I pick up my wife's shiny new Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S Android powered phone, select a photo, click on the share option, select the Xbox 360 and, hey presto, as if by magic (thanks to the phone's DLNA support) the photo appears on our TV. Wife is impressed. I move to the next photo and it turns up on the TV, but it is on it's side. I check the phone and it is the right way up, look back at the TV and scratch my head. Err.. Wife looks less impressed, loses interest and wanders off as I start tweaking settings and pounding through sub menus. I've just hit the last five percent. That part of technology that just doesn't quite work.
The last five percent is when all that processing power and computerised wizardry comes to a grinding halt when it oh so nearly got over the line. It's like recording a great song and then leaving a bum note on the last chorus or writing a classic novel but leaving spelling mistakes on the final page. The last five percent can come in many forms. It is the contact syncing software that works perfectly until it suddenly starts duplicating all your contacts. The website that will not accept your email address when you try to sign up. The sat nav that freezes just as you get near to your destination. The auto-correcting mobile phone keyboard that causes you to send gobbledygook messages. The... oh you get the picture. It can be infuriating and can taint our view of the 95% of technology that just works. It can also leave us feeling powerless. We have no idea, mostly, how the gadgets around us work, so modifying them to try to get rid of the last five percent problem is simply beyond us. If we do take on the challenge it can lead to countless hours of, mostly fruitless and frustrating, tweaking.
Software is made by humans and is therefore fallible, but you sometimes wonder if the last five percent of functionality is deliberately left flaky and unreliable, just for badness. Perhaps it is added in to leave us all wanting more and thinking that maybe the next upgrade will be the one that has that last little feature that we always wanted to work, but never quite did. But, of course, the last five percent is elusive, it is constantly just out of our reach. The latest upgrade just moves it somewhere else. As Bob Dylan once sang: "Talk about perfection, I ain't never seen none".
