Referring to the late 1800's:

The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation—for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p51 (referring to changes in the late 1800s)

Needless to say, the promise was a false one: for most things, there is no pure level of function. Especially not something as intimately related to our daily, messy lives like a home.

And referring to, well, right now:

If one gets past the patina, the quaintly burnished woodwork, the problem is that Steampunk is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the Victorian era filtered through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jules Verne, whose illustrated “scientific romances” seem to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Steampunk.

—Randy Nakamura, "Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design", Design Observer (July 2, 2008)

Nothing has changed.

Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended.

—Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p62

When you read a unilateral polemic, whether by Le Corbusier or some punk on Design Observer, beware.

Typically such frothing attempts to hide some deficiency in the author.

Look for the hidden chip on the shoulder. The author may be suffering—knowingly or unknowingly—from an inability to understand or succeed in a certain aspect of work or life (e.g. aesthetics, or personal relationships), the value of which becomes the target of his attack. She may be afraid of uncertainty, and thus promote formulas. Or maybe he just knows that people vote, with their attention and their money, for the comfort of exactitude—regardless of whether the exactitude is scientific or even useful.

Two perspectives.

Clay Shirky, writing on A Brief Message:

Design is arrogance.

The designer says, “I know what you want better than you. Here it is.” A designer offers judgment as superior; as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Design is humility.

Users are experts in their own lives, lives the designer will see only if she understands their wants and needs. Design is recognition that “good” only makes sense in that context.

And Peter Denning, as the voice of "a user" in an article that featured fictional, representative voices from across the world of IT:

I love using computers. I'm not a computer scientist, and I don't want to be. I just love using the stuff computer scientists make. Awesome! I get some really spiffy things done with your tools even though I am an amateur. Most of the time, your stuff does not bankrupt me, waste my time, or kill me... I am so grateful to have all this computer stuff. My wants and needs determine what computer scientists can sell, so they often listen to me very carefully. Without those wants and needs, in fact, I'd be a nobody.

Honestly, I'm speechless.

Awesome!

Alex and I ran failcamp fast & loose and it worked. (Alex's writeup is here.)

Our guiding idea was to discuss failure, in all its guises. We wanted to hold a forum where it was not only OK to admit to not being glossy & perfect, but actually required. We wanted to discuss things practical and philosophical.

And we achieved those ends, so we're really pleased with how it turned out!

Lots of positive things were said about failure. A number of negative things, too. We talked about how failure had helped us or hurt us, and whether failure is required in life, and whether failure can be avoided. All types of failure were fair game. Lively conversation was had; debates were held; help and advice were given. Everyone opened up and participated at least some.

I've learned that running an event is a lot different than writing an essay, giving a talk (even an interactive one) or participating in a roundtable. (This probably sounds obvious, but it's different when you think you know it, and when you actually experience it.) The event had a life of its own. Alex and I had a vision for how we'd like to guide things, but we didn't try to force it. It went places we weren't expecting, which is both frustrating and really cool.

Alex has described the details of the day really well, and I won't try to duplicate his effort. But I will say that starting off with the anonymous stories in the first half of the day worked really well. Specific stories are a great starting point.

We didn't return the focus to stories again after lunch and the post-lunch slump combined with the lack of concrete details and resulted in a conversation much more abstract and argumentative.

From then on (thanks to Blake & Christine), we moved to a "current problem / current advice" format—anyone who wanted it had 10 minutes of focus on their current issue. Some of these were delightfully philosophic, others very concrete and businessy.

