He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of their ignorance.
It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets, through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.
The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.
We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things are", and then go one of several ways:
- Accept and/or support the status quo
- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.
- Try to work with others to change things for the better.
The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called "humanity" one excruciating step at a time.
Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now, and not forever.
Still, its technical history is that of bodge jobs, even if its matter is free of the constraints other "works" require.
Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was easier in the pre-smartphone/early smartphone era than it is today.
I blame the same force that gave us our progress - capitalism, the market economy, and the mindset it promotes among management. In established markets, all the easy things have already been solved - you can't win any more customers by creating quality products. You have to squeeze money out of perfectly working things. This is where the engine of capitalism stops being aligned with humanity's needs.
There's a business term for all that crap - "value-added". When you see some "value-added" thing it means that the company is about to shit on you to get more money, either from you or someone else. We didn't have that much crapware on computers until vendors realized they could get paid by third parties by bundling their worthless (for end-user) crap. It's a gamble that worked well for the companies - people will deal with crap because they don't have any other choice, and vendors get more profit.
Then there's completely purposeful degradation. Some of the things we had much better 60 years ago than today: shoes, clothes, kettles, lightbulbs, utensils, kitchenware, various home appliances. Sure, they weren't that shiny and plastic, they didn't have an army of "designers" behind them, but they fucking worked and they still fucking work today. I still have a microwave bought ~20 years ago in Sweden, and it fucking works and never had a single glitch. My grandfathers have equipment bought when they were young, whereas my shoes and clothes degrade within half a year or less.
This is the problem. We know very well how to make good things. But making good things is not profitable compared to shitting on your customers.
However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything.
People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we have to throw all that out because we are trying to capture mindshare for mousetrapping on mobile.
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
At least we have options on the web, plus the option to improve/fix things (relatively speaking). He can always send his photos as attachments in an email, or put them up on dropbox and send the link etc. Offline? Different story altogether. That is why people put up with things online. When you get used to real life crap, these problems online seem small.
I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.
Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).
I always told friends to go to the small independent shop over the road where they will get a better deal. But then they have to speak to someone who will baffle them with jargon. Its far easier to see the 40% discount offer (from the initially high prices) as some sort of bargain. I have wasted hours uninstalling crap from PC World machines. One came with 3 firewalls and it wouldn't connect to the internet.
Then again, I guess it's my fault because I always put in the spaces because I'm a masochist who likes finding out how much the web sucks.
I agree with 90% of the points in the article, but I also know that others have implemented similar solutions and only fews have, instead, tackled the same problems with a different, better implemented, solutions.
Anyway, the most annoying example is Skype, I really hate the "oh it looks like is a Live Account, redirecting..." flow, it's annoying.