[This article available at http://www.mids.org/mn/802/help.html] Internet * By John S. Quarterman Can You Help Me With My Computer? GUIs, Platform Wars, Myths Of User-Friendliness, Etc. Usually I write about some combination of the Internet, politics, or UNIX. But I've been asked one question so many times I'm finally going to write about it. The question is: "Can you help me with my computer?" You can probably tell right away by the way the question is phrased that it's about a PC running Windows. Anyone with any other kind of computer or operating system would say what kind--whether Mac, UNIX, VMS, Multics, or whatever, running on a Cray, Alpha, Sparc, Imsai, or whatnot. I answer, "I don't use Windows." It never does me any good to say that. "But can you help me with my computer?" repeats the friend, relative, acquaintance, random passerby, whoever. No matter who, it almost never sinks in that there is any other kind of computer. Any hint that I have anything to do with computers, and here we go. I can even explain in detail that I use UNIX, I don't use Windows, I don't like Windows, I don't know anything about Windows, but still, there it is again: "I'm sure can you help me with my computer!" The Problem So what is it all these people want help with, anyway? Using Windows 95 or fixing problems with it. A nurse claims she "caused a bug in the memory system" by downloading a new copy of Internet Explorer. She's waiting for her friend the computer expert to come by and fix it. A couple I know spent $1500 (a sizable sum for them) on a computer so their children could use it for game and educational purposes and so they could use the Internet. It's been out of commission about half the time since. Why? Because they keep picking up inexpensive software and loading it onto the computer. Why doesn't that work? Because much of it is Windows 3.1 software; that's why it's so inexpensive. It will load on Windows 95, but in doing so it overwrites various system files in an incompatible way and trashes the operating system. Why don't they notice? Well, it says "Windows" right on the package! Can they fix it? They never have. They have an in-law come over and fix it for them every time. I had an uncle who bought a computer and was livid when he discovered he had to buy software for it, too. Really mad. Thought he'd been cheated. The public nowadays mostly knows computers need software, but it's still too much to expect the average computer buyer to notice whether a package of software labelled "Windows" says "95" or "3.1." A retired schoolteacher has a relatively new computer (bought last year) and she uses it mostly for electronic mail. She keeps losing letters as she composes them. She'll minimize the window and then doesn't recognize the tiny minimized icon as anything related. You can point this out to her, maximize it, and then she'll get all excited that she's found her message and she forgets to remember how the message was found. Every time she has to get somebody to find it for her. A horse trainer got a new computer. She didn't have a lot of trouble setting it up, or getting connected to the Internet, although she did have to have a friend come over and help her. The Internet connection part did require three pages of instructions. This has to do with tarzanning among the several directories that contain the various pieces of software (modem, TCP/IP, DNS, mail) that are needed to arrange to send mail through a dial-up IP connection. Fortunately, the local ISP had those already printed out for her. Everything seemed OK. But after the first successful mail message she sent, nobody heard anything more from her. I finally called her up after several days. She said she was getting everybody's messages fine. She had also been answering them and composing new messages to send. She had been successfully dialing up the ISP; obviously, since she was receiving other people's messages. What was wrong? Half an hour with the ISP walking her through the necessary steps found the problem. She had not pressed the Send button on the mail screen before dialing up the ISP. Speaking of tarzanning, what exactly is the distinction between my computer and startup, anyway? Almost anything can be found either way, although it's usually faster to use Find. One university I happen to be familiar with has a whole technical group in the computing center devoted to fixing Windows 95 problems. This almost always consists of reloading W95 from a CD/ROM. These people are paid about $45,000 a year each to reload the same software from a CD/ROM several times a day. How Can This Be? Many people say the reason Windows95 is the most popular operating system on the face of the planet is because its graphical user interface (GUI) is so easy to learn, because it's graphical and intuitive, and all programs adhere to a rigorously consistent set of user interface conventions. The supposedly intuitive GUI isn't. The supposedly obvious icons aren't. The supposedly rigorously consistent programs aren't. It breaks all the time. It requires experts to fix it. No one but technical people ever figure out what's wrong from the manual or from the online help systems. Okay, there is one other exception. Children have no great difficulty learning Windows. But of course children have no great difficulty learning UNIX, either. That's what