Alex – Pricey But Simple?
A million people could come online with a laptop as simple as Alex, says Andy Hudson. But ease of use comes at a price
On the whole, he thinks influencers will be prepared to advise their friends to go with Alex for the simplicity:
Hudson made his first stab at Alex, building a simplified GUI, using a programming tool… within Powerpoint. Microsoft eventually took the tool out, and Hudson found something out: “I was the only person on the planet using it.”
Making a front-end inside a Microsoft program which required Windows to run didn’t really simplify the PC, so he found some people who could rebuild the concept in Linux, and packaged it up. “We dabbled in bespoke hardware, and found that wasn’t worth doing – economically, that model doesn’t work,” so he went with Clevo.
As a tiny company, he’s not going to cause any concern at the big players, but wants to reduce our dependence on themL “One of our biggest jobs is to get round the Microsoft obsesssive society which thinks there is no other option.”
Alex was built by you?
And he makes a comparison between Alex and Windows: in both cases, the developers used feedback in the form of recorded clicks from demo users (Microsoft claimed it took a billion sessions to discover that users wanted their PC to start up quickly). “We learnt by watching and amending,” says Hudson. “We’ve spend an inordinate amount of time with people who say they don’t want a computer.”
These people would not go near PC World, he says: “We asked a bunch of people over 50, where they would buy from, and they said Tesco, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer andArgos.”
Users can open the box and be sending an email in twenty minutes, he says. They get an office package whichis “more compatible with MS Office than MS Office is itself,” – the spreadsheet function is less so, but most of his audience won’t be doing spreadsheets, he says. “Anyone wanting to do something in Excel is already PC literate – and the same goes for PowerPoint.”
The system has four buttonsx – for web, email, word processing and photo manipulation. It also plays DVDs, and has a general purpose media player. Documents “save themselves” with every keystroke, it promises inherent security (Linux, automatically updated under the remote control) and the broadband option will take care of the big bugbear of home users – router configuration.
In some ways, the system is like a mobile phone – every function there has to be behind a simple button because there is no space on the screen, and phones have to reach a bigger market than laptops. He agrees, and says the name Alex is for Alexander Graham Bell, who said his invention was a success “because it requires no skill on the part of the user.”
He’s hopine Alex could get some government support – perhaps from the Digital Inclusion office – and already has some interest form councils and private care homes, he says, “but it’s difficult to get under the wire because of the dominance of Microsoft.”
