| Monday, May 10, 2004 |
11:53 - More spackle! Bring more spackle!
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Further to my post on the latest alpha of Longhorn, Mark Onyschuk (longtime Mac developer and writer) e-mailed with the following observation:
These guys are lost.
They're flailing at trying to graft, Frankenstein-like, a sexy UI onto the pig that is the Windows interface, and in fact the entire Windows zeitgeist:
Windows - the system of button-bars filled with semi-recognizable icons representing tasks like "Cut," "Copy," and "Paste" because keyboard shortcuts are so chaotic that you can't rely on one program to adopt the same shortcuts as another - even if both programs are provided by the same vendor!
Windows - the system of "Wizards" that can never seem to strike the right balance between "freeing your creativity" and handcuffing you to an 8 page dialog box of questions that ultimately produce a result that looks just about as amateurish as if you'd struck out on your own.
Windows - the system that... jeebus... I could go on... the system of Microsoft Bob! Patch over the half-assed concern about usability and create "yet another layer" of software to automate interaction with a fundamentally broken interface that lies underneath.
There's an essay in the broken Microsoft approach to software. The Microsoft approach has always been "more software." It's the equivalent of finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper. These guys have lived and died (and mostly lived) because they could simply "out-software" their competitors. They could literally put 100 hours of software development to counter every 1 hour of their competitors'.
The trouble is that after a point, it's not just about software anymore. It's not just about checkboxes in a review in PC magazine. It's about people having to use the software that's been checkboxed to death in PC magazine.
Microsoft has spent so many years beating off its competitors in the field with "more and more software," that it's lost any concept of quality software. Microsoft is now the hammer, and everything it sees is a nail. It's an awful, or - if you're less susceptible to morality plays - a fitting end to a company that's never missed an opportunity to "out-big" its competitors. They've "out-big"ged themselves to a point where they really believe that more software - a thousand more engineers - is going to solve their problem.
Yeah. I mean, didn't these guys read The Mythical Man-Month? We were all forced to...!
I wonder what ever happened to that supposed program that Microsoft was going to run where they would solicit customer suggestions through an elaborate network of blogs and support forums, and they'd redesign the Longhorn UI to match what the users said they wanted Windows to be like? Was that just so much pie-in-the-sky dreaming?
Because if it wasn't, I'd like to know just what customers told them that what Windows needs are a sidebar for putting things like resizeable analog clocks and news headlines, toolbars with ghostly task-suggesting images in them ("envelopes" for the Contact List, etc) that take up two hundred vertical pixels of screen real estate, and more folder view modes rather than elegantly consolidating the ones they have?
(Example: Windows has "thumbnails" mode, "large icons" mode, and "small icons" mode—all the functionality of which is represented in Mac OS X by "Icon View". On the Mac, you can arbitrarily resize a folder's icons to any size, and position the labels below them or to the right; you can select whether the icons should be auto-arranging, snap to a grid, or be freely placeable; and not only can you choose to have previewable file types (e.g. pictures) shown as thumbnails of their contents automatically, Mac OS X has custom icons, which you can apply on a per-file or per-folder basis. That's in fact way more functionality than you get in Windows' three variants combined, and it's all in one single-click-to-access view mode, with sensible and useful default settings that can be tweaked for each folder or globally. What customers would want this functionality separated out into separate canned view modes? Why would you want to have to choose between "thumbnails" and "large icons", when they do nearly the same thing, and when selecting one or the other reduces your configurability options?)
I hate to mix politics and tech (well, actually I do whenever I can, but it's bloody rare that the opportunity comes up) ... but Windows strikes me as a fairly good model of a socialist bureaucracy in action. Once it's established, all forces point in the direction of "more bureaucracy" and "more centralization". Nobody can conceive of simplifying things—of removing functionality, even if it's for the benefit of all. Nobody will stand for it. Someone will always be outraged; so they move in the direction of trying to please everybody. After all, incremental expansion of entitlements or benefits for a particular group only costs everybody a flat and incremental amount, one that most people won't notice as long as it increases slowly enough. The path of least resistance is chillingly one-way.
One wonders if Microsoft can muster the courage to really uproot the Windows codebase and give the system the complete ground-up rebuild it really needs. That's what they said they were going to do with Longhorn; instead, it appears it's just another layer of spackle. Plus it's what they said they were going to do with Windows XP, and it's what they said they were going to do with Windows 2000...
Where's it all going to end? It's easy to say, as most people do, that Windows will "collapse under its own weight", but that kind of glib near-anthropomorphism is just a misleading dodge from having to make any real predictions about what, exactly, will happen. But it's not like I can do any better. All I can imagine is that eventually there will come a crossover point, a day when Windows becomes so complex that customers start to see it as not worth the effort it takes to wrestle with it. But the day when customers start to reject Windows in favor of an alternative may never come, if the user-interface of the "home computer" gradually becomes abstracted into specialized devices, decentralized from the computer itself; every device would have its own specialized UI, and the computer would become obsolete, or at least would fade to a welded-shut mystery box that the user never deals with one-on-one, like the garbage disposal or the water heater. We'll be calling in specialists to fix our computers—specialists who, alone on Earth, understand Windows.
And that, as modeled by a million public utilities and cable/telecom services, is a stable system. But if it's what Microsoft is consciously building toward, well, I hope the gentle reader can forgive me for not feeling particularly inspired by it.
UPDATE: Chris writes that Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month, uses... a Mac PowerBook.
But of course.
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Brian Tiemann
