Usability: Corporate Price Point vs Consumer Price Point
2009-Sep-29, Tuesday 15:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thorfinnI bought a Drobo, and configured and formatted it last night. Copied the data from my previous external storage disk (which was failing with block errors). Plugged it into the back of the Airport Extreme, and voila, it's just working. Time Machine is happily grinding away doing its thing, and it's very nice knowing that we have 3TB of raid storage that is protected against single disk failure. I didn't have to install any drivers, work out any raid configuration details, or fiddle any settings - there essentially aren't any to fiddle.
This is essentially representative of what I'm enjoying about the current state of play in computer technology - quite a lot of things are falling out of the Corporate Price Point down into the Small Business / High End Consumer Price Point.
A few examples:
- Mobile Broadband (Satellite, early GPRS/3G vs ubiquitous 3G/EDGE and wifi)
- Compute Cluster (SUN, IBM, HPUX, etc vs Google Apps, Dreamhost, etc)
- RAID/NAS (NetApp, iSilon, etc vs Drobo, lots of other manufacturers too)
- Portable Computing (Blackberry vs iPhone, Android, Pre, Netbooks)
What's nice and interesting to note is that the Usability Fu really really matters in this zone. Corporates can afford to just suck it up and pay an expert to integrate a solution (and are almost invariably doing something weird and custom enough that they would have to even with "off the shelf" solutions). Small Business and High End Consumers don't have the time or the money to spend on Integration Experts and Solution Architects. It just has to Plug In And Work. If it doesn't work just like that, you can't sell it effectively in this price point.
Ordinary people are starting to expect computing technology to Just Work and be Easy To Use. And so they should. So, if you're in the industry at all, "It's a tricky computer thing" is not an excuse any more. It should never have been an excuse in the first place. If it's hard to use, find another supplier with a more usable product. They're starting to exist.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 08:58 (UTC)The problem with all of these things is they're not getting consumer acceptance, really. They're getting "power user" acceptance. I've always considered the Drobo to be a very expensive way of building a 4-disk array - but you're right, the interface is designed to be pretty much foolproof.
The biggest move forward for this sort of tech is making it look pretty. iPhone, Drobo - both took existing concepts, put a shine on the interface and most critically - put it in a shiny box. Previous consumer NAS products have all been cuss-ugly and hence haven't sold well. Previous complex phones have had a crunchy interface and have been pretty cuss-ugly and .. haven't sold well outside a corporate market.
I think it's all in the fancy case. Make it pretty and it'll sell.
Andre (not on the DW bandwagon)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 13:24 (UTC)Mobile broadband as 3G was pretty good, yes, but the corporate world was doing satellite data and GPRS and other weird shit before 3G, and that wasn't anything like open-box-insert-card. :-)
And yes, the pretty helps - it goes along with feature simplification (which is a big part of Usability). Options are Bad. If you have more than one or two buttons and lights, it just isn't going to be usable by most consumers.
The drobo is a relatively expensive way to build a 4-disk array, compared to installing a raid card in a machine, but not having to configure anything is a big time saving, and the flexibility of not having to worry about matched disks or the zillion other things you need to worry about with proper raid is worth actual money svings, because you can buy disks at Best $/MB and upgrade your capacity Just In Time rather than having to pay above price point to ensure futureproofing.
My hourly rate is pretty ridiculous, and I work in this space in the corporate arena. :-) I don't want to do it at home, I just want it to plug in and go. Which is why I buy this end of stuff.
And yes, this stuff isn't hitting the Home market yet - it's Small Business and Power User right now. It'll get Home penetration - but that's another few years down the track when the pricepoint drops even further.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 00:33 (UTC)The thing that bugged me about the Drobo pricing was expense against other 'consumer' boxes that include NAS. I'm not really in the market though - despite dealing with such things for a day job, I haven't yet reached the burnout point. So I'm still willing to put up with a reasonable level of interaction with the machines during the setup phase.
One of the things about storage appliances (and RAID cards, they're even less trustworthy) is the classic question - "what happens when it breaks?". I know Drobo have a statement on this, but most manufacturers just quietly assume their hardware will never break, while worrying about spindle failures. Failed RAID cards have led to so much data loss over time. At least I know if my fileserver snuffs it, I can pull that zpool out and pop it in another box without stress.
On the interface front, I like the idea of a simple interface - with an "advanced" button. Or a "BEWARE; DRAGONS" button. The trend towards feature simplification - for example, having to mess with about:config in Firefox instead of having menus for those options - is frustrating because it becomes harder/impossible to make changes outside of what the interface designer felt was important enough to put at the front.
I could really thump someone at Sony for the interface changes they made in the last major Playstation3 update - an attempt to unclutter the menus has decreased usability, and *there's no option to turn it off*.
Actually, taking a quick peek back at the Drobo website - they're now doing an eight-bay unit that talks iSCSI as well as Firewire-800. That's pretty cool.
My biggest beef with RAID boxes has been this whole four spindle limitation. I have a zpool of 4 x 750GB spindles that's approaching full. I could replace them with 2GB spindles, but that still has a clock on it as far as capacity goes, and 2GB spindles have a shabby reliability record to date. Eight way is pretty damn good.
