Mighty Mouse Will Continue To Roar

The Age

Tuesday July 31, 2007

Lia Timson

Personal computers will disappear in the future, with all information stored on the internet and accessed via a plug in the wall. But we will still need the humble mouse to make sense of it all.

As the president and chief executive officer of Logitech, one could not expect Guerrino de Luca to undersell his biggest asset, but his belief is based on nearly 10 years on the job.

On his first trip to Sydney last week to attend company meetings, the Olivetti-trained Italian engineer explained why: "When I joined Logitech, people asked me why I was joining, because the mouse would be gone, replaced by voice. I don't think so, voice is further behind today than it was then.

"That point of contact between people and technology is going to be central to the user experience. Be it mouse, voice, whatever, the inevitable discontinuity between (us) as analog, sensorial entities and the zeros and ones of content and technology needs to be bridged."

While he reserves some enthusiasm for gesture and motion controllers, Mr de Luca does not believe consumers will be ready to ditch the mouse as the main interface with the PC or notebook any time soon.

"Goggles, gloves and dance mats make for great articles, but you have to be mainstream. You can't expect people to do weird things. Once you have such a strong metaphor embedded in the mind and your brain understands the relationship between this (pointing) movement and the screen, you never forget that."

Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, would be pleased to hear that. They developed the first mechanical wooden mouse, before Logitech added micro-controllers and commercialised the invention.

This month the company added the MX Air Mouse to its 250-active-product catalogue. It works as a point-scroll-and-click mouse, as well as a gravity-intelligent motion-detection device that controls media centres remotely. A horizontal move to the right raises volume; to the left, lowers it. A circle to the right makes the music player jump tracks; to the left, it goes back. But a mouse it still is.

"The nature of the problem we're solving will never go away," Mr de Luca says. "We're trying to tame complexity. The nature of the information is exploding, there's evolution but there's (still a need) for interface navigation tools."

He doesn't buy the idea that hand gestures should be understood by machines without the need of a hand-held device.

"There's a role for motion, but we haven't fully understood what that is. Technology is always ahead of the consumer, sometimes too much ahead and disconnected. Yes, you can sell things that detect (the rich) movement of Italian hands, but it (might) not work all the time."

But Mr de Luca could be wrong. It has happened before.

"There are much smarter people than me making product decisions. I have my own ideas, but I've made a lot of mistakes. The cordless desktop (keyboard and mouse, plus receiver) I said would never make it because people don't buy bundles: it was the most successful product because they weren't choosing a mouse and keyboard, they were choosing cordless-ness."

On the other hand, Mr de Luca, a leftie himself, pushed for the development of a left-hand mouse, which never took off because its intended target had already learned to use the mainstream product.

But that's OK, he says, because failure is an important ingredient of innovation, especially when risk is spread so widely no product accounts for more than 3.5 per cent of revenue.

"We have our dose of products that don't succeed, failures that enable us to understand what consumers want. Because even with all the research, you never know how they really behave at point of sale until you try."

Preferring the word "comfort" to "ergonomics", Mr de Luca says much of what the world's largest manufacturer of peripherals produces - including web cams, keyboards and audio speakers - is based on this aspect. "Comfort plays an enormous part in what we do. People ask, 'What is comfort?' You don't know until you experience it and then you can't live without it."

He credits the company's growth over the past nine years with its ability to identify major behavioural trends.

"Communication has always been the attraction of all applications. We built a huge audio franchise out of nothing because we identified digital music as a mega trend."

The others were internet communication, cordless-ness, the digital living room and the transition from PC to notebook.

© 2007 The Age

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