Computing as Innovation
Most users sit down to their computer and immediately draw a blank. They have their coffee in hand, doors closed, cell phones turned off, and chair adjusted comfortably, but they can’t bring themselves to do any actual work. After a few frustrating minutes, they open their web browser and start checking email, surfing the net, and soon find themselves a couple of hours behind on work with nothing but bookmarks to show for it.
Why the lack of inspiration? Because for many people computing has devolved into menial labor. And not the I’m-accomplishing-meaningful-things kind of work either. It’s the What-in-the-world-do-I-do-now variety, born out of systems that lock the user into a rigid set of routines rather than a platform for innovation.
Computers have always been glorified number-crunchers, in some shape and form, but the modern computing environment attempts to shelter the user away from the CPU’s raw power and coerce them into using premade solutions. With the average user now having multiple gigahertz and gigabytes at their disposal (power only dreamed of a few years ago), they seem to get even less done with more horsepower. The primary culprit is usually the operating system itself, especially when it comes to Windows (we will have a separate review of Vista forthcoming).
Of all platforms, Windows may be the most difficult for someone to implement their own custom software for free. The most inherent issue is the complexity of the Windows API itself, and the close-knit marriage between the OS and Microsoft’s expensive Visual Studio products. Commercial RADs attempt to address this issue but, again, cost is a limiting factor. What is inherently missing from the latest implementations of Windows is a free programming environment suitable for rapid application development, that would allow the average user to approach his powerful machine with a problem and come away with his own custom solution. This stifles the creativity thats spurs innovation, and locks users into a closed system that is very hard to open.
In contrast, both Mac OS X and most distributions of Linux include their own programming systems that encourage this innovation: Mac OS X has Carbon and Linux has everything from bash scripting to GCC development.
Computing will become innovative again for the vast majority of users only when Windows develops a free RAD framework that opens the underlying system, rather than closing it. The user must be free to control his computer, not controlled and locked out of it.