Author Archives: Phil Baker

This morning I awoke to an email from United Airlines, telling me that the reservations we made a few months ago, after many days of effort, were now being changed. As I noted in an earlier column, my wife and I, who live in San Diego, worked for days to research and reserve flights from […]

Have you noticed how difficult it’s become to do simple stuff on the web, such as searching, shopping, or simply reading a news article? It seems anything we try to do is met with in-your-face advertising and annoying requests that get in the way of what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s become impossible to escape […]

You have to hand it to United Airline’s PR department. They managed to flood the news this week with their story about how United is now allowing families with young children under 12 to more easily sit together. “We’re focused on delivering a great experience for our younger passengers and their parents and know it […]

When Musk purchased Twitter and began to make his moves, we all were trying to figure out his motivations and logic. So many of his first initial actions made little sense, such as firing key personnel responsible for safety and allowing posts from former members that were anti-semitic, anti-black and anti most every other minority. […]

Artificial Intelligence that can be used to create both written documents and digital art has created a lot of attention in recent weeks because of how much it could change how we work. It can do something in seconds that might normally takes hours or days to accomplish. Currently there are two products that are […]

Like many others these days, we’ve been traveling a lot more by car and avoiding flying on trips of 500 miles or less. It became apparent after the Covid disruptions that flights of an hour or two take much longer after factoring in driving to the airport, parking, shuttling to the terminal, waiting in the […]

A big challenge for product designers is to make complex products that are easy to set up, simple to use, and that keep on working. That’s often more difficult than creating the product itself. When a product is hard to set up it requires expensive customer support and experiences high rates of return. My own […]

The internet was supposed to make it easier to manage travel bookings and provide more competition. But this past week when I went to book round trip flights between San Francisco and Tokyo, I found the process to be much like a video game: full of twists and turns, only to end up frustrated, confounded, […]

My technology predictions for 2023 Mark Zuckerberg will step down as CEO at Meta. With the company faltering due to its lack of new products and astromoical spending on the metaverse, Zuckerberg will bring in a new CEO and focus on R&D. Tesla will face its most difficult year ever, including facing Federal charges for […]

I’m not surprised by the trouble Southwest is going through. As a long time customer, I’ve seen a deterioration on many fronts over the last few years and reported my observations here, here, and here. While the terrible weather was a factor in the airline’s recent meltdown, it wasn’t the major factor. What we’re seeing […]

It was an easy decision to close my Twitter account this past Sunday morning. It was right after Musk tweeted that Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted, writing, “His pronouns are “Prosecute/Fauci.” But it just as easily could have been the night before when Musk attacked Twitter’s former executive, Yoel Roth, by exposing his internal emails […]

Alaska Airlines has recently begun rolling out a new electronic luggage tag to some of their customers. Is it a useful technology or just a dumb idea? When I first heard about it, I was intrigued. You check into your flight on your phone and then electronically create a customized luggage tag by wirelessly relaying […]

Could we be missing something about Musk and what he’s doing with Twitter? For several weeks now he’s eliminated most of its organization that keeps the site running and keeps discourse from being taken over by hate groups and bigots. Now, in his latest move, he’s changing the rules about content moderation. He’s announced he’s […]

Everyone is trying to figure out what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. Since he took ownership a month ago, he’s fired half the employees, laid off another 5000 contractors, lost most of his advertisers, and eliminated the company’s system of verification. While he needs to reduce the losses, his actions are contrary to common […]

Remember when your cellular provders would increase your monthly bill whenever you tweaked your plan? If you added a line or made a minor change, certain discounts would be removed or your monthly charge would go up. Well, I encounterd a new scheme from Verizon that does much the same. When I made a slight […]

Last week’s post described our horror-able experience with Southwest when trying to fly from San Diego to Savannah, GA. I said I’d never use them again once we concluded our trip, but didn’t expect that getting back home could be just as bad. As I arrived at Savannah Airport for our return to San Diego […]

When we plan a vacation and make airline reservations, our expectations are that our airline will get us to where they agreed to take us at the time they committed for the cost we paid. In the occasional case of having difficulty in fulfilling their commitments, we would expect some help in making other arrangements. […]

They block you when you’re reading, they flash rapidly trying to distract you, and they constantly interrupt your train of thought. They’re interspersed in the middle of a story you’re reading or a video you’re watching. They’re like mosquitos that you can’t get away from. Slap one down and another pops up. Go elsewhere and […]

In my column here on August 10 I predicted that Facebook was about to collapse and gave a number of reasons why I came to that conclusion: Lack of product innovation – In spite of having almost unlimited funds, Facebook has had a poor track record in creating follow-on products, and their latest idea is […]

For more than thirty years, China and our consumer technology industry have been partners that helped each other to thrive. Product innovation and design were done in the U.S. and manufacturing was done in China. But now China’s president Xi Jinping is killing that relationship. China became the default manufacturer for a wide range of […]