Don't Ask Where I Want To Go Today
Dec. 31st, 2002 02:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravencallscrowsor "Why the Tech Sector Is In Decline"
Much is made in computing circles of something called Moore's Law. The "law" itself originated in 1964, when Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel noted that the logic density (and, by inference, the power) of semiconductor chips doubles every year. This held true until the late 1970s, when the period shifted to approximately eighteen months.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the similar Gates' Law states that the amount of processor capacity required to run contemporary software doubles every eighteen months.
In practice, though, this isn't quite the case, at least for personal PC users. Looking back seven years, Windows 95 had the following minimum system requirements: 386DX processor running at 8MHz or higher, 4MB of RAM, and 50-55 MB of free hard drive storage. The minimum requirements for Windows XP are a Pentium processor running at 233MHz, a minimum of 64 MB of memory, and a minimum of 1.5 GB of available drive space. Ignoring the difference in the processor classes, that is an increase of 29.125 times in raw clock speed, a sixteen-fold increase in memory, and over a thirty-fold increase in the amount of storage. Following the arithmetic progression, we should see less than five doublings in this time period, or an approximate change of about twenty-five and a half times.
So, the question becomes "Is Windows XP that much better for me than Windows 95 was?" In some ways, the answer is clearly yes; in others, it's at best wishy-washy. Those two minimum systems are both allegedly functional, but they're going to have users wishing they'd just kept an old typewriter and ledger pad, and a deck of cards stuck in a drawer for when things got slow. They're certainly going to have fits when their poor users try to get them to do anything other than bare essential operations, and most of the software for these systems is going to strain them to the breaking point.
Three years ago, a state of the art system ran at a clock speed of 400 megahertz. Today, that clock speed is five times faster. 128 MB Ram in that 400 MHz box was a pretty decent arrangement. The 2.0 GHz machine will feel naked with less than 512, and is probably running 1GB itself. Load 'em up with software appropriate for each, and see what you've got. First of all, you're going to lack in gaming on the old box, since system requirements have risen to the point that the system is at the minimal functional levels, whereas the new one can run anything on the market. OK, so let's take them to work
Installing appropriate copies of Office software on these will give you Office97 for the 400MHz, and OfficeXP for the 2GHz. Would you believe the Office 97 machine will finish its tasks first? The message queueing in Windows XP slows down several fairly common effects in OfficeXP, and additional features have grown into the product. Yes, you can do more things with the new Office, but how many things are you going to want to do?
Then there's Office itself, which seems to be a microcosm of Microsoft as a whole. In the three core elements of the Office suite, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, there are functions which seem similar, but which act quite differently- even to the point where nothing is uniform from one application to another- even something as simple as selecting a type font, display weight and size is done three different ways in these three different applications.
Rather than strip it down to essentials, the mass of chaos is increased with each new release. These applications are a "suite" in name only. Calling them such would seem to imply that the same thing can be done in the same manner regardless of the application. Rather than revisit the code and streamline these processes- make the truly user-friendly, so that someone who learned how to get a particular look in Word could apply it in Excel or PowerPoint as well; the process is to jam in more components and offer all these "extra" features. The next release of the Office suite will have two new toys- XDocs, which threatens to be for XML documents what Front Page is with HTML ones; and One Note, an application designed for note taking. This last one has me completely at a loss. Why do i need this? I can take notes in Word, or in Notepad, even in Wordpad, and i already know how to cut and paste content to rearrange it, which makes it look like there's another application which is going to do just a subset of what another one is already capable of doing. This is not progress, this is bloat.
Unfortunately, the people who are marketing Microsoft products aren't, any longer marketing them for the casual user. Instead, they're being niche marketed. Office is getting all this bloat because it's something to sell to those big companies who have the last new thing. Hey, they provide most of the revenue, so if it's what they can be convinced they want, that must be it, right? Bugger the small user.
Then there's the .Net initative. I think i'm going to scream the next time i hear Steve Ballmer say something about appealling to developers, and what new things developers will be able to do with .Net. What does .Net mean to the average computer user? (dot)Squat.
