Re: When Did Personal Computers Stop Improving?

=> Original post

Deep down I feel the same. "Why can't I do more with more powerful things?" "Why did something need to improve just to do the same?"

I have no real answer to that. When I transport the sentiment into other areas, there's something similar happening. Let's look at bicycles. Today I can pay 2k Euro easily for one, easily. And then it doesn't even have the latest and greatest equipment. Does that special carbon injected frame really add this much to the experience? I have no idea, but it sure feels expensive.

There are some areas where it does make sense to look at the finer details. Music instruments or working tools. It makes a huge difference to the violinist how a violin sounds. And to a carpenter how long a battery drill can do its job.

Yet the same principle that is applied to the violinist is applied to, for instance, a project management tool. What started as a board on the wall with multiple papers held by multiple magnets, ends now in a data warehouse that you can search, aggregate, drill down and up and create dashboards on. Like the wallboard it needs to be collaborative, so any change is mandatorily pushed to all clients who it may concern (and probably everyone else too). In realtime. No matter if the client is currently at lunch or not. Co-workers of mine expect their websites to refresh automatically, hitting the refresh button 3 times a day when they actually need an update is replaced by roughly 40k automatic background checks.

Don't get me wrong here. There are power users that spend all their day in a specific software, and they want to have it spot-on and fast. They want to optimize their processes. And avoid hitting refresh themselves.

This is the conundrum. The reason why nothing seems to get faster. Because every small step forward is being used to please yet another target group. To squeeze in yet another update, another render loop. To make something prettier, nicer, slightly smoother.

The lazy culture

Before "everyone" was in the same place (i.e. the web browser) there used to be the same thing happening like in reallife. In the city center you had cafes and shops and places to hang out. Some shops were too large to go there or it was too expensive for them, so they created something like a mall. An incentive for people to go there. That didn't mean they left the city center, but malls were so attractive, they were visited. However if that had gone the way of the web browser, they probably would've started fights and discussions in the town hall how to add taller buildings, dig deeper tunnels, remove fountains and roads to hold more shops and restaurants. And the town hall would be more creative and creative in complying. That's what modern development essentially is.

I get the impression that sequeezing an application into the web browser (because users are there, they have the software, the sort of know how to use it too) is the easier way to creating something else entirely which might even have a smaller development footprint, has less errors, less jumping through hoops, overall offer the better experience.

So what spiked all of this? Multiple factors.

• Amongst those we have Microsoft and their sheer inability to provide a decent package manager (and no, a mobile store that has just a bad search and little curation isn't a package manager) so developers can push updates automatically to the system (every software I install on windows has their own little upgrading manager, and they are of different annoyance, too).
• Then we have the lack of a good rapid development framework for visual applications. That most operating systems now adopted html5 and css3 for that speaks novels. Desktop computers never got easier in the last 3 decades.
• With every simplicity improvement came another complexity layer. From security to data mining. Believe it or not, there's people out there who use their computers like I use a car. I just expect it to get me from A to B.
• Diversity of frameworks for mobile applications. Apple does something different than Google does. Nokia and Microsoft also did something else. And in theory that's a good thing, because diversity spawns creativity and options, but with the shift from desktop to mobile and from large software company to individuals building small apps, it stopped being feasible to have different ecosystems that still require the same tools to communicate (this is another topic, because there's protocols to mitigate, but that's just not how individuals operate).

And the list goes on...

The only thing that I can/want to do in the long run is to use dedicated tools with their dedicated protocols instead of cramping everything into a browser. And I try to avoid the modern web as much as I can... wish I could do that at work, I really do. The amount of facepalm moments I have per week is not funny.