2. More rigid ; less room for user specific customizations.
Don't make me laugh, James.
Last night I went to the home of relatives who had received an IBM Aptiva PC as a gift. It was loaded with Windows 98, SmartSuite, some anti-virus garbage, and IBM's internet software which had already taken the liberty of connecting them to the internet and signing them up for a modest monthly fee. They called me because they had a three-page single-spaced list of problems, almost all "simple" things that they couldn't figure out. These are college-educated people of average intelligence.
Being used to working with computer professionals (back in the day when I was gainfully employed), I had no real feel for how utterly mystifying these retail white-box pieces of garbage are to the average person. Three different "toolbars" on the desktop offering a seemingly infinite number of useless functions and customizable options, an IBM ad as the wallpaper (these people had no idea that it could even be changed, let alone how to change it), software crashing all over the place ("This program has performed an illegal operation", then if you press "details" you get a register dump, EAX=0FFA3B6C etc. What's an "illegal operation"...did it take out somebody's appendix without a license?), the need to understand the difference between the user id that logs you onto an ISP's service and an email name, what to do when one of the shovelware CD ROM's didn't have an autoinf file on it so you had to explicitly run Setup but there were no instructions telling you to do so, and on and on and on. I didn't even scratch the surface. Try signing up for the contest on Martha Stewart's web page. As I left I felt absolutely sorry for these people. It was a genuinely sobering experience.
I won't write messages like this any more because I know they're getting old. But Bill G. and Michael Dell and company have trained the world to accept garbage as product, and it has made them rich while giving many others high blood pressure. There are no two ways about it. You think people want 'customizable'? Give me a break.
The thing with three buttons, a network wire and enough local processing power to make smart choices on people's behalf will win James. It's not even close. There's nothing to discuss. Your position doesn't exist, and neither does Michael Dell's (see my next post).
Regards,
--QwikSand |
