I’ve decided to fix the tech industry. All of it, right now. Here’s how.

If it’s been done before, do it better

Company exec: I have an idea for an eBook reader. It’ll be like the Kindle, only rubbish and more expensive. Happily, our customers have the intelligence of drunken sparrows and are easily confused by colour. The Kindle is white, ours will be white. They’ll never know.

CEO: Sebastian, you’re a genius. The money I was going to invest in research and development I can now use to buy another yacht, from which I can sip champagne and watch as my company goes down the pan quicker than the contents of a banker’s pockets after a knock on the door from the fuzz.

I guarantee this conversation is going on right now. And it’s not just confined to eBook readers, but laptops, all-in-ones, smartphone OSes, you name it. Monkeys exhibit similar behaviour in zoos, clapping their hands because the first monkey to do so got a banana. Only our tech monkeys aren’t even managing to clap their hands, they’re just wiping their bottoms, throwing the contents at the glass and expecting us to pay for the results. You know who you are tech monkeys. Now stop clapping and start dancing.

Appoint a common-sense officer

It’s my theory that like mobs, companies get stupider the larger they are. Decisions that would have been laughed out of the room in a five-man company appear messianic when preached by one man to five hundred followers.  To combat this, I suggest that every company hires a common-sense officer. Preferably British. Preferably northern. Preferably my dad.

The common-sense officer would sit around drinking cups of tea the colour of rust, and vetoing 99% of the ideas companies have. To give you an idea of the value of a common-sense officer, let’s imagine how this noble position could have prevented some of the tech world’s more recent gaffs.

2007:

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s called Beacon and when you a visit a website, Facebook tells all you friends.

Stu’s dad: [rolls up his copy of the Daily Star and smacks Zuckerberg over the head with it]. Next!

2009:

Phorm engineer:  It’s perfectly secure, but we do kind of know what sites you’ve visited.

Stu’s dad: Smear yourself in honey, find a bear and kick it in the face. The results will be the same.

2010:

Steve Ballmer: So it’s Window Mobile 6, except there’s some hexagons, and it was designed on the back of a napkin. We’re calling it Windows Mobile 6.5.

Stu’s dad: Just stay home and polish your forehead, Steve. Trust me on this.

Take the “chew your own face off” test

Large companies would have us believe they spend millions testing new software to ensure it’s friendly and intuitive. This is clearly nonsense. New software is as friendly and intuitive as crocodile dentistry. Which is silly, because making your software user friendly requires only one person taking part in the “chew your own face off test,” which runs thusly.

Stick a normal person in a room with your software for ten minutes. Once the test is concluded, if that user would rather spend the next ten minutes finding ways to chew off their own face than carry on using your software, you’ve failed. Alternatively, just fit them with heart monitors and measure their rage for the duration. A single spike represents failure. Either is acceptable, and either would make your software … you know, good.

Tell the truth

This is very simple. Every broadband provider should be forced to put up an interactive map allowing you to click on your area and find out what their average broadband speeds are at different times of the day, based on actual usage data collected from existing customers. ISPs should be forced to do this by Ofcom. Ofcom should realise its long held dream of not being hopeless.

Incompetence discounts

The vast majority of shop assistants will never be any good, so how about this instead? Every time they give you a factually incorrect piece of information, £10 is knocked off the price of your purchase and you get to hit them with a stick. This would encourage customers to swot up before going anywhere near the store, and shop assistants to spend less time lathering their head in product and more time learning what that shiny, bleepy, electronic thing in the corner is. The store with the offer on would probably find foot traffic increases tenfold.

The next step

Right, that should get us going. My aim is to publish a tech manifesto that will lead to a better world, full of better people using better gizmos designed by better companies, and I need your help. In the next few days I’ll offer up my rules for we the public. Feel free to post your own suggestions below and after we’ve all had a nice, old bicker and plenty of tea, I’ll pull them all together and see what we’ve got.

The organisers of the 360° IT Infrastructure Event (ironically enough, a name that totally failed to motivate me into attending this week) asked office workers about the technology that would motivate them into doing a better job. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, only 1% said an Apple iPad. A 57% majority kicked in with a boring old new laptop while 35% wanted a new desktop (who are these people?) and a slightly more tuned-in 21% wanted a smartphone. But, and it has to be worth repeating myself here, only 1% said an Apple iPad.

That same survey asked about the type of tech people wanted at work and a stonking 72% came up with the same answer that most bosses would give: a smooth running and efficient IT infrastructure. Only 9% were convinced that the actual answer should be the latest IT gadget. Bad news for Apple there then. It’s also a little sad, as far as I’m concerned, because it seems to me that small business in particular is missing out if it overlooks the benefits that shiny gadgets such as the Apple iPad can bring into the workplace. And in the case of the iPhone and iPad, can take out of the workplace and bring into the homes of your workforce.

An iPhone has motivated me, for example, to do more work than I used to do before I succumbed to fanboy fever a couple of years ago. Whereas I would think twice before getting my netbook out on the train or in a cafe, assuming I’d bothered to take it with me in the first place, I don’t even think at all about the fact that I’m checking my email on the iPhone all the time, and dragging stuff off my business network to respond instantly to client queries etc, no matter where I am.

Sad as this is probably going to sound, the first thing I do when I wake up (after having turned the iPhone alarm off) is check my email and business-related newsfeeds on the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone can motivate me to start work before I get out of bed, what more do you want in terms of being incentivised? My sideways logic tells me that a much bigger iPad, therefore, would motivate me even more.

