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EYE ON EUROPE |
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TECHNICAL BULLETIN NO. 1,346 FROM BILL GATES:
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It’s 'Blackberry Thumb'
and the position is “up”
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
Bill Gates has a
boyish charm about him that sweeps young reporters right off
their feet. When I had a private interview in Paris with him
a few years ago (I was not quite 50) I felt like a billion dollars
as he extended his hand and said, “Hi, Mike, how ya doin’?
Come on in.” He was dressed in a friendly crewneck sweater
and chinos. There was no PR handler in his conference room and
he spoke intimately, as if we were equals in some way.
He was wrong about that. But more importantly he was wrong on
his two main messages: He said the federal anti-trust investigators
would cause him no problems because they could never understand
his business (they did), and he laughed off any talk of palmtops,
pocket PCs and other wireless hand-held devices with miniature
keypads (they have caught on in a big way).
On this second point, when pressed, he was so intense in his
opposition that he flipped into one of his other personalities,
a near-autistic withdrawal with vigorous rocking back and forth.
His voice went up an octave and he sneered that hand-held keypads
would attract “only people with tiny little fingers”.
I had heard he could do this when contradicted but I had never
witnessed it. In a few minutes he calmed down and resumed his
charm offensive.
I recalled Gates’ performance recently when a friend saw
me hunched over a tiny keypad laboriously pecking out an email
with both thumbs. No one told me to type with my thumbs: I discovered
the technique myself. There is no other way to hit the keys and
hang on to the gadget at the same time.
“You’re gonna get BlackBerry Thumb if you keep that
up,” my friend warned. As a matter of fact I already had
sore thumbs, but I didn’t know it was going around. Could
Gates have had a point–that tiny keypads are so awkward
to use that they should never have happened?
Business people in New York and London, especially road warriors
and operatives in financial services, are voting with their thumbs,
and the position is “up”. They must communicate 24/7/365,
from under the table at meetings, the back of cabs, from the
golf course or from the bedroom, if they are to stay competitive,
and now they can do it more or less unobtrusively.
Many of the more than 2.5 million professional users, plus the
Japanese teen market, have been addicted to the hand-helds–the
BlackBerry, the Treo, the Sidekick and a new line of Nokias--for
the past few years and the phenomenon is spreading to the continent.
Personal communication has just ratcheted up another notch. As
Dan Ackroyd might say of the wireless gadget, “It’s
a cellphone, it’s a computer, it’s a floor wax!”
I tried to get a BlackBerry in France a few months ago but they
were not being entrusted to individuals, only to companies. Companies
are easier to track down for invoices. But I was offered the
Nokia equivalent and quickly became hooked. Even when I had nothing
to communicate I found myself trying to provoke responses from
friends around the world so I could get email on this thing.
I didn’t care that it was costing a small fortune in airtime.
My excuse for over-using my keypad was that I was house-hunting
and without a fixed address or a fixed telephone line for five
months. The pocket device was a lifeline and I came to depend
on it.
My wife resented my addiction so badly that she tried to wrest
the device from my grasp and throw it out the car window one
afternoon on the Bordeaux Rocade bypass as I thumbed an email
at 80 miles an hour. I could not let a half hour pass without
checking to see if I had any incomings. I sneaked a peek whenever
I thought my wife was not looking.
I’m better now but my thumbs still ache at night.
Healthcare professionals in the United States seem to have espied
the sore thumb–generically called BlackBerry Thumb–as
a new disorder that they can fix for a fee. It is similar to
repetitive stress syndrome and close to “gamer’s thumb”,
the soreness suffered by computer game addicts.
Several months ago the American Society of Hand Therapists put
out a warning that too much time on the keypad could lead to
swelling of the sheath around the tendons of the thumb. Severe
cases can require an injection of cortisone. Very severe cases
could lead to surgery. That was enough to scare me off.
Bill Gates eventually had to cave in and address the software
needs of the wireless hand-held world but judging by the throbbing
in my thumb joint now, I would say his original instincts were
right on target.
©2005 by Michael Johnson. The illustration
is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column was first posted
Oct. 31, 2005.
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