DEATH WISH 2000

Dick Pountain (23/07/1999 1:30pm): Idealog 60

In my very first Idealog column five years ago I wrote about object-orientation, explaining how this technology had the potential to turn computing into a grown-up industry like the automobile or aircraft industries, where the use of standard interchangeable components has created unprecedented levels of reliability and cost-effectiveness. I ended the column on a rather pessimistic note, hinting that the monopolistic instincts of Micrsoft and the conservatism of the DP industry would probably combine to abort this potential revolution. Was I right?

Well, I'm writing this with my teeth still clenched and my brow moist with a film of cold sweat, having spent the best part of today trying to restore my PC to a bootable state. The reason? I tried installing the latest version of the device driver for my graphics tablet, and it repeatedly GPFed during the plug-and-play phase of bootup. Why did I even try to upgrade, when the old driver was working fine? Because I needed the new one to upgrade my PC to Windows NT. Why upgrade to NT when 95 has been working OK for me for a year or more? Because a piece of software I am forced to use for a job has been written so that it only runs under NT.

Far from growing up the PC industry is still stuck in a state of infantile chaos which gets worse and worse, where each firm's product tramples all over the others, and keeping your PC operating at all means either eschewing the installation of any new software, or plunging yourself into a permanent battle of wits. And there you have the key to understanding the whole business, for the brutal truth is that many of us actually like this battle. A well-ordered community is a boring community, and at some - perhaps semi-conscious - level we crave the excitement of things going wrong and the struggle to put them right. By 'we' I mean not only journalists such as myself, who would have nothing to write about if everything worked (how many microwave-oven magazines have you read lately) but you, the readers of this magazine who are mostly employed in IT and whose job satisfaction depends upon troubleshooting, problem solving, on anything but a quiet life. This isn't only happening in the computer business: having mentioned the car industry above as an example of a mature engineering industry where safety and reliability are paramount, it would be dishonest of me to ignore a powerful countervailing tendency, the Clarksonite vroom-vroom tendency that scorns safety and pollution measures, that wants only more horsepower under the hood and more rubber on the road.

These tendencies come from the grass-roots, not from the top, and they reflect a fairly widespread feeling that we are becoming over-regulated and too safety conscious. You might even see that bloke who was sent to jail yesterday for refusing to turn off his mobile phone in an airliner as a front-line fighter for this 'live dangerously' tendency. Problem is that they will always be in a minority, because the vast, silent majority of people have lives that are already too uncertain to enjoy courting disaster. It was for them that the standards and safety regulations were created in the first place, and they like having a few less things to worry about.

There was a time, around 1996, when it did look as though Microsoft had understood what object-orientation meant and started to take it seriously (if tastelessly and hamfistedly) with its Cairo project. That vision was quickly derailed by the rise to mass popularity of the Web, which frightened Bill Gates half to death and forced him to perform a spectacular, tyre-smoking, U-turn (there's that vroom-vromm imagery again) into the HTML-with-everything world we now inhabit. The fact that HTML is nowhere near expressive enough for the task of organizing the world's information stores is now leading them to propose XML as the new panacea, with the potential for still more chaos as everyone in the world invents their own tags.

Meanwhile the expansion of Gate's evil empire aroused a popular opposition movement which decided to make its stand around what? Some next-generation, state-of-the-art technology? Nope, around Linux, a home-brewed version of an operating system that was already old when I entered this business, and which is the tinkerer and fiddler's delight. Apple had the opportunity to make a brave breakout: had it bought BeOS and spent some of its cash mountain on bribing developers to write a mass of applications for a relaunched Apple line it might now be aiming a kick at the rump of a Microsoft teetering on the edge of the Windows 2000 abyss. Instead it balked, lost nerve and threw the money away on buying NextSTEP which it doesn't know what to do with.

The only feeble rays of light penetrating this cloud of confusion come from the world of Java, which keeps the flame of object-orientation burning on the Web, and from Palm Computing with its gloriously simple PalmOS - put these two together and you have potential dynamite. As Dave Evnull reports in his Unix/Java column this month, Jini is finally showing what real plug-and-play might look like, and at the level of the whole network, not just within the PC/workstation. Meanwhile in his Networks column Steve Cassidy prophesies a Thin Client backlash, where firms will slash their IT expenditure by banning PCs from the desktop. Make no mistake, a backlash is coming against the wilful difficulty of current computing, for the truth is that most people have better things to do with their lives than fiddle.