There’s a lot to a lift.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of an analytical thinker, go and get a piece of paper and a pencil. Think of a lift you know. It doesn’t matter whether you love it, hate it, or have no particular feelings and just think of it as a means of changing floors in a building.

Now, for exactly 10 minutes – time yourself – make as many notes as you can about the factors involved in answering these questions:

“What has made this lift like it is?”

and

“How should this lift be?”.

Turn off the screen. Go on. Really - Turn It Off.

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Anything interesting emerge? Maybe, maybe not. How much did you generate? Anything there about logical behaviour, customer service standards, risk, accessibility, aesthetics, lifespan, safety, efficiency, queuing theory, optimisation, heuristics, geographical location, environmental impact, user health, cost, policy, procurement, politics?

What I love about lifts is that the basic premise is immensely simple and transparent. If you have two floors in a building, a box on a wire can take you between them. With the exception of odd twists such as hydraulic mountings this is essentially all they do. In a sense. But as soon as you start to introduce additional variables: number of floors, number of lifts, uneven distribution of users over time, etc. things can get very complex very quickly. Which makes “what has made this lift like it is?” a pretty interesting exercise in analysis. Finding the story-behind-the-story.

Oh, before going back to the paradigm which will be adopted from here onwards of “a box on a wire” it’s worth briefly remembering the first lift that really caught my attention. My faculty building at university had a splendid creation called a Paternoster. (Pub mythology has it that they’re now illegal. I wouldn’t be surprised.) Every floor of an eight-storey building had two floor-to-ceiling open hatches next to each other. In the two shafts that lay behind them circulated perhaps 20 platforms on a belt stretching the entire height of the building and back again, naturally. At any point in time eight platforms would be ascending, eight descending, and I guess two each at top and bottom going round the wheels in the basement and 9^th floor machine room. For the avoidance of doubt, the platforms were on gimbals – should one ever accidentally travel the voids at top and bottom (and who didn’t?) it wasn’t a question of being hurled from floor to ceiling as the ‘virtual lift box’ inverted. Of course there were nods to safety: pivoting boards built into ceiling, floor and lift platform (think of these as the ‘cutting edges’ and you’ll get the picture) which if disturbed would freeze the whole thing and prevent amusing toe-severing scenes on the way to Dr Brady’s lectures. (While I know many who would do the whole 16-floor trip just to see what it was like, I don’t know of a single soul who tried to test the safety boards to see if their fingers/toes remained intact.)

Back to ordinary lifts. Think again of a set of lifts you know. Are they designed around the user? First thing in the morning – when everyone’s coming in – do they ‘rest’ on the ground floor, ready to receive their cargo, and returning after they’ve dropped each load off on higher floors? What about the end of the day? Would you expect them to take up resting positions distributed over the higher floors to increase the chances of one being ready and waiting as users arrive? Would you skew this to favour the higher floors? That might help more people to take the stairs… Already it’s possible to see how different objectives might be met by tweaking the way the lifts work.

There’s a nine-floor building in London with what seems like a fairly generous selection of eight lifts. Until you watch their behaviour closely. Then you see that, even if all eight are resting on the ground floor, your request for upward travel will only result in the same one opening and re-opening its doors until it’s full. (It probably knows it’s full via a weight sensor in the floor.) You certainly won’t get another one opening its doors for you until the first has left full. This means that some poor souls will have two or three minutes to endure with the doors opening and closing before finally leaving. And others jab frustratedly at lifts they know are there, but can’t use. What on earth’s going on? Then you remember that this used to be the Department of the Environment. Was it a procurement coup to pick the tender with the lowest energy use? Or is a political point being made by tweaking the lift logic to ‘maximum efficiency’ even if this results in a less-than-delightful user experience?

The mathematicians have some fancy algorithms to optimise the basic logistics of covering ground efficiently. There’s even a branch of queuing theory known as elevator theory. Amongst other things it can be used to design how the magnetic heads that sweep over hard disk drives work. (If you have several heads, and need to collect data from different portions of the disk, then you face very similar planning challenges to moving people to different floors of a building.) But, as we’ve seen, even the purity of logistical efficiency can take second place to health, politics or other objectives.

