Brian's Brain

Jun 27 2008 1:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |
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Quality issues aren't restricted solely to video material, of course, and next week I plan to tackle the audio side of the story (complete with, among other things, plenty of amusing-at-least-to-me anecdotes about ridiculous speaker wire claims). But I'll instead close out this week with a confession, followed by a query.

I realize I do a lot of product reviews. In recent weeks, for example, there's been VUDU, ooma, the Netflix Player, and VMware Fusion. I do these evaluations in part because I realize that on-hours engineers tend to also be avid off-hours technology early adopters and advocates to friends and family members.

But fundamentally I attempt to treat them as big-picture case studies of engineering tradeoffs, the same sorts of tradeoffs that each of you in my engineering audience grapple with each day. Therefore, my hope is that even if the products you design aren't similar to the ones I review, there'll be something for you to learn. And of course if you're also designing a streaming media playback device, your interest in a particular writeup might be even greater!

But here's my (perhaps irrational) fear. I have a sneaking suspicion that if, say, you're not interested in an electronic keyboard (or don't even have a clue what an "ooma" is), you'll browse the headline, decline to continue reading, and therefore miss out on an educational (IMHO) diatribe on the big-picture downside of over-enthusiastic P2P incorporation. So I ask...am I right? And if so, what can I do to better motivate you to read past the product-specific beginning bits?

Thank you kindly, in advance, for your suggestions. And have a great weekend, hear?