I love teaching
adult novices to use a computer for the first time. There are few more rewarding
experiences than passing on a trick I've just learned myself to a student who is
just as excited about it as I am.
Unfortunately it doesn't happen very often. Most of my billed time is spent assisting users to learn skills they could have been taught more easily, more cheaply and more effectively, by the software itself.
Despite the appearance of dramatic improvement in recent years, we are falling derelict in the quest to balance the affordable high-tech of personal computers with an equally-affordable high-touch approach to using them.
This is not what we were led to expect for 1994. Interfaces were supposed to be intuitive by now. Operating systems were supposed to be user-friendly. I remember reading about how I could sit my 80-year-old grandmother behind the keyboard and have her computing in five minutes. If she needed help, the manual would be in plain English, and built into the computer rather than printed on paper.
So why did I feel the need to spend three months of my life writing a piece of software designed to teach novices how to copy, delete, identify, read and execute files? We have the technology, so why haven't things improved at a more rapid pace?
The resistance
to change comes in the form of an industry-wide epidemic of Peter Pan syndrome. Everyone
from the designers and developers down to the salespeople on the retail floor are
big kids too busy playing with their big toys to care about the needs of those who
pay for their dinner.
What do children care about the needs of an adult? A child wants you to like what they like, to play the way they play. Walk into almost any computer store and pretend you have money to spend, and you'll likely be offered a good-sized glass of this immature vintage. Actually purchase a computer and you'll receive a case of it to take home with you.
Most tutors hate dealing with novices. Few things will take you back to your computing roots as quickly as talking to new users and helping them with their problems. But there's an emotional gap as well. Most tutors I've spoken with tell me it feels more like a parent-child relationship than student-teacher. What makes it doubly difficult for the student is that the tutor plays the child's role.
Tutors and consultants are usually overgrown kids who make their living coaching others on the baddest toy ever invented. And coaches don't usually enjoy coaching awkward players. The tragic truth is that there are also many tutors who have grown so disillusioned with teaching novices that they speak of their students with a not-really-joking contempt when in the company of another professional.
As if that
wasn't bad enough, the playing field -- the computer's operating system -- was designed
by overgrown kids who know better than to waste their time messing with no-talents.
Is it any wonder that Microsoft still hasn't written usable online help for DOS after
more than a decade of real-people use?
Everyone marvels at how quickly kids learn to use computers. They shouldn't, really. It's simple biophysics. There's more cranial space for the new information, less pressure in the learning process, and the neural pathways haven't been choked by decades of accumumlated stress.
It's hard enough to learn any new skill once you reach adulthood. Young minds can soak up information without much concern about what it means, but by the time we reach adulthood our brains are so convoluted -- some say polluted -- that even the meaning of C:\> has to be filed in triplicate in seventeen different neural storage sites and cross-referenced with miles per hour, third grade recess, the smell of fresh asphalt on a spring afternoon, and the real crippler...life and death. Make no mistake, with every passing day our society links computing skills more closely with survival. It's not a relaxed position from which to learn.
In my experience,
adult computer training is best approached from the same perspective as teaching
learning-disabled children. There's not enough practical difference between the two
to be important.
Unmanaged stress, pressure to perform and overly-convoluted thought processes are hallmarks of learning disability. Learning problems are always marked by a communication problem, either between teacher and student or student and student's body.
I've discovered that every adult novice I work with has a learning disorder. I didn't really believe it until I realized that the students with whom I communicated easily had the same disorders I have, so we made perfect sense to each other.
Effective teaching often boils down to discovering which disorder is in play on a given day and speaking to the person at that level. Depending upon the moon phase, last night's ball scores and how much sleep I got, I could find myself on any given day with dysnomia (mixing numbers), dyslexia (mixing everything), attention deficit or a mild case of narcolepsy. Fortunately, I know my stuff...and I'm relatively familiar with my "junk". The key to my job is finding a way to communicate through any perceptual wall that may exist within my student. It's a bear of a job when I have walls of my own. It's impossible when you don't know you have these walls, and most computer professionals of my acquaintance are either blind or just dimly aware of theirs.
The computer tutor's job was once made difficult by the wide gap between the needs of the software and the language the user already knew. Until recently, learning to use a computer had always been more like learning a new language than learning to drive a car. It's a tough slog for any adult. What makes it worse is the emotional baggage that comes with owning a computer.
The industry
seems to be telling us that if we want their goodies, we had better have respect
for those who provided them. Simply put, the industry shames us into docility by
making us believe we're too stupid to use the product unless we spend a requisite
number of hours with our heads buried in the manuals. They had to do it, so why shouldn't
we?
Our first reaction is disbelief. Weren't we told that these machines were easy to use? Salespeople and developers seldom have a satisfactory easy answer to that one, and the more deeply truthful the answer, the more painful it is to give. It's easier to hide behind technobabble and doubletalk than admit tthe truth: that the industry is going through serious growing pains and the consumer is expected to be a patient parent. The doubletalk and technobabble is simply a way of avoiding responsibility, but it's gotten to the point where even those in the industry believe their own lies. This is brainwashing, pure and simple, and it is murder on the self-esteem of users and the souls of people working in the industry.
