Two Slashes

If you’ve ever been to or live in or near Chicago, you probably know all about “The Bean,” that shiny alien-looking thing in Millenium Park, known for being huge, metal, and, perhaps most importantly given those two qualities, seamless (at least to casual inspection).

A talk with a friend about developing technologies and upcoming expectations of what these technologies will bring led to our noticing how problematic today’s technology is, and why it won’t be getting better anytime soon.

What does this have to do with a notorious Chicago tourist trap?  General consensus today is that consumers want everything they own to work together, or at least appear that way.  They want a combination DVD-playing toaster oven/blender that can do laundry and sort recycling in tandem with a drink-cooling microwave, and they want it all to be done perfectly, with no hiccups.  Unfortunately, I have yet to see a DVD-playing toaster oven/blender that folds my laundry and sorts recyclables or a drink-cooling microwave, but that’s besides the point - the point is that they want things to work perfectly, much like the dozens of individual panels that make up “The Bean.”

As I told my friend, it’s unlikely that we’re going to be experiencing such a demonstration of perfection in any aspect of life (but most specifically technology-based endeavors) anytime soon.  There are two polar scenarios I foresee, and each comes with its own problems when it comes to development.

The first scenario is the “monopolistic scenario” in which one or two companies handle a whole industry of work.  While (seeing that this is the same company all around) the products work seamlessly, they also become rather stagnant and produce little to no improvement from version to version.  While this means that things work well, after a while people get tired of seeing the same old thing all the time and wish there was something else to go to (which in turn creates a market…blah, I’ll spare the economics class talk).

The other scenario is the “competitive scenario” - as you might have guessed, this scenario involves a large number of companies all producing similar products.  You get near-constant development and revolutionary ideas and designs, but at the same time these ideas pave the way for a plethora of different, unconnected tangents (which is, unfortunately to say, also expected when each one is determined to make a profit from their product).  This would be akin to why you can’t typically use parts from one car on another - sometimes they have a slight chance of working, but other times you’re likely to break even more.  The point here is that there’s so many things to choose from, so many choices/paths/whatever-you-call-them, that ultimately what develops is not one “right” path but a series of dead ends.

These dead ends actually crop up more than you think.  Look at the current generation of video hookups, for example:  DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.  They all get video from point A to point B (and sometimes other things too), but each one has its own guise and is not directly compatible with one another.  DisplayPort, for example, supports daisy-chaining monitors through one cable; HDMI supports audio transmitted through the same cable.  While these are novel ideas…notice how they aren’t all that easily interoperable (well, HDMI and DVI are to an extent, but that’s not my point).  So, as consumers, we are left to either try and find what works best for our situation, and hope that everything we buy comes with support for that connection method, or sit and pray that one day someone will come along and magic everything into one “universal” connector, making themselves money, and consumers happy.

If you need a mixed example of standardization, just look on the back of your TV, computer, or home telephone.  Assuming the company that produced whatever you’re looking at isn’t an ***hat, you’re probably staring at the same menagerie of cables, ports, jacks, and plugs someone else is.  Thank standardization for that.  But at the same time, you can also note that while whatever’s plugged in there works with the setup you have now, you have the seed planted in the back of your mind worried about what happens when you need to bring in something new.  Is my mouse going to work?  Will my TV set play back the content from this Blu-ray player?  In these instances, your use isn’t seamless.  Instead, you find yourself driven by an inadvertant commitment to a specific set of technologies that may become outdated at any moment.

Another good example would be a digital camera (or more specifically the storage mediums for them).  Notice how Sony has their own “private” storage system with Memory Stick, something that Canon, Nikon, nor Kodak can or will use, and that this lock-in also means that without adapters, cables, or other fun things, the only way you can quickly show off those snapshots is by ramming them into a Sony television.  As far as seamlessly working, not bad for two things manufactured by a multimedia electronics corporation…but once you bring Toshiba or Panasonic into the mix, all bets are off.

Blame it on capitalism, blame it on everyone’s desire to keep secrets - whatever you blame, it’s probably at least a small part of why we’re in such a hole.  Unfortunately, the hole’s getting deeper by the day, and there’s no easy way to get back out.

So, I suppose you could say that “The Bean” represents not only Chicago’s continual placement of public art, but our desire for technologies and lives to work together in harmony - with no unsightly seams to tear at or detract from the beauty.  Unfortunately, “The Bean” is also the perfect metaphor for something we can’t have.  File it away with everlasting love, superpowers, and eternal life - because this is one thing that won’t be coming…at least, within our lifetimes, and I’d be pretty confident in placing bets on ‘never.’

I came across a video purportedly demonstrating some of the new features of Windows 7 that Microsoft’s been working on.  While this early in the development cycle, such videos should be met with questions and belief in deceptive and mockups of what people would WANT, I figured it was worth a few moments of my time to discuss it.

For your convenience, the video is embedded below:

Now that you’ve seen what we’re expected to be using in just a while, perhaps it’s time to point out that absolutely none of this is revolutionary or breathtaking, or even a big step up from what’s available now.  If anything, all they’ve done is take the hard work and brilliant ideas of others, and besmeerch them with an Arial Black Microsoft logo.

Windows Explorer
Browsing for files in a paned/tabbed system navigator is not even remotely new.  Konqueror, Dolphin, and countless other utilities have been doing this for ages.  And there are add-ins available for Windows XP.  Nothing new to see here.

FTP Locations
How many times around the track does it take for you to realize that this is a feature of Windows already?

Now, Microsoft:  Where would you like to go today?  Because I’d like to go somewhere where the featureset of your operating system isn’t yesterday’s news to everyone else.

…Wait, you seriously thought I was kidding?

Keyboard Shortcuts
This may be new to Windows users who don’t want to use remapping utilities, but other platforms have had this for a while.  The one I can think of off the top of my head is the K Desktop Environment, which is extremely lenient and flexible when it comes to setting things like this.  On the other hand, this is also one of those features that permits standardization to fly right out the window.  Just wait until Great Aunt Cecil remaps all the keys to Shutdown and wonders why the manual telling her Ctrl-P to Print instead powers off her machine.  Perhaps this should come with a safety warning.

Screen Animation & Capture
The video portion of this, if true, is at least a long time in coming.  But they’re only integrating the tools many people use and reuse daily (Camtasia, FRAPS, etc.), and I highly doubt they’re even going to consider it for use in anything more than a basic desktop capture (i.e. no games or really-hardware-accelerated functions).

Disk Usage Analyzer
Pardon me while I clear my throat here; to have the nerve of pushing this as new is pushing it.  It’s been done…a lot better and with a more helpful visualization than a pie chart.  (Anyone notice that smell?  Smells like burning pie to me…and I think it’s coming from the Redmond campus.)

Task Manager
The only thing new I see here is that someone’s finally harnessed the power of Netstat in a convenient graphical interface.  Though, they’re definitely a bit late in this respect.

Virtual Drive
Need I say more than, “Daemon Tools and Alcohol, noobified?”

Website, Blog, and Portal Designer
Excuse me, but why is there a copy of Expressions in my operating system?  Shouldn’t that be something extra?

Seriously now, I can’t wait until people actually start using that…you can tell who the inexperienced are by their use of one of a few dozen stock header images and designs that probably say “Microsoft” in more ways than there are calendar days in a year.

Coming Soon…

• Image Conversion - Image conversion.  We’re spending all our time and money on image conversion.  Because Grandma can’t use the software that came with her digital camera to do it.  Or because it’s a part of several other operating systems and work environments.  Take your pick, because either way it’s still lame to me.
• Document Conversion - I love how ‘document’ can be so vague as to encompass anything and everything all at once.  Does this mean Windows might actually be able to open OpenOffice files?  Doubt it, unless you want to install the third-party filter.
• PDF Conversion - Wait, doesn’t this one smell like a royalty fee?  Has Adobe approved this?
• Password Manager - This one I can understand, but it’s also nothing new.  KDE has Wallet (which IE had something similar to), OS X and GNOME have keychains, and other password managers have their “acceptable alternative metaphor” to a Post-it note in a wallet.

I know I should be taking everything in that video with a grain of salt, but I can’t stand unoriginality in something like this.  Vista was just catchup for OS X (and a failed attempt at that, too…heh)…now it looks like Windows 7 is slated just to move Microsoft’s operating systems division into something resembling the early 2000s…most likely after 2011.  Oh well, at least it’ll give me more time to enjoy my eXPerience.