Its official.  Ladies, get your pink handbags out.  The new ad from PC World and Dell is officially the most patronising ever.  It starts with the line

My world is fashion.  I just have to colour co-ordinate everything.  Even my laptop.  That’s why I love the new Dell laptop.

Pass me the barf bag.  Please.  It just gets worse.  Should I get pink to match my shoes….  Must I go on?  I am sure you get the picture.

This is an example of 2 companies who have money to waste.  2 companies who have no idea of how to talk to women and most importantly, no idea of the role that technology plays in a women’s life.

I thought that Dell would have learnt from their latest Della ‘for women’ website which seems to have such bad press that they have renamed it.  This is disappointing as the Dell Inspiron mini 10 is a  fantastic piece of kit.   I also thought PC world had made some progress with their latest work.  But alas, it seems a group of middle aged balding in marketing (sorry but it has to be) decided that “women are the answer.”

Here’s the logic.

Women like shoes.

Women like pink.

So to make women like technology, we need to pink it up and dumb it down and make it match her shoes.

Do me a favour.  None of the professional women I know (which is where the biggest financial opportunity is) would be seen dead with a pink laptop.  For most women over the age of 12, pink is definitely not their world.

And even more offensive is not the colour, but the positioning.   The women I speak to love technology.  The creativity and human interaction it adds to their life.  Not because it matches their shoes.

On the positive side, it confirms how much technology brands need specialists such as Lady Geek to put an end to patronising ads like this.

If Microsoft can do it then I can go one better: My three year old son is reviewing the latest touch-screen laptop sent to me by HP: The HP Touchsmart TX2.  I had reservations about a touch smart screen as why would you need a touch screen on a laptop when you have a keyboard, but my son really loved it.  So did his favourite toy Serena…

I have to admit that I was in a state of giddy anticipation when I got home to find that the courier had delivered a shiny new Nokia N97: It came in a under-stated black box which resembled a treat from a Regent Street boutique. It was a pleasure to unbox, as I appreciated the way it feels comfortable in my hands.

The N97 is a radical new design, somewhere between a classic touch-screen like the iPhone and a keyboard-phone like the Blackberry. The whole device slides open with a very satisfying swing that just exudes quality engineering revealing an easy to use QUERTY thumb-pad and a joystick for people who do not enjoy using touch-screens. Other bloggers have complained about the angle of the slide: The screen is at approximately thirty degrees to the key-pad, and it’s impossible to push it flat. I never found that to be a problem because the shape of the phone when opened out makes it very easy to hold securely while typing and walking.

I agree with Susy Weaser when she says that the test of a good gadget is that you should not need to read the manual. It does not take me long to download the Facebook and Twitter application.

However, it takes me ages to find out how to change the basics: date and time, profiles, personalisation. I found the structure of the configuration application very confusing: It took half an hour to connect to one of the many WiFi access points in the house and even more time to download the Google Apps.

Nokia are pushing their “Ovi Store” as the one-stop shop for all applications, however I found that I couldn’t find the applications I wanted. The search did not seem to work at all.

In all I think I must have spent about twelve hours customising and tweaking the phone’s apps and settings before I had something which seemed vaguely right.

Speaking of customisations – the phone seemed to want to do it’s own thing: For example even though I set up my own Google Mail application and then the “Mail for Exchange” client (which can be used to connect to Google’s calendar and tasks) it still insisted on forcing me to set up Nokia’s own mail software each time I powered on the phone. Even after I relented and signed up for “Ovi Mail” it still wanted me to set up the mail service every time I switched the phone on, which happened rather a lot given the phone’s tendency to crash in the middle of whatever I happened to be doing.

And on the subject of reliability: The Symbian platform is known for it’s dependable full-featured phones. I’ve been using Nokia’s S60 phones for more than three years. Unfortunately somebody in Nokia’s testing department must have been on holiday when they were preparing this for release: Even after upgrading all the software to the latest version this phone crashed two or three times per day. It usually happened at the least appropriate time, such as when I was talking on the phone.

The most annoying bug was a quirk on the key-lock: If left un-used for a minute the device automatically locks it’s keyboard to prevent accidental dialling. You are supposed to be able to unlock it by simply flicking the keylock switch on the side, however from time to time it would decide to ignore this. Other than removing the battery to hard-reset the phone I could find no way to get back in control of the device. Given that this happened two or three times a week I’m astonished that Nokia’s quality-control people did not spot this problem.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the screen itself: It looks just like any other mobile phone touch-screen however unless you push it quite hard nothing happens. I found it required quite a bit of pressure to make it work, and then given the force you have to use it becomes very imprecise so I often found myself pressing the wrong button by mistake. The N97′s touch-screen is really quite clumsy. It’s got no multi-touch and Nokia cheekily bundle a little stylus with the phone – suggesting that Nokia are well aware that this touch-screen is not intended for touching.