Rebuilding a user's self-esteem is not a job for which I enjoy taking money. I spend no small amount of time with students either justifying my fees or massaging their shame over their feelings of stupidity. Neither is useful or necessary. After a decade of real-people computer use, Microsoft and Apple should have had their act together enough to write operating system software that doesn't require weeks for the average user to understand, use and maintain.
The simple fact is that there isn't an operating system in existence, or -- to my knowledge -- even on the drawing board, that fits together and functions in a way that meshes with the training the average Western (or Eastern) has already accumu-lated over decades of cultural training.
(A quick explanation to Mac users who think this doesn't apply to them: you haven't witnessed pain until you've watched a novice with poor hand-eye coordination attempt to make the connection between mouse movements and the screen cursor; and the concept and process of modifying system settings and configuring desk accessories confounds more people than you might think. The Mac only seems intuitive once you under-stand how Finder is structured)
Identifying
and dealing with emotional role reversal -- the way that the industry plays child
to the consumer "parent" -- is in my opinion the cornerstone to creating
truly user-friendly software. Sadly, I expect it to take at least another decade
for the industry to arrive at the same conclusion.
In the meantime we have "idiot guides", videos, classes and tutoring to fill the gaps left by convoluted manuals and online help that doesn't.
Sorry, but in my books anything referred to as an "idiot guide" carries too much emotional baggage to be an effective teaching tool for any adult with an ounce of sensitivity. The mass-market training videos I've seen generally neglect the fact that the best teaching approaches to any subject only work effectively for about one-tenth of the population. Most reports I've heard from those attending computer classes sound more like high school whines about summer school than excited testimonials from empowerment seminars. Reports about private tutors have only been marginally better.
As a private tutor and independent consultant, one of the most important -- and difficult -- parts of my job is salving the wounds of people who failed the idiot guides or were left twisting in the wind by an irresponsible or insensitive consultant. On the flip side, one of the most loathsome tasks I face is dealing with people who, in the words of a more experienced tutor, "have learned a few buzzwords and think they know it all."
Both groups are victims. The latter group just doesn't know it yet.
Did Apple ever consider the difficulties a perceptually-impaired adult faces? Probably not. All they knew was that they needed something that demanded less technical precision and memory-based learning than major competitors MS-DOS and CP/M. All CP/M and UNIX's developers seemed to be concerned about was creating something that worked, and if it required a programmer's skill and knowledge base just to be a competent end user, well, that was the price to be paid for being among the technological avant-garde.
(For those who care, CP/M is now a dinosaur; UNIX is alive and well in its various forms. It has its own graphical overlay, X-windows, which functions comparably to the way Windows works at a deep level: as a graphical overlay for DOS.)
Microsoft found a happy medium between the exacting demands of command-line interfaces amd the pretty-but-super-ficial Macintosh Finder when they finally developed Windows into a usable product, but they neglected to consider the problem of language at a deep enough level.
Did Microsoft's programmers consider for more than a moment whether first-time Windows users might prefer not to learn a new language before they could use the software? Or that DOS' online help, which even Windows-only users still need, might be more useful if it resembled something other than a recipe card for technojocks? Probably not. Despite their enormous market-testing budget, Microsoft's novice-level pre-release beta-testing program appears to consist of releasing the software and working around the complaints. Novices tend to overload pre-release bug report files with "obvious" and "unrelated" problems. (To be fair, their beta program is much more involved than this, but the fact remains that this is how ineffective it appears to the end user.)
There's another,
more insidious problem that needs to be addressed in the programs themselves and
the way they handle errors. When something goes wrong in a program, there's seldom
advance warning, a helpful post-mortem or a dialog box that says "it wasn't
your fault". Only a handful of programs let you configure error messages so
that they'll tell you "Your fault and here's why" or "Not your fault
and sorry for the inconvenience". When this level of communication doesn't exist,
there is an implication that the user is responsible for errors. Garbage in, garbage
out, they say. What about the "garbage in" from the programmers who wrote
the software in the first place?
More than any other consumer product, computers tend to blame the owner for problems which the product itself was intended to solve. The industry prefers it that way.
Computers
are supposed to be easy to learn for people who think normally. "Normal"
in this context means linear and rational. But this is only half of the human mental
process. Graphic interfaces address the creative, emotional mind, but I have yet
to see an operating system which adequately addresses the emotional needs of adult
students, which takes into account that by age 35 almost everyone is tired of being
blamed for problems they didn't cause, told they should know things they were never
taught, and generally has enough bad learning experience to make any challenge at
this level a serious chore.
