Another few hours invested in tech support for the parents, and it always inspires the same feeling: massive resentment.
Not at the parents, of course, who are lovely and patient and appreciative. No, at the stupid Microsoft-led home computer industry that still, 30 years in, hasn’t worked out how to make it easy to work with their material. Basic needs that have been iterated billions of times around the world – “my old computer isn’t working any more, how do I get all my material across to the new one I just bought?”, “I mistakenly allowed this program to launch automatically when I turn the computer on, how do I stop it?” – are frustratingly complex to resolve. Help systems are incomplete, assume too much, or are downright misleading. The desktop + files metaphor is a nightmare. (And lets not even mention the havoc unleashed by switching platforms.)
Illustrative point: two people are in a room together with their laptops, connected to the same wireless network, and they want to share files. It is several orders of magnitude simpler for them to sign up to Dropbox, using servers on the other side of the world, than to use the wireless hub they’re both ten feet away from.
This is boneheaded and wasteful in the extreme. Unfortunately, it’s what we’re stuck with. There is, apparently, no consumer imperative driving OS designers to build broader, more usable, more accessible forms. The consumer imperative is overwhelmingly for building higher: teetering sky towers of speed and prowess that offer only one narrow stairway up. (Honorable and notable exception: the iPad)
I’m not suggesting that building broader would be easy, mind you. Usability is hard. Distilling complex systems of interdependent logic into usable everyday tools is an enormous challenge. But, come on. We deserve better than this. We *need* better than this.
I just can’t figure out why there isn’t more focus on this. Surely all those designers are doing parental tech support too, right? Forget dollars – isn’t that motivation enough?
“my old computer isn’t working any more, how do I get all my material across to the new one I just bought?”
Copy the /home directory across. Wait, why are you looking at me like that?
😛
🙂
Oh man, what the hell is with windows help function seeming to get worse with every iteration? There is now no index and no contents, just a searchable database whose search function is fundamentally broken.
We need a help function to teach us how to use the help function.
As good as linux is (fastfastfast!) it’s not going to work very well for anyone who already has trouble figuring out how to use a dvd player.
Morgue, having been in the parents computer chair frustrated with something or other I can understand your pain but I’m not inclined to sympathise too much. I think we (me included) want way too much from our computers and want to spend way too little money or time achieving it.
You touch on the solution. Dropbox and the other online solutions seem to be a very good idea to me and I think that if computing continues to trend towards it then OS simplification is going to happen. Basically our computers will become simplified to making the next generation of web interfaces work and we will rely on servers all around the world to keep our data and all our preferred programs running and up to date. When we no longer download programs or even store our personal data to our computers and expect it all to work, the developers will be able to optimise programs for things like broader, more usable, more accessible.
Chuck: that sounds like we’ll be going back to a world of mainframes and terminals. 🙂
How about either a) using a Mac OS, or B) use bluetooth? Or C) I just remembered which computer you’re speaking of…..
Since Gar and myself both got macbooks, we have been automagically (and smugly!) able to share our files with each other over the wireless network here (depending on what security setting we use, of course).
Mmm yeah the good ol’ Mac. A computer that is basically a toy, but that cannot run any decent computer games. The perfect gift for children who hate fun.