Hi Steve,
on Thursday, October 28, 1999, 9:20:51 AM GMT+0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>> Computers will become a more and more integral part of our lives, but
>> they will look and behave nothing like these primitive, difficult to
>> use, unreliable, frustrating tools we use now - and it won't be that
>> long - but in the meantime, there are livings, even fortunes, still to be
>> made.
SL> Again, I take offense.
Why? Even if this was meant to offend computers (which it wasn't), why
do you take it personally? I think Paula is not suggesting anything
but saying what many people concerned with the future (I mean those
who try to foresee business matters, not fortune tellers -
those waddoyoucallems) say will happen.
SL> I do not find my computers primative,
I agree with you.
SL> difficult to use,
I disagree - they are, for the general public. At least "too"
difficult.
SL> unreliable
I believe this depends on the software - hardware is pretty reliable
these days, in my personal experience.
SL> or frustrating.
<sigh> I wish you were always right on this one. ;-)
SL> I find that people have unreasonable expectations of what a
SL> computer should do and that they need to be educated to the fact
SL> that their expectations are entirely unreasonable.
This is the point were I entirely disagree with you. Expectations that
might look "unreasonable" to you today, may be the standard tomorrow.
Heck, I had this superfast computer with 16Mhz!! Had anybody ever told
me that tens years later, I would be calling 400MHz "not really fast
enough", I would have labeld him unreasonable. - How about our
Winchester Disks with the incredibly big storage capacity of 10MB? Had
anybody told me I would have a 6.2GB hard disk on my "home computer"
(!) only 15 years later, I would have laughed. - How about Bill Gates'
famous prediction that 64KB of RAM should be enough for everybody?
Along with these three things (speed/RAM/HD space) come possibilities
that will make computers really easy to use. Let me take voice control
complete with secure networking ("Computer, what's my account balance
at Bank A today?") as an example. Keyboards are one of these things
nobody wants to use in the future.
SL> The alternative is the continued dumbing down of computers to a point
SL> where they are virtually unusable by anyone other than complete idiots.
The average user does not need to be beyond complete idiots. Without
going too much into detail, I take programming a VCR as an example.
Don;'t you believe that this will be made easier so that Pop and Aunt
Mary will be able to prgramme theirs? - Computers will go the same
way. This is hardly avboidable in an open market. The consumer will
decide, not the programmer who says the consumers will just have to be
educated. The consumer refuses and says: "you want me to buy your
product, make the product the way I like it".
Please don't forget, you live in a computer world, for you this is
easy, but the average person (who will be the average computer user)
is interested in baseball, discotheques, or shareholder values. Even
if they could learn, they don't want to. Example: every manager in
business nowadays needs to know how to use Excel. Personally, I hate
these spreadsheets. OK, bad example, because you won't be able to do
these without a keyboard, even in the future, but what I want to say
is that many people whose focus on life is somewhere else than
computers, may not be too stupid to use them but simply not
inrterested in the complicated way they work now.
>> If RIT Labs thought they had a chance of putting TB on even a small part
>> of corporate desktops, do you think there would be any contest?
SL> Yes, there would be.
The people in my office love to use different fonts, different font
sizes, and different colours in emails. I hate it. But that's why I
think Outlook will keep the biggest market share. I don't think TB
intends to go after that market, either. But let's not assume waht
TB's target makret is - RIT Labs will either have their own opinion,
or just wanted to create a programme *they* liked and are happy that
others like it too. We - the users - can only speculate and that is a
waste of bandwidth.
>> I think - having sort of forgotten now - that my point was that a
>> software company has more to consider than a few e-mails posted to a
>> user list with respect to providing news reading capabilities or
>> anything else about the development of their product.
SL> Exactly, like looking for a niche market a lot of people forget, including
SL> you, repeatedly. The power user who doesn't want everything and the kitchen
SL> sink in their program.
And this is were I agree with you. I see TB as a programme which does
not cater to the masses but to the "select few" computer scholars. By
this I mean all sorts of programmers (pros, ex-pros, future-pros, and
hobbyists), postmasters and the like, who seem to be the majority on
this list, too, if I am not mistaken. And, with computers becoming
more and more important in everybody's life, the numebr of these
"select few" is steadily increasing. A niche market in which TB
apparently excels.
--
Best regards,
Thomas.
Message reply created with The Bat! 1.36
under Chinese Windows 98 4.10 Build 1998
on a Pentium II/350 MHz.
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