The iPhone has already set the standard for a touch-screen.  Everybody knows how well the iPhone works – you can touch it with one or two fingers. You can manipulate images on screen with easy to learn gestures. You do not need a stylus or any special accessory to use it. Like most modern touch-screens the iPhone, HTC Magic, Palm Pre and pretty much everybody else uses a “capacitive” screen which can sense the presence of your fingertips without the need to push. The N97 uses an older generation of screen known as “Resistive” – it’s the same kind of screen that you find on a Nintendo DS. This cheaper sort of screen relies on actual pressure in order to register input.

Please do not mistake me for an Apple fan, it’s just that I recognise that they got it right whereas Nokia got it wrong. And that’s a real shame because the screen was supposed to be the biggest selling point of this new machine. I cannot think why Nokia decided to go 2nd best for the phone’s main feature.

The N97 is packed with features, cool things like a built in FM transmitter, the best mobile-camera on the market, and an email application that easily rival’s Blackberry’s flagship. On paper this looks like the best phone ever made however silly design mistakes frequent annoying bugs makes me reluctant to recommend this product. Other than the screen (which a great many people will not find a problem), all of the phone’s problems are to do with it’s software so in theory Nokia could release an update which corrects all of the phone’s faults. Rumor has it that they will be releasing a refreshed version of the N97 with an improved screen (but without the joypad) – I hope that Nokia can pull it off second time around.

Finally, it’s been said that the N97 is one of the most eccentric products that Nokia have ever made: The week before I had to give it back they sent me an even more bizarre product to review. It’s supposed to be an “anti-theft” device for the N97. You clip your state of the art Nokia into what looks like an early 1980′s phone and then run an application which is intended to make the N97′s screen look exactly like an old-fashion phone keypad.

The end result is that your N97 is made to look like something that Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting might have used.  My kids love it.  It shows that even if they did not get the N97 completely right, Nokia has a sense of humour.

I am loving the evolution of the I am a PC campaign.  Its warm, personal and positions Microsoft as a champion of humanity rather than a cold, distant high functional technology brand which mainly appeals to men. Women use technology as a means to creativity and to provide meaningful human interaction in their life.

One of the ads features a 4 and a half year old Kylie (too cute for words) who uses Windows Live Photo Gallery to send a picture of her fish to her parents.  The strategy is simple: technology so simple that a 4 and a half year old could do it.  Another features a small boy has a large construction ranged all around the kitchen, and demonstrates taking lots of pictures of different parts of it, transferring those from the camera to a laptop, and then stitching them all together to make one.

Its a thankful departure from Microsoft’s unsuccessful retort to the Apple ads which was the wrong strategy for a myriad of reasons I have discussed before.  This is about what Microsoft stands for and gives them a narrative that goes beyond their product.

Its not about the piece of kit.  Its about how you use technology to enhance your home.  Its not about the spec.  Its about what that spec enables you to do.  Its not about the photo.  But the memory and signal you are sending to those who you send it to.

It starts to take Microsoft from being part of ‘my office life’  to being at the ‘centre of my home. ‘   Not a bad place to start.

Here are a number of assumptions that I have encountered so far:

1. Young women don’t think IT careers are cool, and still imagine the industry to be populated with uncool ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’.
2. High schools struggle to present up to date, interesting IT classes and fail to engage the interest of young women.
3. Women want creativity and meaningful human interaction in their work, and they don’t feel that IT careers provide either.
4. Women enjoy using gadgets (eg mobile phones) but are not interested in the technology behind them.

These seem fairly reasonable, and widely held theories, but while so few people in education really know what women find rewarding or off-putting about IT careers, and while they base their recruitment drives on assumption it is no surprise there are so few ladies entering IT careers.

On June 22nd I spoke with Anna Liu, Associate Professor at UNSW. Anna’s career in IT spans 15 years. I will be posting more from my conversation with Anna, so watch this space.

When asked how she first became interested in IT Anna says that it was in the third grade when she chose to go to a Computer Summer Camp. She also sites an earlier episode, when her father identified her interest in mathematics on a first-grade enrolment form. Did she really stand out as a mathematician so early on or did she respond to proactively live up to her father’s expectations? She doesn’t know for certain, but it seems that she certainly had her parents’ encouragement from an early age.

