An Open Letter to the Computer Industry
You may or may not be aware of my existence; you certainly appear to be logging my every move, but it's not clear that that information is ever seen by human eyes. At any rate, I am a consumer of many of your fine products, and many more products that are much less than fine.
I am writing to bring one important fact to your attention: I am not a complete moron. I am a fully functioning adult, and capable of making my own decisions about what software I want to use, and how I would like it to be arranged.
This means that when I have set my monitor resolution to 1280 by 1024, it is because I have a large, clear monitor, and I would like to maximize my usage of space. It was not the result of some sort of random flailing at the keyboard, and I have not been sitting here just wishing that Windows Update would run the resolution back down to 640 by 480, or whatever cartoonishly huge pixel size you set it back to.
In a similar vein, I have a large number of icons on my desktop, and I have carefully placed them where I want them. I have not been sitting here paralyzed, just wishing that Windows Update would alphabetize them for me. Nor have I been itching for a "Wizard" to come along and offer to remove icons that I haven't used in the last ten minutes. I put the icons where they are for a reason, and if I change my mind, I will move them myself. Stop doing it for me.
I will admit to occasional moments of indecision-- I'm only human, after all. I sometimes do things like holding down the Shift key for a few seconds, while I try to think of just the right word. Despite what you appear to think, this is not, in fact, a request to have everything I type thereafter appear in ALL CAPS, FOR THE REST OF TIME. And when I indicate my desire to have my text continue to appear in lowercase, by hitting the "CANCEL" button, you should fucking well cancel the action, and not go ahead and capitalize everything anyway. I particularly enjoyed trying to get my Unix shell account to recognize "LOGOUT" as a valid command.
And speaking of buttons that don't give you any choice in the matter, let's talk about Norton Internet Security (which came pre-installed on my home computer). With its nagware dialogue boxes that pop up every 3.4 seconds. And its update boxes that pop to the front, and can't be moved, as if I just couldn't bear to live without knowing how far along it is in downloading updated parental control lists. And the bizarre requirement that I re-start the computer because I've acquired a new set of virus definitions. But most of all, what I love about Norton Internet Security is that the restart announcement comes in a dialogue box with only one button: "OK," which automatically shuts down and restarts the computer. I really enjoyed that one. And then there's the lovely little Lord Vetinari touch of having a red button up in the corner to close the dialogue box, and then making it do exactly the same thing as pressing "OK".
Look, you have informed me that I must re-start for the new definitions to take effect. I am aware of that now. Your job is done. I will restart when I am damn good and ready to restart; for instance, after I've finished writing the blog posts that I was writing during your interminable update process. Summarily closing all open applications and losing my text will not endear me to your products. In fact, it has driven the chance that I will ever buy anything you make essentially to zero. Once the free demo period is over (in another thirteen days, as your software helpfully keeps reminding me), I will strip my computer of every last trace of your products, if I have to borrow a giant magnet and scramble the hard drive to do it (that'll take RealPlayer out, too, I hope...).
Those companies who have not been mentioned by name, don't start feeling like you're off the hook. These are just the programs that have pissed me off in the last two days-- the rest of you are just as guilty of assuming me to be a moron. Stop that, at once.
I hope this clears things up. I look forward to you making adjustments to address these issues.
Chad Orzel
Posted at 9:13 AM | link | follow-ups |