I love the optimism, but I'm a pessimist. Even at the first paragraph:
> "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it should be the other way around."
I already have objections: User and businesses overwhelmingly voted with their wallets that they want appliances. The big evil megacorps didn't convince them of this - Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. The Nintendo Switch sold 152 million units, the malleable Steam Deck hasn't broken 6.
Software that isn't malleable is easier to develop, easier to train for, easier to answer support questions for, and frequently cheaper. Most users find training for what's off-the-shelf already difficult - customizing it is something that only a few percent would even consider, let alone do. Pity the IT Department that then has to answer questions about their customizations when they go wrong - user customizations can easily become their own kind of "shadow IT."
The send off is also not reassuring:
> "When the people living or working in a space gradually evolve their tools to meet their needs, the result is a special kind of quality. While malleable software may lack the design consistency of artifacts crafted behind closed doors in Palo Alto, we find that over time it develops the kind of charm of an old house. It bears witness to past uses and carries traces of its past decisions, even as it evolves to meet the needs of the day."
If you think this is okay, we've already lost. People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability.
Coauthor here.
You make a fair point! Ease of use matters. We all want premade experiences some of the time. The problem is that even in those (perhaps rare!) cases where we want to tweak something, even a tiny thing, we’re out of luck.
An analogy: we all want to order a pizza sometime. But at the same time, a world with only food courts and no kitchens wouldn’t be ideal. That’s how software feels today—-the “kitchen” is missing.
Also, you may be right in the short term. But in the long run, our tools also shape our culture. If software makes people feel more empowered, I believe that’ll eventually change people’s preferences.
Well, if I may continue my pessimistic outlook, I would simply say that anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. Programmers are chefs - we take ingredients called SDKs and serve them up into meals called custom software. Anyone who isn't a chef, might need to buy the packaged cake mix at Walmart.
For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there was a time when cars were experimental and hand-assembled. Imagine if Henry Ford in the 1920s had focused on democratizing car parts so anyone can build their own car with thousands of potential combinations; I don't think it would have worked out. It is still true that you can, technically speaking, build your own car; but nobody pretends that we can turn everyone into personalized car builders if we just try hard enough.
I gotta say I don’t understand your point about cooking — billions of people who aren’t professional chefs cook meals every day! These meals may not live up to restaurant standards but they have different virtues — like making it taste just the way you like it, or carrying on a family tradition.
On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal…
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
That said, I think talking about cars may be stronger ground for the argument you’re making. Mass production is incredible at making cheap uniform goods. This applies even more in software, where marginal costs are so low.
The point of our essay, though, is that the uniformity of mass produced goods can hinder people when there’s no ability to tweak or customize at all. I’m not a car guy, but it seems like cars have reasonably modular parts you can replace (like the tires) and I believe some people do deeper aftermarket mods as well. In software, too often you can’t even make the tiniest change. It’s as if everyone had to agree on the same tires, and you needed to ask the original manufacturer to change the tires for you!
First thanks for the original article and it is great to know a team is going deep on this.
I am a bit fed up with software less because of malleablity but because of the cloud walled gardens. I can't open my Google doc in something else like I can a pdf in different programs. Not without exporting it.
This for me interested and I found remotestorage.io which looks very promising. I like the idea that I buy my 100gb of could storage from wherever then compose the apps I want to use around it.
I hadn't thought of malleable software... that's a whole other dimension! Thanks for introducing this as a concept worth talking about. Of course I have heard of elisp and used excel but haven't thought of it front and centre.
In terms of cooking ... I feel like cooking is easier potentially as for the most part (some exceptions) if I know the food hygiene and how to cook stuff then it is an additive process. Chicken plus curry plus rice. Software is like this too until it isn't. The excel docs do a great simple budget but not a full accounting suite. With the latter you get bogged down in fixing bugs in the sheet as you try to use it.
I think it is good you are researching as these could be solvable problems probably for many cases.
Something I have always thought about is sometimes it matter less if the software is open source than if the file format is. Then people can extend by building more around the file format. A tool might work on part of the format where an app works on all of it. I use free tools to sign PDFs for example.
