H2O + Keyboard = Fail

I have a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 that I absolutely love. I do a LOT of typing in my job, and sometimes with normal keyboards I would get carpul tunnel symptoms (pain in the wrists, etc). After putting up with that for long enough, I switched to an ergonomic keyboard, and the difference was night and day. If you are at the right place and right time, you can catch me carrying my keyboard into work in the morning, and home after work (I’m saving up money for a second keyboard and a decent ergo mouse).

But that is not the topic for this article. The keyboard, when functional, is absolutely wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone who does a lot of typing. The reason for this post is actually my 1 year old daughter, her effect on my oh so wonderful keyboard, and why I think Microsoft ultimately failed here.

She’s awesome! She runs around the house, smiles and laughs at everything I say (even if it isn’t funny), and generally makes my world great. But, she tends to be a bit clumsy, as most 1 year olds are, and today she showed me that Microsoft really sucks it up at designing fool proof hardware.

I set up my laptop in the living room when I work from home and watch her while my wife goes to school. The keyboard on my laptop is pretty terrible. It skips keys sometimes, the shift key get stuck, and these are known problems with this particular model laptop (HP Pavilion dv8315nr). So, I naturally bring my ergo keyboard and hook it up in the living room as well.

Well, today I was busy working on a project and I had a glass of water next to me (hey, programming is hard work and everyone needs to stay hydrate right?). My daughter came running up to me and started grabbing for the glass, and naturally I snatched it up before she could get to it. In doing so, I managed to drop a few drops of water into my keyboard (maybe 6 drops if you compared it to an eye dropper). No big deal I thought, and I took a paper towel and absorbed what I could see, and went about my work.

Everything went swell until around 5 PM. I worked out a bit, and came back to check my email, and noticed that I had trouble typing in www.gmail.com. It came out as www.gmail.om. I figured typo, and went to correct it. Then I noticed that nothing in the lower left hand side of the keyboard worked anymore. z,x,c,v, shift, and alt all failed to register.

“Oh hell” I said to myself. Knowing that water and computer parts don’t mix, I thought the worse, and immediately unplugged the keyboard from the rest of my computer. After popping a few keys off (x,c), I found some more water in the keyboard, but I also found something much more interesting.

Underneath the keys on that part of the keyboard, there is nothing in between the keys and the board that registers key presses. So essentially, the water had gone straight through the keys and directly onto the board, which I’m assuming is shorted out until it dries.

So back to the original point! Why is a big named company like Microsoft still designing hardware like it is supposed to be used in a museum? Here is a company with endless resources, great products, and absolutely failure to recognize that they are in fact the reason that computers are so prevelent in society. Keyboards are no longer just for big computer labs that hook up to the mainframe with signs on the doors that say “No food or drinks.”

Hardware vendors need to start realizing that computers are everywhere, they did this, and they need to design for it. A GREAT example of this being a reality is the IBM thinkpad. They have designed in water protection, drop cage, and other features that protect the computer from daily use and human fallibility.

So even though I’m a small blog in a big Internet, I’m going to propose a challenge to hardware vendors. Start designing your products for the average user who may on occasion drop water in the keyboard and might not want to cough up the money for a new keyboard (or be able to  - those diapers, I tell you!). Design them for users who move a lot, work in dusty areas, greasy areas, whatever. You made these possibilities a reality, yet you choose to ignore them to cut costs in production.

I admire the Thinkpad for it’s inginuity and practical protections. I’m actually saving up money for a Thinkpad to replace this pile I have now. I could go with a cheaper computer that may have the same speed and disk space specs as the Thinkpad, but what I really like about the Thinkpad is that they are designed for use by me, faults and all.