A closing thought: next time you’re waiting for a lift, or indeed, in a lift, and you don’t quite get the service you want – you might well be getting the service that some else wants you to have. And that goes for pretty much every other customer experience you encounter…

(Or why the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic means we shouldn’t get so stressed when big projects go tits-up. A journey via the physics of music, the ingenious Bach, and a whole lot of faking.)  Take a string. Tie it tightly between two fixed points. If you have a guitar to hand, even better, but it’s not essential. In fact, you should be able to grasp all of what follows without any props at all, providing you’re prepared to take on trust some of the descriptions. Please now forget everything you know, assume, or half-remember being taught about music theory. Pluck the string and listen to the sound. That note – the clear, strong one you can hear? This is our starting point. Our fundamental. Hold your finger lightly against the string, half-way along. Pluck again, in the centre of one of the halves. Hear that new note? If the string’s tight enough, it should be higher than the open-string note, but in a way, its twin. Sounding very similar in character – in perfect harmony in fact – just higher. (“Twice” as high in a sense. The string is vibrating exactly twice as quickly as it did when it was twice the length.) If you laid the sound waves of the open-string note side-by-side with those of the higher note, every other ‘peak’ of the waves would be in exactly the same place. That makes for great harmony. (All going swimmingly so far; let’s mix it up by finding another note). This time hold your finger lightly against the string, but a third of the way along (doesn’t matter from which end). Pluck the shorter part of the string with your other hand. Now this is quite different. You get a note that’s even higher than the ‘half-way’ note. Play the ‘half-way’ note again. Then the “third-the-way-along” again. Listen to the difference. If they were played together at the same time (you’d obviously need two identical strings) they’d also sound in pleasant harmony. The higher note’s sound-waves are packed together a little more tightly, but laying the two side-by-side, the peaks would again coincide regularly, this time in a 3-to-2 ratio, rather than 2-to-1 as before. Let’s introduce some labels here to cut down on the hyphens… Call the ‘half-way’ note the ‘octave’. (Try and wipe from your mind the oct- prefix as being anything to do with the number eight. All that can come later, as I hope will become clear). Call the ‘third-the-way’ note the ‘dominant’. What we’ve done so far, without using any musical theory to speak of, is build a relationship that mathematically links two notes together. Two notes that are in perfect harmony. This simple description will be the building block of what follows. Which should get quite a bit more weird soon – bear with me. (By the way, the demonstration with the tied string and so on couldn’t have been done using a piano. Not an ordinary piano anyway. Because a piano has to ‘fake’ its notes, just a tiny bit. All will become clear, I hope.)

Promised much, delivered a bit of it…. Where did it go wrong, Mistress Mac? Was it your huge screen that wasn’t really, pin-sharp graphics that seemed to blur the more I looked at them, ever-so-unexpected crashes when you promised you wouldn’t, wilful absence of a delete key or my shock at realising just how much the rest of the world hated you as well?

You were gorgeous though, even if far, far heavier than you should be. It’s been a while (over 15 years) since I flirted with your sort. I’d expected the operating system to have changed. But not always for the better, huh? The dock is clever, but how am I really supposed to use stacks? Why do some applications produce a lurking icon that’s-sort-of-like-a-disc that I have to ‘eject’ (but others don’t)? You Macfans are grinning here, thinking, Windowsdinosaurboy, you have to accept some things Are. Just. Different.

Of course I do, but I had such high expectations… Expectations like the not-crashing thing. Oh dear. Three on day one, two on day two, the most spectacular finishing with a jump-jet take-off noise and the fan hitting a coloratura E flat before I strangled the power off.

I’m not a jealous man, far from it; in fact your failure to talk to other devices when I actually wanted you to was just plain embarrassing. The one feature that would have meant I could live (sort of) within a native Mac environment would have been PDA synchronisation. Business critical this one. Can it be done? No.

This was the surreal bit where I picked below the gloss and found myself back in 1987 groping around for bits of shareware and half-baked garage apps from A Bloke In Wisconsin who swears he’s finally cracked how to get Lynx or Lion or whatever to speak in code to Windows Mobile. But not Leopard, yet, oh no, we haven’t got the, erm, sorted, the, er, we’re waiting for more info from Apple, mutter… shuffle… refund.