Also adding that software only being inflexible due to being mass-produced is the state of the pre-Enshittification era that we already left behind.
Since the last decade or so at the latest, software is often designed as an explicit means of power over users and applications are made deliberately inflexible to, e.g. corece users to watch ads, purchase goods or services or simply stay at the screen for longer than intended.
(Even that was already the case in niches, especially "shareware". But in a sense, all commercial software is shareware now)
> But in the long run, our tools also shape our culture. If software makes people feel more empowered, I believe that’ll eventually change people’s preferences.
I'm really curious to see how the overlap with BABLR plays out. In many ways we're doing the same experiments in parallel: we're both working on systems that have a natural tendency to become their own version control, and which try to say what the data is without prejudice as to how it might be presented.
In particular BABLR thinks it can narrow and close the ease-of-use gap between "wire up blocks" style programming and "write syntax out left to right" style programming by making a programming environment that lets you wire up syntax tree nodes as blocks.
It's still quite rough, but we have a demo that shows off how we can simplify the code editing UX down to the point where you can do it on a phone screen:
Try tapping a syntax node in the example code to select that node. Then you can tap-drag the selected (blue) node and drop it into any gap (gray square). The intent is to ensure that you can construct incomplete structures, but never outright invalid ones.
> Coauthor here.
> That’s how software feels today—-the “kitchen” is missing.
I believe you'll want to read this essay which appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of Market Process, a publication of the Center for the Study of Market Processes at George Mason University ...
"An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Kitchens" by Phil Salin
Having worked for him, I'd say his wikipedia entry doesn't do him justice, but is a good start if you're curious--like your Ink & Switch group he spent many years trying to create a world changing software/platform [AMIX , sister co. to Xanadu, both funded in the 1990s by Autodesk].
http://www.philsalin.com/kitchens/index.html#:~:text=An%20In...
Look at HyperCard (more or less dead, regrettably) or Excel and you'll see many useful "applications" created by non-programmers over the years.
People want to create, but need tools to make this easier / more abstract than regular programming. Most companies want to get them into their walled gardens instead, especially web-based companies today.
you should take a look at TFA; both of those are mentioned in great detail! it's a good read
> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it.
Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were faced with the choice of doing it all again or sticking with the defaults. But I'd chalk this up to Windows not treating the customization data as important enough to provide backup/export functionality, not that people didn't want to customize)
The features increasingly went away in later Windows and Office versions, but I assumed it was some corporate decision. Was there ever actual backlash from users against those features?
Tech-oriented people love software malleability and also can handle the responsibility - e.g. understanding something that's broken + customized by you could have been broken by you.
Non tech-oriented people, the masses, absolutely love customizability and malleability--but aren't willing to handle the responsibility. They will reach out to tech support who can't possibly know every customization option of every application and its effects, and complain when they tell them to reset/reinstall.
And in a corporate environment where the company provides the PC, the company would rather not deal with it. Office dominates at the workplace, is mostly making money from corporate users, and users want it to behave the same way it does in the workplace. So any backlash by users is simply not going to matter unless it might cause companies to not renew their licenses.
A company I work for is moving to Office-on-the-web for PCs that are used by people who don't really use Office that much except possibly to read Word docs, in order to save on licensing costs I presume. It's even less customizable than any desktop version. So the trend is going to continue.
You're talking about a world in which costs are centralized. A central entity handles all R&D costs and all customer support costs for one product.
If you split the support costs between many members of a community though, you don't need to fear customization. Then, ideally, the users who are most alike will support each other, the same way you can get a degree of support for some particular flavor of Linux by seeking out other people who use that flavor (or another one that's enough like it)
Backlash will be in the form of working, competing software maintained by communities, precisely because this is the only form of backlash that might cause companies not to renew their licenses.
What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
Well, there's a (modest) learning curve involved in customizing color schemes and of course more complex tasks that are still in the domain of user's options.
Users can be fearful of "messing it up" if they change defaults. Making changes necessarily confers responsibility to follow instructions, learn how to alter settings and know the set of options that are appropriate to change and which are not.
Not setting the text color the same as the background color and making everything unreadable, including the UI to change the color back?
