Summary: Want to see the future of computing? Look in the mirror.

Bright Lights, Big City

I live on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania. Honestly. The chunk of pavement closest to my house is a tertiary road about a half mile west of my gravel driveway. It's hicksville. Redneck country. And while I've been in city traffic a bunch of times, I always experience some small sense of culture shock when I'm back in it, so my limo ride from O'hare to the Wyndham was doubly interesting. (We don't see that many stretch limos out here in the sticks, you know. We certainly don't ride around in them much.)

Watching all that traffic pile up, ebb and flow, made me think about the ubiquity of the automobile in America. They're everywhere and our society would pretty much grind to a halt if they suddenly disappeared. In fact, we'd be hard-pressed to imagine life without the automobile, but there was a time, less than a century ago, when the internal combustion engine and the assembly line were just a gleam in Henry Ford's eye. The fact is, the automobile didn't burst onto the scene full-fledged and functional. It took time for manufacturers to sell sufficient numbers to create the kind of demand that would lead to roads and bridges which were friendly to cars as well as horses. It took even longer to build highways and longer still for a national system of highways to link the entire nation. While those years were passing, the automobile became less of the novelty that it had been at its birth and more of the transportation tool that we've come to take for granted. It became more standardized, more reliable, and this makes sense if you think about it from a user-oriented perspective.

When we get new toys, we will often forgive them if they don't work right the first time, every time, just because their uncertainty is part of their charm. If you've got a car to go to church to on a Sunday morning, but a horse & buggy ready to rush your spouse to the doctor on a rainy Monday night, then you don't mind if the car doesn't always run the way you expect it to. But when the car becomes your only means of transportation, it had better be reliable. The first time you get into it and it doesn't start when you desperately need to get somewhere, you'll begin making plans to replace it.

So, too, with computers.

As I've remarked here before, we haven't always had the Personal Computer. We haven't always had the Internet or the World Wide Web. We haven't spent fifty or sixty years standardizing our business infrastructure, our communications, our personal work habits, our lives around these beige boxes. It seems as if we've been doing it forever because of the rate of change in the computing field.

As a college sophomore in '78, I took an introductory computer science class, learned how to use a card punch machine (no, I don't remember anymore) and wrote a couple of simple bookkeeping programs in BASIC. Like most of the computing world, I logged into our campus mainframe and did all of my work from a terminal. Later that same year, I got my first look at a real PC, a TRS-80. (Did I hear someone snigger?) I remember sitting late into the night, manually loading a spaceship game, laboriously typing in line after line of code just to play something slightly more sophisticated than Pong. It was cool! If it didn't work right the first time, if my dyslexia got the better of me and I transposed a couple of characters, so what? I wasn't working. I wasn't writing a term paper or editorial on deadline. I wasn't sitting in front of tool. I was playing with a really neat toy and part of the challenge of the game, part of the fun, was just making it work.

From Toy to Tool

Fast forward twenty years and look at the change.

For better or worse, saying that most of my life is centered around my computer is pretty accurate. I correspond with my colleagues, friends and family, create course syllabuses, write reviews and editorials, balance my checkbook, track project expenses, research on the Web, deal with faxes and play games right here. While many of these tasks aren't critical, a number of them are. When I'm working on deadline I don't have time to duplicate work. I have to get it done the first time.

While a huge chunk of computer users have been dealing with these beasts for years, another chunk, one that I believe is significantly larger, has just got into the game. In their new book, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft, authors Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie briefly describe the growth of the Internet:

In 1993, the primary users of the Internet were scientists, professors, and engineers at university and government labs and a handful of corporations. By 1998, there were 130 million users from all walks of life. Web commerce also exploded from nothing in 1993 to $22 billion in 1998, with predictions of hundreds of billions of dollars early in the next century.

As we're all painfully aware, these are the people who have filled Microsoft's coffers with a gazillion bucks, for the most part unwittingly, because they didn't know that they had a choice. For the most part, they aren't business professionals, engineers, wonks or geeks. They don't know ROM from RAM from Virtual Memory from Virtual Reality and they don't care. They're happily playing their new versions of Quake, Diablo or Solitaire, mucking about with Office '97, surfing the Web for the first time with Internet Explorer, marveling at how neat everything is and wondering about those funny blue screens that lock up their machines so frequently.

It's as if they're out for a Sunday afternoon ride.

Do they get concerned if their machines hang? Most likely, but they're not getting too upset because they haven't built their daily routines around them. E-mail, web surfing, word processors and that lot haven't become important to these folks on a daily basis. Yet.

But as the months stretch out ahead, as the newest newbie suddenly discovers what it's like to suffer through a Blue Screen of Death at a crisis point the night before a business report or homework assignment is due, when the FAT file system claims another sensitive piece of data, these people will, like the rest of us, howl in frustration and start ratcheting up the demand for better, more reliable products.

They'll start making the same demands that we've been making for years.

Does that mean they'll abandon Microsoft and rush to IBM for copies of Warp? I wish. Unfortunately, unless something much more dramatic happens than anything we've seen to date, most of these poor unfortunates will address their demands to Redmond, but that isn't really the issue I'm looking at. The point I'd like to make is simply this: The concerns that we have right now, the concerns that we have had for years, are the concerns that the computing industry as a whole will have in the very near future. Since we remain with an operating system that has proven its dependability time and time again, the rest of the industry will eventually adopt our point of view, with regards to reliability, at least. As time passes and the fad that was computers becomes a necessary tool, users will become less forgiving, more demanding. The applications mantra that so many of the pundits have chanted will fade to a dimly remembered echo as millions of voices are raised to complain about another BSOD. After all, if every application in the world runs on your machine but you have to reboot 3 or 4 times every working day, if you have to re-create work that you've already lost twice, you're really not getting much done with all of those wonderful applications that work on your machine. You might actually be better off running a half dozen applications on a platform that doesn't crash all the time.

Are We The Only Veteran Users?

What's that I hear you ask? What about all of those Windows users who have been dealing with GPFs as long as we've been avoiding them? Since they've had lots of time to let the glamour wear off, why aren't they jumping on this bandwagon? Why haven't they raised these issues?

Frankly, some of them may never realize how badly they've been taken. Others got into a comfort zone with DOS and have pretty successfully resisted moving out of it. If Microsoft has its way, the Y2K bug will push them, kicking and screaming, into Redmond's Next Best Thing, but, who knows? Maybe they'll jump to Caldera or PC DOS 2000 and hang onto their old boxes. As for the rest, they are starting to make their voices heard. You can hear them on the Internet and in the trades: People within the industry, like ZDNet Editor Jesse Berst, raking MS over the coals for the unnecessary cost of Windows '98; ComputerWorld columnist William Ulrich questioning Microsoft's Y2K record; Avie Tevanian of Apple and Steven McGeady of Intel whose DOJ testimony is a damning description of the slow death innovation and reliability have suffered at Bill Gates' hands. And those OEMs who posted warnings to their customers to avoid upgrading from Win '95 because the new code was too flaky. People outside the industry, like Ralph Nader, who has a column in the November 9th ComputerWorld, again calling for a closer scrutiny into Microsoft's business practices which have resulted in a situation that victimizes "consumers who pay high prices to use mediocre and unreliable products." Slowly, but surely, these legions of Windows users are beginning to get to the same place that we stalwart OS/2 people have been for years. They're starting to hear the message: It's RELIABILITY, stupid.

If IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., want to know where the computing world is heading, they need look no further. Poll the OS/2 users of the world, large and small. We've been riding the crest of the wave the whole time.