“Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry” – Sony CEO Howard Stringer

Although the quote’s a year or two old now, the bloated remote for Sony’s new Google TV would suggest that the culture of engineer-knows-best is still firmly in place over at Sony.  And that’s a shame, because even a cursory comparison of Sony’s and, say, Apple’s performance over the past few years would suggest that engineers may in fact not be the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry.

Engineers, it turns out, are the engineers of the electronics industry – and while crucial to the technology involved, should be kept out of the room when it comes time to do consumer electronics user interface design…

…or you end up with TV remotes that look like this.

Give them points for perseverance – Sony’s been at this internet video thing for a while now.  Before Google TV, there was the somewhat underwhelming Video Link system, and before that, there was the even more underwhelming RoomLink system.  None of these efforts gained much traction in the marketplace, and last year saw the company that brought us the Walkman a generation ago close 18% of its manufacturing facilities and lay off 20,000 workers.  Over the past few years, the company also accumulated quite a reputation for user-unfriendly, semi-functional CE hardware – so much so that it was satirized in a profanity-laced Onion News Network segment that contains language far too kid-and workplace inappropriate for us to link to directly here (to be fair, the Onion has lampooned Apple hardware design as well).

To date, that scathing Onion News video clip has received 3.7 million views on YouTube alone.  While the folks at Sony could not have been too thrilled about that, you’d think someone there would have recognized the Onion piece as irrefutable evidence of Sony’s poor reputation for product design and resolve to improve it.  Sadly, though, although being first to market with a Google TV-embedded flat screen is a tremendous opportunity, this bloat-remote would suggest Sony still hasn’t quite ‘gotten religion’ yet regarding good product design – in fact, this monster of a remote stands in stark contrast to the less-is-more UI ethos of none other than Google, their new internet television partner.

Granted, there has to be a keyboard – it’s Google, after all, gotta have that search.  Granted, some kind of soft-menu infrared pointer system would probably be cost-prohibitive, at least right now.  Still, there’s no excuse for this remote.  Even at a glance, it’s clear no distinction whatsoever was made between how commonly used controls and uncommonly used controls are presented – instead, the kitchen sink is thrown at the user in one single flat one-dimensional overwhelming onslaught.

To see what the Google TV remote could have looked like, take a look at this prototype Boxee Box remote.  Realizing users would be changing the volume or paging through channels a bit more often than they’d be using the Function, Alt, or Backslash keys, these clever fellows decided to put the keyboard on the bottom.  In this way, not only does the remote dtill look like a remote (making it about 30 times less intimidating than Sony’s) – it also makes it more stylishly at home on the coffee table, while at the same time keeping the keyboard dust-free.  Win. Win. Win.

Who would want Sony’s remote on their coffee table?  Engineers, 15 year-old boys, and video editors, maybe -  I, for one, wouldn’t want to come home from a 9 hour day sitting in front of a computer keyboard only to find another computer keyboard – with dual jog wheels, no less – staring at me from my coffee table.

During that same interview from a few years ago, here’s Stringer attributing the success of Apple over Sony to the latter being handicapped by its choice of closed technology: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, he claims.  This is an entirely reasonable argument only if one ignores the inconvenient truth that Apple, the company that ate Sony’s lunch so thoroughly over the past few years, was and remains today perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (App Store, anyone?)

Any  holes in the logic behind Stringer’s claim aside, it begs the question: is it possible that Sony still fails to grasp the role that elegant, thoughtful, and friendly user interface design plays in the success of a consumer electronics device?

If so, memo to Howard:  it’s the users, not the engineers, who are the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry.