Occam's Machete

My wife has a laptop that is getting a little old. It runs Windows XP and she uses it mostly for browsing and email. Lately it has gotten really slow. Some disk access silliness is killing the OS. I could troubleshoot the thing or…

A year ago I had an old laptop that had been running its native Windows XP for several years until it got too slow. I tried defraging the disk and other tricks to no avail. I probably could have sussed it out but, you know, I have better things to do. Like installing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on it which was fun, in a perverse sort of way, and gave me a screaming fast machine with most of the 40G drive free. On the other hand the wifi was intermittent and tended to be hard to reestablish once it was dropped. Also It was difficult to get my bluetooth mouse to pair up automatically. I hacked the scripts for it but, you know, I have better things to do so I even though I could get it to work it wasn’t very reliable.

To make a long story longer, along came Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. One day I saw the “Upgrade” in the desktop version of the software updater. I should say that one of the greatest things about Ubuntu is its use of the old debian apt-get mechanism to keep the system up to date. When security or bug fixes come along they are automatically made available to all users. The download and installation is automatic too. This even works for upgrades of the OS so the Upgrade Manager was offering me the nifty new 7.10 (they try to do an upgrade twice a year).

I did the upgrade with hopes that it would imporve some of the rough edges of 7.04. It took many hours of download and configure. The upgrade asks you to edit conflicting config files, which would probably scare a casual user, but I got through these ok. When I was done the wifi worked flawlessly and my bluetooth mouse paired automatically and connected instantly when I turned it on (even faster than my Macbook Pro).

I pimped it out with a nice theme for the new Compiz-Fusion window manager complete with some slick Mac-ish icons and had a pretty sweet machine with plenty of free disk and all the bells and whistles. Back to my wife who had finally given up using her laptop. One night she sees me playing with my old machine and says, “That looks pretty cool.” I set up Thunderbird to get mail from her account and she hasn’t used her old machine since.

I guess I have to install Ubuntu on her old machine now since mine has been taken over…

Put on your rant filters because I’m all over-stimulated about the state of Western consumer markets. Somewhere along the road from WWII to the post-modern world economy we got really used to every advertising and marketing trick employed to grab our attention. In fact we have become addicted to the next big thing. The thought came to me when my wife was telling me about a Starbucks in Shanghai where the Chinese manager wanted to serve spaghetti on Fridays in some sort of bizarre attempt at Western marketing. My first thought was, “how naive and childlike.” After all we gave up Spaghetti Fridays back in the 50’s didn’t we?

Anyway it got me to thinking about how product categories and the sophistication of our marketing campaigns have evolved over the years. Take personal computers. They began as a home brewed tangle of user built pieces and evolved into a standardized mass produced product and then into a commodity with little to distinguish one brand from another and now we see signs of the computer as fashion. You will see what I mean along this trail.

One can argue (so I will) that this trend exists in the software industry. First there was custom built software crafted by in-house programmers (stacks of Fortran cards) then the major application and OS categories coalesced (Windows and Office) followed by commoditization (open source). Is Web 2.0 just the natural tendency of any mature technology to become fad driven? Is MySpace only the fashion of the day to be replaced by FaceBook tomorrow and TagWorld next month? Can we begin to plan for churn in the software industry based on waves of fad as the fashion industry has long done? If so it means a major shift in the way we see software. No longer will need drive the decisions of software consumers—now what is cool or fun will rule the day.

Classic white Gmail anyone, or would you rather have the U2 endorsed subversive black version?