It's easy to free up your creativity and absorb new knowledge on a sunny day in the countryside. But try mastering directory structure on the day before a major deadline. This is how most adults approach learning computers, and the industry simply is not offering enough of a helping hand. Again, what does a child know about an adult's needs?
The roots of the problem run far deeper than simple role reversal, and they're firmly entrenched in the soil.. There is an enormous communication gap between provider and end-user that has existed practically since the birth of computers themselves.
The stereotype of the computer nerd in thick glasses and lab coat hasn't really changed, not where it counts. The major differences are that today's nerds earn enough to sport thick Carrera glasses, and they are in real demand now, not simply working in the only field which will tolerate them.
These nerds (and regardless of what disguise they wear, they -- and I -- are nerds) have been dictating what a computer should look and feel like, and how it should behave, since day one. As a result, the behavior of a computer directly reflects the intellectual prowess, linear thinking skills and emotional maturity of the programmers. Remember that the next time someone hands you the "garbage in, garbage out" line.
Virtually the entire industry is geared toward serving two minorities at extreme ends of the scale: the highly logical and the easily teachable. Logical people don't need to fight with each other; logic settles the arguments, and principles -- not personalities -- rule the behavior of the participants. Brains don't usually fight with artists either. It's too much work to find middle ground. But when the extreme meets the middle, where most of us live, all hell breaks lose. There's power at the extremes, and people don't normally let go of power until it's taken from them.
Developers often appear to forget that strength in one area is weakness in another. Linear thinkers can just as easily be called "unimaginative" thinkers. Creative people can also be termed "illogical". By the same token, computerphobia could translate as cautiousness, reduced attention span as efficiency-oriented, and a "slow learner" as a "thorough study". It's all a matter of perspective. The problem is the developers' lack of awareness that in a free market economy, it's the customer's perspective that matters.
Most of us lie between the linear and the creative. The difference between respectful and disrespectful treatment by the industry and is the difference between being a "novice" or "neophyte" and a "dummy". It's telling that "dummy" is now so common a description of the adult novice that we're supposed to laugh at it, the way we once chuckled as we described wives as "the ball and chain" and children as "rug rats. Words are just words, after all, but where did that word come from and why is that particular word used to describe you?
Children won't
mind being called "rug rats" until they discover that rats do a lot more
than squeal, scurry across rooms and eat a lot. They also carry disease and create
all kinds of irritations. Any adult using this term to describe a child knows that
"rat" carries all this extra baggage. If you really believe "dummy"
is a term of endearment, consider the fact that once the "dummy books"
became trademarked, the industry responded with a new name for third-party computer
manuals: "idiot guides".
I haven't
taught an adult yet who didn't have at least one "mental block" which didn't
qualify as an actual learning disorder. On any given day, depending on my stress
level, I might suffer from any of four recognized learning dysfunctions. And while
online help for programs themselves is improving dramatically, operating systems
-- even graphical interfaces -- aren't even close to an appropriate level of user-friendliness.
If you doubt for one second the depth of hostility felt by the industry toward the adult novice, consider this point. It wouldn't take more than a small fraction of Microsoft's or IBM's resources to address the needs of adult novices with intuitive, multileveled, highly-detailed, menued, online help from the word GO that can even determine where your mental blocks might be on a given day and speak to you in language you can really understand.
(In fact, I believe that "type GO and press ENTER" is the only written instruction any user should require to install and use a program at a basic level.)
This degree of user-friendliness requires massive amounts of program code, which in turn chews up development time and disk space. I've been quoted as saying that developers won't go to these depths because consumers won't pay for the extra development and product cost.
That's not even close to the real reason why developers don't create first-rate training materials. The helpfile is usually the least time-consuming part of product development, and lesson files can be deleted once lessons have been mastered. There are few users who wouldn't pay an extra five to ten dollars for a $150 program for the extra disks and programming required for effective training materials, particularly when this investment will save them at least several hours of manual-diving, and at best hundreds of dollars in third-party training.
Understanding and adapting to adult learning dysfunction won't require years of research to implement in software, either. Useful prototypes of user-friendly online help already exist.
Microsoft
did a wonderful job with the Windows 3.1 online introductory lesson. It allowed for
as much repetition, interaction and interruption as most users needed. It wasn't
perfect -- for example, it didn't address the needs of perceptually impaired adults
who need help memorizing hotkeys in place of mouse lessons -- but it was well-executed.
And it didn't consume a mountain of disk space or man-years of programming.
The unfortunate part is that the training stopped with Program Manager. Eventually users must wade through the manual, attend classes, or pay a tutor from $25 to $75 an hour to learn how to install new programs, back up data and understand filing systems. These are elementary skills which could easily be taught by the operating system itself, and they should have been.
Not many people
learn how to install new programs, find files on the hard disk or use the included
applications without several hours of hitting the books or being shown by someone
else. Windows 3.1 should have been a twelve-disk set, not six. The other six disks
should have contained walk-throughs for its other features. For the next while we're
going to have to resign ourselves to learning a lot of our computing tasks by memory
and repetition. Here's hoping long-term memory lapses or attention deficit don't
happen to strike you on the day you need to learn these skills.
