In 1996, a casual acquaintance asked my inevitable opinion on buying a new computer, and, as he knew me only slightly, he was surprised, in a way that only a casual acquaintance of mine can be, since a less casual acquaintance of mine in 1996 would have known of my fanatical-bordering-on-rabid (but-still-grounded-in-some-semblance-of-reality (or-perhaps-that’s-just-Steve-Jobs’-reality-distortion-field-talking)) devotion to the Apple Macintosh and by extension the entire Apple product line — he was surprised by my sure-tongued and completely confident reply that he should, with all due haste and a level of immediacy that most people reserve only for cheering their favorite sports teams, buy a Macintosh.
To which he asked the equally inevitable question, “What if Apple goes out of business?”
And I replied, “Then you will have missed it.”
To those marketing executives who believe that “ease of use” is an item to be tacked on at the bottom of a feature checklist (”New and improved version 2.0, now with ease of use!”); to those developers who think they have this whole “user interface” thingie licked because their application has skins; to those poor, poor hapless users who have been programmed to believe that “user-friendly” means Clippy, I say unto you:
You Just Don’t Get It.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim