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Tunnel Vision

In a recent entry, I remarked that I was not surprised but frustrated that commenters on an article about MS and bundling issues on Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog turned into a Slashdot-type thread.

Instead of discussing the issue at hand - bundle, who gets to decide? (government, courts, producer, marketplace or some combo) - it turned into a thread that was all about bashing MS, touting OSS, saying people should dump Windoze into the river and get a Mac and so on.

Some valid points raised, but...this was not the time nor place for same.

I wrote Drum and asked him why he thought the thread went off the road in such a precarious manner. His reply:

In other words, he's sort of given up on the expecting intelligent discourse when tech issues are raised. They always seem to degenerate into some sort of technological jihad.

This reminds me of Eric Raymond's recent rant - again, commented on in this blog - about OSS's poor track record with user interaction.

The thread running through each of these articles is pretty simple: Many tech folks - even those who are actually pushing products out there for us to use - are blind. They don't get that much of this tech stuff is incomprehensible voodoo to most of the world; they can't seem to look in a peripheral manner to see the big picture or the gradients of gray.

I.e., if an article mentions Microsoft, it's time to slam MS and promote Linux/Apple/OSS etc. Whatever the article's topic.

I.e., people want choice, even if it's to pick "WAN, LAN or Build Own TCP/IP stack" via a wizard for network connectivity.

Bleh.

I'm all for choice; I'm all for getting MS to - somehow - toe the line and behave in a legal manner (moral manner? what percentage of capitalistic companies behave morally??).

But there is this relatively small group that is making all the tech decisions for everyone, and this small group has, in many cases, blinders on. This small group does not know better.

Evidence? Call Myth-Busters!

Myths busted (People = the vast majority of the world):

• People want choice: No they don't; they want something they can work cheaply, interchangeably (think .DOC or .XLS files) and that doesn't require learning. They don't want to have the choice to download a plug-in to view this or that. It should be installed by default. If not, bugger off.


• OSS is better because the source code is available: Most people don't care; they will never look at the source code, even if they run Linux. Take this a step further: For most People, 'source code' is...uh, what??


• MS is devil spawn: Both in the U.S. and E.U., Microsoft has been found guilty of major infractions. Fact. Yet MS has brought (yes, 'at what cost!?') a certain degree of standardization to the desktop (the People's computer). The Web has taught us that this is a good thing. I love that I can send someone an Excel spreadsheet and be pretty damn confident that the recipient can open it. As Martha Stewart would say, that's a good thing.


• OSS is free - as in Freedom, not (necessarily) as in Beer: People: "Huh?" and "Big whoop..."

Obviously, this is simplified, but it's a good snapshot. Most people don't care about the "religion" of technology; too many technologist seem to fall into the religion trap. At the same time, these examples leave out the potential benefits - invisible to People - that OSS can bring, for example.

But the invisibility is an issue: If People don't see it, they won't care. And few like to be educated so they can see the formerly invisible, especially if they don't care about the course (in this case, tech).

Use a car analogy: I don't really know how an automatic transmission works, but I want my car to have this. I prefer to drive only cars with same (and clutches everywhere thank me...). There are good, solid reasons to use a manual transmission: I don't care. Which takes less experience/learning? Automatic.

I'm done.

Ditto for computers. People want to take the computer home, plug it in and...bingo. All done.

And this, my friends, is how you start a flame war!