If the next version of Windows does not include the level of help I'm suggesting is necessary, I won't be surprised. Microsoft has had two years to release a Windows 3.2 with just those features. They finally did it...sort of. They released a series of interactive guides to the major features of Windows as a rather costly add-on.
Thanks, but where were you when we needed you? Adding these extras to Windows itself would have boosted the retail price all of $10. If they were scared of losing customers to the price, they could have released a stripped-down Windows Lite or Windows Expert for a few dollars less. These are simple marketing solutions. That they weren't implemented is just about inexcusable, but as I'll demonstrate in a moment, entirely understandable, given Microsoft's dynamics
Learning to use an operating system is one thing. Maintaining it is quite another. Like cars, computers need maintenance from time to time, but the days when users could reasonably be expected to act as their own technicians are over. Operating systems have grown far too complex for the average user to maintain.
When you buy a car, the owner's manual says "refer to qualified personnel for service" for jobs as simple as oil changes. You can do the job yourself if you want to learn how, but the point is that you're not expected to know much more than how to steer the thing.
Not so with
computers. Owner's manuals for cars are usually less than a hundred pages. The IBM-compatible
user is confronted with nearly a thousand pages on the operating system alone. The
industry seems to be telling us "if you want to own the product, we expect you
to know how to take care of it." In my circle this is known as passive-aggressive
behavior. I'm ashamed to say that I've been guilty of this behavior myself. I still
fall into it from time to time.
Part of this stems from brainwashing I've absorbed myself. As a general troubleshooter, there's no way I should be expected to know every piece of software I'll come up against. Yet I find myself expecting to perform to this level of perfection. And despite all I know I still have a very difficult time defending myself against a prospective client who expects it from me.
I forget that I'm being called in because of problems the user can't solve on their own. I forget that when I can provide information from memory or prior experience, it's a bonus. I forget that computers are like cars only insofar as the hardware does what it was designed to do. I forget that working with software is much more like working with another human being than working with a machine.
I forget that what I'm really paid for is not having all the answers, but rather knowing where to find the answers I don't have and being responsible enough to find help in situations where I can't solve the problem.
Heaven help
you if you meet me on a day when I expect myself to be perfect. I can't do it, and
when I fail I'll be frustrated. Someone -- or preferably something -- is going to
get it. I've known this for years about myself and had a damnably difficult time
dealing with it. Many, perhaps even most of my colleagues, don't see this in themselves.
And when this expectation of perfection becomes so internalized that they forget
they even have it, they begin to lose touch with humanity and magic and worship with
heart and soul at the altar of cause-and-effect mathematics.
That's not the frightening part. What's really scary is that once you do suppress this knowledge of your need to be perfect, you find yourself able to perform machine functions at a much higher level. Athletes do this consciously. Computer geeks tend to do it unconsciously. Ultimately they forget that users and software are not nuts and bolts to be bent until they fit into place. They forget that computers were meant to make life easier and more interesting, not to replace life itself.
Aren't computers
supposed to be providers and storehouses of information? The whole notion that we
should require a printed manual to use them makes about as much sense as a having
to start your car's motor with a bumper-mounted steam engine.
Even if the average user does still require a minimum level of maintenance skill, the industry is doing a horrendous job of providing it. Need to check your hard disk for random file errors and fix them? Eventually everyone does. Why can't you type FIX, SERVICE or MAINTAIN at the command prompt and get a menu of choices with optional help on what they mean?
We have teaching methods which allow functional illiterates to become excellent auto mechanics. There is a huge market of adults with Grade 6 or lower reading levels who could whiz through Windows and master Macintosh Finder quite easily if they had a manual written and illustrated simply enough to be understood, or online help that responded to the way adults ask questions. But they don't.
We have the
technology, but not the will. Creating these materials is not difficult when you
have the resources of an Apple, a Microsoft or an IBM. But it's a bear of a job when
the act of creating them entails a tacit admission of your former insensitivity.
And that's where the real resistance lies.
Let's go back to the "idiot guides" for a moment. They're reasonably good replacements for the manuals which come with most software and operating systems. But they only serve to reduce the level of complexity from ridiculous to tolerable. They're still only a partial solution. There are few more heart-rending and angering experiences than teaching someone whose self-esteem was shattered by their inability to comprehend a "dummies" book. I encounter so many victims that I'm in danger of becoming numb to them.
Change isn't
likely to come from the developers and programmers. It will not be triggered by any
sense of goodwill on the part of the industry. Pardon my cynicism, but it will probably
start in the boardrooms and be driven by a growing market of novice users of average
and below-average intelligence. If these people can't learn to use the operating
system, everyone loses money from manufacturers to publishers to retailers, all the
way down to the service sector.