One bit of freeware actually managed to get my PDA contacts into the Mac address book - all but one of them, anyway. Unfortunately it was supposed to do iCal as well, but could only cope with going in one direction (and that wasn’t the device-to-Mac route which might even have satisfied me as a back-up).

Apple themselves. Flawed Geniuses. That shop/zoo/theme-park in Regent St. ’Nuff said. Having beaten a way through the spotty backpackers to find similar-breed-but-in-black-T-shirt, I asked what seemed to me simple questions. “This is what I need…” “Will this work with this?” “And this software I think too, and it all has to work together or I’ll bring it back: how wonderful that you give me 14 days to get it right, at no risk.”

“What do you mean, not the software? It’s the whole set-up I need to check out. Oh, ok, yeah, sure I understand, you trust me, but not completely. Yeah, that’s fine. Tell you what I’ll buy the software then, get free trial versions if I can to test it all out, but if it’s good then I’ll open my shrink wraps and I won’t have to come back to the zoo again.”

At which point I asked for some child pornography.

Well, you’d think I had judging by the look on the face of my Genius. What I’d actually said was “Ok, so can I also buy a copy of Windows then so I can install that if Parallels seems to be working out?”. No. I cannot get that here. I cannot buy porn here, I cannot buy narcotics Class A, B nor C here, I cannot buy an Olympic-size swimming pool here, and I most certainly cannot buy a copy of the most popular operating system in the world from here. It’s a computer shop for heaven’s sake. What was I thinking?

C’mon guys – the war is over. You have your market, Bill has his. You’re fashionable, he’s functional. You Aren’t Really In Competition With Each Other. Move on. Sell his software. Take a margin on it. Don’t be so proud. Perhaps even think about licensing some of your own stuff? Sell those little white apple stickers as well and let your wannabee designer/musician/artist types use it to cover up the letters “IBM” on their £400 laptop that is just as quick, just as useful, oh and about half the weight… (ranting aside, I’m rational, I know PCs are cheaper and just as quick, but I still came into your shop. Repeat: you are not in competition).

And some other little tips for Apple if they’re remotely serious about having anything called customer-centric strategy. Sticking a little plug-in to Safari to play the most common embedded media files wouldn’t really be that hard would it? I’m even prepared to wait for a ported iPlayer if that’s a better way overall for the BBC to spend my licence fee. But to get “Game Over” when trying to watch a tiny video clip on the BBC News site? Purrrr-lease.

Put the delete key in. Just above backspace, where that rather less useful Eject button lives at the moment. Just there.

Buy Missing Sync or PocketMac Pro. Make one of them work. Make a fortune out of a robust PDA-to-Mac product. Or just put it into the operating system.

(I’ll probably get another one before very long though. Let’s see if there’s anything behind this new MacBook Pro launch rumour first…)

The first post - and straight to the last rites…

It’s well over 10 years now since I’ve been part of online communities of one sort or another. Support, discussion, campaign, “special interest”… Some of the cheery older souls I’ve known are in their 70s now. One or two may even have died. In fact, statistically, quite a few must have.

But these are still early days for this end of the market. Logging on and popping off is only going to get more popular, inevitably (in the most literal sense of the word). Many of the departed have already publicly documented their decline and demise, of course - in some cases movingly and memorably (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4211475.stm).

Blogging off into the sunset has so far only been open to those who have a bit of notice: perhaps tragically young, perhaps angry, always compelling. What of the rest of us, declining at a greater or lesser rate? What protocols will evolve as an ageing generation taps ever more slowly at the keyboard, arthritic knuckles creaking away? Will it be good form to breezily claim spritely vigour, in defiance of all physical evidence? Or will it be polite to gradually warm up your network to the reality of your imminent cooling down? (Getting honest about things - which, if this site has a theme at all, could become a recurring feature here.)

And just getting the message out to those networks, particularly if it’s all a bit sudden… Will wills routinely feature a few choice URLs, or even ids and passwords? (I am reminded of the death of a friend recently: the family, doing their best to contact friends, went through the address book sending blank emails with funeral directions attached. From the deceased. That was interesting.) Has the first enterprising intermediary already set up shop? I note that www.ifyourereadingthis.com already has an owner.

We don’t know. But we’re definitely going to find out.