It's a shame the judicial system didn't break up Microsoft. As it is, the company has too many fingers in too many pies, moves in too many directions, and lurches from one thing to another, rather than taking hold of the concept which was so successful when Windows came out- delivering something radically new and different and BETTER for everyone who used it. People got excited about Windows 95. It was a completely different magnitude of experience for most computer users. Sure, there are those of us who poked around under the hood, and realized that it wasn't really that different, but it excited a lot of people. Since then, other operating systems have come out, each with the promise of being the biggest and brightest and shineyest, but the hype has fallen short every time. It's time to reinvent the process, and start daring to reach for the golden ring again, and dare to innovate in a way that's not just for the companies who are going to buy hundreds of thousands of products, but to excite the little guy again. Get him something radically different that works, and it'll change the world. If i were a Unix administrator for a large company and was approached about changing to Windows, the answer would be a flat out "No." Unix is stable. It's not flashy, but you don't need it to be flashy Get it configured to do something, and it's very safe doing it. You don't hear of Unix or Linux security updates releasing on an almost weekly basis- they do their jobs, and do it right.
Until Redmond learns to simplify things, and to restore the vision to what technology can do for the man on the street, there will be no positive change for Microsoft. There will be increasingly periods of chaos, of indefinite leadership because of the lack of vision, and glitzy marketing campaigns that are mostly meaningless fluff. Expect to see stock prices continue to slip until they hit the mid-30s, and then settle there between say 35 and 42 dollars per share, just by sheer weight.
Much is made in computing circles of something called Moore's Law. The "law" itself originated in 1964, when Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel noted that the logic density (and, by inference, the power) of semiconductor chips doubles every year. This held true until the late 1970s, when the period shifted to approximately eighteen months.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the similar Gates' Law states that the amount of processor capacity required to run contemporary software doubles every eighteen months.
In practice, though, this isn't quite the case, at least for personal PC users. Looking back seven years, Windows 95 had the following minimum system requirements: 386DX processor running at 8MHz or higher, 4MB of RAM, and 50-55 MB of free hard drive storage. The minimum requirements for Windows XP are a Pentium processor running at 233MHz, a minimum of 64 MB of memory, and a minimum of 1.5 GB of available drive space. Ignoring the difference in the processor classes, that is an increase of 29.125 times in raw clock speed, a sixteen-fold increase in memory, and over a thirty-fold increase in the amount of storage. Following the arithmetic progression, we should see less than five doublings in this time period, or an approximate change of about twenty-five and a half times.
So, the question becomes "Is Windows XP that much better for me than Windows 95 was?" In some ways, the answer is clearly yes; in others, it's at best wishy-washy. Those two minimum systems are both allegedly functional, but they're going to have users wishing they'd just kept an old typewriter and ledger pad, and a deck of cards stuck in a drawer for when things got slow. They're certainly going to have fits when their poor users try to get them to do anything other than bare essential operations, and most of the software for these systems is going to strain them to the breaking point.
Three years ago, a state of the art system ran at a clock speed of 400 megahertz. Today, that clock speed is five times faster. 128 MB Ram in that 400 MHz box was a pretty decent arrangement. The 2.0 GHz machine will feel naked with less than 512, and is probably running 1GB itself. Load 'em up with software appropriate for each, and see what you've got. First of all, you're going to lack in gaming on the old box, since system requirements have risen to the point that the system is at the minimal functional levels, whereas the new one can run anything on the market. OK, so let's take them to work
Installing appropriate copies of Office software on these will give you Office97 for the 400MHz, and OfficeXP for the 2GHz. Would you believe the Office 97 machine will finish its tasks first? The message queueing in Windows XP slows down several fairly common effects in OfficeXP, and additional features have grown into the product. Yes, you can do more things with the new Office, but how many things are you going to want to do?
Then there's Office itself, which seems to be a microcosm of Microsoft as a whole. In the three core elements of the Office suite, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, there are functions which seem similar, but which act quite differently- even to the point where nothing is uniform from one application to another- even something as simple as selecting a type font, display weight and size is done three different ways in these three different applications.
