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Re: Computer Glitches and the Microsoft Windows Mentality
Posted by: Paul Murphy 2005-01-02 14:24:05
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The English language is a great tool. It's expressive, powerful, inclusive, and evolves through the democratic and open-source processes of accepting change on the basis of common usage. Great, but you know what it doesn't have? Enough useable swear words. Think about it, you probably know eight to ten "emotional verbalizations" applicable to a complete and unmitigated, but easily prevented, disaster caused by human laziness or incompetence. Give it some thought and you might make it to fifteen before having to repeat entire phrases.
Re: Computer Glitches and the Microsoft Windows Mentality
Posted by: Eliyahu "Eli" Skoczylas 2005-01-02 15:00:41 In reply to: Paul Murphy
I am often amazed at the decline in concern over quality that has come over the industry. I recall when, around 1980, I worked at Ontel, a small manufacturer of dedicated word processors. When complaints started surfacing that the systems might need to be rebooted as often as once every few WEEKS, there was a major investigation.
I attribute the whole acceptance of lackadaisical computer performance and frequent failures to the spread of Microsoft's phenomenally atrocious early versions of Windows; who in the industry doesn't remember when the normal "fix" for any problem in Windows '95 or '98 was to reinstall (!) the operating system?
Before the PC revolution, computers were hidden gods attended by their priesthoods, and resentment over their potential for errors was high. I still remember a song from those days, I believe it was by Charlie Daniels, where a frustrated customer faced with an erroneous account stabbed his punched card statement full of holes, told the utility (phone company? whatever) to "shove that up your computer," and was rewarded by a large refund check.
Later, hundreds of millions of people were exposed to computers on their deks at work, at school, or at home, and largely thanks to Microsoft's shoddy software, found that the "gods" were more fallible and pathetic than any human could imagine. On the one hand, this eliminated the real fear of confronting mechanized perfection that people had twenty-five or thirty years ago, afraid practically to touch a keyboard for fear that they would "mess it up," but on the other hand it accustomed them to accepting and even expecting that computers were especially unreliable and notoriously sensitive "pieces of junk." This contempt was at the heart of the Y2K scare, as people whose only personal experience with a computer was the constantly crashing box on their desk were suddenly confronted with the ubiquity of "real" computer systems in telephone, air traffic control, and power switching systems and expected them to be as fully prone to fail as all of the "personal" systems that they'd experienced.
Sadly, only very few people have been regularly exposed to higher quality systems such as those from Apple or Sun, so that they can trust their computers and expect them to perform with anything like the reliability of an automobile or even a lawn mower.
To my mind, one of the absolutely worst things that Bill Gates and Company have done is to foster this contempt for computers and implicit expectation of unreliability among the general public, to say nothing of the billions of man-hours and trillions of dollars that have been wasted dealing with incompetent software.
We in the IT industry can only work dilligently over the coming decades in pursuit of quality, in hope to one day rebuild the image of credibility that is now only a memory of a bygone era.
I attribute the whole acceptance of lackadaisical computer performance and frequent failures to the spread of Microsoft's phenomenally atrocious early versions of Windows; who in the industry doesn't remember when the normal "fix" for any problem in Windows '95 or '98 was to reinstall (!) the operating system?
Before the PC revolution, computers were hidden gods attended by their priesthoods, and resentment over their potential for errors was high. I still remember a song from those days, I believe it was by Charlie Daniels, where a frustrated customer faced with an erroneous account stabbed his punched card statement full of holes, told the utility (phone company? whatever) to "shove that up your computer," and was rewarded by a large refund check.
Later, hundreds of millions of people were exposed to computers on their deks at work, at school, or at home, and largely thanks to Microsoft's shoddy software, found that the "gods" were more fallible and pathetic than any human could imagine. On the one hand, this eliminated the real fear of confronting mechanized perfection that people had twenty-five or thirty years ago, afraid practically to touch a keyboard for fear that they would "mess it up," but on the other hand it accustomed them to accepting and even expecting that computers were especially unreliable and notoriously sensitive "pieces of junk." This contempt was at the heart of the Y2K scare, as people whose only personal experience with a computer was the constantly crashing box on their desk were suddenly confronted with the ubiquity of "real" computer systems in telephone, air traffic control, and power switching systems and expected them to be as fully prone to fail as all of the "personal" systems that they'd experienced.
Sadly, only very few people have been regularly exposed to higher quality systems such as those from Apple or Sun, so that they can trust their computers and expect them to perform with anything like the reliability of an automobile or even a lawn mower.
To my mind, one of the absolutely worst things that Bill Gates and Company have done is to foster this contempt for computers and implicit expectation of unreliability among the general public, to say nothing of the billions of man-hours and trillions of dollars that have been wasted dealing with incompetent software.
We in the IT industry can only work dilligently over the coming decades in pursuit of quality, in hope to one day rebuild the image of credibility that is now only a memory of a bygone era.
