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I love the optimism, but I'm a pessimist. Even at the first paragraph: > "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable materia

I love the optimism, but I'm a pessimist. Even at the first paragraph: > "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it should be the other way around." I already have objections: User and businesses overwhelmingly voted with their wallets that they want appliances. The big evil megacorps didn't convince them of this - Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. The Nintendo Switch sold 152 million units, the malleable Steam Deck hasn't broken 6. Software that isn't malleable is easier to develop, easier to train for, easier to answer support questions for, and frequently cheaper. Most users find training for what's off-the-shelf already difficult - customizing it is something that only a few percent would even consider, let alone do. Pity the IT Department that then has to answer questions about their customizations when they go wrong - user customizations can easily become their own kind of "shadow IT." The send off is also not reassuring: > "When the people living or working in a space gradually evolve their tools to meet their needs, the result is a special kind of quality. While malleable software may lack the design consistency of artifacts crafted behind closed doors in Palo Alto, we find that over time it develops the kind of charm of an old house. It bears witness to past uses and carries traces of its past decisions, even as it evolves to meet the needs of the day." If you think this is okay, we've already lost. People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability.

gklitt 1y ago
Coauthor here. You make a fair point! Ease of use matters. We all want premade experiences some of the time. The problem is that even in those (perhaps rare!) cases where we want to tweak something, even a tiny thing, we’re out of luck. An analogy: we all want to order a pizza sometime. But at the same time, a world with only food courts and no kitchens wouldn’t be ideal. That’s how software feels today—-the “kitchen” is missing. Also, you may be right in the short term. But in the long run, our tools also shape our culture. If software makes people feel more empowered, I believe that’ll eventually change people’s preferences.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Well, if I may continue my pessimistic outlook, I would simply say that anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. Programmers are chefs - we take ingredients called SDKs and serve them up into meals called custom software. Anyone who isn't a chef, might need to buy the packaged cake mix at Walmart. For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there was a time when cars were experimental and hand-assembled. Imagine if Henry Ford in the 1920s had focused on democratizing car parts so anyone can build their own car with thousands of potential combinations; I don't think it would have worked out. It is still true that you can, technically speaking, build your own car; but nobody pretends that we can turn everyone into personalized car builders if we just try hard enough.
  - gklitt 1y ago
    I gotta say I don’t understand your point about cooking — billions of people who aren’t professional chefs cook meals every day! These meals may not live up to restaurant standards but they have different virtues — like making it taste just the way you like it, or carrying on a family tradition. On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal… https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ That said, I think talking about cars may be stronger ground for the argument you’re making. Mass production is incredible at making cheap uniform goods. This applies even more in software, where marginal costs are so low. The point of our essay, though, is that the uniformity of mass produced goods can hinder people when there’s no ability to tweak or customize at all. I’m not a car guy, but it seems like cars have reasonably modular parts you can replace (like the tires) and I believe some people do deeper aftermarket mods as well. In software, too often you can’t even make the tiniest change. It’s as if everyone had to agree on the same tires, and you needed to ask the original manufacturer to change the tires for you!
    - xg15 1y ago
      Also adding that software only being inflexible due to being mass-produced is the state of the pre-Enshittification era that we already left behind. Since the last decade or so at the latest, software is often designed as an explicit means of power over users and applications are made deliberately inflexible to, e.g. corece users to watch ads, purchase goods or services or simply stay at the screen for longer than intended. (Even that was already the case in niches, especially "shareware". But in a sense, all commercial software is shareware now)
xg15 1y ago
> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were faced with the choice of doing it all again or sticking with the defaults. But I'd chalk this up to Windows not treating the customization data as important enough to provide backup/export functionality, not that people didn't want to customize) The features increasingly went away in later Windows and Office versions, but I assumed it was some corporate decision. Was there ever actual backlash from users against those features?
- RiverCrochet 1y ago
  Tech-oriented people love software malleability and also can handle the responsibility - e.g. understanding something that's broken + customized by you could have been broken by you. Non tech-oriented people, the masses, absolutely love customizability and malleability--but aren't willing to handle the responsibility. They will reach out to tech support who can't possibly know every customization option of every application and its effects, and complain when they tell them to reset/reinstall. And in a corporate environment where the company provides the PC, the company would rather not deal with it. Office dominates at the workplace, is mostly making money from corporate users, and users want it to behave the same way it does in the workplace. So any backlash by users is simply not going to matter unless it might cause companies to not renew their licenses. A company I work for is moving to Office-on-the-web for PCs that are used by people who don't really use Office that much except possibly to read Word docs, in order to save on licensing costs I presume. It's even less customizable than any desktop version. So the trend is going to continue.
  - xg15 1y ago
    What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
    - 1y ago
bigstrat2003 1y ago
> People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability. Software in the 2000s was markedly better to software today. But it's cheaper and easier for companies to produce shitty software, so that's what we get. It has nothing to do with consumer preference.
selfhoster11 1y ago
Training and support for applications isn't a thing outside of enterprises, especially for SaaS web apps. You simply cannot reliably get support for Google or Facebook services unless you know some very obscure channels. It is wrong to say this is a trade-off: it is a regression.

