Sometimes it is depressing to be in this industry. IT started out with a great promise: Make people more creative and more productive. It has partly delivered on these promises, but largely to technically savvy people. I love being creative on my Mac, but these days, all the work involved in learning how to do it and to keep the machines running, costs more time than I have.
Today, I stumbled across a document about the Lisa. The last truly revolutionary Computer to enter the market. Back in 1983. Since then, the industry has played catch up and merry go round. Reinventing the wheel, fighting to get rid of legacy introduced during the great OS wars and new legacy being introduced in the fight for world dominance in the Internet.
Today, Computers are harder to use than ever. People think it is easier because they are more educated about it. They confuse more power with easier to use. They confuse stone age technology emulations with modern applications. Marketing tells the customer it is innovative technology. Yes, we reinvented the wheel - but we got it right this time around.
No, they didn´t. Do you know the story about how a small boy had a revolutionary idea about airplane wheels? The problem there is that wheels for airplanes have to be replaced often because of the enormous stress put on them when the plane lands. The boy had the idea to prespin the wheels so that they wouldn´t be stressed so much when they make contact with the runway. A system like that cost a few thousand Dollars per plane and would save a lot of wheels.The wheel makers proposed another solution: Invent longer lasting rubber.
Microsoft Software is like that: Selfserving. Development focuses on problems in the software, not the problems the customers try to solve with it. It focuses on becoming the best typewriter there is. Causing more paper to be printed than ever. It will never help to create a paperless office, because it sole purpose is to print out paper.
Paper is the most effective means of communication simply because the tools to produce it are the most advanced. Try to make a Website. Not only will you fail in making it look good, it is damn hard to publish it. Not so with paper: Using Word is easy, connecting a printer is easy, printing stuff is easy. Does it look good? Probably not, but it certainly looks a good damn better than your web page.
This is just one example of where the IT industry has utterly failed. Very few people know about the true powers a Computer has. I doubt that very many of them work for Microsoft. Most people think a computer is a typewriter with a pretty color TV part attached to it. Can you blame them?
Anyway. Go, read the document about Lisa and try to imagine what the world would look like today if that System had won out.
How do I see Mac OS X? The fact is, that its most striking feature is not that it is terribly easy to use but that it is terribly easy to program for. However, we do not live in a world where people write their own programs to do graphical design, do we?