“But what,” I asked, “about the coolness factor? Were you not worried about what your peers would think?”
Anna laughs “Well I think I was already classed as one of the geeks!”

We chuckle; neither of us were trend setters at school. But does Anna still see the coolness factor as an issue for female high school students with the potential to enter IT studies and careers? Is there still a perception that IT is uncool and does that really prevent women from pursuing IT studies?

“I think that perception has changed a lot” she says, “IT is the cool thing right now, and I can see women getting into it, particularly the social networking aspect.”

We decide that coolness is not so much the issue at the moment, but Anna raises another point:

“We don’t see enough female participation in the IT industry because we are failing to attract the hardworking female with good HSCs…”

“Generally speaking, girls who get good marks and who enjoy science and maths go straight into medicine. Those who enjoy the communications and English language aspects go straight into law. I don’t know if it’s a matter of dollars or that we haven’t publicised and marketed top IT executives.”

It seems a valid point; most of us know lady doctors and lawyers, and I dare say could name a few fictionalised TV characters in those professions too. But there are fewer recognisable people, in real life or TV who demonstrate the success and enjoyment that women can achieve in technical roles.

So how can we encourage women in technical roles to come forward and share their experiences?

Veronica is a successful software developer. Here she shares some of her experiences in the gender-stereotyped world of IT:

“During the first year of my Computer Science course at USYD, there was no shortage of female students — the ratio was about 50/50. Most of them Asians, very few of Anglo-Saxon background. I think in Asian culture, “geeky” girls are not classed as uncool at all (at least not in Hong Kong, where I grew up — they are often viewed as well informed and thus cool).

“After the first semester, numbers of females started to drop drastically. I have asked a lot of friends why they dropped out, and they generally say how they don’t really care about IT as much as say Economics or Commerce, or Law, so they switched. Of those, there are also many that felt like it’s hard to compete with people (mostly guys) who grew up programming and full of “techniness”, while they are just starting to take an interest and learn for the first time.

“My Computer Science course in uni was full of guys who were proud of their hard core programming abilities, and often they would paint females as ‘noobs’ and ‘wannabes’ — in a group work intensive uni course, this is a big disadvantage for female students who are generally interested and want to do well, but were labelled as lame and pretty much ostracised from the group.

“Many I found, dropped out thinking “I don’t have to put up with this crap”, and end up in other courses where they felt they were taken as equals.

“I also think fewer females start being interested in IT when they’re young because of that mental image of a computer nerd with thick glasses who can’t communicate — can’t help that, it’s a popular stereotype.”

Thanks to Veronica Luke for sharing her experiences.

I treated myself to an iPhone. As many objects of desire, an iPhone does not come cheap, so the shopping experience could be expected to enhance the status of the object of desire as, well, desirable.

An advantage of getting an iPhone is, indeed, that you can buy it in an Apple Store and avoid other technology stores. I would have been able to buy it online, too, but I wanted the in-store experience. So I went to Apple’s Regent Street store after making an appointment with a personal shopper first. Given how crowded the store is, that was a good decision.

I was quickly assigned my personal shopper and led to the cordoned-off area for the personal shopping experience. Although I had done my research beforehand and knew exactly what I wanted, he took me through all the options. I, playing the role of the customer, engaged in the ritual of the sales pitch. My personal shopper was a mid-twenties guy. He explained all the options to me in an unpretentious way. This would make it easy for people who are not sure what they want to make their choice.

After getting a brand-new boxed iPhone based on my choice, my personal shopper set out to register it. Sadly, he had to open the box for this. This meant that my unwrapping experience at home was diminished. But who would complain about this if he then does all the admin for you and you can use your phone straightaway?

He told me the process would take 15 minutes, however he did not consider o2. There was some website problem and we were always kicked out of the registration system. My personal shopper finally rang them using his personal BlackBerry (a bit ironic given that it was an Apple store) and registered the iPhone. It was rather 45 minutes than 15 minutes. However sitting in the personal shopping area of the Apple Store that was not too much of a problem.

Although the box had been opened, my personal shopper put all the material carefully back into the box and gave me a nice shopping bag to carry it home. I could bring my new iPhone home in style and could start using it straight away.

We have said many times that Apple as a brand appeals to female customers. Apple Stores are unlike other technology stores. Apple understands that technology should be an object of desire. My whole shopping experience was not unlike a personal shopping experience in clothing stores on Regent Street. I can imagine that women do like shopping in the Apple store. I did not feel patronized like in other technology stores. The shopping experience had some style to it. The purchase was wrapped beautifully. This makes the object of desire even more desirable. Particularly for women.