gklitt 1y ago

Coauthor here. You make a fair point! Ease of use matters. We all want premade experiences some of the time. The problem is that even in those (perhaps rare!) cases where we want to tweak something, even a tiny thing, we’re out of luck. An analogy: we all want to order a pizza sometime. But at the same time, a world with only food courts and no kitchens wouldn’t be ideal. That’s how software feels today—-the “kitchen” is missing. Also, you may be right in the short term. But in the long run, our tools also shape our culture. If software makes people feel more empowered, I believe that’ll eventually change people’s preferences.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Well, if I may continue my pessimistic outlook, I would simply say that anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. Programmers are chefs - we take ingredients called SDKs and serve them up into meals called custom software. Anyone who isn't a chef, might need to buy the packaged cake mix at Walmart. For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there was a time when cars were experimental and hand-assembled. Imagine if Henry Ford in the 1920s had focused on democratizing car parts so anyone can build their own car with thousands of potential combinations; I don't think it would have worked out. It is still true that you can, technically speaking, build your own car; but nobody pretends that we can turn everyone into personalized car builders if we just try hard enough.
- gklitt 1y ago
  I gotta say I don’t understand your point about cooking — billions of people who aren’t professional chefs cook meals every day! These meals may not live up to restaurant standards but they have different virtues — like making it taste just the way you like it, or carrying on a family tradition. On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal… https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ That said, I think talking about cars may be stronger ground for the argument you’re making. Mass production is incredible at making cheap uniform goods. This applies even more in software, where marginal costs are so low. The point of our essay, though, is that the uniformity of mass produced goods can hinder people when there’s no ability to tweak or customize at all. I’m not a car guy, but it seems like cars have reasonably modular parts you can replace (like the tires) and I believe some people do deeper aftermarket mods as well. In software, too often you can’t even make the tiniest change. It’s as if everyone had to agree on the same tires, and you needed to ask the original manufacturer to change the tires for you!
  - xg15 1y ago
    Also adding that software only being inflexible due to being mass-produced is the state of the pre-Enshittification era that we already left behind. Since the last decade or so at the latest, software is often designed as an explicit means of power over users and applications are made deliberately inflexible to, e.g. corece users to watch ads, purchase goods or services or simply stay at the screen for longer than intended. (Even that was already the case in niches, especially "shareware". But in a sense, all commercial software is shareware now)

xg15 1y ago

> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were faced with the choice of doing it all again or sticking with the defaults. But I'd chalk this up to Windows not treating the customization data as important enough to provide backup/export functionality, not that people didn't want to customize) The features increasingly went away in later Windows and Office versions, but I assumed it was some corporate decision. Was there ever actual backlash from users against those features?

RiverCrochet 1y ago
Tech-oriented people love software malleability and also can handle the responsibility - e.g. understanding something that's broken + customized by you could have been broken by you. Non tech-oriented people, the masses, absolutely love customizability and malleability--but aren't willing to handle the responsibility. They will reach out to tech support who can't possibly know every customization option of every application and its effects, and complain when they tell them to reset/reinstall. And in a corporate environment where the company provides the PC, the company would rather not deal with it. Office dominates at the workplace, is mostly making money from corporate users, and users want it to behave the same way it does in the workplace. So any backlash by users is simply not going to matter unless it might cause companies to not renew their licenses. A company I work for is moving to Office-on-the-web for PCs that are used by people who don't really use Office that much except possibly to read Word docs, in order to save on licensing costs I presume. It's even less customizable than any desktop version. So the trend is going to continue.
- xg15 1y ago
  What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
  - 1y ago

bigstrat2003 1y ago

> People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability. Software in the 2000s was markedly better to software today. But it's cheaper and easier for companies to produce shitty software, so that's what we get. It has nothing to do with consumer preference.

selfhoster11 1y ago

Training and support for applications isn't a thing outside of enterprises, especially for SaaS web apps. You simply cannot reliably get support for Google or Facebook services unless you know some very obscure channels. It is wrong to say this is a trade-off: it is a regression.