This is going to take time, and even with grass-roots market demand it won't come without one hell of a fight. Before it can, the industry has to come to terms with its hostility toward adult novices. One of the best-kept secrets in the industry is that a sizeable percentage of the computing power elite doesn't want you to own computers...not unless you're willing to pay blood compensation for the old injuries which turned these people into geeks and nerds in the first place.
This next statement is going to sound pious and sanctimonious, but that doesn't detract from its truth. This secret desire for vengeance is so well-kept that only a handful of people in the industry even acknowledge that it's true, let alone consider it an important issue.
I've spent far too much of my time apologizing for my industry, my "family". The reason why you can't fix hard disk errors simply and easily isn't because the industry is "young" and hasn't caught up with the needs of users yet, but because it is caught in the same trap of irresponsible use of technology suffered by virtually every major industry in this century. There's no glamor, no kick in writing user-sensitive training materials, not for a "real programmer".
It's far less
painful to reach for the next rung on the ladder, to build bigger-better-faster,
than it is to stop and examine the legacy you've left behind and correct your mistakes
before moving on. It's human nature, and there's precious little we can do to change
this without genetically re-engineering the entire human race. The best we can hope
to do is come to an understanding.
Money buys insulation from reality, and the opportunity to postpone responsibility, but ultimately this insulation wears out or becomes ineffective. Eventually you run out of new thrills and have to face your past. Whether you come to face your past depends upon how creative you are at finding new thrills. Our legacy of war is proof of how conquest becomes the source of comfort and thrills when money can no longer buy pleasure. How readily you'll face your past depends upon its quality. The quality of that past determines whether you look forward to retirement or a rest, or dread it.
The relatively passive nature of computers makes them highly attractive to people who have an unpleasant social history. The present generation of computing's power elite comes from a group of kids who didn't generally find much satisfaction with their peers. The computer geek stereotype came into being only because there were enough real computer geeks to support the concept.
Like most
computer geeks, I learned to accept computers as a substitute for more "normal"
pursuits such as romantic/sexual relationships, competition and social interaction.
I've been alive for 35 years, but I haven't "had a life" in terms that
most of the world accepts and understands. I know how it feels to prefer not to ask
for dates because your "geekiness" has resulted in a perfect, 100% "no"
record and one more rejection would be one too many, to give up on sports and outdoor
activities rather than have sand kicked in your face one more time, to collect welfare
and avoid job interviews rather than be fired every month or two for being "antisocial".
I've even had counselling professionals look me straight in the eye and tell me in
real disgust that my life was a joke and I ought to feel suicidal.
Mine is not an isolated case. These experiences are shared, to a greater or lesser degree and in various forms, by a very large percentage of the computing elite. We've been denied a lot of what we wanted, and now we are ridiculed for the strengths we've acquired to deal with our losses.
People who have been denied a past will reclaim it with a vengeance if given the power. Make no mistake about it; the stupidity you feel when your computer doesn't work as expected is the nerds' revenge.
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is perhaps the most visible public icon of subversive geek vengeance. His is a hostility buried so deep that it makes him look like a mage instead of a manipulator. It's not always easy to spot this trait until it gets acted out. Orson Welles' fictional character Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane was the classic example, and a historical lesson. As a newspaper editor he prided himself on championing the little guy; later in life he became an apologist for Hitler.
Remember how Kane's rise to power started? By being wrenched in one of the most traumatic fashions imaginable from his home and family. Welles and co-author Herman Mankiewicz both had a strong understanding of how the past reverberates into the future, and the effects it can have on corrupting humanity, as have all the great writers through history. Gates' early life has been largely glossed over, but his actions in the present make it clear to anyone with even the barest understanding of developmental psychology that his must have been an extremely difficult past. Gates denies this for the most part, which is typical of powerful figures acting out old battles on the world stage.
Ethics get so grey at his altitude that it's easy to mistake irrationality for the real magic of power and charisma. It might sound marvellously new-age that Gates is unafraid to leave his briefcase unattended in an airport because he considers theft too inconsistent with reality to be possible. But he also dates by video link-up. Is it because he emanates so much love that his possessions are sacred even to thieves? Or does it have more to do with an aura of fear of real human contact? Gates could have been known more for his statements about the role he wants Microsoft to play in making information technology a tool for peace. Instead he's known for his stated desire to see that Microsoft has a hand in virtually every aspect of computing, and a product in the hands of every consumer able to afford it. Bill Gates is powerful enough not to have to care about his public image, and the tragic truth is that he is only stating out loud what much of the industry can only think.
I've sacrificed my street-level reality to the Silicon God often enough to know dangerous naivete when I see it. And when I hear about a generation of programmers unwilling to talk about, or even test, their new products for fear that Microsoft will buy them out or steal their concepts, loud alarms fire in my head. Hitler also believed in magic, had strange sexual/romantic ideas and held power by fear. Hitler also gathered around him the disaffected genius of his generation. Hitler also scared the daylights out of the more sensitive genius' of his day.
