I’m a fan of pen and paper, or pencil if you prefer. I’ve written about this before in Resilience of Technology last year. I’m in a different place now, literally and figuratively. I didn’t give up on pen and paper but I do rely a bit more today on my portable device as a translator and because I’m unavailable most of the time, it reminds me when I have to reconnect to the rest of the world. What you all would call meetings.
Yesterday I knew I had a meeting coming up so I opened my Proton calendar app to verify what time the meeting was. When I did I was greeted with the message you can see. Update Required. WTF!? The meeting is clearly stored IN the calendar on the device — as we can tell by the little red dot. So why won’t the app show me my calendar? Italics because, you only believe it’s your calendar. The truth is, the software developers and product managers at whatever tech company you’re dealing with are the ones that “own” your data and allow you, even when you pay for the service, to access it on their terms.
That’s the beauty of my old day-planner. It never decided that it was too early or late in the day for me to open it. There were no geographic boundaries in which it was allowed to work or not. A couple of things of note here you may also notice. 1) That’s not a North American cellular carrier. Correct. I am traveling internationally and data plans are limited. 2) My battery level is quite low. Now I’m faced with trying to find a way not only to feed the battery, but also to acquire connectivity. Do I turn back, believing I have enough time till my meeting or continue on further. Hoping that I’ll be able to satisfy both requirements - which will involve spending money - in order to continue what I wanted to do beforehand. Who owns who in this scenarios?
Here’s the real rub however. This didn’t have to happen. It is a design choice by the application provider whether to ‘kill switch’ the existing apps. I also wrote about this with Microsoft turning my OneNote into a read-only application. Even though I ‘owned’ it too. Well, they continue to step on their customers hands and feet. They have bricked Office 2019 for Mac and refuse to fix it for customers. Again, you only thought that exchange of dinero for software made it yours to use.
Rather than just rant to y’all about this I opened a case with support on this. Am I the only person who this bothers? Maybe. One thing I’ve learned though is that the product teams certainly aren’t going to fix it if they don’t have a ticket. In their world they are rewarded and compensated (generally) by seeing the counts of downloads of the new version increase. Whether you need/want it or not. To their credit, they responded quickly and were quite nice.
That said, as another mate of mine says, it’s basically a grin fuck. Sorry, not sorry.
What’d I do? I turned around and checked my calendar on another device. Turns out I didn’t have to, as the meeting was several hours later. I still haven’t updated the App. When other tools break, I don’t keep them in the toolbox anymore. So why should this be any different?
