Experts in the automobile industry, at least those who are candid and honest, are quite clear about this. The automobile of today, despite all its high-tech trappings, is a nineteenth century device dressed up to look modern. Since the technology is decrepit and inherently inefficient, the cost of a car keeps going up every year while almost everything else that is manufactured is getting better and cheaper every year.
Wait a minute.... cheaper, perhaps...but better?
In the case of information technology, despite tomes being written and countless seminars and workshops, usability and user-friendliness remain huge barriers, yet to be scaled.
Imagine if you had a new rental car to drive every morning, with strange locations of all controls.. the gear shift, light switches, the wipers, the radio, the heater, the defroster, the mirror adjustments, and so on.
Well, turning on your PC every morning is a bit like renting a new car every morning. In the night before, those tech trolls in Redmond, or Santa Clara, or Bangalore, or Taipei, or Tel Aviv, or some similar place have strived to make things "better" for you. Your screen opens up to new downloads, patches, "improved" interfaces, "easier" navigation buttons, "friendlier" sound prompts, "exhilirating" animations and video clips, and so on.
But, despite all the strangeness, your strange new rental car starts up in a few seconds when you turn the key.
Try getting your computer to do that. No, we won't even talk about "flick-the-switch-and-the-light-turns-on" responsiveness from your mobile phone or your PC. Just give us our daily spam-free email bread, and a glass of water, and we will be happy.
So, why is IT not user friendly and is often usuriously fiendish? All the dollars you "save" in buying the IT gadgets with their plummeting prices... well, many times more "shadow dollars" are spent in terms of the hours and hours you have to spend dealing with such IT. The Moorish Law of fiendish IT user experiences easily clubs into submission the rightly famous Moore's Law of falling costs and prices of IT devices.
Yes, okay... but why is this the case?
The answers lie, of course, in the nature of information technology and the nature of the industrial-competitive culture that supports the development of such technology.
In the techno-industrial-competitive culture surrounding information technology, rewards go to those who innovate in the next, emergent arena rather than to those who fix yesterday's and today's problems.
This is of course in sharp contrast to the dinosaur auto industry where any make and model that does not start promptly when the key is turned, or whose brakes may or may not work depending on the "mood" of the vehicle, would be driven right off the planet. Attempts at adding the extra cup holder, the surround sound audio system, and the sexy spoiler are rewarded only after the ignition and the brakes work.
But even in the high-tech world, some industries (are forced to) behave differently. Imagine a pharmaceutcal company that launches a very unreliable drug for hypertension and then moves all its research energies into the next big thing: a highly uncertain way of controlling the spread of cancer. The FDA, the professional medical community, and the vigilant consumers provide enough checks and balances that such things do not happen -- for the most part.
Until there are such countervailing checks and balances, and until the reward mechanisms of the techno-industrial-competitive culture of IT change dramatically, we are doomed to crashing computers and signal-dropping mobile phones.
Kinda makes you nostalgic for the Model T (or at least the orginal Beetle Bug), doesn't it?
Nik Dholakia