I've also
seen enough hollow philanthropy that when Gates claims he'll donate his millions-cum-billions
to charity in a few years, I have serious doubts about whether there'll be anything
left to donate. Giants fall hard, and Microsoft is one of the biggest.
I'm not alone in my concern. Some of the most respected voices in computing have echoed a call for the break-up of Microsoft under the US' Combines Investigation Act, and I expect to see action taken by the US government in the next year or two to accomplish exactly that. Heaven help us if they don't.
I want to make very clear that I do not see Bill Gates as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. But when one of the most powerful people in the world demonstrates sociopathic behavior that affects the decisions of those under them, it is cause for serious concern, and awareness of the existence of a threat is the first line of defence against it. Gates' behavior has met those criteria on a number of occasions (let's not forget that sociopathy is not usually a condition with 24-hour-a-day symptoms). Al Capone cried at the opera and gave large sums to children's charities in particular; even he had humanity in him at some level. But the ruthlessness in business that took Capone to the top of his field inspired others to emulate his behavior. He's not much different in the shower from most computing professionals of my acquaintance. But several years ago, the personality traits which distinguish people like Gates were seen as something you had to put up with in order to be in step with modern technology. It seems more than just a historical coincidence that since Gates became a role model of ultra-success, those same traits have become things that average computer users have learned to respect and worship in fear, and even more frightening, many of those aspiring to success have consciously tried to emulate them.
At the risk of sounding alarmist, I've studied enough history to feel very threatened by the current state of the industry. (It's a tough line to walk, because that same fear also feels at times like excitement...you mean that I could be a powerful person in this new high-tech environment?) If the Geek Guard, of which Gates is only the master sergeant, entrenches itself in the boardrooms of enough high-tech firms, we can kiss goodbye any chance of seeing computers fulfill their promise as a great tool for peace and equality for at least two generations. The "sins of the fathers" are met upon the sons and it usually takes a full two generations to undo the damage.
I'm guilty of many of the same sins I attribute to the Microsoft's of the world. I have made sly accusations to clients that it was their fault for buying the products they purchased, rather than the fault of the manufacturer for not providing them in a usable form. I've looked back at some of my own writing in horror as I realized that it cleverly set the reader up to feel like a complete idiot, when the fault lay with me for not knowing what I was talking about. Without consciously intending to, I've encouraged people to be dependant upon my "wizardry". I've refused to apologize for mistakes rather than endure the shame of being human and prone to errors my computer can't make. And I've distanced myself from the people I am paid to serve because -- and this is not a word of exaggeration -- people have never given me the satisfaction my computer has.
The worst part isn't that I've done these things. It's that I've had many colleagues whom I respected as among the more conscientious computer professionals tell me that I had done nothing that everyone else in the industry wasn't doing, and I had no reason to feel ashamed or even to change my ways. If it's true that everyone is doing these things, then there is something very, very wrong with the industry.
Cowardly
geek that I still am, I'm only singling out Gates and Microsoft because of they are
the most visible and obvious example of the industry's Peter Pan syndrome. Granted,
Bill Gates doesn't personally dictate what we buy and what we can use, but Microsoft
employees who do make these decisions generally adopt his worldview as a corporate
survival reaction. Microsoft does dictate to a very large degree what we can and
can't buy, and high-level employees usually get to those high levels by emulating
the beliefs and behaviors of those at the top.
That's not to say that the men at the top aren't sometimes personally responsible for major gaffes which eventually hurt everyone. I've been accused of being overly-loyal to Atari, but having lived and worked on both sides of the tracks I still believe that one of the most unfortunate episodes in the history of personal computing is the fall of Atari.
In 1985, this company which was previously best-known as a manufacturer of video games, released the ST line of home computers. It was -- and still is -- the easiest, most sensible, most cost-effective graphically-based personal computer system ever released. It never got the respect it deserved from the industry, who considered the company a joke; or consumers, who couldn't accept that a games manufacturer might make a reasonable PC. Next to the Commodore 64, it was the closest we've come to a Volkswagen computer: something that combined versatility, ease of use, low maintenance requirements, power, reliability and low cost.
Atari President Jack Tramiel started out by developing the desktop calculator and eventually building Victor Comptometer into the one-time industry giant Commodore.
After selling out his Commodore stock and shifting his interest to Atari, he apparently became bored with PC's after his Commodore 64 experience and chose to leave the personal computer division of Atari in the less-than-ready hands of sons and nephews. In just a few years the Atari line turned from a serious contender with a superb product and the most loyal user base in computing into a dinosaur. I was one of the last to jump ship. I still remember the discussions on a large international online service, which had several high-level Atari employees contributing, and the increasing bitterness and disillusionment as everyone's hopes for the product seeemed to evaporate before our eyes. Even those of us who had no idea how to work a cash register knew that Atari was making disastrous decisions. We as users were being left twisting in the wind, and there was no small amount of teeth-grinding over the fact that this wonderful device had no future.