children do all day, after all: learn new things. They're used to it, and they have a pool of friends their age to ask questions. Now in my wife's house (we live in different states and commute; long story), the children have a choice of UNIX or Windows 95. They use Windows 95 for games and Word. They have no problem using UNIX for everything else, especially electronic mail, Web browsing, and other Internet uses. The GUI Religion One of the big advantages of Windows 95 is supposedly that it has a GUI, and GUIs are supposed to be inherently easier to use. In my office, we mostly use UNIX, because we're trying to get work done involving the Internet. I find it takes no longer to take someone off the street and train them to use enough UNIX commands to get the job done than it does to teach a new Windows 95 user enough to reliably send and receive mail and to handle simple filing operations. For example, there is, in my experience, zero difference in the learning time between Pine with its textual menus on UNIX and any GUI mail program on any platform. And Pine has better error handling. [INLINE] People who have used Microsoft products for a long time find this hard to believe. They have no trouble using Windows, they say. And probably they don't, because they've learned each new idiosyncrasy of each new release from DOS on as it appeared. The power of familiarity cannot be overestimated. As an extreme example, consider telephone numbers. Essentially arbitrary sequences of 7, 10, or even more digits! How much worse could a user interface possibly be? Yet nobody notices that much, because we've all become familiar with it. Familiarity wars used to occur with TOPS-20 vs. UNIX. This was with two command line interfaces that Windows users would probably find indistinguishable without learning each of them. And even between TOPS-20 and VMS, even though VMS's command language was basically a subset of that of TOPS-20. People liked what they were familiar with. They didn't want to learn anything else. They didn't understand why anyone would want to learn anything else, or why anyone would have any trouble with their favorite interface. In fact, a lot of people have a lot of trouble with Windows. Experienced users get used to it, including getting used to having problems. New users aren't familiar with it, and experience frequent problems as problems. So Why Is Windows So Popular? If all that is true, why is Windows so popular, anyway? As anybody who is familiar with the history of computing is aware, Microsoft only adopted GUIs because Apple had demonstrated that the Macintosh with its GUI could maintain a significant market share even in the face of Microsoft's marketing might. The original Windows GUI was a clumsy knockoff of the Mac GUI, deliberately modified to be just enough different to avoid legal problems. Windows 95 is a slightly more consistent rehash. Windows didn't cause Microsoft's market dominance. Microsoft adopted Windows to help maintain its already overwhelming market lead. Most Windows 95 users are not familiar with this history, of course, because most of them have only been using computers for a couple of years. So why is Windows so popular? Because Microsoft has managed to convince practically every manufacturer of any computer sold into the mass market to ship the computer with Windows installed. It has nothing to do with intuitive user interfaces, design philosophy, or quality of software. If Windows had any real competition, its quality would improve or Microsoft's market share would decrease, because people wouldn't put up with the current shoddy state of Microsoft's software. Others say Windows is so popular because it has so many applications. That's putting the cart before the horse. Windows has so many applications because so many people use it: The application designers want to leverage their efforts by putting their software on the most popular platform. Sure, there's feedback in the other direction. But it's just not true that Windows became popular because of the applications. Besides, what applications do most of these people want to use? Two things, mostly: games, or the Internet. Most games, for sure, run mostly under Windows 95. But the Internet is accessible from just about any known computer platform. Yes, people also use PCs for accounting, and word processing, and other similar office work. But you can get all those programs or others like them for Macintoshes or UNIX. People use Windows 95 because it's on their computers. Microsoft has successfully created a self-perpetuating monopoly. Conclusion I know some readers will chastise me for going by anecdotal evidence. It's interesting how no one wants to accept anecdotal evidence unless it agrees with their opinion. But, yes, anecdotal evidence is not enough to prove a phenomenon. However, the kinds of problems I have described here are so widely reported, and there are so many people who make a living by fixing them over and over for users, that I think there is a real phenomenon here. Next time I buy anybody a computer, I'm putting Linux or BSDI or Solaris or some other version of UNIX on it. Maybe I'll leave a disk partition for W95 so people can play games. Or not. Copyright 1998 MIDS mids@mids.org , www.mids.org (512)451-7602, fax: (512)452-0127 1106 Clayton Ln., Ste. 500W, Austin, TX 78723, USA.