I do a little bit of jogging in my spare time, mainly along in the Brighton and Hove seafront. In my opinion the most important article I use when jogging is my running shoes. Many years ago I tried many different manufacturers of running shoes and found the Nike shoes suited my feet. I have used them ever since.

I recently made my annual pilgrimage to Niketown in London to buy a new pair of running shoes (Interesting that the actual number of styles of running shoes is tiny compared to the amount of Nike shoes they actually have in the store).

After making my choice - newer version of the previous years shoe -  ( I am really boring) the sales assistant asked if I used an iPod Nano. If so was I interested in the Nike+iPod integration.

As I always run with my iPod Nano I succumbed. Getting the system home all I needed to do was install a little transmitter into my left shoe, and plug a receiver into my iPod. That was it!.

It's fantastic; you choose how long you want to run for - time or distance- and it then tells you when you have completed various stages of the run. It tells how many calories used, minutes per mile and a stack more statistics.

When you next plug your iPod into your PC the system automatically syncs with iTunes and also sends the information to your personal section of the Nike running website.

Why do I like this little product so much?. Firstly it has added a new dimension to my running, pushing me to run faster or longer and ,more often than before; Secondly the integration was extremely simple with little intervention from myself apart from registering my personal details- it did what it said on the box and a whole lot more - It just worked.

I have just spent a weekend with a very good friend and his family in Chicago. My friend is a technology fiend. He frequently invests in the latest technology as soon as it is released to the market.

Just over a year ago he had his first child, giving him the perfect excuse to purchase a domestic High Definition Video camera from Sony. He was delighted with the pictures from the camera. However he soon discovered that the format that Sony had chosen to use for the video was propriety. This meant he couldn't edit the video clips and could only view the videos using Sony's own viewer.

My mate was upset. He managed all of his other video clips using Microsoft Media Player. He then spent many fruitless months looking around the internet to find a third party company that would convert his propriety Sony Video's into a standard format. His view of Sony is now much diminished. If he had know that Sony used a non-standard video format he probably would not have purchased the camera.

So what have the above got to do with a blog about Unified Communications?

Simple really, if organisations are going to fully embrace Unified communications the solutions need to be;

• Intuitive and easy to use - so end user training requirements are minimal
• Standards based - so UC components from different companies integrate tightly

If the manufacturers and integrators can't guarantee these two attributes then users will ignore Unified Communications and stay with their existing solutions.

Comments

There are currently 7 comments about this blog.

Chris Gabriel, 7 months ago

I think the missing word here is intuitive. Forget standards or simplicity, its about making technology that fits into a normal life or business process. Technology doesn't generally work when people have to change their behavior. If Mark's jogging shoes linked to his i-Pod (the world really has gone mad) forced Mark to jog with a limp he wouldn't have used them. Too many technologies force us to limp rather than run free!!!

Mandy, 8 months ago

And anyway the openness of standards is in the eye of the beholder - see a blog entry I wrote on this site a few weeks ago entitled 'Open standards ... a cautionary tale'.

Mark Adams, 8 months ago

Gary - As per my comment to Victoria I completely agree with your point

Mark Adams, 8 months ago

Victoria...Yes I think that there will always be a tustle between open and proprietary of applications, depends on yor viewpoint. Many companies wish to use proprietary software to differentiate their solutions - Apple, Microsoft and so on. Whereas others believe that open is better. As consumers I believe that we can only vote with our wallets. A good point in questions is Blu-Ray v HD DVD. Both consortia are very consious that they dont want to be the Betamax of next generation recording solutions..

Victoria Furness, 8 months ago

I've heard a lot of people raving about the Nike/iPod transmitter. However, I've also heard mutterings from other quarters that Apple is becoming more proprietary in its outlook, rather than open in its approach to technology development. Do you think this is one of those problems that will always exist, particularly as companies like Google, use the openness of their applications as one of their key selling points?

Gary Eastwood, 8 months ago

Hi Mark, a good point well made! Unfortunately, the Tech industry never seems to heed the lessons of the past. Standards wars have always occurred, and still do (Google's OpenSocial platform mentioned in other blogs is a topical case in point) - the only losers are the users and consumers. Caspar's 'consumerisation' of products should indeed be the way forward. But for those vendors that ignore this, we can all try to stop tedious standards wars by voting with our wallets !

Caspar, 8 months ago

Hi Mark Could'nt agree more with your statement about making things easy to use and intuitive. I read a strategy document about Google last week - one of their key precepts is that its all about the user experience and making the solution 100% focused on the user. I think direct consumer environments are great testing grounds for what is and is'nt a great easy to use product - apple are a great testament to this with the mac and ipod focusing purely on the user. I am sure that a lot of UC solutions and wider social networking vendors would do well to follow this logic of making their products "consumerised".

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