Screaming Penguin

Blah blah blah, iPad. Whatever. Much linked article at Funkatron this week about users and how computers are appliances and we have been giving them the wrong thing for three decades. Sweet Jesus I get sick of hearing this. First, it isn't our fault that people want more computer than they can use. For years people have sauntered into Radio Shack or Best Buy equipped with some barely understood lingo about MagnaRAMs and JigaPixEls and bought computers. They buy general purpose computers because they see all the cool things people can do with them. Jobs and Apple since 1984 have been trying to sell the idea that a computer is an appliance, like a toaster. That is fine, but that is incredibly hard. People could have purchased Word Processor appliances. Email appliances. Chat appliances. These have all been marketed. The problem is people know better than to buy those, even if they aren't 100% comfortable with hierarchical file systems. When the automobile first came out, it was a hobbyist vehicle. You had to really understand how to deal with an ICE to even own one. Today, you don't even have to know how to work a clutch, and still, it takes weeks or months of training for a teenager to learn to drive. It cars are so damned hard to operate, not to mention dangerous, why do we even have them? Because they can take you anywhere. If people really wanted ease of operation, almost everyone would all take the bus. They don't. They want the power to go where ever they want whenever they want. If an automatic transmission makes that easier, they will use it. If it make it easier but limits them, they will learn to drive a stick. Sure, software has gotten easier to use. As the common cases for software are narrowed down, it gets refined. But in the large, what drives people to new software isn't the ease of use, it is doing something different. Maybe there are a large number of people who wouldn't play LPMUD but would play World of Warcraft. Woohoo, but that doesn't mean there weren't millions and millions of people who drove the development between the two. The iPad is computing appliance. More so than anything else perhaps ever marketed. That is great, but that also means it will forever be nailed to the known factors of computing. It will never be a device for innovating in what you can do with a computing device, because it will never be a general purpose device. You can't innovate in automotive technology if you can't open the hood. You can't even realistically develop new racing strategies if you can't change your tires. The iPad might do well. But the iPad is a bus -- a bus with comfy seats and Isaac the bartender tossing you a pina colada in the back. It won't take you everywhere, but it will get you maybe 70% of the way there, but it won't take you to the happening nightspots that everyone is talking about.