"Chosen" Life

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Posted by Radhika

How often have u planned dinner with friends and took an hour to decide which place you would like to eat at? Have you stood in a mobile store, surfed mobile related sites and enquired with people, only to be more confused in the end? How often have you Googled only to think that there is too much information you are flooded with? It is true that these days we are spoilt for choices, but do we really enjoy the privilege is something I am not sure of!

For example, at work we initially had laptops with no stripped down rights. We shifted to another campus where due to some security issues our admin rights were taken away, followed by that was the scanner rights and then USB drives. We all wondered how drastically our life would be turned upside-down at this intrusion.. Surprisingly it wasn't. As for those whose life was drastically affected,they found ways to soothe the hiccups!

Another instance is the applications/softwares in our computers - you have those that have overlapping functions like, MS Office Picture Manager is a stripped down version of Photoshop, but I still use the former for simple functions like compressing or cropping a picture. For calculation purposes, every once in a while I still use the Calculator rather than MS Office. I just like to keep it simple. Of course, it is also about one's usability but then again these softwares have been part of every new version of Windows/Mac that has been launched, surely with the user in mind.

An interesting article I read in Harvard Business Review might throw more "intellectual" light on the same, have a look: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/11/why-people-want-less-choice.html