[lit-ideas] Re: Could an academic discipline do this?

--- Andreas Ramos <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Apple has a very high profile. Is there anything
> behind the smoke?
>
Well, yes and no. Apple is a design company, they are
extremely good at taking something like an MP3 player,
designing a good user interface to it, packaging it
well, and selling what is indeed a good product.

But they are not a very good computer company. They
are very good at building appliances with limited
functionality, and I thought they should head that
road well before iPod came out. But computers are not
single  purpose appliances, they are hugely powerful
and complicated machines. As Microsoft puts it, a
typical user uses perhaps 20% of the functionality,
and to make matters complicate they all use different
20% of it.

Modern functionalist design is all about fitting to
purpose, scrapping unnecessary functionality, focusing
on the common usages... simplifying. This a very good
way to design scissors or MP3 players, but it has
proven less succesful with information processing
tools.

For example, spreadsheets. Pionereed by Lotus 1-2-3
and nowadays known by brand name Excel. By any
standard of computer science, product design or
business practice Excel is an awful tool. It leads to
unnecessarily complicated data structures, a database
would be much more elegant in most cases. Excel
applications tend to border on unusable, due to lack
of clear division between code and functionality among
other things. Any corporate CIO will tell you that
they have hundreds, or even thousands, of Excel sheets
that very commissioned by no one, have no
documentation to speak of, are in all ways
unmanageable and also critical part of their corporate
infrastructure. Excel even does math badly, the random
number generation is anything but random for example.

And yet it is probably the most succesfull and
important computer program ever. I've used Excel to
display days to retirement to a high school
headmaster, to simulate a board game, to calculate
returns on different scenarios, to build scripts for
moving files... People run their entire business on
set of spread sheets, researches use it to correlate
data from different sources, house wives balance the
family budget. It gets people who would laugh
hysterically if you asked them whether they can
program, to build programs tailored to their needs at
the moment. Which is what computing is all about.
Excel is to computing what Lego is to toys.

As to academic disciplines with similar virtues, how
about economics? Easy enough to understand and useful,
even if leaving a lot to desire to theoretically.


Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland


      
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