If Atari
had challenged IBM and Apple as aggressively and intelligently in America as they
did in Europe, where the ST series was a huge hit for several years, the average
user would have benefitted regardless of which computer they bought.
Imagine the marketing execs at Microsoft having to vie for market share with an operating system which nearly anyone could master -- and maintain on their own -- in just a few weeks. (It took me two months to become an "expert user" on the Atari; the same feat took me eighteen months on the IBM-compatible.) They would have had little choice but to acknowledge the consumer demand for a simple, solid, easy-to-maintain product, and Windows 3.1 would probably have looked a lot different. Instead we have operating systems that only a professional can troubleshoot.
This is the price of having one company responsible for about 80 percent of the operating system market in North America. Microsoft has parlayed its success as OS market leaders into development and marketing of applications such as Word, Works, Excel, Access and Visual Basic, products so undeniably good that Microsoft are arguably the best applications developer in North America as well. They're into hardware, selling mice and keyboards, and on at least one occasion a Microsoft executive has publicly admitted disappointment that Microsoft can't actually sell computers without violating anti-trust legislation.
Things are working marvellously in Microsoft's favor right now. But then no one can deny that Hitler, Lenin and Mao worked wonders with their economies as well in their first years in power. There are precious few mountains left for Microsoft to climb. As any industry watcher who doesn't fear a lawsuit will tell you, the urge for conquest which lies latent in all great powers has already begun to surface at Microsoft. (For better or worse, my anger has overwhelmed my fear, and I no longer care whether stating my beliefs and observations lands me in court.) They've already been caught in the act of perpetrating Orwellian doublespeak and propaganda tactics in their dealings with the public, and not just once but several times.
Let's face
it...nerds are made by abuse and neglect. They all have axes to grind, most of them
justly so. But if the industry cops to its hostile attitudes and passive-aggressive
behavior, it will lose considerably more than face. Our society has very little patience
left for offenders of any kind, even repentant ones with skinny legs who wouldn't
know love if it gave them a heart attack.
The Peter Pan's of the industry and their emotional perspective still largely determine what we can buy, how it will behave and who will be permitted to master its power. I have met few honest vendors and a support pro's who didn't confess that sprinkling their technological fairy dust on a novice was a painful experience they'd prefer to avoid. It calls up too many ghosts. The sad part is that many of those who make a sincere effort to be compassionate eventually wind up "leaking" their frustration in other aspects of their behavior. You can't run from what you are; eventually it catches up to you.
Microsoft is a perfect example of this dynamic in action. Their Wizards technology bends over backwards to make data manipulation easy for novices. People who didn't know desktop publishing from scrap paper could -- and did -- turn out exceptional-looking documents on their first or second try. Their Windows 3.1 tutor, which demonstrated the basic features of the Windows environment, was another exceptional piece of training software. It received a lot of kudos, and rightly so. In fact I still use it as a standard against which I measure other tutorial software. It was exceptionally well done for its time, and many hoped it was indicative of how Microsoft intended to treat its customer base. The thing is, Microsoft did those jobs right. When they haven't produced their best, their responses have not met the standards that WINTUTOR.EXE and Wizards technology have led consumers to expect.
When Doublespace
-- an integral part of the MS-DOS operating system beginning with version 6.0 --
wrecked millions of files, they released the bug fix as a paid "step-up"
option. I still meet people who believe they are at fault for data loss caused by
the faulty Doublespace software. I myself didn't discover until months after its
release that the upgrade files had been available all along at no charge from Microsoft's
bulletin board. In the meantime Microsoft sold millions of step-up disks through
retailers at $10 to $18 apiece.
Imagine that every GM product produced for the last two years had faulty brakes and GM offered to "improve" your brakes for a nominal fee. This gives you a pretty accurate picture of what Microsoft pulled off with MS-DOS 6.2.
What really makes me ashamed is that as much as I thought I took a sensitive and responsible approach to my work, it took an angry client to point out this injustice.
Not long after this fiasco, they were successfully sued by Stac Electronics. Doublespace itself was a rip-off of Stac's technology. Developers throughout the industry were ecstatic, and I still remember seeing colleagues' eyes light up as they talked about it. Perhaps losing a relatively public court battle would prompt Microsoft to change their tactics, because they had been reputed for years to be one of the dirtiest technology traders in the industry. If you developed a useful utility, it was almost an industry joke that you dare not test it publicly for fear of Microsoft either buying out the developer at bargain-basement prices or copying it outright if the price seemed too high.