That takes a pretty basic safety mechanism to address, require confirmation after the change. Windows has (had?) that, after 15 or 30 seconds or whatever from a change (like to resolution or something) it reverts back without confirmation. This makes changes of all sorts easy and cheap to perform. The worst case is you idle for 30 seconds waiting for it to go back to a legible form.
I think having the monochrome mode (which might be available at start time, and would also (temporarily) reset the font) would help with this and other problems (e.g. if one colour of the display is defective). This might be used for the UI to confirm the change but also when you start the computer that it can display such a message so that you can use that to recover from this and other problems (including screen resolution, colours, fonts, languages, and many more).
And when they click through the confirmation without reading it like the vast majority of users?
If you can't see it because you borked up the colors badly enough, why would you be clicking on it?
Didn't say the buttons were invisible, just text.
Even if this specific example is flawed, non-technical users can and do end up in similar non-sensical situations that require a call to support to sort out. The more customization that's possible, the more complicated those calls can get. (Think of the support guy that has to figure out that Grandma's Windows Home setup has custom group policy settings that her well-meaning grandson setup to make things simpler for her by hiding this or that, and now she can't follow the tech's instructions that work for 99.9% of users)
Not only that, but they do so enough that the added cost to field those support calls is enough for companies to change their products to reduce their likelihood.
Almost no-one on this forum falls into the category of user I'm describing. And this kind of user is one of the most common for general consumer software. There is a real cost burden to supporting software with configurability.
And when this kind of thing gets messed up, do users go "Oops! My bad!"? No, they go "This software sucks, I'm going to use <competitor> instead where this kind of thing never happens!"
A common failure mode I’ve seen: since Windows 8/8.1 iirc, so-called “Microsoft accounts” are used to login to the OS, as opposed to local user accounts, which were the status quo for personal computers, and are managed locally by the OS on behalf of Administrator users. Many legacy Windows users had and have no idea what the difference is or why it matters, but part of the Microsoft Account setup flow in Windows OOBE involves setting up 2FA for the new Microsoft Account, and I think it will let you use email or SMS, and maybe even a phone call to get the 2FA code. I think you are given the option to complete the 2FA at a later time, in case the code is delayed, but I forget for sure.
I can’t count how many people I helped to regain access to their computer login because of losing access to the method used to receive 2FA codes for Microsoft accounts, which is necessary to login if you have forgotten your password. The Microsoft account user setup won’t let you make a password-free login unless you use a local account, and short easily guessable passwords don’t meet their online account security requirements. Most people probably don’t want a Microsoft account if it has this failure mode, but people don't know the trade offs at the time of user account setup, and Microsoft uses that ignorance as leverage to get people signed into everything so that you will have have opted-in to all of this. It’s such an own-goal by Microsoft and it makes me feel for users who have no idea how any of this works. It’s a hard problem to solve, I’m sure, but it shouldn’t be like this.
The people who are most disadvantaged by the high tech highly secure thrust of modern tech are those who have the least skills with technology. Low skill users are also most at risk for scams and malware and other kinds of tactics, so I don’t mean to say that having no password is good. Having no password is a bad solution to the problem of computers being hard to use for many people, and they don’t know what they don’t know, so anything that they haven’t seen before is a cause for concern or alarm to their mind. Since most people have forgotten that they even have a Microsoft account by the time they have trouble logging in to their computer using one, they click around until they get to the account recovery, and then usually get their account locked because they can’t solve the security challenges that they never faced before or anticipated when doing the initial setup perhaps years prior.
The old lady who calls tech support saying "half my screen is grey!" and it turns out she accidentally resized her taskbar to the maximum size.
Remembering where the setting is so if you want to update it again you do it on your own instead of calling tech support.
> People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability.
Software in the 2000s was markedly better to software today. But it's cheaper and easier for companies to produce shitty software, so that's what we get. It has nothing to do with consumer preference.
Training and support for applications isn't a thing outside of enterprises, especially for SaaS web apps. You simply cannot reliably get support for Google or Facebook services unless you know some very obscure channels. It is wrong to say this is a trade-off: it is a regression.