August 4, 1997
What Channel is On?
By Bob O'Donnell
I'm no couch potato, but I've definitely spent my share of time in front of the TV.
And, I'm no novice on the Net. But, I'm struggling to reconcile the concepts of channels
with the Web. Oh sure, I get the basic idea: Convert each Web site into a TV channel and
we can turn the Bruce Springsteen lyric into "Got 57 million channels and there's
nothin' on." But I'm wondering how well it really translates into practical
experience.
I say this because I've begun to use the Public Preview Beta 2 of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer (IE) 4.0, which makes heavy use of the "channels on the Web" concept,
and I find it very confusing. At first I thought it was just me, but in conversations with
others who've tried the beta, there's been a great deal of agreement that channels (at
least as they're implemented in IE 4.0) are not helpful, but confounding.
Many other aspects of the browser are very nice: The new History, Search and Favorites
side-panel frames, in particular, really help in getting you around. But when you start
using the channels, you'll find your entire screen filled with a different type of
interface that's very disconcerting because of its lack of familiar controls. Now that
I've lived with it for a few weeks, I admit that it's a bit easier to get around, but the
first impressions are really bad.
More importantly, I've found that I rarely -- if ever -- check the channels I initially
signed up for. Partially that's because I'm not sure if what I'm getting is current, or
needs to be updated and if it does need to be updated, how to do it. To me, it's much
easier to simply go to the Web site I'm interested in and find out what's there.
Most reviews I've read of the product have been fairly glowing. I've seen few, if any,
of the complaints I have or that I've heard from listeners to my two radio shows, who are
typically intermediate to advanced end-users. Most of their feedback matched my own
experiences. I have to wonder if this is a case where having a reviewer's kit or some kind
of other backup information helped writers get past the initial confusion.
Regardless, it's clear that without some major tweaks to the interface, IE 4.0 and then
Windows 98 will require a great deal of end-user training. I find this surprising, because
in most respects, Windows 98 is a much more incremental change from Windows 95 than 95 was
to Windows 3.1. As a result, I expected (and believe most others probably thought) the
move from Windows 95 to 98 was going to be more akin to the jump from Windows 3.0 to 3.1
than from 3.1 to 95, which everyone knew was going to require serious training.
Finally, I have to wonder now about the practicality of push mechanisms for most
people. First of all, there are serious questions about how many people really need (or
want) information pushed to them as soon as it becomes available. And secondly, if it's
hard to figure out how to make a feature of questionable value work in the first place,
most users will avoid it like the plague. I certainly think the concept of push technology
is appealing to many people, but as with television, the actual results are much less
impressive.
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Copyright 1997, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
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