Things I learned about running this kind of event that would inform/change the way I'd run a second one:

• start with / focus on something concrete (e.g. specific fail stories)
• without concrete reference points, the conversation can very easily became too abstract and heated
• without prompting, a lot of the stories will be about money and business (which is, I think, a barrier to getting to the philosophical heart of the matter of failures)
• with a group of 20, a moderator is a really good idea; either break into smaller groups or moderate to keep the volume & talking order in check

Things that were amazing and have pleased and inspired me to *no* end:

• how open, sharing and understanding everyone was
• how thoughtful people are about their own & others' situations
• what great ideas people had for how to steer failcamp back on track & future meetings
• how successful and—dare I say it?—painless an ad hoc day can be (we're really pleased how it turned out, & must thank the wonderful participants for this one)
• holy crap, we made it to 6:30pm (everyone was exhausted by this point, but wow! we never expected it to actually happen)
• nobody actually complained that I talked too much (other than me)

I've got more to say on the topic of failure in general and failcamp in specific, but I'm exhausted.

Major props once again to Tara "Miss Rogue" Hunt, whose idea of LoserCamp spawned our very own failcamp, and who we know attended in spirit.

NB: Want to run your own failcamp? Alex and I are going to work up some materials for anyone who wants to—suggestions of course. It may be a few days, since we're quite busy, but feel free to contact us thru the Google Group with any questions or announcements!

A good in-depth article on information hoarding:

Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged.

Linder being the author of The Harried Leisure Class, apparently. A book I haven't read and probably won't.

There's also this rather insightful essay by Nicholas Carr. Which I did read through to the end, finding myself agreeing with him, at least on the effects of too much information on my own person. (Whether Google's 20% time is engineered purposefully for evil is another question. I hear from many "Googlers" that it's 20% after your requisite 80-hour week, and David Hansson recently pointed out that it's supposed to be 20% more time doing the exact same things only with a different name, and that getting away from the computer sometimes might be a good idea.)

There is this counterpoint, if you can call it that, by John Batelle but I found it a little too "rah rah INFORMATION AGE!" for my liking.

Karl Duncker was a brilliant psychological researcher in the early 20th century, and one of the important figures in Gestalt Theory movement. His seminal work was his book on "productive thought," Zur Psychologie des produktiven Denkens", as well as the English-language book *On problem-solving. Neither of which it is possible to get your hands on, unless you know how to search a lot better than me.

According to a little book I'm reading, Information and imagination, Duncker had this to say about "finding a solution to a current problem on the basis of its similarity to a problem or problems encountered in the past":

It is the most banal and least rational form of finding solutions, practicable in any world whatever, provided this world contains similarities and repetitions at all.

And

He who merely searches his memory for a solution... may remain just as blind to the inner nature of the problem situation before him as a person who, instead of thinking himself, refers the problem to an intelligent acquaintance or to an encyclopedia.

I find this interesting on several levels.

Firstly, I love to read old books because reading new books that talk about the past is never the same as reading old books where authors speak about the present (their present, that is). When reading new stories about the past, it's so easy to slip into the habit of judging those ridiculously foresighted people from history, and how could they have ever believed that anyway? Like, duh. Even when they attempt to explain the uncertainty of history, new stories always seem to have a "just-so" quality. Reading old books puts you in touch with the flawed humans of yesteryear (perhaps leading to a better understanding of the flawed humans of today). You can feel their certainty or confusion while also being aware of all the changes and advances in understanding that had since occurred.

Secondly, I'd never heard of Karl Duncker. He didn't even have an English-language Wikipedia page until I created it (my first! I've never found a major topic missing before). And yet he was an important person in the psychological research of the time, a subject of a number of contemporary papers and featured in several contemporary books. I read a lot of books on psychology, and creativity and problem-solving especially. So I find it odd, to say the least.

Thirdly, I think he's right. Most people would argue that the very essence of problem-solving is pattern detection. Until just now, I would have argued that pattern detection (and synthesis) is why having outside hobbies, or being in more than one field, is so useful for creativity. "Aha! this heating dispersal problem, that's like the air pockets in butterfly wings!" and that sort of thing.

But Duncker's got a point:

The pattern-finding mode probably leads to satisficing. Given Problem X, and a pattern-finding mission, you are most likely to halt at the first "good enough" entry you find in your mental filing system. Even if Problems A, B, D, and F are all similar, even covering separate facets of Problem X, most people would be satisfied with Problem A if it comes up first. It's good enough. It fits the pattern well enough.

"That's good enough", though, is not a sentence I like to utter.

I hate feed readers. The idea for creativescrape was midwifed by that hate (a fiery, passionate hate it is).

Like email, feed readers are almost exclusively uniform—and uniformly bad. They try to make everything in the world fit into the same mold, however cramped and unpleasant it may be.

As developers we naturally find this kind of pure, perfect abstract to be intellectually orgasmic, but as designers we must naturally find it impractical and even repugnant.

Thomas and I planned out creativescrape and it took us a longer than a day in terms of calendar days to finish it, but I doubt the time, thus divided, added up to more than two "man" days total.

(My belief in small projects? Still going strong. They're a release valve, gratification, practice opportunity, test of theory and self-promotion all wrapped up in one. Just fucking ship, indeed.)

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Over at Hyphenated People, we've been spending the summer cooking up something new: a fixed-price deal. Fun and challenging for us, and affordable for you.

For a flat rate, you can choose either:

• The Inspector. In which we explore and analyze your entire application[1] and deliver to you a fancy report including a written analysis (including callouts and sketches) and suggestions for improvement. Topics considered include application structure, flow, individual screens' usability and layout, insights about targeted users, and aesthetics (aka "the pretty").

• The Drive-By Design. In which we explore your application, and thence, with that knowledge, take any single, full page of your choosing and redesign it from the ground up to be more effective. In this case we deliver to you a fully-realized design, original design source files (PSDs) and a written explanation of our recommendations for that page and its situation in the entire application.

Either package is ideal for smaller companies and startups, and anyone who is having a difficult time loosening the purse strings for hiring usability consultants for a long-term project.

There's no further obligation. Our reports and advice are yours. We will happily make ourselves available for further assistance (availability permitting), but you can implement our suggestions any way you want, and with whomever you want.

That Price, Which is Fixed

The price for either package is just $3,500 USD. If you'd like further details, drop us a line at yo@hyphenateme.com with your preferred method of contact and we'll give you a prompt return call or email.

Write us now. You know you want to.

Nota bene: We're only budgeting the time for a few of these projects this summer. It'd be a clever marketing tactic to make that up and then urge you to contact us now if not sooner, but it's actually true. This is something we'll be doing in addition to our normal, larger jobs. We will of course deliver our very best (as we always do), but this is an experiment for us from a business standpoint.

[1] This assumes a fairly typically sized application: similar to or bigger than Basecamp, smaller than Salesforce.

Having just torn through two "brain vacation" novels (Maxx Barry, if you must know), I'm back at it. I just can't stay away from non-fiction long enough. I need a vacation.

Anyway, I've begun reading The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, which so far is very good (despite a horrendously bad cover). One of the initial points is that our puritannical desire to separate form (serious stuff) from aesthetics (frippery) is, of course, bullshit.

This kind of dualistic "cleaving" is also prevalent in the desire to view humans as rational creatures who sometimes falter with their emotions, rather than creatures who are primarily driven by emotions with the occasional rational bent. (Not to mention the devaluing of emotions and the praising of rationality, which just simply does not reflect the neurobiological evidence we have about how humans work.)

On a semi-related note, some work reminded me of this particularly interesting psychological experiment and I thought I'd share it with you:

<embed pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/' src='http://psychologie.fernuni-hagen.de/lernportal/Multimediamaterial/Video/Heider.mov' controller='true' autoplay='false' height='170' loop='false' width='190'></embed>

Our social instincts are so deeply rooted that they can be triggered even in the absence of faces or suggestions of human figures. In a separate line of work from his eye-tracking studies, Klin has been using a short film devised by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel during the 1940s that features a few simple geometric shapes—a big triangle, a circle, a smaller triangle—moving about the screen. Heider and Simmel discovered that, when asked to describe this film, people almost invariably impose a social interpretation on it; instead of speaking in terms of inanimate shapes passively changing positions, viewers invent stories in which, for example, a chase might be taking place between a bullying big triangle and a terrified little triangle. But according to Klin, autistic subjects do not personify the shapes in the film, and rely instead on purely physical metaphors in their descriptions.

— Yale: Mapping the social mind (here's the original paper)

And another description:

They cite a study by Heberlein et al., who presented the following film to human subjects: a big triangle chases a little circle around the screen, bumping into it. The little circle repeatedly moves away, and a little triangle repeatedly moves in between the circle and the big triangle. When normal people watch this movie they see these interactions in social and intentional terms. The big triangle tries to harm the little circle, and the little triangle tries to protect the little circle.

However, a patient with damage to the amygdala, an almond-shaped collection of different brain structures, fails to see these shapes in such intentional terms.[4] Consequently, for Greene and Cohen, because this attribution of free will is generated by a brain area, it is also an illusion.

— Does Neuroscience refute free will?

The Orphan Film Symposium has an excellent article discussing the original film, including diagrams and analysis, links to the original footage and a Flash reproduction.

I got passed the baton by Giles Bowkett. In my flattery, I've decided to return the favor by aping his style. He also pinged a bunch of people, and thus far only Paul Dix and I have responded.

How old were you when you started programming?

I was six or seven when I began to look at the family computer, an Apple //c, in a different way.

Before that moment—which I don't exactly recall—I had spent countless hours playing some Sesame Street coloring game, some dolphin spelling game, Dazzle Draw, Short Circuit, Impossible Mission, Joust and Dig Dug.

I should say that this would have been 1990 or 1991. That Apple was ancient by that point. I've got a retro tech sensibility for my age, cutting my teeth on computers that were a decade old by the time I got to them.

How did you get started in programming?

I wish I could spin a millionaire's-memoir-quality yarn here about the miraculous paradigm shift that occurred when I realized that I could play on the computer, OR I could play with the computer.

Unfortunately, it's lost to the fog of memory. I don't remember how it happened. I just remember that it did. (My personal theory is that I found old school BASIC programming books in the library, as they still had them, and as I crawled all over that library and inspected every shelf.)

Once it had happened, I was obsessed. The very fact that I could hit some keys and make things appear on the screen was not that new to me—I could also draw and color and then type on my creations to print, after all. That was merely playing in a sandbox of someone else's devising.

But the idea of making the machine dance to my tune… that was endlessly fascinating. I was drawn to its bizarre mix of complete and utter logic and, to my 6-year-old brain, the equal unfathomability of it. It was too much to hold in my head at once—I didn't know how computers worked, after all—but the tiny bits that I could understand thrilled me. It was a classic case of "reach extending beyond [one's] grasp." I found a peephole into another world.

I remember at one point having problems with the computer and trying vainly every combination of boot floppy and magic keyboard command that I knew to get that Applesoft BASIC environment running so I could code. (Maybe I was trying to do something with two floppies at once? I had the immense luxury of two 5.25" disk drives!) I don't remember the outcome, I just remember a child's perverse and unflinching determination, feeling that there was some voodoo magic incantation that I would find if I just kept randomizing.

What was your first language?

Applesoft BASIC. A language that, when we replaced the Apple //c with a Mac IIsi, I would try vainly to return to with various BASIC interpreters that never worked, for reasons unbeknownst to 9-year-old me. (Interpreters like Chipmunk BASIC. I even remember the name, 15 years later. How about that? The software was completely inexplicable.)

You could argue that it wasn't really my first real language because I never got a complete grasp on it, although I did things with variables and inputs and so on, learned about order of operations and procedural execution (although not in those terms), and typed in lots of programs from other books. I didn't really get serious about programming "real stuff" on my own until much later. I suppose that's not surprising, since I was 6 years old.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I stared at this question for a while. I was thinking about which early web app I could possibly claim to be my first "real" program. But then I remembered Murgatroyd.

I played around a lot with Hypercard, and later HyperStudio, but never really programmed anything with them. But what really did get me programming was an infatuation with interactive fiction (aka text) games.

We had a copy of the Infocom Treasury[1] that appeared around the time of our first Mac—and I have no idea why or how, because I don't remember asking for it but I was the one who installed and played it.

But I was completely taken with them... I played Infidel, and Ballyhoo, Zork I thru III, the haunted mansion one, and lots and lots of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, the game is what introduced 9-year-old me to the HHGTTG book series.

Like most kids, when I'd become totally into some masterful thing, I wanted to make my own, regardless of a total lack of skill or knowledge. Thus I found World Builder, which was a little development environment exactly for just that very thing.

I learned a bit of the World Builder script using the documentation and built two applications: one, an alien named Murgatroyd with a lot of antennae that told jokes (complete with mouse-drawn pictures that changed based on the joke—World Builder was pretty sweet); and two, a game based in a school, although I only ended up building a couple of rooms.

Alas they are lost to time.

After that, and before I got into web development, the only other thing I completed was a bot on a MOO. A squirrel that would steal other people's items, among other things. I suppose that was my first brush with object oriented programming (although I didn't know it at the time).

What languages have you used since you started programming?

When I was 10, I ended up reading a book on HTML. I made tons of web pages. As that got boring, I wanted to write a script to generate web pages, so I asked around on Usenet and ended up buying the famous camel book on PERL.

<caption>My home page, circa 13 years old</caption>

Taking my understanding of inputs and outputs from BASIC, World Builder and the MOO scripting—plus a few pages of the venerable camel—I wrote a little script, but could never get it to run on my web host. I again asked on Usenet, but nobody could figure out what was wrong. Being unable to find any help or make any progress at all, I gave up.

Later on the cycle repeated itself with C and C++. The books were terrible, incomprehensible, and I had no one who could help me. My brother broke my first "real" C program (a guess-the-numbers game) by entering a 0 instead of a number from 1 to 9 and thus threw it into an infinite loop. I'd been impatient and clever and discovered recursion on my own, but didn't know how to solve the infinite loop problem, or even what it was called.

Around 16 or 17, I finally mastered a language: PHP. (Along with database design and SQL.) Since then, I've also become expert level in JavaScript and pretty good with Ruby as well.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Don't remember!

I know it must sound like I've done a lot of unmentionable pharmaceuticals to cause so many lapses in memory, but I really just don't put that most emphasis on firsts, I guess. Only if they're important. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't. I'm pretty sure there was a lot of stumbling involved.

The first big one that I remember was for as a subcontractor for a client in California. I must have been 17, maybe 18 on the outside.

They had me build something like a trouble ticket system. A ticket could be infinitely passed up and down the chain of command based on people who were in certain groups or specific roles. People had to accept the ticket, bounce it up or bounce it down, and the business logic was frighteningly complex. I had never heard of ACLs by that point, but I managed to invent one that looked pretty much textbook.

The logic of the ticket bouncing around stretched me—even while I thought it was a terrible idea—and I don't think I'll forget that project in a hurry.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Two things:

1. Just about everything in life is more important than programming.

Arguing about technology or programming languages is a complete and utter waste of human capacity. (And that includes defending them from "idiots," as well.) The moment you feel superior because of the technology you use, or the language you write in, god kills a kitten.

It's a means, not the way itself.

2. Prerequisites are a load of crap.

Some people seem to think they need to master college-level math before learning to program. Worse yet, some people seem to feel the desire to inflict this idea on the rest of the world.

Math is a tool and a skill, and a way of thinking about the world. Programming is a tool and a skill, and a way of thinking about the world. You can come to one by the other, but the order doesn't matter.

What little programming I did do before the age of 12 helped me very much as a 7th grader in Algebra. I was the only one in the class who got the idea of variables and formulas. I thought, "Hey, that's like programming!" Ditto with Geometry in 9th grade. "Hey, truth is binary and truth tables are like lookup tables, and proofs are like if()/then()!" And so on.

