> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.techcanbebetter.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Reflecting on managers; Smart Home products
- URL: https://www.techcanbebetter.com/reflecting-on-managers-smart-home-products/
- Published: 2024-11-21T18:50:56.000Z
- Updated: 2024-11-21T18:50:56.000Z
- Description: Reminiscing about some of my early career managers and what I learned from them. And some thoughts about smart home.
- Author: John Ludwig

I'm on vacation this week, which is giving me time for reflection.

## Microsoft era managers

I’ve been reminiscing about some of my managers from my time at Microsoft. I worked with some fantastic people, and I learned a lot from each of them.

My first manager was Rob Glaser. This was a challenging group to land in at Microsoft — Rob had only one speed, and it was full-on. I learned a lot about the value of intensity from Rob. And he also taught me the batting average metaphor — **you need to get up and swing, you are going to strike out a lot, but that is OK, even the best players strike out more often than they connect.**

Richard McAniff was my second manager. Richard was intense in his way but a lot more balanced than Rob. On the professional side, Richard drilled into me that “you can’t gain market share if you aren’t shipping” — all of our incredible innovations and ideas didn’t matter if we weren’t in the marketplace. And personally, Richard taught me about vacations — **it is worth investing a lot in vacations because they create the memories in your life**. This insight completely transformed how I thought of vacations for the better.

I briefly had some other managers and then moved to work under Brad Silverberg, who had the most significant impact on my professional growth and success. I learned so much from Brad. He drilled into me the “dog food” principle — we all used exactly the products our customers used, did things the way customers did, and lived the problems our customers lived. And Brad had such a great eye for detail — every part of the product was worth attention, down to the smallest detail of file timestamps, the number of floppies the product used, or the name of a particular file. This attention made the product so much better and made everyone’s job seem essential, even the most junior jobs with limited scope. And overall, **Brad had such a passion for products — he wanted to create great products, coherent products, products that had “soul.”** It was an honor to work with him — and I'm looking forward to seeing him at breakfast tomorrow.

## The year of the smart home, again

I’m certainly no home technology Luddite. I’ve embraced every Apple device since the Apple \]\[. I am a daily user of my Mac, iPad, iPhone, AirPods, and AppleTV. I used Airports when they existed. I’ve tried the Pencil. I’ve used every variant of Mac, iPad, and AirPods. 

I’ve tried almost every Amazon hardware experiment — I am a daily user of my Kindle, Eero devices, Ring devices, and Blink devices.

I use a variety of other smart home devices from other vendors — cameras, security products, vacuums, smart TVs, lighting and irrigation controllers, connected appliances, garage door openers, etc. I have a whole page of apps on my phone for interacting with all this.

So I love that [Apple is trying to innovate in this space with a home device](https://spyglass.org/apples-new-hip-to-be-square-home-device-2/?ref=the-outer-ring-newsletter) and that [Amazon is trying to innovate in this space with a new Echo device](https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-goes-big-with-echo-show-21-for-smart-home-control-organization-and-entertainment/?ref=techcanbebetter.com). There is certainly room for improvement in the smart home space. The UX of all the solutions today is pretty rough; the welter of incompatible standards is exhausting. I am sure Apple has some ideas from HomeKit about killer new features, and I am sure Amazon has some ideas from Echo usage about killer new features. So I welcome the innovation and competition.

There are some significant challenges in the space, and I am interested in seeing how Apple and Amazon address them. 

The first is naming and identification. Smart home devices typically have either autogenerated or user-provided names, neither of which help you at all. “TP-Link-A56Z32i” doesn’t help me understand which light it is, nor do my user-generated names when I have a sea of lights or when I move smart devices around. And none of my devices have any spatial awareness – I can't say "Turn on the lights in the living room" or "turn on the irrigation in the northeast corner" without doing a lot of constant name and device group maintenance. **What I really want to do as a user is point at an area and say “I want more light over here” or “turn that thing on” or “turn on these things here at sunset every night”**. 

The second challenge is human interest. Vendors can make smart home tech 1000 times better — and I don’t want to be the IT manager for my home. I do not want to spend time on all this smart home stuff, and I certainly don’t want to be my family's first line of support. **Humans adopted PCs and phones for productivity, entertainment, and communication. Smart home tech provides none of these; it just provides all the IT burden without any of the IT benefits**. 

I suspect a successful home device will have significant productivity, communication, or family entertainment features. I am looking forward to what Apple and Amazon do in these directions.

##