Time will tell whether Microsoft's attitude toward their industry changes. (If anything it seems to have gotten worse since the discovery of such alarming features in Windows 95 as subliminal images in the startup screen.) Their attitude toward the public doesn't appear to have changed for anything but the worse. When Stac won their suit, Microsoft stopped putting drive compression of any type into their MS-DOS package for a time, instead promising to provide it later. In the summer of 1994 they released MS-DOS 6.22 with their new, legal Drivespace compression. They went to the poisoned well again, releasing an MS-DOS 6.22 update disk set for users who wanted the latest disk update. Once again, it was available as a free update on bulletin boards and Microsoft's Internet sites, and Microsoft didn't sell nearly as many "step-up" disks as they did with 6.2. But they did sell some, which is a shame in itself. This "step-up" was of almost no practical value to anyone who has DOS 6.2, and everyone who owned versions 6.0 through 6.2 was entitled to the 6.22 step-up free of charge anyway. All people were paying for when they bought the 6.22 step-up was the disks, the package, and the convenience of being able to get the update from a retailer.
What makes this even more insidious
than their MS-DOS 6.2 shenanigans is that in this case, the "step-up" was
released not because they made mistakes with the software, but because they
got caught in the act of infringing on copyright. Profits earned from sales of the
step-up disks may be a drop in Microsoft's ocean, but the revenues from this meta-product,
revenues which came out of the pockets of those who believed they needed the update,
at least partially paid their bill to Stac Electronics. It's reasonable to say that
most of those who bought the step-up disks were swallowing at least part of the blame
for Microsoft's offence.
Call it creative marketing if you like. Many industry watchers, myself included, would label it subversion. It takes a lot of time, isolation and plotting to carry out an act of geek vengeance this slick and pretty. Whether Microsoft's motivations were Conscious or not, actions such as these indicate contempt for the consumer. And Microsoft is far from being the only firm doing these things. A careful examination of the reactions of IBM, Intel and many others to similar public relations challenges and you quickly reach the conclusion that Microsoft is far from being the only firm with top-level executives capable of acting on this kind of thinking.
It's less frightening to me that this is happening -- power corrupts, and by the time we reach Grade 8 we should all have learned a high degree of cynicism -- than the fact that we accept this behavior. I've told bald-faced lies to clients, advised a few on purchases I wish I had the money to take back now (if they know about it they haven't told me yet and I'm not saint enough to tell them), and fudged on more questions than I can count. And I've almost always gotten away with it. Yet I've been told hundreds of times that my facial expression always seems to betray my dishonesties. The simple fact that I was able to get away with dishonesty about computers when I can't seem to get away with it in any other area of my life speaks volumes about what has already happened to people's rational judgement when it comes to computers. In fact, my clients, not my colleagues, have even told me on more than a dozen different occasions that I take ethics too far.
They're right...but not in the way they think.
I never wanted to pull the wool over anyone's eyes; I just wanted to earn an honest living, and when honesty got in the way of living, I settled for earning money any way I could. And I was supported in doing so by colleagues I depended upon to help me with ethical dilemmas, people who were struggling like I was, who seemed to care about others and act on that concern, and who hiked in the mountains on weekends and slow days for the good of their spirits. They look like good people. And they believe they are doing nothing wrong.
Make no mistake about it...this is an epidemic from the top down, and I expect it to get worse before it gets better. Maybe a lot worse. Any salesman who has seen the intrusions into privacy made by Win 95's registration wizard or noticed the subliminal images in 95's startup screen will either have to swallow hard when offering this product to the public or be prepared to explain the situation to every purchaser. Any other reaction would be a compromise of ethics, and you can't compromise in one area of your life without having it leak out into others.
Any adult
who approaches computing for the first time with anything less than a child's innocence,
openness and capacity for absorption is fighting the flow, and eventually they're
going to get hurt. Everything from the hardware on down to the interfaces was designed,
built, tested and marketed by and for overgrown kids. Intended or not, desirable
or not, the whole industry is working through a serious case of Peter Pan syndrome,
and it's not going to be a quick cure. We have a long way to go before computers
fulfill their promise as an equalizer. Let's hope the worst is behind us, but for
heaven's sake, let's keep our eyes open in case it isn't. If some of the more disturbing
rumors about what's going on in the boardrooms of the biggest high-tech firms are
even partly accurate, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.
In the meantime, don't ever forget that there's a good chance that the people you rely upon to help you with your computing problems, from what to buy to how to use it to what to do when it doesn't work, may be relying upon the Microsoft's and Atari's as models for behavior without even realizing what they're doing. If these people are causing harm to others, eventually they've got to be awakened to that fact, but the time to do it is not when you're most in need of help yourself. We're talking about brainwashing here, and you can't deprogram a cult member as long as they believe they are living in God's good graces. The only confrontation they are ever likely to respond to is the one they have never experienced: being treated with understanding when the tables are turned and they become the potential victims once again. Because the sad truth is that men like Bill Gates are as tragic as Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane.
As long as the Geek Guard does have power, we can't fight back. All we can do is defend ourselves. The only sane approach is to abandon them to their silicon god and find some safer place to raise the children. Once they've had a taste of power, it's almost impossible to break the addiction, and few of those who taste it ever even want to.
Microsoft's Christmas '94 TV campaign was dead on the money...this stuff is powerful...and power is the best drug of all.
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Last modified: Sept. 23/95