| Sunday, October 20, 2002 |
13:03 - Just for the record...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Weregonnabefaster.shtml
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Update: Brian Tiemann comments. He misses the point: When the Mac's marketshare falls to a certain point, there will begin an unstoppable downward spiral as developers stop stupporting it and users are forced to leave because the software they need is no longer available. Many an elegant wonderful usable marvelous candy-colored design has died because of market forces.
I wasn't missing the point; I was ceding the point, and making a different one.
Yes, I know it's inevitable that the cheaper and crappier solution will always win. But is that any reason to gloat over the death of the competitor who had the audacity to try to hold itself to a higher standard? I mean, you know that the other computer companies hold Apple in higher regard from a business standpoint than the average consumer does. Apple has billions in the bank (and while they posted a $45 million loss last quarter, somehow their cash assets grew; doesn't sound to me like a company that's on the brink of bankruptcy); and though they've been steadily going out of business for twenty years now, Compaq has been merged, Gateway's only got a few months left at best, and Dell looks to be the only real contender to survive the dot-com crash. And yet they all look to Apple to tell which way to run. They see Apple as a survivor, a harbinger of public taste, and a pioneer with arrows in the back. They all let Apple come up with the cool designs, and then they copy them. And their advertising and marketing-speak betrays that they consider Apple the team to beat: Gateway's "iMac-killer" machines, Dell's blatantly false claim to have been the first to put 802.11 into its laptops (Apple did it a year earlier). They see Apple continuing to be wildly successful, when all the numbers and common sense says they should be long-dead history. And they do it while earning an insane amount of customer loyalty, the kind Dell or Gateway or even Microsoft would kill for. Seems to me they're doing something right.
Part of the difficulty here is that both of them are talking about something different than I am. What they're saying is what should happen, because of coolness and happiness and the search for elegance. What I'm saying is what will happen, because of market realities.
Yes, and that's the difference between what we're arguing for. I know what the market realities say. I know that it's inevitable that everybody's elegant and well-designed system will eventually be replaced by something unspeakably pedestrian. But my argument is, why try to hasten that process? Apple is a force of good in the industry today. As I said above, the other companies rely on Apple to push the envelope on cool new features and designs (and to take the fall if they're misguided). I think innovation would stagnate without Apple around, just as MSIE's development froze solid as soon as Microsoft had driven Netscape from the market.
I happen to think that what should be is worth fighting for; I don't intend to just roll over and pee on myself because of the overwhelming burden of the futility of it all. While there's still a chance that the ideals of elegant design will remain alive, I'm going to fight to prevent the inevitable from happening. Maybe that makes me completely disconnected from reality. Maybe it means I'm taking the role of the Taliban, who should have surrendered the instant it became clear who would win the war. But I think that if something should be, then it's worth defending. There's always a chance, isn't there?
By the way, Brian's problem with Excel was, well, with Excel and not with Windows or the x86, and it probably would have failed the same way on OSX.
No, that's not what I was getting at. My beef is with Excel, yes; but more accurately, my beef is with this cult of software shittiness that we've all embraced with such gusto. We encourage, with our dollars, the intense mediocrity of software written to Microsoft's standards, instead of software written to Apple's. Companies everywhere talk about crises of perceived quality, yet they refuse to do anything about the lack of design guidelines and expectations that software written in the Mac tradition has.
I'm not naive enough to believe that there's no buggy software for the Mac. Of course there is. But when the paragon of software quality that we all admire is Microsoft, and we keep gleefully gobbling up the turds they keep flinging out the door at us (and begging for more), then software is never going to get any bloody better. Mac software has design ideals and guidelines that are followed in the software development community to a much greater degree than even the best commercial Windows software written by the paragons of design that we consider supreme. If more people would pay attention to how Mac software was written-- or at least take some goddamned pride in what they write-- then we would all spend a whole helluva lot less time bitching and moaning about our "stupid computers" and buying anti-virus and and anti-spyware and Registry-cleaning software in a dogged attempt to pretend we know what the fuck our computers are doing.
If Excel had been written by Apple, you can bet that at the very least, that "Document was not saved" error message would have been just a trifle more helpful.
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