Thank You eBay!

Hi all,

If you haven’t heard, this week will be my last here at eBay after two awesome years. I thought about this one for a while and ultimately, the timing was right.

So I will be joining a start-up called Meraki in Downtown Mountain View and I’ll be part of a tiny team trying to break the digital divide by opening up wireless broadband internet access to the rest of the world. More specifically, I’ll be doing anything, on and off-line, design wise to help get the word out.

It’s been an honor to work on such challenging projects with such wonderful, passionate, and knowledgeable people. It’s very humbling being around the talent here. I have grown so much because of you all.

I leave behind my work on iWeb so hopefully if you need to reference anything, it’ll be easy to find and as for people needing documentation done, I will get them up before my last day in PDF form.

I'm sorry if I haven't had the chance to talk to everyone in person before this email. I would love to grab coffee, chat via email, IM, and of course there's always the going-away party this Friday at Katie Bloom’s.

All the best,
John

Random Thoughts: Good User Experiences

I have just witnessed the power of a good... no... amazing user experience.

So I finally caved and bought an iPhone. Now I was one of it's biggest haters... Mainly because of the price. But last week, Apple dropped the bomb and brought the price down of iPhones down $200. O... M... G... I caved. Hard.

Originally I thought it would just be a phone attached to an iPod video but leave it to Apple to come out with something totally unexpected. The result is a device that is a combination of daily features that are delivered to the user in a way that is intuitive, powerful and dare I say... fun!

So I had a number of co-workers with one and I was impressed. But owning and playing with one are two different things. I found myself yesterday driving to pick up my girlfriend's car and we totally overshot the exit and we had no clue if we did or not (We both have horrible case of wanderlust). Instead of pulling off the freeway, we just whipped out the phone and dug up the exit we just passed. It brought it up and we just missed it. I'll spare you all the other stories but you get the idea. The right thing at the right time.

Now I had a fairly featured phone to begin with however it was such a pain in the ass to do anything that I didn't even bother. Now everything is such a joy to do. It's the point that I'm working on my laptop and I found myself trying to use my finger to manipulate the data on my screen. Heh...

So for everyone out there, I was wrong (dead wrong) about the iPhone. It's everything and more. But it's one of those things that unless you own one, you'll never really know.