Death of the DouchePad

One of the finest pleasure I experience in the workplace is to witness early adopters of immature technology. They behave like kids, my therapist would say there's a transference process between the device and the owner.

When these bozos buy the latest gadget, they quickly tour the office and demo whatever crap they bought to showcase how forward-thinking they are compared to other CGI members. They won't hesitate to pay $500 with after-tax money on some piece of electronic that won't improve their personal productivity, won't help them get laid and definitely won't bring any new revenues to the corporation. When asked about how great their new gizmo is, they invariably look upward and claim that 10 years from now whatever thing they just acquired will be common yet much more powerful and will help solve all kinds of tough problems like world hunger and socialism.

Such scenes are irritating, because these assholes keep bugging you and you loose precious billable minutes to listen to something so irrelevant you have to excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to break the conversation.

The fun part though, is witnessing that same early adopter deflate slowly and painfully when "their" technology is discarded by the market.

Case in point, HP killed the TouchPad less than 2 months after its introduction and more or less announced the death of webOS, the "fantastic" technology they got from Palm. It's an epic fail, what was HP's board of directors doing all this time? Check this out, you don't want these guys sitting on YOUR board, they'll steer your company into a major ditch.

Any meth-smoking dropout living on the street would have told you the Palm acquisition and the release of the TouchPad was doomed to fail since from a strategic standpoint the product had the same price and no real benefits compared to the market leader the iPad.

Following the press release, on-line retailers started a "fire sale" to get rid of uncool TouchPads at a 80% discount.

So back to our gizmo luminaries, this was a major blow to their ego and on Monday they were acting as if their spouse had dumped them over the week-end. Long face all over, the gadget that acted a social enhancer the previous week is hidden during meetings, since owners do not want to face questions such as Oh yeah, that was the device that got axed last Friday, how does that make you feel now? How much did you pay? How about future upgrades?

Dear members, this is yet another proof that you work for the best company in the world. Since we don't invest money in - just saying the word is painful to me - R&D, you are secured from the pest of hardware and software development. Others put the shareholder's money at stake in risky ventures, and we - the service people - just harvest the mature technologies that our ultra-conservative clients pick.

If you want to impress folks in a meeting, don't use a fucking DouchePad to express your thoughts in less than 140 characters. Get your HP 12c out of your jacket and crunch numbers in RPN, that will definitely grab my attention in a positive fashion.