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Quite a few of my friends have bought iPhones. I don’t deny that they’re a great product. Touch screen contextual interfaces are definitely the future. The inclusion of an accelerometer and GPS was genious, potentially allowing so many awesome applications and new ways of interacting with devices and information.

I will not buy an iPhone. It isn’t the price. Sure they’re expensive, but the price will drop as soon as more companies start making devices with similar functionality and the price of the parts drop accordingly. Just look how cheap flash memory is these days :O

These are the reasons I won’t buy an iPhone:

1) There was a time when Apple products were geeky. They were niche. People bought them for their looks, sure, but also for their quirkiness, their hardware, their excellent applications, and their exclusivity. Some of these properties still apply today. More often however, I think most people buy them because people think they are cool. I’d hate to be associated with the Apple fanboys/girls, Apple’s devout followers who flame anyone who offers the slightest criticism towards the corporation they love. You know who I’m talking about, you probably know several. By buying Apple you become one of them, you become the stereotype.

2) Apple’s a dodgy company. Earlier this year it was revealed that Apple wants to lower the amount of cash music artists receive for digital downloads to a paltry 4%. The artists - you know, the people who actually create the product that everyone else is making the cash from? ‘Nuff said.

3) It isn’t cool. Apple has managed to fuse form with function to create something that’s relatively easy to use, but which can do a lot of stuff. But it isn’t cool. Whipping out your iPhone to look something up in the middle of a conversation with friends isn’t cool. Using your iPhone to check whether you have new email at wherever you are isn’t cool. Using your iPhone in the company of other people gives them the impression that you can’t bear to be away from the comfort of the internet for more than five minutes at a time, and that you find your present company boring. I see it as being similar to opening up a novel and reading it while people around you are having a conversation - it’s rude.

Until do-it-all devices like the iPhone become small and unobtrusive enough that they are invisible to use, using them will always make you look like stupid or like you are being rude to people around you.

Recently my software engineering project team at uni went through a fairly significant restructuring. The project we are working on is a backend for an existing system so it’s pretty technical. We decided to go with a less hierarchical, more flexible approach to organising the team because we didn’t want to get bogged down with too much overhead. Communication between subteams (implementation, design, testing etc) was very “flat”, ie. anyone can communicate with anyone else in another subteam, communication doesn’t need to go through team leads.

However, after first semester it was clear things weren’t really working out. Progress was being made but we were behind schedule with implementation and very little testing had been done at all. Not having an assistant project manager to take over during the midyear break didn’t help much either, especially since we were supposed to make our first release to the client a week after the end of first semester exams. In order to turn the project around the team underwent a large reorganisation at the start of second semester.

Big changes were made in terms of communication and decision making. We still have subteams and subteam leads, but a few of the subteam leaders were replaced, and team members were assigned to particular subteam(s) rather than be given the choice. Previously, decisions which affected the entire team were made with the entire team present and subteam decisions were made during those subteam meetings with input from the subteam members. Now decisions which affect the entire team are generally made by the PM and Assistant PM, with consultation from the subteam leaders at the weekly team leaders’ meeting (a new addition this semester).

Obviously the original, flexible way of running the team failed. It relied a lot on team members being very pro-active which wasn’t really the case (except for a couple of exceptions). It also relied a lot on having really good communication. We initially decided to be quite light-weight in terms of the amount of processes we used. The communication processes were pretty much just common sense. However, communication was really one of the first challenges we faced as a whole team. During team meetings people were afraid to speak up, and so decisions didn’t really get made. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that we didn’t really know each other very well, we hadn’t had any social events yet, so everyone was still kind of in that stage where you go out of your way to be super polite and not rock the boat with anyone.

I think communicating effectively in teams relies a lot on people being comfortable enough with each other to be able to tell someone when they need to lift their game. If the team is not comfortable enough with each other to tell someone they need to improve it’s very difficult for the team as a whole to make improvements. This was possibly one of the reasons it took such a long time to rectify many of the problems which caused problems in first semester (resulting in schedule slippage), along with the lack of initiative shown by team members to stay focussed on getting tasks done and plan for what needs to be done next. It’s not good enough to be able to tell someone they aren’t contributing enough over email, because it’s very difficult to make people accountable over email.

I think communication problems can often be much more serious than team members being too scared to speak in front of the team, or critique each other. Some people have a habit of talking a lot without actually saying much. A lot of words are said but not much information is conveyed. My project team has atleast two people who do this. It’s really frustrating as it can take up a lot of time during meetings or conversation, and afterwards you aren’t at all clear what point they were trying to make, even if they seem to think they’ve said something incredibly profound.

What is the solution to these communication issues? I’m not entirely sure. UML is a language which lets people convey technical information in a way which is concise and consistant (ie. there’s only one way to interpret it). I don’t think it’s possible (or even wise) to introduce a similar language specifically for the purposes of cutting out superfluous words in order to enable people to communicate in a more concise manner - it could start sounding like the Newspeak in the novel 1984. I think different people communicate in different ways for different reasons, for some people it seems speaking is part of their thought process. In that case perhaps the best you can do is ask people to clarify what they mean. It’s just part of the challenge of working in teams :)