Popular Software
I am regularly amazed at the most popular software. The stuff hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people use everyday. Most of it truly sucks. It sucks so bad that I wonder why normal people use technology in the first place. Is life that bad? Where staring at Facebook for hours seems like a good use of time?
But I want to specifically focus on productivity software. We’re told to learn and use these bloated, slow, complicated and predatory apps to make a living. Spend all our time in Slack, drop everything on Trello, get everyone on the Figma file, react in the Google Doc...
A lot of my examples provide a decent way to get many people looking, interacting, commenting and working on the same thing. But they all have a tendency to bloat beyond recognition, requiring more and more of your time for setup and documentation as opposed to your actual job.
Computers were supposed to liberate us from busywork, make the previously impossible possible and the difficult trivial. Work from anywhere, your own way and collaborate with everyone. Some people have that, or a version of it. But the rise of spyware(even for office jobs), middle managers increasingly winning the call back to the office, the reverse centaur AI jobs, not to mention (yet) the huge bubble hiking up all computer part prices.
We’re in troubled waters, but we can do a lot better. If we know how, what to look for and what to do about it. And in the series to come I’ll be discussing the philosophical underpinnings of popular software. Basing a lot of my criticisms on the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, because I am a professional and they are genuinely great, well written, useful, practical and hold up wonderfully.
I'll be tackling questions like:
- Just what does it mean to use a particular software today?
- Who does it serve?
- Why is it like that?
- How did it get that way?
- Can it be better?
- Should we all use something else?
- Should we be be making our own software?
Let’s delve deep and find out, together. Don't forget to leave your thoughts!