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Moore's Law for Software
I work in the trenches, doing tech support at the University of Northern Iowa. Weblog plug here. Anyhow, the hardest thing I have to do is convince a user that they need to upgrade to the newest version of a product, or to convince them that they don't need to. The amount of resistance I get when I try to upgrade someone from WordPerfect 8.0 to 9.0 is amazing sometimes. Users don't handle change well at all, so a software developer who is attempting to do something truly revolutionary is going to have a hard time getting their users to follow along. Just renaming and moving a few of the commands on the menus is enough to frustrate most of my users, and they'll start griping about how they always knew where it was in their old faithful version of their software. I prefer Microsoft Word to WordPerfect, I know them both, used WordPerfect since version 4.0 and Word since version 2.0, but try to get someone to use Word if they're a WordPerfect user, and it's like pulling teeth. I'm sure this argument extends to many other software areas, this is just the most common one I encounter. The other users that are frustrating are those who want to upgrade, but they don't know why. The kind who say "I need Windows 98 put on my computer, that's what I have at home, and I want the files to be compatible". No matter how many times I explain that the files are compatible between them, they don't seem to catch on. It's a case where they want everything to be the same, they don't want to have to think about what they're doing. They learn how to use a computer through rote memorization of basic tasks, not through an actual understanding of the processes involved. Technical users, "geeks", support personnel, programmers, etc. understand how the computer works, they can adapt to minor and even major changes in less time than end-users. Take HTML editors, I'm sure I could pick up Adobe GoLive, DreamWeaver, BBEdit, FrontPage, etc. and make basic web pages within ten minutes in any of them. I haven't used all of those packages, but they do the same thing, I only have to adjust to a difference in terminology or layout or icons. For the typical end user, it's a whole different ballgame, they just know that when they click this shiny button, it does what they want. They don't think about what the term means, what other terms mean similar things, etc. Any change to their software will alienate them. It's this alienation that prevents new and better tools from replacing existing tools that are adequate for the job. Only when a tool becomes inadequate will the user accept a replacement. Another example from my daily life is the e-mailer PINE. PINE still runs on the VMS systems here which double as the e-mail servers. Trying to explain to someone how to read an HTML formatted e-mail or easily retrieve an attached file can be a nightmare, but they don't want to switch from PINE to Eudora, Outlook, etc. because they're completely lost in those applications. As technical people, we find that hard to imagine, it's got big shiny buttons with words like "Reply" and "Forward", how hard can it be? The users don't think in that level, they don't analyze what they're seeing, it's rote memorization. I'm not criticizing users, if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have a job. I'm just saying that the same rules don't always apply to them as apply to you and I, and that's what holds back revolutionary changes to our software. Mac OS X is going to be a good example of this, many of the long-time Mac users are going to be angry, lost, and confused by the new OS, even though most of us are excited about the technical improvements like pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory. Just my two cents. :) -Seth There are responses to this message:
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