Especially if my boss were to give me one for free… (note to self: can I have an iPad please?)

 Two points. Number one: every man gets lonely but I don’t like my front door that much. Number two: it doesn’t bloody work. Most nights I stumble home from the pub only to stand before my house waving my hands like an orchestra conductor and weeping with vexation because the damn thing refuses to open. Even if it did work, it has no advantages over a key. It’s no smaller, no faster, and it’s not like keys have ever being particularly difficult to use. Except for Bayon, of course, for whom a key is like carrying around a surfboard.

But, here’s the worry. Once you start doubting the technology in your life, it becomes very difficult to stop.

You see after leaving my house this morning, the first thing I did was to plug in my headphones where they’ll probably remain for a majority of the day. I listen to music on the way to work, when I need to concentrate in work, when I go the gym, go on long journeys… You get the picture, and I suspect most people are the same. My MP3 player is great, but I do worry that we’re increasingly using our technology as an excuse to bundle ourselves up against the world, ears blocked with headphones, eyes blocked by laptops. When was the last time we looked at a stranger on the bus, let alone talked to them?

Then there’s Tesco, which has recently been invaded by the self-service machine. What an incredibly aggravating device this is. Instead of handing your sandwich over to a till person, you now swipe it yourself and bag it yourself, an action which is promptly followed by it telling you it doesn’t recognise what you’ve swiped and doesn’t believe it’s in the bag. I swear, using these things is about as much fun as rubbing your bum over sandpaper, and I’ve yet to use one without it locking up and calling a till person anyway. I’ve never gotten one of these things to work, and thanks to the sheer amount of hassle they cause, the queues they’re meant to reduce are now out of the door. Thank you for shopping with Tesco it chirps. No, no Tesco, thank you for completely wasting the last ten minutes of my life. 

Next up is an electronic swipe card to get into work, which I always lose, a lift which can’t count and will invariably skip whichever floor you’re on, and a possessed work computer which couldn’t be anymore evil if it hovered five feet off the desk and threw up on me every time I started it. There’s my phone which dials 999 every time I sit down, my laptop which makes a noise akin to nails down a chalkboard when I turn it on, and every single peice of software I use on a daily basis which invariably turns a five minute task into a fifteen minute chore.

In fact, as I bring this rant to a close just about the only piece of technological bobbins which makes my everyday a parade is the microwave. Two thirds of everything I eat has probably been irridiated by that baby, and I make no apologies for that because I hate cooking, don’t understand fine cuisine and have no truck with healthy food.  

Opposite me, David Bayon is picking away at his salad while watching the gymnastics (he’d like me to write that he was watching something manly, but we all know the truth). Jon Bray was watching the long jump. And to follow a whim, I fired up the table tennis highlights. We have, somehow, slipped with barely a murmur into on-demand internet TV, and it’s fantastic.

Even the resolution is high enough to impress. Bayon (now switching his attention to athletics) has just exclaimed “you can see her heart beating” as he watched one of the 400m runners stand ready for the race.

It takes something like the Olympics to show us how far technology has come. The BBC iPlayer has been around in one form or other for the last two years, and we’ve become used to it. But do you remember how you last watched the Olympics? If you’re anything like me, it was mainly via a highlights programme on terrestrial TV. I’d have been lucky to see two minutes of table tennis. If I wanted to, I could watch 50 minutes’ worth, or fast forward to precisely the match I was interested in.

Now we’re all casually firing up our browsers, streaming live or pre-recorded events direct to our display. Makes you wonder how far things will have improved by London 2012.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them – digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

But even then, when all these problems are eventually solved – and they will be, because even a blind squirrel finds an acorn eventually – it still won’t make a damn bit of difference to my feelings. Yes, you can rabbit on about convenience, and having every single book on the planet in the palm of your hand. But a book is about more than just the words on the page. A book is the entire experience, from walking into the bookstore itself, to reading it and passing it onto a friend.

For proof, just look at the enraptured expressions of shoppers next time you walk into Waterstones or the Oxfam book shop. Shopping for books is a pleasure, people dawdle over them, they roll them around in their hands. They read the blurb on the back, flick through the pages, linger on random sentences. They smile. A book is an event, but eBooks dilute this event to mere words. They strip out the feeling, the sensation, the experience that surrounds a novel. They make it – soulless – machine like.

I think eBooks probably have their place. Manuals, technical books, maybe even schoolbooks would undoubtedly benefit from a technological overhaul. As I remember, the sheer weight of textbooks that accompanied me during my A Levels made every day purgatory and I’m sure more than a few teenagers would be delighted to have that weight replaced by a reader jangling in their pocket.

But not me. I love books. I love technology. But in this case, I’m convinced the two are better off apart.

It was a bit of a whirlwind romance to be fair, love at first sight and why shouldn’t it have been? The Eee is thin, pretty and most importantly cheap – pretty much my ideal date. Only thing is, success has turned its head. Suddenly, with the release of the Eee PC 900, it’s not so cheap anymore and if it carries on gorging on additional tech, it’s not going to be so thin either.

All in all, I think somebody needs to sit down with Asus and explain that its baby doesn’t need a bigger screen. It doesn’t need a bigger chasis, it doesn’t need more memory or a higher price tag. There are plenty of other laptops around for that, and yet the uncomfortable feeling persists that while everyone else gets giddy about tiny, cheap laptops, Asus, almost perversely, intends on taking the Eee the other way.

And when it does, expect a very messy break up.