Tim Altom

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman to try to force him to remove an aerial photo of her beachfront house from a public photo collection Adelman said was chronicling beach erosion in California. Suddenly, an obscure house on a shoreline jammed with rich people’s homes was highlighted all over the Web, along with the story of how Streisand was leaning on Adelman. Her attempt at intimidation detonated right under her manicured fingernails. Streisand lost three ways. Her $50…

Do you even know that there’s a browser in common use besides Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? If not, don’t feel bad. IE has some 80 percent of the browser market, if “market” can be defined as “where you give everything away to get mind share.” Frustrated with Microsoft and IE, the techies of the world have written their own browser through a mighty effort coordinated by Mozilla, a California-based not-forprofit (www.mozilla.com). It’s called “Firefox.” Currently, it has roughly 15 percent of…

I’ve noticed a trend in restaurants lately. Most of them seem to have dropped those customer comment cards they used to keep clamped at each table. I can see why. In my whole life, I’ve probably filled out fewer than half a dozen of those things, and always when I was particularly irked about the service. I’ve never turned them in, consoling myself with filling them out to blow off steam and then heaving a sigh as I tore them…

I was scanning a 2004 report on corporate security the other day when the phrase “Less than half of all businesses ever evaluate their return on investment (ROI) on security spending” came scrolling down the page. The sentence includes a presumption that is just dead wrong. No security software ever made its purchaser a dime. It can make the seller wealthy, but there is no way security software is an investment. It’s a cost, and always will be. In point…

Why can’t products be easier to use, simpler and with fewer gadgets? Why do we have so many features we never get around to using? Buttons and dials on car radios are proliferating, and even metastasizing to the steering wheel. There are so many switches in new cars that some of them go forever unused, simply because we can’t remember what they do. Cell phones are sprouting menus within menus. Even refrigerators are getting computerized controls with a television in…

Office life has never been a particularly attractive one. No office, no matter how exciting or extensively outfitted with Aeron chairs, is going to be mistaken for a human habitat. Our species long ago outgrew living in tiny little caves with flickering lighting and strange stains on the floor, except at work. In Cubeville, there is often isolation, but no privacy. Thoughtful reclining is easily mistaken for laziness. Office parties and office politics are frequently undertaken by the same people….