| Monday, January 13, 2003 |
09:51 - The Future is Already Installed
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0103/010303.html#011303
|
(top)  |
Whoo. Lileks has devoted most of today's Bleatage to detailing his experience with a piece of benighted PC movie-editing software. Usually he seems to try to keep the direct specific software-fisking of post-iApp PC software to oblique sidelong references, and I don't blame him; given his experiences, and those of any Mac user who knows, who knows from first-hand experience that there is a better way than the fighting and swearing and throwing up of hands in frustration reported over drinks by one's dinner partners... and given the all-too common reaction of said dinner partners if you meekly raise your hand and say, "Um... 'scuse me, but... Macs aren't like that," he has every reason to be discreet about it like we've all learned to be in order to maintain mealtime civility and avoid getting a "ETYLOCAM" branding iron in the ass.
But the iMovie-pretender software he talks about, it seems to me, is the kind of thing to bring a guy's defenses down, come hell or derision. Software like this does that to a guy. This is the product of a wasted afternoon devoted to learning useless crap about an application that shouldn't have any such useless crap to learn about it, if it had been designed properly. And yet, it's interesting: so many PC users are so resigned to this kind of wrestling with their software, on a daily basis, that it doesn't make them anywhere near as pissed-off as someone steeped in Mac software gets when venturing into that world, armed with some technical know-how but handicapped by a presumption-- completely flawed in the PC world, it seems-- that the software maker is not malicious, that the app developers aren't trying to take out their own frustrations on the user, that the companies in question actually want to help the user do something.
It's a perfectly reasonable assumption out here in the ghetto, but it leads to nuclear explosions of the head when you cross over. And, oddly, it's the PC users who are afraid of the unaccustomed weirdness of Macs, not the other way around.
Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month talked about how software development flouted the traditional rules of manufacturing and R&D, how if you threw more men at a job, it became more late, not less-- largely because software is something that only highly savvy individuals with an intimate knowledge of other highly savvy individuals' areas of expertise can produce, where cooperation and willingness to code to a standard must wrestle with each engineer's personal flair and cleverness. No semi-skilled labor here. It's a bunch of mavericks all trying to write to their own visions of the future, and the more such people you fling into an already-late project, it'll just make it worse.
Eventually every manager and CS student in the world had read that book, and it became standard operating practice. But it still only addressed the side of developing functionality, shipping on time, that sort of thing. Its lessons-- that software is something inherently different, that has to be developed with priorities that aren't obvious or intuitive to the manager-- haven't been taken to heart yet in so much of the computer industry, in the areas of usability and design. Software makers still seem to assume that focusing on user-interface, writing software that abstracts itself toward enabling an ability rather than on remaining software that the user has to learn, is still a luxury that's unnecessary to invest in. And they're right, really, because the PC market doesn't follow Brooks' observations either: it moves and ebbs and flows based on price and feature set, qualities that seem intuitively obvious to most consumers as being of paramount importance, because they are of paramount importance in every other kind of product. And what that leads to, tragically, is companies that write software toward the goals of price and feature set while shelving the whole making it easy and enjoyable to use and obscuring unnecessary technical esoterica from the user chimaerae. They're not necessary. Customers will learn to cope. They'll buy the software 'cause it's cheaper and has more checkboxes and more function buttons on the main screen; sure, they'll only use the software once and then abandon their digital filmmaking careers. But that's not our concern! We just gotta sell 'em that one boxed copy and make it just useful enough that he'll feel too guilty to return it for a refund.
Computers are something different. They have to be treated differently. Price and checkboxes will only get you a half-solution, and traditional solutions on the R&D end will only solve more price-and-checkboxes problems. Not the usability problem.
In order to create usability, you've got to invest in UI development-- an enterprise that probably won't directly earn you any money, because most of the industry's consumers don't buy software based on usability, much though they might caw about wanting software to be "easy". (People get software with their scanners or cameras, and that's what they learn to use. Or don't.) You've got to make the decision to write not to the known money-making goals of price and checkbox items, but instead to the intagible goal of making the software do stuff intuitively and correctly. Now, this won't necessarily make your company any more money, and it'll cost a lot. It's not necessarily good business. But it is what serves the customer, whether it be good business or not. To put it into "prisoner's dilemma" terms, you've got to "collaborate" in order to serve the customer; you've got to take a hit for the team. You've got to invest in an area where it's not intuitively beneficial to the company to invest. And if all the companies in the world did that, they'd be subject to being undercut by one company that "cheated"-- selling software that it chose to write toward price and checkboxes. Guess which product customers will buy?
A company that chooses to stick to the intangibles and make products that only 5% of the public can properly appreciate is "collaborating" even when the whole rest of the world is "cheating"; they know they're dooming themselves to a tiny sliver of the market. But they do have the right idea, and as long as they continue to exist, there's some reason to believe there's hope for the industry-- that some people, some engineers and managers and designers in the field, do care enough about usability and serving the consumer as to forgo large market share and profits in favor of those elusive ideals.
People wonder why we Mac users are so obnoxiously self-satisfied and smug when we talk about this sort of thing. Well, I'm sure everybody's been in some position or other at some point in life where you see that Hey! Everybody's doing everything all wrong! Can't they see that?! -- and yet you can't wave your arms and yell enough to get anybody's attention. The best you can hope for is to be called a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a malcontent, some snobby geek who's living in a dream world.
But you can't just remain silent, knowing what you know, can you?
I'll say this for his machine, though: if he ever wants to back up that 3.3 GB movie file on floppy disks, he's all set.
Yep. It's sure got that checkbox nailed.
|
|
