The Best Software Is the Kind You Know How to Use
My friend Marion, who chairs the department of nutrition at New York University and has been a dedicated computer user for 16 years, can hardly be described as a techno-phobe. But she does have a technology problem: upgrade resistance.
In 1983, Marion adopted the word processor XyWrite, once a market contender but nowadays of interest primarily to computer-trivia buffs.
By the mid-1990s, I viewed her continued devotion to XyWrite as quaintly archaic. After all, the program was based on the antiquated DOS operating system and relied on arcane key commands in a mouse-click world. A graphical interface was infinitely easier and offered superior features, I’d argue. And she was finding her files increasingly difficult to share with technologically up-to-date colleagues.
If her dogged loyalty wasn’t a matter of money or Luddism, what explains Marion’s resistance to what would seem like common sense?
“It’s like a primary language,” she explains. “Like the first language you learn, it’s your native tongue.”
She captured an important truth about computing: The best applications are the ones you know how to use. No computer program, even on the Mac, is effortless. So perhaps it’s not surprising that, in an era dominated by the cult of the new, upgrade avoidance runs rampant.
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Need reasons to stay put as the industry attempts to line its pockets by playing on your insecurities about keeping current? Start with software’s exasperating complexity.
In the marathon we call the business world, who but a hobbyist or gamer has time to learn new software unless it’s essential? The old XyWrite was ideal for pure writers. It was very fast because it wasn’t larded with needless, obscure styling features.
The legal profession has often been cited as a technological backwater. A large share of the legal market still uses the DOS version of WordPerfect. That’s because lawyers understand that time is money.
“In law, an industrywide standard of file compatibility is really important, and most of the graphical improvements don’t matter to people who only bang out single-spaced Courier,” said Jeffrey Tarter, editor of industry newsletter Soft-Letter. “There has been no reason to upgrade and lots of reasons not to change.”
For most major applications, said Peggy O’Neill, an analyst with Dataquest in San Jose, “the software that was on the market a few years ago is good enough for most people’s needs.”
Then there are the products whose appeal gets crushed in the upgrade mill. Take PIMs--personal information managers that track contacts and meetings. I’ve used a couple for long periods, but never happily, and discarded many.
On occasion my old PIM has failed to work properly on new computers or operating systems. I can buy a compatible version of the same product (if the maker is still in business), but then I’m compelled to deal with data-transfer headaches (never a seamless process), learn a new interface and navigate a fog of new features of dubious utility.
In an era in which shipping buggy software is the norm, most businesses remain keenly aware of the hidden costs of software upgrades: training, support and debugging. That’s why many organizations won’t support Windows 98. Their technicians can barely keep pace with demands posed by Windows 95.
And the Y2K problem, though created by shortsightedness, is the mother of all upgrade avoidance. Before their backs were against the wall, most technology managers viewed the hassle and expense of defusing the ticking time bomb as greater than the apparent benefits.
And they’re painfully aware of computing’s productivity paradox. Until recently, academicians contended that after all the variables are taken into account, the computer revolution demonstrated no overall benefit to America’s productivity.
Aggregate data can be pretty far removed from an individual’s experience, of course, and few of us would consider giving up our PCs even if we could. But consider the reluctance to upgrade as a latent human instinct to waste less time on nonsense.
The problem may be the PC itself--a ponderously complex device with a wide range of capabilities that few people use fully and fewer still understand. The solution, say the makers of new digital appliances such as WebTV and the Palm III hand-held computer, are tools that do only a few things but aspire to the relative ease of a TV remote or telephone.
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As for my friend Marion, in 1996 she upgraded to a Windows computer, ending her love affair with XyWrite; the Windows version was a Microsoft Word look-alike.
“So I switched to Microsoft Word like everyone else and stopped fighting it,” she said. “Even now, there isn’t a single thing that gets done on Word that goes faster than I could do with XyWrite. It brings me to tears when I’m in a bad mood.”
And as for me, PIM or no PIM, I’ve always used a personal organizer book--flexible, portable and if you write in pencil, reasonably forgiving.
But after years of lugging that bulky dinosaur everywhere I go, I finally gave it away and bought a Palm III. Hope for the next big thing springs eternal.
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at charles.piller@latimes.com.
