Tikkabik

Hans Eisenbeis has an interesting piece in today's Boston Globe entitled El Camino syndrome?

He talks about Microsoft's new Xbox 360 and a quandary facing consumers nowadays -- to wit, the proliferation of devices that try to do too much, and end up confusing consumers.

This issue is central to Nintendo's philosophy towards its development of the Revolution, which has already taken some hits for its relative lack of horsepower compared to the forthcoming PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360, and for the unusual design of its controller, which more closely resembles a TV remote than it does a gamepad.

In interviews, Nintendo's ranking officials note that video gaming has become too complicated and that mainstream consumers are unnecessarily intimidated by complicated controls and lousy interfaces. I couldn't agree more. While the game business is booming -- or at least it has been for several years now -- a lot of people still don't play games, because they just don't get them, and they don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for the privilege of finding that out.

To support his hypothesis, Eisenbeis points to a string of multifunction products that should have succeeded but didn't -- Chevy's El Camino chiefly among them (from the front, a passenger car, from the back, a pickup truck) ... hence the name of the article.

Part of it is just a question of design, Eisenbeis admits. "These capabilities hide behind strange symbols and inscrutable buttons. They frustrate and irritate consumers, who don't want to spend the time or energy to figure out whether they're any use."

That may be one of the secrets to the iPod's success. Despite the fact that the market is polluted with products that have better feature sets -- FM radios, voice recorders, the ability to stream audio from other devices and more -- the iPod has won the major market share in the portable digital music player market. I think it's partly because the iPod is as easy to use as falling off a log, and it's also because Apple owns a terrific ecosystem in both the iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

Early users of the Xbox 360 have been impressed with its ease of use not only as a gaming system but also as a media center. It's clear that Microsoft has invested a lot of time making the device as easy to use as possible if you're planning on basing your entertainment system around the console experience. And ultimately, as the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Will the Xbox 360 buck the odds and become the next can't-live-without digital device? At a $400 cost of entry and a temporary but real constraint on availability, I don't see it happening any time soon, but over time, it's certainly possible.