The Death of the Death of QR Codes

People keep talking about the death of QR codes. "Oh, look, some new phone works with 'near field communications' chips and maybe one retailer in Chicago has the transmitter/receiver to talk to it, Oooooooh."

Or maybe there's some other new thing; it doesn't matter what it is, they (those people who want to be the first to predict the death of everything) are always hammering the first nail into the coffins of everything.

The biggest complaint I read from every coffin-nailer about QR Codes is that you need to open the app to scan the code. WTF? Everyone has 100 apps on their phones and they regularly open and close them to do stuff. But for some reason, the line over which no man shall pass was drawn at the QR code reader app.

One article complained that it was too difficult to fit the code within the app's tiny focus box... WELL THEN YOU HAVE THE WRONG APP. The app on my phone uses about 75% of my screen and it's nearly impossible to NOT scan the code. I would need to be actually falling, tumbling down the stairs, head over heels, for the app to not work. And that's only because I switched apps so I could take video of myself falling to put on YouTube. "Oh, man, check out this video this guy took of himself falling down the stairs. Oh, man, is that his tooth? Did you hear his spine snap? Is that blood on the screen? I'm forwarding this to everyone."

This is nitpicking because we all fiddle with our phones all day long, enabling and disabling GPS, Bluetooth, muting the sound while we play Temple Run, and asking Siri what she's wearing today.

But the biggest ACTUAL USEFUL ACCURATE complaint is that many codes simply link to crap. I don't need to describe what crap is in this post because I have enough reviews that point to examples. In fact, I might go back and relabel them all with the word crap. What marketers fail to accept is that the mobile user is enormously fickle and disloyal. Everyone is always looking for the next hot trend, and trends, by definition, are not loyal to any product or image or brand. Not everyone who uses a QR code is hip to what attracts customers. And they make the rest of us look bad.

The reality is that if QR codes don't survive as an essential marketing tool because they get surpassed by something better, that something is still going to require you to fiddle with your phone to make it work. You will snap a photo, or enable communication between a payment system, or whatever.

Because no one can afford to leave an app that accesses the camera running all day long; it just sucks the battery dry. Same thing if it's a chip that broadcasts a signal. And if it's a chip or app that links to any payment system, you're only going to enable it when you are actually paying because if you leave it running all day, someone is going to find a way to exploit it and steal your money through your phone.

Now, given that I've just argued against the death of QR codes, let me point out they have limitations that could lead to their inevitable demise. The truth is that any middleman application is doomed at some point. And the QR code is essentially a middleman. It's a broker, negotiating the transfer of information between the seller and the consumer. There are four basic components to the QR code transaction: the customer receiving the information, the information provider, the QR code that links to, or contains the information and the application to read the code. And four parts, for many people, is one too many.

So any new technology that utilizes an application that can successfully broker that meeting between the user and provider without requiring a QR code is going to be the killer. And there are applications out there that already do this. They take a photo of a printed page or an ad or an image or even an object and then contact a server to retrieve more information about whatever was photographed. To some degree, Google Goggles can do this. There is also an app called Shortcut that can do this. These products are still limited in what information gets found, but they are here now.

Another option for future QR code killing could be a Visual Siri. If you've seen the ads, Siri responds to voice commands and does a pretty good job at finding information and answering questions. But what if you could point your phone's camera at something and ask, "What is this?" And your phone could say, "That is a 2012 Ford Focus. I've found 3 Ford dealers pretty close to you." Or point your camera at a Philly Cheese Steak and the phone says, "The 1200 calories for that would put you off your diet."

Or point it at this guy and your phone says, "He's a wanted man. He has the death sentence on twelve systems. Mess with him and you'll be dead." (Yes, that's a Star Wars reference.) That could be pretty helpful to know if there were no Jedi around.

Having your phone become your brain can open up a whole new area of study for social scientists: what happens when everyone receives the same answers from a single voice? Will we hear, "Siri, who should I vote for?" coming from the ballot booth during the next election?

As devices become more powerful, some new technology will leap easily over the limitations of the QR code. But that will never mean that the code is bad technology. It does a few things extremely well. It's free to make one any time you need one.

The downside to that is that anyone can make one, even someone with evil intentions who wants to infect your phone with some malicious software.

And chances are pretty good that any new reader application will work with them, just as they should work with 1D bar codes to allow us to scan products in stores for inventory or identification purposes. Because, even if we begin using our cameras in combination with some new image capture app, it's still going to be nearly impossible to tell the difference between a 14 oz. box of Captain Crunch cereal and a 17 oz. box, unless you scan the bar code and read the universal product code.