The only problem is the price starts at $US1499 - which is too huge for a box with no Fibre Channel/SAS connectivity.
I'm not sure home penetration is going to be as simple as an interface cleanup, either. Getting people to see the value in redundant storage seems to be a problem, almost as tough as getting people to see the value in backups...
This is turning into a ramble - probably best done with drink in hand. Fancy a bevvy sometime?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 02:36 (UTC)As for Advanced button - actually plugging the Drobo into the back of a real Linux box, you can get exactly that. There's a whole bunch of tools that let you do crap to it if you really want to.
Poor value in backups is because they were bloody hard to actually do properly - up until Time Machine. 60% of users knew they needed to do backups (bad enough), but 4% actually did regular backups (argh). Now? Anyone with a mac and an external disk or a TimeCapsule has hourly snapshot backups, and most places selling macs will push an external disk onto you for that.
Home penetration for this kind of stuff will come when Apple starts shipping machines pre-built with RAID, and Time Capsules with RAID built in, which will force everyone else to play catchup again. Probably after ZFS support makes it, which will be after ZFS is actually sufficiently bulletproof for home style random breakage, which is not yet. Essentially Home penetration will come when the tech is not just Usable but Invisible. Home users don't even want one button or any options - it just has to come along with the whole package in one unit.
Drinkies? Heh, I have zero free time - dancing 3 nights a week... OTOH, I'm in Richmond on friday nights every fortnight for dancing with an early evening before 20:30 free.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 03:01 (UTC)Plugging it into a Linux box defeats the point of an appliance and turns it into a hell-like mess of high power consumption, additional management, performance bottlenecks and generally makes it more appealing to just stuff more disks in the machine. Besides, Linux .. smelly.
I doubt ZFS is going anywhere with Apple, really - they've pulled all references to ZFS from their marketing material and have been very, very quiet on the subject. ZFS isn't really cut out for consumer hardware, from a desing point - it expects I/O subsystems to honour cache barriers, for example, and that's just not a given in a land of USB storage. ZFS is nifty stuff, but it wasn't designed to be a consumer filesystem and probably never will be.
Apple's marketshare has managed to climb to around 10% - a big step up. That still leaves 90% of desktop users not able to enjoy Time Machine and such features. I'm not using with with my Mac - but I avoid keeping anything valuable on an unmirrored machine and have an rsync cronned to cover the stuff that is there. Not exactly user-friendly, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 03:16 (UTC)As for ZFS, Apple will do something that lets them do consumer RAID in machines at the OS software level. Whether it turns out to actually be ZFS with another layer over the top, or they decide to spend a chunk of their core engineering team on designing and writing HFS++ from scratch, or they find something else, I don't know, and they probably don't either yet. My bet is they're making decisions about that as we speak.
There's some stuff in Vista Business about automated backups - does anyone know if Windows 7 has stuff in that space? I think they'd want to...
Usability is Pretty
Date: 2009-09-29 13:35 (UTC)Complex interfaces are Ugly - too many things, no clear flow, hard to intuitively interpret what you need to do next, all these things are Bad Usability, and are also Ugly.
A Usable interface is clean, has nice flow, enough space between things without being so much space that the eye gets lost, has elements that guide you through the flow of what you need to do next, etc, and these things all add up to making it look Pretty.
Usable is Pretty, Pretty is Usable. That's overstating the case somewhat, but there definitely is a big overlap.
Re: Usability is Pretty
Date: 2009-09-29 16:59 (UTC)Elegant design is as much about functionality as aesthetics.
Re: Usability is Pretty
Date: 2009-09-30 02:42 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 10:16 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 13:13 (UTC)Printers get shared out too, incidentally. You'll want a USB hub, as the thing only has one builtin port.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-29 21:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 02:39 (UTC)Home Users need tech to do that so well that you can plug anything into anything and have it work. Not there yet. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 00:21 (UTC)I wants one!
<--nigel
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 02:41 (UTC)And yeah, the DroboPro does look nice, doesn't it. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-30 10:59 (UTC)Relatedly. I wish I could recover all the time I wasted fiddling with ReadyNASes for work. They're everything that's wrong about whacking a basic web interface on top of a Linux box and hoping for the best.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-05 02:01 (UTC)Those failures can always happen, regardless of your solution. That's why anything I actually care about having is being kept in multiple locations.
RAID is not Backup.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-05 02:35 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-05 03:43 (UTC)Most of the weirdness I've read about seems to be from people expecting something that doesn't exist unless you're willing to go all the way to a full on corporate grade system like NetApp or iSilon or similar. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-05 04:17 (UTC)I wasn't particularly referring to people expecting too much of the product either. For a single example, see http://speirs.org/blog/2009/1/28/drobo-its-part-in-my-downfall.html (which did eventually get solved, but not everybody's a popular Mac developer blogger...). There's a few others too, one of them just recently.
For the money, I'd personally just buy a pair (or more) of normal external drives and deal with it.