Fear of the future

The iPad is a new Apple device with not the best name that has not yet appeared on the market, but was only announced on January 27, nobody left anyone indifferent. I no longer remember such violent disputes about any thing. While leading analysts are at a loss and cannot decide whether this is a victory or a defeat, or have already begun to actively throw mud at a new device before they can even hold it in their hands, let's get acquainted with the rather interesting position of Fraiser Spears , developer of the plugin for iPhoto and Aperture FlickrExport , Flickr applications for iPhone and iPod Touch Darkslide and the system for comparing changes in files and folders Changes .

I can tell you more about the iPad later, but the volume and power of the violent attacks on this device by really technologically advanced people are amazing.
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Some try to disperse this roar, comparing it with certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: “There is no radio. Less space than Nomad . He is behind the times. ” I'm afraid these reflections on January 26 miss the point.

The industry’s response to the iPad is nothing more than a fear of the future.

For many years, we believed that it was necessary to simplify the use of a computer for ordinary people. It is difficult for me to come to a different conclusion, except that our efforts in this field have completely failed.

I suspect that secretly we, the supporters of high technologies, really liked the idea that ordinary people would depend on us in the field of our technological shamanism: on those magic spells that only we can perform to cure their computers, on the prophetic statements that we make about the future, and from the good deeds that we award to the decisions to buy this or that thing.

Ask yourself: in what other area do adults depend on the help of other people when they need to buy something? Women often turn to men when they need help buying a car, but this is due to the car dealers ’disgusting misanthropy, not because ladies are worried that the cars they buy will not work on their local roads (sorry computer-car analogy, my shortcoming).

I am often upset by the infantilizing effect of high technology on adults. They are thrown back from the state when they control their life, to the children's, medieval world, in which gremlins appear to torment them, and disappear at will, and the only salvation from which are magic, spells and local healers.

Together with the iPhone OS in its iPad incarnation, Apple offers to do something about this; I mean to really solve this issue somehow, instead of just discussing possible solutions, and the whole world starts to go crazy.

Although not quite the whole world. People whose backs have already broken under the weight of technological difficulties and failures instantly understand what is happening here. Those of us who patiently explain to a child or colleague day by day that the reason why there is no “Print” item in the “File” menu is that although the Pages document is on the screen, the actual application is Finder , and it has no open windows, they understand what is happening here.

Barbarians are at the gates of the city. They require access to the programs. They require control over their own experience in working with information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may like appealing OpenGL applications, and they do not always share our aesthetic feelings, but these are the people whom we promised to serve for 30 years, while deceiving them in countless ways. They are much more than us.

People talk about the field of distortion of reality by Steve Jobs, and I will not argue that this person has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. However, there is another field of distorting reality at work, and everyone who makes a living in the technical industry is under the influence of its influence. This field of distorting reality tells us that computers are amazing, that they work beautifully, and only too stupid people cannot handle them.

The technical industry will experience bouts of fear of the future for some time. Many will cling to their ideas at the level of January 26 of what it takes to do the “real work”; clinging to the idea that it is the computer component that is the “real work”. This is not true. This Work with a capital P is not formatting fields, installing drivers for a printer, loading a document to the network, completing PowerPoint slides, starting a software update, or reinstalling the OS.

A real Work from a capital letter is training a child, treating a patient, selling a house, registering road defects, recording the order of this table, designing a house or organizing a party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort to prevent and recover from problems created by fully open operating systems. Think about how far people have gone to acquire skills that their key interests and their work do not directly depend on, just to be able to do their job.

If the iPad and other devices — his followers — allow these people to focus on what they do best, this will fundamentally change the way people think about working with a computer, from what they fear, to what they should do with admiration. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background computing is not worth getting a computer that is no longer terrible.

Meanwhile, Adobe and Microsoft will still stomp their feet and whimper.