Published January 26, 20000
But for whom? Soon the information age will be entering a great maturing period. Already some computers are easier to use appliances. Those companies who support this empowerment for the user will be rewarded by patronage.
At the dawn of the big computers (1960s), the Ivory Tower elite established who would and would not access their Goliaths. Within the locked glass-encased rooms contained rows of refrigerator-sized tape drives, and disk platters the diameter of mature redwood trees, built over a raised floor of cooling vents, automated argon fire extinguishers.
Passage into this domain for limited computer time usually meant groveling to the geek-keepers of the computer. This is an empowering arrangement for them, but something much less for the user.
In the next decade, the insatiable appetite for personal computers fueled advancement of the micro. They were small and affordable for the common person to control themselves.
Those “pathetic little wimp machines,” ridiculed the specialists, were useless to do real work. They underestimated the whole genre.
The personal computer, turned the world on its ear. It liberated regular folk to use them as they wanted. The users could install applications and add storage. But control was soon to revert, by design and circumstance.
The Micro-computer controlling companies like IBM and Microsoft didn’t want empowered users; they wanted it for themselves. Soon complex systems were introduced that required specialists to understand and maintain.
In a few years, computers were laden with intricate nuances. Computer users flocked to the ivory tower clergy for their consultation. The average person owned his own machine, which felt empowering, but reality was a different perception.
Special interest factions had imbedded planned dependence for the sake of revenues. IBM chose an inferior architecture to protect their “real computer” mainframe corporate customers. Their vested interest was in billable services for installation and maintenance, dispensed by their specialists. Those three letters meant it was the best. Was it? They said so.
IBM didn’t relinquish control; they lost it. Smaller companies dwarfed the former computer leader by conditioning the public’s perception. Rightly or wrongly, those emerging companies can credit their success to not serving the individual user.
Some of these major software publishers deliberately released programs with known bugs (errors in coding), lots of them. They make money, lots of it, selling upgrades that fix some of them and, consequently, introduce new ones. The cycle is perpetual.
People have become reticent to change, blindly adopting the popular, albeit problematic, status quo. All choices are relinquished to the specialists. The Information Technologists gratefully follow the relatively safe course of the software vendors’ theme, and thus it becomes creed.
The substance of unbroken devotion to “that’s the way it is” acceptance is the notion that there is no other choice, and, “We must pay and pay the piper. It’s too confusing, so someone else must decide for me.” And the Press listens to the specialists who parrot the profit centers of this charade.
In the Information Age, we are supposed to be empowered to decide for ourselves. Delegating choice is surrendering to the planned detrimental consequence. Calling cousin Louie for his opinion, who happens to work at Microsoft, is a habit hard to break.
The Information System Technologists types—God bless them for doing their best—prefer computers that are not easy to use (job security). They ask for more software features, thus more complexity, instead of demanding improved features and simplicity.
A very small percentage of a program suite, like the popular Microsoft Office, is utilized by the average user. Are there other choices for doing real work easily? Certainly, but their proper functionality has been compromised on your machine running the Windows operating system.
The specialist have shifted from the keepers of the central computer, behind glass, to the masters of the network. The more esoteric the knowledge needed to operate a computer, the more valuable is the elite. Déjà vu.
There is a middle strata of specialized “skill” that invigorates those who know about <config.sys>, <autoexec.bat>, dip switches, interrupts, and the hundred similar things unnecessary for a human’s attention. Computers should be able to configure themselves, like Macs do. Circumventing complexity is smarter and elegant.
Every market matures. Automobiles were once a complex toy: manual chokes and crank-starters that only a man would operate. Now safety and ease-of-use are commonplace, accessibility to everyone, with a driver’s license.
No one is to blame, but we allowed it to happen and are continuing to feed it. Our conditioning for more features, more updates, more bloat, for more of our money seems to be a desirable passion. To learn from past mistakes is one of life’s lessons, or is destined to be repeated.