Monday Mindset: Technology which is supposed to be magic, isn’t.

I regularly talk to people who are frustrated the piece of technology they bought isn’t doing what they wanted.

I ask what they wanted. What they wanted is not what they bought because they wanted something which can’t be bought. They wanted to create something beautiful, they wanted to impress someone else, they wanted to make something people would pay money to buy, they wanted to make something which would have all the family names and family tree on it and “would bring the whole family together.” (Yes, those are all true stories and that quote is an actual quote from a conversation I had.)

The technology they bought was expected to do this, because — and that’s where the reasoning starts to get shaky.

Usually, if I ask long enough what the reasoning was I’ll find an assumption that the technology they bought should be able to do this because technology can do anything. Technology is magic.

But it really isn’t magic. Whether software, hardware, digital, electronic, old, or new, it’s a tool. It can help the user achieve a goal. The user still has to choose the goal. And that gets back to what is the goal and why is that the goal?