Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert, blogger and generally interesting guy) wrote a blog post recently that really caught my eye.
He says CBS Sports contacted him to ask him to create a "business-looking" screen that a viewer could quickly pop up using the Boss Mode button built into CBS's video feed viewer. The idea is that if an employees is watching March Madness (the NCAA basketball tournament) on his computer during working hours he could quickly hid the fact from his boss. Further, they wanted the content to look business-like, but to actually be funny on closer examination.
It is nice to know CBS Sports has a sense of fun. That's all this is of course. Some commenters have decried the waste of corporate bandwidth, and the poor morality of shirking work. As a CEO myself, I don't see it that way. I measure my team on what they accomplish. If they can do an excellent job and still watch the game, then they are excellent as far as I'm concerned. The corollary is that if someone is consistently only delivering excuses for why the job is not done well, then they are a problem that must be dealt with.
Anyway, what really grabbed me about Scott's blog post is that our product PrivateEye has a Boss Mode that solves this problem exactly, and in my opinion far more elegantly than with a keyboard button. There's an option in PrivateEye to turn on Boss Mode - a setting that lets you choose what you want your screen to show in an 'emergency'. When it's on and you're looking at your screen you can enjoy the game (or your work) normally, but if anyone else looks at your screen or you turn your head away PrivateEye immediately displays your chosen Boss Mode view.
The idea is more elegant than hitting a button on your keyboard because that's a dead giveaway that you were up to no good. With PrivateEye, all you do is look away and it happens automatically. If this sounds implausible to you, please suspend disbelief for a minute because the product is real. You can check out video of it working here.
Sorry for the commercial, I try not to do that in this blog. I'm just really excited that someone like CBS is, in a humorous way, acknowledging the display privacy issue too. Now what we really need is to get on their radar screens for next year. Coming in 2011: March Madness, On Demand, In the Privacy of your Cube (powered by Oculis Labs). Catchy, isn't it?
