What have we done to ourselves? What have we become?
I make a good living providing support and consulting services to a large number of clients who use computers to aid them in running their businesses. These are not gadflies or "innovators," these are serious people who care about running their businesses, staying in the black, keeping their clients satisfied, keeping their overhead low and return-on-investment high, and keeping things humming along.
Why then do these selfsame hard-nosed business people allow themselves to be bamboozled by the marketing leviathans of the computer industry?
While visiting the Houston site, I perchanced to witness a clerk in the client's payroll office performing a routine timesheet entry task on her desktop PC. I was startled to see that the program she was using was an old character-based program written in (I learned later) Fox Software's FoxBASE. What startled me, though, was just how fast this program ran on her computer!
In case you missed it, I said "Fox Software's FoxBASE." Prior to its acquisition by Microsoft, FoxBASE was one of the premier dBASE III+ clones whose slogan was "nothing runs like a Fox." Renowned for its "Rushmore" indexing technology, FoxBASE produced some fast applications. And this was on '286 and '386-class computers. Imagine, then, what it was like to perceive a program of this type running on a Pentium.
It got me to thinking: why should I be amazed at this display of raw processing power? The answer came to me an instant later, when I realized that the program was unencumbered by the overhead of maintaining a GUI, or graphical user interface.
Have we become so enamored with the glitz that we've forgotten the primary reason we use computers: to aid us in the rapid, accurate processing of data? I fear the answer is "yes." Thanks to the massive marketing efforts of Microsoft and others of its ilk, we've been sold a bill of goods. In the guise of making computing easier, we've hobbled ourselves with unstable software, ever-increasing hardware demands, and a spiraling need to keep up with the "latest and greatest."
"Oh, you're just a Mac user," I can hear you saying, "you're just biased against the Windows crowd." While I hold no love for Microsoft, this article isn't intended to be a Microsoft-hating screed; I don't hold Apple Computer blameless, either. While I appreciate the Mac's tighter integration of hardware and software, the MacOS of today is far more fragile than its predecessors. In the past, if a program crashed on a Mac, it was because the programmers of that particular application didn't follow Apple's published guidelines for writing Mac software. Today, it's not uncommon for a Mac to crash due to a flaw in the OS itself. In this regard, Apple and Microsoft have much in common. If you're a Mac user, when was the last time you counted the number of icons parading across the bottom of your screen when you boot up? Each one represents an add-on (or "init" in Mac parliance) extension to the MacOS. Almost every one consumes a portion of the computer's memory, and demands a tiny slice of the CPU's time, all resulting in incremental slowdowns of the computer's overall speed. And each one increases the potential for a crash, due to some conflict with another extension. Heck, I remember when the instructions for installing a new piece of Mac software could be summed up with the words, "just drag the icons from the floppy disk to a location on your hard disk."
The marketing mavens' answer to this performance hit, has almost always been to throw more hardware at the problem -- more RAM, faster CPU, faster disks -- I even coined a term, "biggerbetterfaster" to blanket this so-called "solution."
Why does no one find this appalling? Why do the bean counters not rail against the outlandish costs associated with promulgating this facade? Why is it that the cartoon strip "Dilbert" has found such favor among workers (and let's be fair, some managers)? Tom Peters, who wrote the wonderful tome, "In Search Of Excellence," might today re-title this work "In Search Of Mediocrity."
I maintain that there have been virtually no true advances in the computer industry for the past twenty years. Despite "biggerbetterfaster" the result is merely "cheapersameoldstuff." We are still using the same technologies for storage, for display and for input/output. True innovation would have given us affordable speech recognition, tactile Input/Output, workable "fuzzy logic," and other truly "human interface" technologies, not more of the same-old-thing, just cheaper and faster. Instead, we have been "sucker-punched" by the appeal of "user-friendly" claims of greater productivity and ease-of-use. And for some reason we turn a blind eye to crash-prone, and sometimes unusable software in the name of "technology." Does anyone still believe in the "paperless office?"
The pride of creation appears to have been replaced by the need to "rush to market." Software that costs in the hundreds, sometimes even the thousands of dollars today, would have been scorned and rejected en masse in the past if it exhibited the behavior we routinely accept as normal today. Do you complain when you're greeted by a "General Protection Fault" or "An error of Type 11 occurred?" Has the desire for "good" been replaced by "good enough?"
There are some bright lights on the horizon, though. One who springs to my mind is Dave Winer. Who's he, you might ask? Call him an insider. Back in the 1980's, Dave wrote a program for the Macintosh called "MORE." Not a word processor, MORE was an outliner, such as the kind high school students learn to create to organize term papers and the like. Later on, Dave published a program that met with lukewarm acceptance, called Frontier (a marvelous product name from a pioneer, don't you think?), that brought scripting capability to the Mac, which until then had none.
So? Consider the following: Bill Gates listens to Dave Winer. Winer shared the podium with Dr. Amelio at a recent Apple presentation. I call that keeping pretty good company (even if you don't like the people named above, you have to admit they're influential in the industry!). You can read Dave's opinions in online articles he publishes called DaveNet.
Why all this talk about Dave Winer? Because I think he's one of the few true visionaries in the industry today. Remember the product, "Frontier," I mentioned above? Even though it was never a commercial success, and it languished for a while, Dave never let it die. A few years ago, Dave quietly reworked a fair number of the program's core routines and released the program, free of cost to all who cared to download it. Since then, a dedicated group of computer users have worked in concert to develop and grow the product into a kind of computer "Swiss Army Knife."
Why all this gushing about Frontier? Simply because it does so much and costs so little, it's hard to define. It has no glitzy interface, although one can be built around it. If it doesn't already do what you want it to, you can add that capability to it. It continues to grow through the efforts of Dave and the community that's grown around it. You want documentation? Someone has created documentation. You want help? There are mailing lists and UseNET groups galore. And all this costs only the time and effort you want to spend on it. To me, Frontier, and people like Dave Winer represent true luminaries, who are advancing the "State of the Art." Isn't it telling that Frontier never made it "big" as a commercial product?
It's probably significant that I can't attribute the following quote, which sums up my feelings about the State of The State of The Art: "People no longer want elegant computing solutions."