I am a big fan of  Microsoft Office OneNote. I think it is one of the most compelling applications Microsoft has released in recent history. I also love the physicality of my Moleskine notebooks as well. This new product from Adapx looks like it could bridge the two worlds. The future is bright for the convergence of paper and computing. I wonder how long before I can get an e-Paper Moleskine and equip my favorite fountain pen with digital ink.

Adapx Product Store - Capturx for MS Office OneNote 2007 Kit

My original post on War Rooms was made while I was at Microsoft. You can see it here, or read it below. (I could have sworn I took my MS BLOG down before I left but somehow it is still up.)

No I am not off my rocker or renouncing my beliefs and experiences with agile practices. I am a fan of precision. I like well engineered gadgets, cars, motorcycles, and systems. I prefer that our use of language is chosen with care to convey precise meanings. The term “War Room” is commonly used to describe a team collaboration space. Unfortunately teams generally go to a “War Room” during unusual activities – a bug bash, a production problem, a security breach. All of these are a crisis event. This is the root of why I don’t like the term “War Room.” For movie fans the quote from Dr. Strangelove is very apropos:  

“Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room!”

I believe the default state of a development team should not be in crisis. The natural state of a productive development team is in collaboration. This is accomplished by having the team do the majority of its work together. One of the most effective ways to facilitate this is by putting the team in a common shared space. Calling this space a “War Room” commutates the team is in crisis when it isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

So what should this space be called? One of the neat things about language is that sometimes precision is emergent – it takes time and use of imprecise terms to get the collective social consciousness to reach agreement. I have seen these spaces called “Team Room”(bland), “Collaboration Space” (unwieldy), Pit (short but certainly not sweet); the truth is that the term “War Room” has what an oenophile would call good mouth feel. I am hoping that a good collective term becomes emergent soon.

If you have a better term please drop me a line. I would love to hear it.

Here at Blast Radius I have been doing the change agent thing as well and we are on our way to what we seem to be calling Team Spaces. I like that and it seems to be working well.

Today one of my top guys sent a link to a new study from the University of Michigan. They found that productivity doubled in collaborative team environments. While at Microsoft I managed to get funding for a new space designed around collaboration for the patterns and practices team. Channel 9 still has a video tour of the space up if you are curious.

A few weeks back I was hopping up and down shouting when I got to see the Seattle Sunday paper. On the front page was an article on Microsoft's innovation in office configurations and pictures of the space for the patterns and practices team. Michael Puleio who I had hired to be part of p&p was right there on the front page, and Peter Provost who took over my job when I left was quoted. Way to go guys. Here is a nice slide show from the Seattle Times that shows great pictures of how the office spaces at Microsoft are changing.

I am pleased that as an industry we now have some more quantitative research supporting what many of us understood at a fundamental level for a long time. This joins other research on agile practices (notably Dr. Laurie Williams work on Pair Programming).

These practices work and make people happier in their work experience. What have you got to lose by trying them. Come on in, the Team Space is fine.

Well I broke my Jawbone today. No not the one the attached to the bottom part of my skull but rather my Aliph Jawbone. If I had broken my OEM jawbone I would be having a lot of trouble using the built in speech recognition in Windows Vista to write this blog post. More on speech recognition later.

They say that admitting that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. I don't really want to recover from my gadget affliction so I am not sure I really want to admit to anything.  However, I do admit I am a bit of a gadget nut - well maybe more than a bit. I like to get my geek on. I had a Nokia 6310i and a Jabra BT100 Bluetooth headset long before anyone realized that wireless headsets were required equipment for a superior mobile phone experience. I have had a series of Jabra, Plantronics headsets since then. Some I loved, and some I hated. Once I got the hang of putting the Jabra BT 100 (then later BT 250) on my ear I came to love them. They comfortable to wear any had increasing better levels of sound quality in subsequent models.

I have an affinity for design - I like things are well designed, elegant, simple, work well and do the job. Sometimes I lag the market while I wait for a technology to mature and sometimes I'm willing to put up with the slings and arrows associated with being an early adopter.

In April I read a column by John C. Dvorak that mentioned the Jawbone. I travel a lot and manage a distributed team so I spend a lot of time on the phone. Better sound clarity and performance in noisy environments (like airports) is the holy grail of headsets. Combine that with an elegant design and I decided I had to have one. I placed an order that day.

When the Jawbone arrived I was reminded of a section in Guy Kawasaki's book The MacIntosh Way. He was writing about the importance of presentation of product. One of his examples was the packaging for the 4D database package from ACIUS when he was President there. He explained that a lot of work had gone into the packaging to present almost a "new car" experience. The package was black, sleek, shiny, substantial and even had a new car smell. I was reminded of this recently when I was cleaning out some old boxes and came across my copy of 4D for System 7. I hesitated to throw out because of the substantial nature and the beautiful presentation even though for me the software had been irrelevant and in storage for 15 years. (I kept it - for now.)

The Jawbone packaging was just like the 4D packaging. It was sleek and black and presented the Jawbone in a beautiful manner. Unfortunately it was too beautiful. Too beautiful is what happens when something becomes so beautiful that it loses its utilitarian functionality. I actually managed to damage my Jawbone when I removed it. A plastic clip secured the ear channel to the packaging and in my haste I pulled the rubber boot on the ear channel off and damaged the mounting tabs on the ear channel. I was a really disappointed with my new purchase because it was so hard to get out of the packaging. It should have been intuitive, but the hidden clip stymied me.

I was able to ignore the damage for a while, but eventually the rubber in ear boot would not stay in place. I broke out the super glue and soon the cyanoacrylate did its job and the rubber in ear boot and ear channel were one. Shortly after that my friend Bill pointed out that a Jabra ear gel was a perfect fit did a better job than the plain round Aliph in ear boot. Doh!

Using the Jawbone has had its moments both good and bad as well.  Everyone I've asked has reported that the call quality is significantly better than other headsets. This was certainly the case for me. So the quality of the product in its core value proposition of sound quality in noisy environment had been a success. The secondary (perhaps primary?) goal of being a stylish accessory for the face was being overshadowed by two other usability problems directly related to being too beautiful.

The first problem is the whole mount/dismount problem. Getting the hang of putting this thing on your ear is hard. I have spoken with other Jawbone users who agree that this is big problem. Sure it is beautiful and I may buy into the whole face accessory line and want to wear it a lot but I am certainly not going to be a proto-Borg and wear it all the time. I feel like an idiot when I am fumbling it on to my ear when I get a call and am juggling my phone with one hand and hoping I can get it mounted before the call goes to voicemail. Well designed products should not make you feel like an idiot.

The second problem is the root of my broken Jawbone. The USB charger is a funny little curved cup that you place the end of the Jawbone in. Several male connectors poke through the end cap and charge the internal battery. Now kudos to Aliph for including both a USB and a normal charger in the package. But minus 10 bonus points for the kludgy mating system to get power. The insert and remove cycle on the charging cup is fraught with peril. Each time you try to pull the Jawbone out of the charger you run the risk of pulling the little thing apart. I finally misjudged the effort and ripped the rear cap off while trying to pull the Jawbone out of it's charging cup. Whoops.

So I broke my Jawbone today because it focused on being too beautiful instead of super useable. Something to consider in your designs. I certainly hope I learned a good lesson here and make sure my designs strike an appropriate balance between elegant design and utility.