Monday, August 01, 2011

Lion:

The 1984 Mac, and mid-eighties developments in graphic user interfaces generally, were breathtaking improvements that held out vast promise for the future. That promise has largely not been kept; there's been a slow, inexorable regression. Software vendors have managed to squirm out of providing software support, so there's no pushback in support costs. Instead of software getting easier to use, people accept the necessity to take "computer literacy" courses.

And everyone now expects to treat computer software as an adventure game, where you discover how things work -- and trolls lurk at every bridge, because the old 1980s "Inside Macintosh" goal that _everything_ should be undoable went by the board a decade or so ago.