So I will continue to call bullshit on the idea. Anything that puts barriers between people and programming is wrong.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

I can't think of a single particular thing. In general:

• Kicking the ass of something that was beating me.
• Learning something that made my brain hurt.
• Doing more with less.
• Gaining complete control over simple machines. (I don't think programming on these "infinite" multi-purpose computers is nearly a fun. The web, to me, is metaphorically a return to the simplicity of a computer I can hold completely in my head and control, like the Apple //c or TI-83 calculator. A limited, knowable universe.)

[1] Turns out this is actually called The Lost Treasures of Infocom I. I have been thinking of it as Infocom Treasury for the past 15 years though, so I'm not about to change. Sorry, reality.

Next up...

I pass the baton to:

• Michael Nutt
• Laura Thomson
• Thomas Fuchs
• Clay Johnson
• Erik Kastner
• Colin Barrett
• Ann Halsall
• Britt Selvitelle

I came on to keep a system alive and rewrote it from the ground up, learning OO along the way. The system solved an office politics problem; this was intentional. If you're in your early 20s and you tell CEOs they fucked up their org chart, you'll never get anywhere, but if you just build a tool which requires a certain structure of social interaction, you can fix the problem the CEO caused without anyone ever seeing you do it. Designing social software is as much about social engineering as anything else.

— Giles Bowkett, How I Got Started Programming

Big surprise?

Here's an internal Microsoft email written by Bill Gates, which allegedly came to public view due to a lawsuit. From this Seattle PI blog post. It's long, but definitely worth at least a skim:

---- Original Message ----
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame


I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

Bill’s situation is worse than my personal experience but still, this aspect of the system needs to be looked at carefully and become a sign off item for each release.

And:

So I take from this that we have lots of opinions and input. However, no one appears be saying that we, WMPG, are chartered and/or should own this.

And:

But, if you want nothing revolutionary and want to band-aid (which is fine and understandable) then I agree with your plan to give it to Dave.

I believe that there's only one path to excellence and that is to have (or be) an incredibly strong leader. Someone whose taste and opinions are deeply understood by every single person in the project or organization. Someone who doesn't wiffle-waffle all the time based on market surveys or what the competition is doing. Somebody who deeply knows and isn't afraid to share.

The "What Would Steve Jobs Do?" line is an old joke, but it's also one that people can answer faithfully (those who work creating things at Apple, anyway). And the answer isn't always something nice. I once saw Jobs throw a digital camera off the stage at a keynote, in a little infantile fit of rage, nearly hitting one of his support staff in the head. My friends who used to work at Apple complained about his horrible temper. You don't have to look hard, here on the web, to find Apple alumni talking about how the dreaded thing finally happened to them: the laser eye of the Steve turned to them, or they got caught with him in an elevator.

Nevertheless, Steve Jobs represents a cohesiveness of taste and vision.

Bill Gates does not.

What does Bill Gates want? Other than "money" and "crushing the competition" and (as of late) "being a philanthropist," who knows? Until today, I wouldn't have expected to read the above email and come to the conclusion that it was legitimate. I didn't expect to hear about Bill Gates complaining about the uselessness that is Microsoft's web site.

I've read that many Microsoft employees fear being on the receiving end of a Bill note, just as much as many Apple employees fear bearing the brunt of a Steve harangue. But considering that the products Microsoft puts out are so bad, while fear and respect of Bill was high, I would have guessed that those dreaded Bill emails would have a different sort of content. Because if they were about usability, then what's left to explain the total breakdown of action? And yet here is one about usability that the average Joe User can relate to.

But the difference is that at Apple it works, and at Microsoft it doesn't. Why?

A couple weeks ago, at RailsConf, I tweeted that I was skipping Joel Spolsky's keynote and why.

Judging by the few responses I got, most people took this to be a joke. It's not.

I try very hard to watch what I put into my head. To a greater or lesser degree of success. All kinds of research is out there that begins to explain what affect information has on our not-21st-century brains and there are many reasons to believe in a mental architecture that functions on the principle of shit-in/shit-out (SISO). (I say " />