Today's Guardian newspaper has reported the first arrest of a person "stealing" wi-fi from someones home by perching with their laptop outside their house. For the Police, it's clear that this is a form of stealing. But a "technology PR consultant " (oh God, what is that!) called Stephen George is quoted in the article as saying that the Police action is unrealistic and that "if people want to stop others using their connection they can secure it in a few minutes. If they don't...that's really their own fault."

Well, Mr George, I wish I had had you with me when I installed my Netgear wi-fi in my home last year. I lost a weekend, a weekend I want back and the memory of crazy instruction leaflets, unrealistic IT requirements and a charming but in the end much too familiar lady in a call centre in India still leaves me exhausted.

For Mr George's view is that shared by many in the technology industry. But how many of them have actually tried to set up wi-fi. In my case, I needed to have a second laptop, in addition to my domestic PC, attached directly to the modem to create a secure password. This was not possible, I had to move my PC down from my study to plug into the modem at the cable socket. Even then the system would only work when I removed the password, it was a long and tiring saga I never want to repeat.

I was not at all surprised to hear that Netgear were admitting that 40% of their equipment was returned with nothing wrong with it. Yet again, technical marvels are reduced to scrap because people can't use them.

This is true of so much technology development, as I have written about before. I was intrigued to see the boss of Orange UK in the Guardian earlier this month talking about the power of exciting new convergent technologies gaining acceptance by being used initially by technology minding early adopters before becoming magically accepted by the wider population.

I am amazed at this approach and don't agree with it for one moment. The social acceptance of technology is totally dependent on the rate at which it is eventually designed to be usable. Great popular services such as eBay, Flickr and social network services like My Space and Facebook may or may not not look great but they are all well designed so that people can use them. Technologists however remain in total denial about the importance of design in creating usable and attractive services, and then wonder why every one loves Apple so much, even when the "technical" performance is not that impressive (to them).

They will never learn and they will continue to burn huge amounts of investment and time producing exciting new technology that no one wants or can't use even if they did.

So don't blame me that I can't set up a secure password on my wi-fi, blame the technology companies who have obviously have never tried to do it themselves, and failed to design it to work properly.