Technical competency and terminology abuse

Today Apple unveiled its new iPhone, claimed to have reinvented the phone. So let’s talk about invention.

The iPhone is a music player, a phone that integrates seamlessly with contact management applications like calendar and address book. You can also view photos and watch videos and browse the web with its beautiful bright screen…… that is so wicked cool…. except my iPaq from 6 years ago could do all that!

I loved my iPaq, I still do. I have a large compact flash card and Windows Media Player so I can listen to music and watch full feature films on it. Back then when wireless wasn’t popular I had a CF modem I used to browse the web with Pocket IE. Believe it or not Pocket IE loads as fast as anything, it even scales down pictures to make web pages look great on that bright screen. I don’t have a GPRS card which otherwise would have allowed me to make phone calls with it (at the time I saw a Cisco demo of the integration of iPaq and Aironet 802.11b card to make IP phone calls). In all fairness, my iPaq is a bulkier than the iPhone. It also requires a stylus for scrolling – which brings me back to why I like my iPaq so much – it’s programmable - Microsoft had made Embedded Visual Studio freely available, and I have written several applications for PocketPC (available here). I could have added thumb scrolling myself, its just software.

Seen here double as a GPS is my iPaq, or what my coworker Ray so affectionately dubbed the brick for its bulkiness

I am not Apple bashing again (as I sometimes do) and I am sure the iPhone is a fine piece of shit. But the thing is, invention should be something new. Packaging together old functionalities doesn’t pass as an invention. Shinny shells and pretty graphics shouldn’t be passed on as inventions. Churn out a piece of equipment that basically does what some 6 year old PDAs could do and call it an invention makes me mad.

This behavior of terminology abuse has gone out of control in this industry. Six months ago I was reading up AJAX for work. AJAX is essentially 4 lines of code that allows a browser to update only portions of a page (instead of reloading an entire page). The technique of repainting as little as possible is ancient; it has been around forever in computer animation because it is crucial to avoid screen flashing. Yet you see so many less columnist calling AJAX a powerful technology. Pluuuuuease, a technology? Software that park cars - that’s technology. AJAX doesn’t even pass as a technique.

Since then I’ve been paying attention to how people describe software. Indeed, the better programmers normally would saying something like “we can just call those functions” instead of “we can leverage that technology”. And if you have said the latter in front of me, that’s right, I probably have rolled my eyes and grumbled “technology my ass”.