The ability of technology to deliver a poorly considered and all round pants service must be one of the great insights of any age. From the Stone Age, the seventy seven thousand year bone awls from the Blomberg Caves in South Africa were a great disappointment to the stoneworkers of the day and they ended up just being used to pierce holes in clothing. In the early Medieval period, the development of horse shoes was severely hampered by the lack of existence of Northampton as we know it and there yet to be a sufficient number of cobblers with the requisite skills.
And here we are in the present. Our ability to create stuff that gets people all excited in the downstairs region, yet which fails to deliver any quality of service, is an absolute wonder.
Take the QR Code. No, I'm not going to do the traditional joke.
Here's one I made earlier. One scan of the code and lo, the text is displayed
Well. I say "one scan of the code" but that entailed an entire sequence of operations. Mainly dillying around with a smartphone, making sure the right app was installed, launching the app, pointing the camera at the code, waiting for it to focus, aaaaannnd, yes there it is. Look at my big fat head, etc. Success, but that's not really asking it to do much other than display a bit of text.
So what can we use them for? Well the marketeers are out in force on this one, any opportunity to lure you to their website to extract your cash. Putting microscopic QR codes on every item you're likely to meet, almost invisible to the unaided eye on toothpaste tubes, and completely unrecognisable to the QR code app...
But wait, there was one moment where suddenly it seemed to make some sort of sense. On a for sale sign on a house there was a QR code. Great, that saves having to type in the estate agents web address or use their sub-standard search facility that never finds the actual property, this QR enabled option will take me straight to the details of this house I don't want to buy.
Of course it turned out to be absolutely useless. It lead straight to a non-mobile optimised web site that decided that as my device wouldn't load the full website it would redirect me somewhere else and drop all of the details of what I was after. "Welcome to our search page" - oh piss off.
This isn't the fault of the QR code. The process of creating a QR code may be simple enough for those with zero technical knowledge, however the lack of technical knowledge reveals the fact that there is a lot more to the process of delivering a coherent service. There is a great big missing lump of work that should take place in the middle to make sure this all makes sense.
This lack of understanding of the entire process isn't the fault of the developer of QR codes either. They had worked on an idea that was designed to track industrial processes after they discovered there were limits to barcode technology. These industrial processes were clearly defined and bounded, and worked reliably.
The precursor to the QR code in industrial use
So what's the deal. Well, the problem lies in in the implementation and the failure of the innovation process. There's nothing wrong with trying to innovate, however in some cases a product is a beta, beta, beta version of something that hasn't had the rough edges and faults chipped off yet and it is a long way from being unleashed onto humankind. There's an assumption that people will do the right things, but people don't always know what the right things are especially when there are a lot of complex interactions.
These problems will no doubt be overcome, although the QR code is unlikely to be part of it. Virtual Reality technology will give us the ability to point a camera at the actual item rather than a QR code. For example just point the camera at the house that is for sale and it will lead directly to the information required, no, sorry, it'll lead directly to the non-mobile optimised web-page which will then redirect you to the same rubbish search page. The fully integrated system problem will still exist, sorry.
Are people still using QR codes, they still a thing?
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