… er, right now, it is apparently this blog posting you’re now reading… at least for the three-word quoted phrase
“grandma friendly computer” (with or without the hyphen) … go figure!

Searching in Google just now for that phrase gives me exactly one hit, referring to someone called gwin who wrote, concerning MacWorld 2003:

Apple is in a great spot with OSX now– with their “iLife” (aka iApps) suite and now a native browser, they truly have the most grandma-friendly computer experience available

Hey, I love Apple, but grandma-friendly? Not yet, I’m afraid. So within a few hours, search engine crawlers being what they are, I confidently expect this posting to start creeping up as the top hit – for a while anyway.

But why so few hits for that phrase? This (easy-to-use computer) is an old old issue – maybe I underestimate the political incorrectness of “grandma friendly computer” (but hey — I’m old enough to be a grandparent, and as you might expect, some of my best friends are grandmothers: yes, they’re all pretty computer-savvy, but nevertheless I think the phrase conveys the right flavour in a very concise manner.)

So what gives? Here’s what triggered this little piece:

I had an interesting experience last week setting up a relative with ’some stuff’ (laptop, broadband, wireless router, the works), not from a complete ’standing start’ but rather from a baseline of WebTV / MSNTV2: she had about 5 years of regular, intensive, daily use of WebTV, using it for general web surfing, emailing, genealogy research, and so on. Although WebTV will drive a hardened computer user batty, the fact is that it has damn nice and easy to use interface, given all the constraints. But there are things it cannot do, naturally, and it seemed a good moment to upgrade this relative.

I had failed to do this with other relatives in the past – I just couldn’t find a setup that was simple enough for a normal person to use, without having to rely on me or another relative for backup support (”What does this message mean?”; “Why can’t I do X?”). But I’ve been waiting for over 30 years for the ’simple setup’ for the computer-phobic, and it’s still not there – all I can say is that Phil Goldman, Bruce Leak, and Steve Perlman who founded WebTV over 10 years ago were right not to wait, but instead to set up a company to ‘do it right’!!

Anyone reading this knows how bad it is out there… just that I had forgotten. I won’t bore you with the details: you can imagine. I shouldn’t be surprised by the state of the art, but I am. One can set up a computer in a kind of ‘kiosk mode’ like you see at some hotels and airports, which restricts it in certain ways but makes it much more robust. This is a classic tradeoff: for family members, you often want that tantalising ‘freedom to expand’ – “just one more plugin, grandma” – but this inevitably opens the door to confusing error messages.

Let’s hope that at the very least a side-effect of the One Laptop Per Child / $100 Laptop project will be a degree of grandma-readiness; I appreciate that grandma is not in their target demographic, but the level of simplicity we’re striving for would be a worthy goal for that project too!

UPDATE: I see that about two years ago, I used similar terminology in this posting about my SliMP3:

UPDATE 2: I’d better bag “grandma-friendly PC” also – there were in fact 2 hits on Google for that one as of June 9th 2006.

come on, guys, can you see grandma having to reboot her hi-fi?

Technorati Tags: grandma+friendly+computer, grandma.friendly, $100+laptop, one+laptop+per+child

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