GUI Races (Updated)

I’m watching.

The current trend in computer user interface is racing up a dead end street. I could be entirely wrong about this, but we’ll see. I am certain the current leadership in development projects are almost uniformly stupid about it. That is, they are too focused on the “cool” factor, as if that were their only hope of market survival. Granted, that “cool” factor does have strong vibes with the consumer market. It’s trendy; gotta run with the trends to stay in business, no?

No. It’s an old myth by now, but still a myth. Any economy, macro or micro, that depends solely on consumer tastes, is dead where it stands. Not simply because someone else will come along with a cooler idea and steal your market share, but the consumer market itself is entirely too fragile. The underlying economic system is rather like an impossibly tall structure with a high center of gravity. It will eventually become unbalanced. While it won’t fall quickly, it will crash very hard. (Hint: It’s being done to us intentionally by those who control the banking system.)

We are just about there. Whatever it was the computer GUI designers thought they were chasing five years ago, it’s just about to evaporate. The consumer economy is going to shrink to insignificance for anything not essential. People will do their best to keep the devices they have, or maybe seek a used one when they break the older one. Sales of new tablets and cellphones will probably fade before this year is out. Pretty soon the biggest market for computing devices will be business and government. That is, it will be a PC workstation market.

Even if the market is only somewhat reduced, it will be catastrophic for any vendor heavily invested in consumer grade products that aren’t on the bottom edge of the price range. The consume-only device will cease to dominate unless it becomes dirt cheap. Barring some earth-shattering technology discovery that can replace current devices for less than the buying power of $50 (US) today, that market will fade or die.

Way back when the home PC first became possible for what was then a prosperous consumer class, a couple of big outfits came up with the Graphical User Interface. Their market share was small, but surging on the GUI. Someone at Microsoft realized the only way they could dominate was to do it better than anyone else. So they invested millions of dollars hiring genuine human behavior PhDs and tested hundreds of ordinary people with no computer experience for months. They sat them down in front of a computer and let them do whatever it was they would naturally do without any instructions. Then they refined the interface and did it again. They repeated the process until what they had was as close as they could possibly get to instinctual human behavior — Windows 95.

By any useful meaning of the term, it was an intuitive GUI. Go ahead and snicker, but it worked.

Granted, the exposure of almost every human on the planet to that and other GUIs since then means we no longer have a pool of inexperienced users to test. You could suggest that the consumers have moved on from that first intuitive model. But if you’ve ever visited any corporate or government workplace, the first thing you’ll notice is that they have not moved on. So if you take away the Win9x/Win7 style interface, productivity sags very quickly in most offices. Something about that basic design still reflects fundamental human wiring, not just current habit. Right now, HP is getting a boost in sales because they realized there was such a big demand for Win7 over Win8 that they could make lots of money. So if you go to their sales sites, you’ll find lots of Win7 stuff prominently featured. And sales are good.

So long as almost no one but a few computer nerds and dweebs are using Linux, the GUI doesn’t matter. But when you start looking at corporate-friendly distributions of Linux, they all look somewhat like that basic Win95 layout with minor variations. There are numerous other factors involved, but there will not be a year of the Linux desktop until the dominant offering looks like Win95. It also has to work about the same, with all the convenient features right there in easy-to-discover “intuitive” locations in the menus.

GNOME Project? Those people must be from another planet. It’s almost Orwellian how they use the same words to describes things no ordinary human would recognize. That whole project treats ordinary computer users as a species that should be wiped off the earth. KDE Project? They aren’t quite so hostile, but they still try to reprogram humans into something non-human. They abandoned the intuitive model. LXDE is the project that will never be finished because they keep arguing amongst themselves over insignificant details like academic communists. XFCE is workable, but still not very responsive to basic human expectations. You can make it look like Win95, but it’s not fully integrated into the underlying system the way even Win95 was. There are no other viable contenders for the comfort of common computer users. You would think it was a part of your Open Source licensing that you first commit to hostility against ordinary computer users.

Don’t get me wrong; I still run Linux. There’s nothing like the Linux command line. And these days it runs on just about every piece of hardware and is easier to install than Windows. Best of all, you need not concern yourself with activation and licensing (unless you purchase commercial tech support). Most of the essential applications and suites are approaching parity in most areas, clearly better in just a few points. Server setup and configuration is much easier to find on Linux than on Windows, and much simpler to do. If you follow all the rules for both, Linux is still incomparably more secure and stable than Windows Server, and considerably more flexible in ways that really count. Yeah, Linux is that good.

Until you look at the GUI. It sucks. And all the people running the show are literally unable to hear when you tell them so. Should you actually get their attention to the nature of the problem, you’ll be lucky if all they do is snicker like you were some kind of idiot. Who gives a flying f*** about ordinary computer users? Not the Open Source guys, that’s for sure.

I’m waiting to see how this turns out.

Update: Stated in different terms, Matt Asay says the same thing, in that Linux is not an alternative if people have to learn from scratch all over again. If Linux developers are too arrogant to accept standard computer UI conventions for whatever reason, they clearly have no interest in wider adoption. If she has to learn different habits, you cannot sell it to the Valeries of the world.