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Editorials:

A less tactile future, and how to avoid it

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing most of my typing on a Matias Tactile Pro 3 — a mechanical keyboard that’s much like the original Apple Extended or IBM Model M keyboards, in function, if not appearance. If you’re not old enough to remember those, that means it relies on mechanical key switches instead of the rubber membrane used by most keyboards these days. You feel, and hear every key press — and, after you’ve used one for a while, you’ll be much more aware of the mushy alternative hiding under other keyboards, and likely find them quite unsatisfying.

Mechanical keyboards have seen a slight resurgence as of late among gamers, who value their accuracy, but they mostly remain a niche product for folks like me — writers who might also happen to collect manual typewriters, or coders who honed their skills to their familiar clickety-clack sound in the 80s and 90s. I bring this up because it’s not just keyboards that have gotten less “tactile” in recent years, but computing and consumer electronics in general — and that includes cellphones. 

RIM, we’ve been here before

By now you’ve no doubt read or at least heard about the New York Times interview where RIM’s co-CEOs wound up asking most of the questions and challenged conventional wisdom about the company, or seen the BBC interview that Mike Lazaridis put an abrupt end to (see below, if you haven’t). Those both offer plenty of juicy morsels for folks like us to chew on, but they’re also indicative of a broader sense of frustration from the company that’s getting difficult to ignore. One that is strikingly similar to what we’ve recently seen from another company that grew to dominate on the world stage, became a figure of national pride in its home country, and is now struggling to reinvent itself in the face of stiff competition: Nokia. 

To get an idea of how similar the two situations are, we only need to look back to 2009 — admittedly an eternity in the smartphone business, but not really that long ago. While Nokia still dominated the worldwide smartphone market with Symbian by year’s end, there were clear signs that was about to change, with Nokia’s share slipping a full ten percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone — largely due to rapid gains from Apple and, yes, RIM. After that, it wasn’t long before the company’s CEO found himself in the hot seat, while Gartner and countless others began tossing around phrases like “re-arranging the deck chairs.” We all know what happened next.

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Other writing:

The Globe & Mail, “Flickr offers snapshot of where the Web’s headed.” December 1st, 2004

Video game reviews for The Globe & Mail: Metal Slug Advance, Alien Hominid, Destroy all Humans!, Game Boy Micro, We Love Katamari, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks

Movie Maker, “Oscar Snubs: 20 Great Films That Should Have Won an Oscar, but Didn’t.” March 20, 2005

Mindjack, “Reunderstanding Movies.” December 12, 2003.

Mindjack, “The New Future.” January 15, 2000. Also reprinted in MISC. magazine.