It occurred to me the other day that when one starts working with a large corporation, say over 10,000 people, it’s like being a tourist. You drop into a corner of their world and start feeling your way around, learning the lingo and the lay of the land. After a while you start to get comfortable, but perhaps make the mistake of thinking that every other part of this “nation” looks and acts and talks the same. Don’t forget that you are just a “corporate tourist” and you’ve just begun to scratch the surface of the culture.

Particularly for really large companies that have been around for a long time, getting to know them takes as long as getting to know a new country - years. The jargon, the TLA’s, are always one of the first and most obvious hurdles to get over. But as you spend more time in it, more nuances and subtleties unfold and present themselves. It takes a great deal of time to really feel, act and be seen as native. For a long time there will be a bit of distance, a thin veil, between you and “the natives”, and it takes deep, intensive and prolonged exposure and interaction to remove those.

I’ll give you an example: I recently learned that a corporate client has a very specific interpretation of the word “test” - they see it as a black and white, pass/fail procedure. Therefore talking about customer testing of designs, which are looked at partially subjectively, was setting ourselves up for problems. Simply substituting the word “evaluation” made everything OK again. This was never something that came up in conversation explicitly with the client - for them they were embedded in this way of thinking, and it was only after a chance conversation that it came to light.

It would be great if there were bus tours and cruises that gave quick overviews for corporate tourists, or a “Lonely Planet Guide to Megacorp”, or a Berlitz book of acronyms for Global Industries, Inc. Unfortunately we have to do it the old fashioned way: shoe leather, notebook, camera, facetime, and learn-by-oops translation.

Brilliant little bit by Steven Colbert on the genetic history of the new AT&T wireless. As Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen points out, Colbert does in 30+ seconds what the CEO of AT&T/Cingular failed to do in six minutes presenting on stage at MacWorld Expo: letting people know that Cingular will actually be changing its name to AT&T. The visual “travelogue” that Colbert does nicely recaps the garbled brand legacy that is AT&T today. His before/after image of the country at the end is great.

Take a look at this fairly randomly chosen page on Amazon (picture crop above). It contains the following:

• 3262 words
• Over 220 links (not including links that appear on pop-out submenus which add over 60 more). This is as many links as Yahoo had on its homepage at is peak of link quantity a couple of years ago.
• There are zones for navigation, purchasing (with multiple sub-zones), reviews, user-generated content, a wiki, a discussion forum, automatically generated recommendations, recent history of Amazon searches, advertising, special offers.
• There are also 8 search boxes and 6 drop-down menus, 4 master navigation tabs, and 12 buttons related to adding things to the cart or a wish list.

There isn’t a whole lot of obvious order to how these are presented, and no strong grid to help organize content.

What’s funny is that it mostly works, despite having what would generally be considered an overload of content and distractions. The amount of stuff enourages a non-linear approach to reading the page, as your eyes zig-zag around as they catch onto baubels and buttons.

In some ways an Amazon page is very much like wandering around inside a Target store.

You’re not expected to take everything in in one go, but are offered enough enticements to keep you coming back for repeat visits, each time aquiring a deeper understanding of the shopping landscape. You trundle your shopping cart around and some things will catch your eye, adjacent choices will be offered, and so on.

The other thing it has in common with Target is that every product is treated the same, whether it costs $1 or $1000 (the price range on Amazon is different than Target…). Every product gets the same set of features, recommendations, search options, tagging, etc. (With exceptions made for items like books, which have special features like SIPs that aren’t relevant elsewhere).

But it does raise the question of how much more can be loaded onto an Amazon page. Or perhaps they will start taking things away? The product wikis don’t seem to get used much, and discussion forums and user-uploaded photos only show up occasionally and then mostly for high-emotional-involvement or hot categories. Even a pretty hot product that’s been on the market for a while, like the Razr, only has 2 discussion threads and no wiki entries. Given the lifecyle of many products, they will be off the market before having time to build up wiki/discussion momentum.

I suspect that we will soon see Amazon either start to trim back, or do a wholesale redesign to bring some order to the (almost) chaos. They haven’t had a full redesign in quite a few years and have been adding “Web 2.0” snazziness incrementally, it feels overdue. 

New feature starting today: Some favorite books that cover roughly the same narrow territory as this blog: design, business, culture, technology. I’ll update occasionally as I find new good books, and perhaps do lengthier reviews also. These will be linked from the sidebar navigation. If you have recommendations on books you like, let me know! I’ve got quite a backlog at this point, but am always happy to add to the stack.

Two announcements at the annual CES show last week highlighted how much of a screwed up mess the world of home theater is. Thanks to fueding by Sony and Toshiba over incompatible high-definition DVD formats (Blueray and HD-DVD) consumers have been left with an expensive choice to make, potentially sinking hundreds, even thousands of dollars into a dead-end solution.

LG announced a player that could handle both formats, at $1200. And Warner Brothers of all people announced a type of disc that can be dual-encoded, with one format on one side, and the other on the flip. (Read)

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the complexity and uncertainty that awaits anyone wading into the home theater waters. I’ve started doing this in the last couple of months after years of 2-channel stereo listening, and it’s a horrible experience. I’m a fairly tech-savvy person, but it’s been overwhelming trying to understand all the intricacies of the various components and formats.

In a search for more information I came across the very comprehensive AVS Forums, but these only brought up more layers of technicalities. Here’s an excerpt from a typical post:

1. X-over settings. Can the speaker cross over settings be set differently per each channel? Example: front @ 60, center @ 80, surrounds @100
2. HD and Blue Ray DVD HDMI audio. I do not understand if any post processing is done on the 5.1 Lossless PCM channels from these players. Will DD PLIIx or THX 7.1 apply to these? What are the limitations?
   
3. Will this unit pass a 1080P video stream via HDMI unadulterated?
4. If I have a 1080P video stream going through the unit with HDMI to my display device, how does the OSD and Set up menu display?

To the uninitiated, most of this is gobbledegook. Even if you understand the acronyms it’s hard work to plough through it all.

This is just a ridiculous state of affairs. No-one should be expected to understand all this crap that only engineers and programmers should deal with on a day-to-day basis. It’s like exposing the intricacies of engine fuel management systems in cars to car buyers. In fact it’s worse, because home theater involves multiple manufacturers, components and formats that are mutually dependent on one another, and which the customer has to self-assemble into a system that works, like multi-thousand dollar lego blocks.

It’s no wonder that “home theaters in a box” are so popular - they provide a reasonable experience of choosing and setting-up, albeit at a significant expense in performance. Or for people with large budgets, hiring a consultant to select and install the system for them is the way to get around the confusion.

The manufactuers aren’t doing themselves or their customers any favors right now. They do little to explain the intricacies and even less to simply the creation of a system. From a technical point of view they may make excellent products, but from a systems and user experience point of view they flat out suck.

Unfortunately the home theater magazines don’t help much here - they are as filled with geeks into the terminology and tech as the manufacturers, and do little to help out the true novice enter the field.

Until this whole cluster you-know-what gets sorted out, quality home theater is going to remain a niche confined to the wealthy and the extremely persistent.