"In the late 1960s, Laurence J. Peter created the "Peter Principle,"
postulating that managers are promoted to their level of incompetence,
causing organizations to falter. As I reflect on the software tools I'm
using in 2005, I've concluded that there is a software corollary to the
Peter Principle -- software evolves to the point that it's unusable.
I'm writing this column in Notepad. Why? Have you tried writing an
outline, end notes or an indented bulleted list using the latest
word-processing software? Wizards and autoformatting tools try to
anticipate what you're typing and in the process irreversibly scramble
your work.
Our modern operating systems contain vast numbers of CPU-consuming
add-ons: a wagging dog that searches for your files, invisible
background processes that constantly download patches and user-interface
tchotchkes such as thumbnail previews of your multimedia. With all this
increased complexity comes a lack of reliability, perpetual security
holes and poor performance. Boot times are long, lockups are frequent,
and viruses are epidemic.
Although my computer today is 100 times more powerful than what I had in
the late '90s, my current environment has less speed, lower productivity
and higher cost of ownership than my Pentium running Windows 98 Second
Edition and Microsoft Office 97."
"In 2006, let's break the cycle of creating more complex, less reliable,
less usable software and agree that less is more. I encourage the
software industry to take a lesson from Gmail and other successful thin,
good-enough applications. Do we need Longhorn/Vista and a new 3-D
graphics engine-driven user interface with so many lines of code that it
will be a challenge for even the most brilliant programmers to maintain?"
<http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,107140,00.html>
©2005 Bill Anderson |
