Dick Pountain/01 August 1996/14:38/Idealog 24
I've just returned from a very pleasant holiday in Provence, a week surrounded by cicadas, oleanders and no computers whatsoever. The subject of computers only arose briefly when my hosts, who both have high-flying jobs in the media, informed me how much they hated the things - he had palmed his off onto someone who 'needed it more', while she could barely bring herself to answer email and scribble the odd memo in Word. I wouldn't normally set much store by such a small sample but over the last six months I seem to be hearing this story from more and more people I know.
To catch up with industry events on my return I turned to 'Microscope' (see, I finally worked in a plug for one of our own magazines) and these were among the headlines that caught my eye: Psion pulls out of Amstrad takeover, thus squelching my last column; Plimsoll Publishing reports that 40% of UK computer hardware companies fail to make a profit and classes them as 'in danger'; Microsoft predicts 'sluggish demand' for 1997 and a delay for its Internet products; Wall Street dumps high tech stocks; plus Yet Another Article About How Utterly Crap The Content Of The Web Is and why you shouldn't bother. Then I turned to the Guardian to discover that Gary Trudeau is devoting a whole week of Doonesbury to deriding the Internet hype ("We feel that lives are for wimps") and remembered that this is the cartoon strip that single-handedly sunk Apple's Newton launch. However a hot bath and a tablespoon of laudanum soon had me feeling cheerful again.
It certainly feels like the cyberphobia that I've been carping on about for the last year is finally starting to bite into sales. Indeed it feels as if the world is dividing into three camps: the 0.1% who actually enjoy fiddling with computers, playing Doom and surfing the Web; the 9.9% who have to use computers at work and hate them; not forgetting of course the 90% who have no access to computers at all (and possibly not enough food or housing either.) Of course PC Pro is read mainly by that first 0.1% so the fact that you are reading this may isolate you from the other 99%.
The industry itself seems to sense no danger at all, indeed is fuller of techno-optimism than ever, though that optimism seems ever more at odds with users' perceptions. The truth is that PCs, and perhaps Macs too, have reached a critical level of complexity where they can in theory do more than ever, but in practice just barely work at all (and then only if you know how to tweak them all the time.) The unfathomable unreliability, which you don't encounter in other consumer goods, is what drives ordinary people mad and makes them hate computers. Larry Ellison and his Net PC brigade have diagnosed this problem perfectly accurately, but their notion that replacing the PC with an even dumber box connected to an equally unreliable, low-bandwidth Internet will improve matters is just plain batty.
The last time I felt a gap this wide between makers and the mass of users was seven or eight years ago, in those bleak latter years of DOS before Windows 3.0 arrived, when juggling enough DOS memory to get the already bloating Wordperfect and Lotus 123 to run became a black art (does anyone else remember EMS cards?) The industry slumped, firms went bust and it took the boom spawned by Windows 3 - the Windows that finally worked - to get things running again.
We at PC Pro offer a view of the very highest end of the marketplace, a view in which OLE automation, client/server, data warehousing and Intranets are the stuff of everyday experience, but for a great many PC users such matters belong in the same realm as space shuttle fuel injector technology; they just want to know why Winfax sent those first three faxes OK but refuses to send the fourth, or why Word 7 keeps opening a six month old letter to Aunt Jemima whenever you start it up.
There's no question that Windows 3.x lead to an improvement in software usability for a while, but that progress has all now been eroded by the verminous proliferation of floating toolbars, and by the bane of Windows 95 and NT users, those multi-page tabbed dialogs which are just as confusing as anything from a 10 year old DOS application. Somewhere along the line everyone seems to have forgotten once again that simplifying means actually removing stuff, not just hiding it on the ninteenth tab of some dialog. Fixes are promised for everything - Plug 'n Play, Simply Interactive, USB and the rest - but none of them is here now.
The excitement over Microsoft's Nashville (see Jon Honeyball's columns this issue) is certainly justified for those of us who are au fait with Web technology and have access to an Intranet, but I'm beginning to wonder how many of us that actually involves. The horrid notion keeps creeping into my mind that maybe Netscape really has torpedoed Microsoft, but not at all in the way most people think. Maybe it has just frightened the Seattle giant into chasing it over a precipice, by derailing Microsoft's object technology plans which were finally beginning to look sensible after such an agonisingly long gestation. I see wars, horrible wars, and the river Hudson foaming with much red ink.....[<fx> tinkle of tablespoon against bottle]
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