[gui-talk] The Mosen Excursion

[Steve Jacobson]

Allen,

I think you have made some good points here, and I hope we have learned from this that one person, even a blind person, is not a reason to decide if a product is 
good or not.  Nothing about Freedom Scientific paying Jonathan Mosen instead of HumanWare changes the quality of the BrailleNote or the PacMate, at least not 
immediately.  

I think that having two competing products is very helpful in our small market.  What puzzles me a little is that HumanWare appears not to have protected 
themselves very well.  Jonathan Mosen likely has a lot of very detailed knowledge of the hardware plans and the marketing strategy for the BrailleNote over the next 
couple of years.  One might make the case that the different approaches mean that there isn't much value in transferring this information to Freedom Scientific, but I 
tend to think that is not the case.  Being on a more open platform, it is going to be easier for Freedom Scientific to anticipate a particular feature that the BrailleNote 
has, even if they don't do it as well.  I hope that this move results in companies being more careful to guard their data.  Possibly there was some behind the scenes 
negotiating that took place making my concerns not relevant, but we will never know if that is the case or not.

As consumers, we are sometimes caught between a rock and a hard place.  We want to know more about what is going on behind the closed doors of the 
companies that make assistive technology so we can have an influence on what they do.  On the other side of the coin, though, companies can only stay in 
business if their product has something unique to offer.  If BrailleNote and PacMate are exactly the same, then we don't have a choice.  Therefore, the possible 
transfer of internal knowledge from BrailleNote development to PacMate development is something that concerns me.  Further, since Jonathan is one of us, I feel it 
would have been nice if he had explained his thinking on this since he has had a very close relationship with his customers over the years.  Of course, it could be 
that he can't for legal reasons, and we're left in the position of wondering and speculating, but I have a feeling that he will never have quite the credibility that he 
enjoyed even recently due to the dramatic change in positions on such things as open versus close architecture of a note-taker.

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 08:20:48 -0400, Hoffman, Allen wrote:

>The Mosen Excursion
>All:
>Just something to think about regarding Deborah Kendrick's article regarding the energy in the blindness community over Mr. Mosen's employer change.  In her 
article she theorizes or postulates that the energy is due to the fact that Mr. Mosen is blind.  While she may be right in her theory, if so it is troubling to me, and 
should be something blind folks might consider as they move forward in their continuing love affairs with technological solutions.
>  
>The assistive technology marketplace is small, with a small set of vendors, and a small set of customers.  Government purchasers are a significant portion of the 
buyers, and educational government buyers are a large portion of that.  The market is not consumer electronics and has no intention currently to become that.  
Would we base a buying decision regarding a consumer electronics item on the fact that, company X has fifty employees who are blind, and company Y has two 
hundred? 
>So what?  If people in the blindness community are upset about one person who is blind changing alliances, then their analysis of how to select products for their 
use is flawed from the start.  Personally I don't assume that a product will be better designed by someone who is blind than someone who isn't, and to think so is 
throwing in a whole load of assumptions about both sets of people.  I think that often people who are not blind don't take the time to understand how items really do 
need to function for people who are blind, but then again, people who are blind often don't take that time for themselves either.  its a "roll the dice" situation really--
depends on the person, not the disability! 
>Maybe the lesson learned here is that disability-centric thinking can be problematic when applied too often.
>one of my general principles I always try and promote in life is that the world should work for everyone--universal accessibility.  HumanWare has taken the 
approach of making a specialized product that does not really ride on the electronics market, as their interfaces are all proprietary, while Freedom Scientific has gone 
another path.  Both approaches produce proprietary, expensive solutions.  its a preference, but please, lets not base a preference on the concept that there's a 
person who is blind in one camp as opposed to the other.
>Just my ten cents worth--inflation ya know.