million to 6 million units in 2007, while turntables grew more than 80% . That’s not bad for a technology that has been in decline for two decades. And, it should only improve now that Amazon and Best Buy are stocking more LPs. (Perhaps, finally, an example of a "long tail" that works.)

All of this is a long way of saying: The abilities of technology are limited by our own abilities. We could probably show a video on the head of a pin, but who would want to watch it?

I’ve been with a variety of engineers and CTOs helping me to assess a company or technology. The difference between a young technologist and an older, more mature one: The former starts with the technology and eventually gets to the people using it, and the latter starts with the user and moves outward toward the technology. It’s a striking difference when you see it in action, and yields a whole different set of insights.

This isn’t Emerson, or Leo Marx, or people “become tools of their tools” stuff. This isn’t Charlie Chaplin caught in the cogs of the machine. This isn’t a nod to Luddites. This is recognition that technology with unlimited potential really isn’t, and factoring that into its design and use is essential.

In fact, any scheme that envisions technology as a panacea—and that’s about 90% of the business plans I get to read—is headed for a rude awakening.

That’s why the story about Defense Secretary Robert Gates was so surprising this week, hidden away behind all the articles spewing fiscal calamity. There are few organizations on earth more closely associated with the funding, research and development of the latest and greatest technology than the military in general, and the American military in particular.

I wrote not long ago about Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans, credited in American myth to brave Kentucky frontiersmen who, in fact, fled the battle, relying on the accuracy of the artillery—a product of the nascent Industrial Revolution—to rout the British. I was reading recently about Eli Whitney, who, when he wasn’t trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to defend the patent on his cotton gin, was desperately (and again, unsuccessfully) trying to meet the American military’s commitment to what was called interchangeability: If an American soldier found two broken muskets on the battlefield, he should be able to make a single working musket from the interchangeable parts.

This was such an important idea that, when finally perfected (by others, not Whitney), the British—the acknowledged leaders in global manufacturing in the early nineteenth century—referred to it as the “American system of manufacture.”

So, the other day when Secretary Gates told the National Defense University that leaders must be skeptical that technology can bring order to the violent battlefield, he was saying a lot. “Never neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of warfare, which is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain.” Gates challenged those who advocated investing in smaller numbers of higher-technology weapons in a belief that war can be revolutionized, fought at long distance with American forces never getting bloodied.

Had America, for example, invested more to simply add armor to transports in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said, we could have saved American lives.

“Be modest about what military force can accomplish, and what technology can accomplish,” he concluded.

Cool. Embrace technology, but be modest about what it can really do. This is the kind of CTO you want to take into battle.

I wonder if Secretary Gates would be willing to take a look at my iPod?

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations