| « | Well Meant But Wrong |
»
|
|
Friday, December 23, 2005
Appliances
Gerard Van Der Leun woke screaming yester A.M.:
Last night I had one of the most frightening dreams a man can have. I dreamt that someone, who hated me very deeply, got me a new computer for Christmas. I woke up screaming, but the dream persisted. The horror! The horror!A new computer! I could just see it. It had everything: a processor so fast that it was measured in googlehertz rather than megahertz, more ram than the entire sheep population of New Zealand, a hard drive bigger than the Great Plains, and a megaplex sized-monitor capable of displaying 2.5 trillion ordinary colors at warp six and with such a blistering intensity that your eyes boiled in your skull. A broadband connection so huge it could suck the Library of Congress dry in a nanosecond. The CPU was covered in sable. The keyboard fashioned from rare woods. The wireless mouse was surgically implanted in my finger tip so all I had to do was gesture mystically.
It got worse.
This Christmas puppy came loaded with Fritterware. It had Pantless OS, BrokenWindows 2010, HomelessOffice 2004, Internet Deplorer, Fretscape, Opensource Godzilla, iEverthingEverywhere and Pong. The Paperclip was back as the host of a computer training program aptly named RageMaker. When I opened the box in my nightmare my first impulse was to rip open all the other presents in hopes that someone had given me a gun so I could just shoot myself.
Nothing is worse than life itself than a fully loaded new computer, and I've been using them for nearly 20 years. Setting up a new computer is like getting ready to French Kiss an elephant; you know it will be a new experience, but you know it won't taste like veal cordon blue.
As one who routinely perpetrates these horrors upon a generally unprepared world, your Curmudgeon has some sympathy for Gerard's condition. Some; not an unlimited amount.
Laymen -- by which your Curmudgeon means "those who are not computer geeks" -- who've purchased computers these last few years may be partitioned into two categories:
- Those who knew exactly what they wanted from their computers, and got it;
- Those who had no idea what they wanted from their computers, and didn't get it.
The division between them was captured nicely by this comment:
What you want is the equivalent of a toaster. An appliance, in other words.Yes, it will eventually come to that, but I'm not sure that you really appreciate just how friggin' complex these computers really are.
He who sets out to purchase something of which he has no in-depth comprehension can nevertheless secure himself, and arrange for satisfaction from his purchase, by defining and delimiting his expectations. This is a two-part process:
- He must arrive at a clear, sincere picture of what he wants from his acquisition, and at what cost in money, learning time, and effort;
- He must resolve not to be disappointed if that's all it does for him under those constraints.
A tangent: When a man goes out to buy a car, he's often mesmerized by many aspects of his target vehicle that have absolutely nothing to do with the way he'll be using it. This is most easily seen in the way people choose SUVs, most of which are capable of much, much more than their owners will ever ask of them. Yet it's often those extra capabilities that seduce a buyer into choosing an SUV over a conventional sedan. (It's often dreams of sexual adventure that seduce him into buying a red sports car, and those fantasies are usually just as unrealistic.)
There's no question that computers have been over-hyped. Most home units are used for little more than rudimentary Internet communications: E-mail and Web surfing. That's not because they're incapable of more in the hands of a knowledgeable user, but rather because their owners either want nothing more from them or are unwilling to invest the required time and effort in the project.
Probably the ideal computer for the typical purchaser would be an "appliance" with sharply defined capabilities, beyond which it could never go. Such an appliance might provide:
- Rudimentary Internet capability: an E-mail agent, a browser, and the commonest of the pager programs;
- A simple word processor -- much simpler than Microsoft Word or Corel Word Perfect;
- A simple money-management / bank account interface program, perhaps on the order of Quicken;
- Some capability for handling pictures and music.
That's about all the typical user is willing to put out the effort to master. However, he wouldn't willingly part with $1000 for that device, if its vendor were honest about its limitations. He might pay $300. That wouldn't provide the vendor with enough margin to sell through a conventional distribution pyramid, where distributors and retailers demand a piece of the action; he'd have to have his own sales force. Nor could the vendor afford extensive after-market-support operations or training programs; the price would compel him to leave the purchaser to his own devices.
And that's most of why the personal computer industry is in the state it's in today.
Comments
Ironically, that’s just about exactly what I recommended for my brother, father, father-in-law and about a dozen non-geek friends. In most cases, it was a Mac mini or iMac with AppleWorks, Quicken and built-in software (Mail, iMovie, etc).
In the few cases where a PC was essential (usually for work compatibility), it was an equivalent mix of hardware and software. The only problem with the PCs is that they are harder to support remotely: Windows breaks in mysterious ways, at times, and it’s sometimes very hard to diagnose and then repair a problem without being there with tools. With Macs, it’s a little simpler, though I occasionally do have to drive to my father’s house (7 hours away) to help him out when he gets in a really tight fix.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 12/24/2005 at 12:15 AMFor $300, the OS on that “appliance computer” would probably have to be Linux. No way you could spring for a Windows or MacOSX license at that retail price.
Now, before our Curmudgeon’s blood pressure hits danger level, I will say that such a project might be just the thing to show how Linux can be made usable for the masses. After all, pretty much all the pieces of software you’d need are already available: Thunderbird, Firefox, Gaim, etc. Putting them all together in a user-friendly, foolproof way should be possible, it would just be what we call “a Small Matter of Programming.” (Meaning: it might take a whole bunch of effort.) If I were a man of leisure, I might just take a stab at it myself…
Perhaps the tack to take would be to think of it as a fancy game console. After all, the newest consoles, such as the Xbox 360, cost around $300, or more than that, even. Trouble is, console makers tend to subsidize the cost of the hardware and make it up in game licensing fees, which wouldn’t really be possible with this “appliance computer.”
The other thing I’d worry about is that this business plan has already been tried...and failed, even in the heyday of the Internet Bubble. Remember Netpliance and the 3com Audrey, to name just two examples? And there was a company working on a Linux-powered game console as well (the Indrema), which bit the dust before they even got off the ground. So the “appliance computer” might be commercially doomed from the get-go.
Perhaps, in the end, there’s just a certain level of complexity that people expect out of computers. Computers are complicated because people’s needs are complicated, and not all the same. Software is big, again, because people’s needs are big (as Jamie Zawinski once said about Netscape Navigator 4.x). Most people will only use a subset of the features of Word or WordPerfect...but they’re different subsets; take out any of the features, and you lose a certain percentage of users who have to have those features. There’s no easy answer to this.
Posted by Erbo on 12/24/2005 at 03:19 AMI have to agree with Vanderleun. You shouldn’t need an EE degree to operate a computer at this late date.
Nor do I consider all of the excuses offered for why it hasn’t happened to be valid. Miscrosoft claims it would be too expensive to rewrite the source code for Windows in Assembler. Yet they have incredible profit margins and employ the fifty-thousand or so smartest people the world. Somehow the formula won’t resolve.
I would, however, urge anyone who can afford it to get into a laptop in preference to a desktop. They are far superior, IMHO. And if I can do 3D graphics and animation, professional commercial graphics and prepress, and Web development on one, no argument as to horsepower will persuade.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 12/24/2005 at 04:55 PMOne of the unstated requirements for many new computer users is “works just like the Windows machines everyone I know has”. Which means that, at this point, the Microsoft tax is more than 50% of the cost of the computer they need. (That is, the license fees for Microsoft OSes and applications which have superior but different alternatives available for free exceeds the cost of the hardware. This has been true for years now in the desktop market, and is rapidly approaching truth in the laptop market too.)
The price point for the computers I’ve been buying for family members and nontechnical friends is now below $200. But that’s because I don’t put Windows on them. (I might, and pay the extra money, if I thought for even a fleeting moment that I wouldn’t inevitably end up dragooned into being my mom’s tech support. But we all know how such hopes tend to work out...)
Posted by Matt on 12/30/2005 at 06:53 AM
