David W. Fenton wrote:
[snip]> I don't know. While one could say that Apple had an
agenda, MS came
late to that ballgame.
Why would Apple and Microsoft have an incentive to misrepresent the
research? What good would it do them to design their products to be
less useful than they could be?
To sell mice.
The "less useful" concept isn't an accurate one in my
opinion -- I think that both Apple and Microsoft design
their software more and more for the lowest common
denominator of user, not the power user. Look at the menus
that appear in Word -- it really pisses me off to have to
click on "more" to see all that should have shown up on a
menu in the first place, because most of the time what I
want to do is hidden in the "more" category. Yes, I could
edit the menus (all software should have user editable
menus!) but if they weren't trying to hide the entries which
are more confusing to the casual user or to the person who
only types business letters, I wouldn't have to.
But corporate America has shown time and time again (look at
all the horrible pharmaceuticals that kill users but are
still forced through the FDA testing and onto the
marketplace) that it will design something and then find the
research to prove that it is the best way that could have
been designed. Like the tobacco industry finding doctors to
verify that smoking cigarettes doesn't cause cancer.
I have absolutely no confidence that the giants of the
computer world have any interest in designing anything other
than that which will make them the most profits and will
appear with the most "flash and glam" so the uninformed
public will buy it. That it may also be useful to the
informed public is merely an added benefit, but the
usefulness to the informed public is limited by what will
make it the most profitable, not the most useful.
I was just discussing the iPod Touch with a friend who is
disappointed in the battery life while watching videos, and
he raised the point that by making the battery 1mm thicker
the battery life could have been significantly increased
(he's an engineer and so not uniformed on the subject) yet
they chose to go with the thinner battery.
--
David H. Bailey
dhbai...@davidbaileymusicstudio.com
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