Rather than strip it down to essentials, the mass of chaos is increased with each new release. These applications are a "suite" in name only. Calling them such would seem to imply that the same thing can be done in the same manner regardless of the application. Rather than revisit the code and streamline these processes- make the truly user-friendly, so that someone who learned how to get a particular look in Word could apply it in Excel or PowerPoint as well; the process is to jam in more components and offer all these "extra" features. The next release of the Office suite will have two new toys- XDocs, which threatens to be for XML documents what Front Page is with HTML ones; and One Note, an application designed for note taking. This last one has me completely at a loss. Why do i need this? I can take notes in Word, or in Notepad, even in Wordpad, and i already know how to cut and paste content to rearrange it, which makes it look like there's another application which is going to do just a subset of what another one is already capable of doing. This is not progress, this is bloat.
Unfortunately, the people who are marketing Microsoft products aren't, any longer marketing them for the casual user. Instead, they're being niche marketed. Office is getting all this bloat because it's something to sell to those big companies who have the last new thing. Hey, they provide most of the revenue, so if it's what they can be convinced they want, that must be it, right? Bugger the small user.
Then there's the .Net initative. I think i'm going to scream the next time i hear Steve Ballmer say something about appealling to developers, and what new things developers will be able to do with .Net. What does .Net mean to the average computer user? (dot)Squat.
It's a shame the judicial system didn't break up Microsoft. As it is, the company has too many fingers in too many pies, moves in too many directions, and lurches from one thing to another, rather than taking hold of the concept which was so successful when Windows came out- delivering something radically new and different and BETTER for everyone who used it. People got excited about Windows 95. It was a completely different magnitude of experience for most computer users. Sure, there are those of us who poked around under the hood, and realized that it wasn't really that different, but it excited a lot of people. Since then, other operating systems have come out, each with the promise of being the biggest and brightest and shineyest, but the hype has fallen short every time. It's time to reinvent the process, and start daring to reach for the golden ring again, and dare to innovate in a way that's not just for the companies who are going to buy hundreds of thousands of products, but to excite the little guy again. Get him something radically different that works, and it'll change the world. If i were a Unix administrator for a large company and was approached about changing to Windows, the answer would be a flat out "No." Unix is stable. It's not flashy, but you don't need it to be flashy Get it configured to do something, and it's very safe doing it. You don't hear of Unix or Linux security updates releasing on an almost weekly basis- they do their jobs, and do it right.
Until Redmond learns to simplify things, and to restore the vision to what technology can do for the man on the street, there will be no positive change for Microsoft. There will be increasingly periods of chaos, of indefinite leadership because of the lack of vision, and glitzy marketing campaigns that are mostly meaningless fluff. Expect to see stock prices continue to slip until they hit the mid-30s, and then settle there between say 35 and 42 dollars per share, just by sheer weight.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-12-31 06:05 am (UTC)I finally found you.
Date: 2002-12-31 07:01 am (UTC)-- Rik
Re: I finally found you.
Date: 2002-12-31 11:10 am (UTC)Has southwest Florida developed a Goth/Industrial scene?
*relief*
Date: 2002-12-31 04:19 pm (UTC)I have been searching for you for quite a while -- and I suppose I should clarify exactly who I am, so that there is no chance of mistaken identity.
My name is Rik. I used to live in Sarasota with my mother and stepfather, the latter of which I dislike intensely to this very day. I attended a messianic jewish synagogue called 'Beth Simcha' -- an institution that has since come to earn my intense dislike -- and played drums there with the music ministry. I worked in an espresso bar downtown, and used to take leisurely strolls on Main Street after hours with my friend Vanya, talking about spirituality and philosophy and esoterica and martial arts and Tori Amos and what we wanted to do with ourselves and our lives.
I miss those talks. And I am glad to have found my friend again.
I have much more to say, but I will end this loquacious reply for now before I risk boring you to tears.
-- A
no subject
Date: 2002-12-31 10:12 am (UTC)