Tomorrow I am going to drive for a few hours to install a new computer for my in-laws. We ordered it delivered to our house. My wife installed all the software and moved all the files. Tomorrow, I will install it, because I don’t think they could even transport it and plug it in. Well, that’s not true. I think they could do that, but I have no confidence that it would work. There would be something we overlooked about their Internet connection or some other difference that we couldn’t simulate at home that will scotch the whole deal. Technology is still too hard for the average person.
We’ve all heard the stories of people asking why you press the Windows “start” button when you want to turn off the computer, but my mother-in-law had an equally interesting question: “Why do they call it wallpaper if you put it on your desktop?” I had no answer for her.
But the real answer is because we love to make things complicated. Things remain difficult because we allow them to be. We put up with it. I do, too, which I was reminded of on Friday when posting to the Search Engine Guide blog.
First, some background. Bill Hunt and I wrote our book on search marketing in 2005, and a centerpiece was a way to project the real business value of search marketing. One of the linchpins of that process was the Yahoo! (nee Overture) Keyword Tool, which provided the monthly demand of any search keyword for free.
Fast forward to 2007. Our book is broken. Yahoo! first stopped updating its numbers and then allowed the URL itself to die, throwing up 404 pages instead, all with no official announcement. For a while, Bill and I thought that it was just a mistake, but after a while we realized that we needed to come up with an alternative tool.
But there wasn’t any. We contacted several companies with paid tools to get their help, but all were either unwilling or unable to help. Bill’s team eventually developed an arcane procedure that turned free click estimates from one of Google’s paid search tools into estimated keyword demand, which I posted a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t perfect, but it was free and it was better than nothing.
Then. a commenter pointed out that the long, convoluted procedure we outlined was in many ways unnecessary, because Google had a free tool that directly predicted clicks, without all the steps we had shown. Google was not in the habit of making traffic estimation easy, so both Bill and I wondered if this was a mistake (and would be taken away), but then Google announced it was committed to helping people estimate keyword demand, so I made a note to simplify the procedure, which I did on Friday.
But in my haste, I hadn’t noticed that Google announced something far better than I had dared hope—it was providing not just click data but keyword demand data, with none of the calculations needed before. And it was all free.
But we had spent so many months ripping our hair out trying to find this kind of tool, that I didn’t even recognize it when it fell in my lap. So, I dutifully posted the simplified procedure I intended to all along, totally missing what Google had really announced. I was so used to things being difficult that I couldn’t even recognize it when they became easy.
I was accustomed to it being difficult. I had accepted that no one was going to help.
Well, the great thing about blogs is that someone pointed out my mistake immediately and I corrected the procedure to the new, easy way today. I apologize for my carelessness in missing what was going on, but it’s fixed now.
But I realize that I have been too accepting of all the complexity, too willing to deal with the pain and difficulty instead of demanding better. I don’t know if I can change overnight, but I am resolving to expect more and to reward the companies that deliver it. Just because I am an engineer doesn’t mean I like to work harder at technology than anyone else does.
