Metaphorically speaking

摘要

The two biggest consumer-technology successes of recent times are a white page and a wheel. The white page belongs to Google, the world's most popular search engine; the wheel to Apple's iPod, the world's most popular portable music player with a hard disk. Both form part of so-called "interfaces"-metaphorical gateways through which humans enter and navigate around a technology. Both are also picture-book examples of simplicity concealing complexity underneath. The white page is said to have come about as follows. In its early days, Google kept receiving strange anonymous e-mails containing only the number 53. Sometimes they stopped coming, then they started again. Eventually, one of Google's geniuses figured out that the e-mails arrived whenever Google had made changes to its web home page that expanded its word count beyond 53. The anonymous adviser was telling Google to keep down the clutter (although why he picked 53 as the cut-off point remains a mystery). In August this year, Google made the biggest stockmarket debut of any technology firm in history. The current word count on google.com is 27.