Neal Stephenson pointed out something that struck a chord with me in “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”. He pointed out that car interfaces weren’t cursed with having to be “intuitive”; instead they made up steering wheels and gear shifts and all sorts of arcade controls. He expresses relief that cars weren’t invented in the computer age, or we’d have to steer with a mouse and change gears by clicking a drop-down menu.

The moral of this story: some things can’t be improved upon. We have to realize when we got something right, and then leave it alone. Similarly, there are some things that nobody is ever going to want, and we just have to stop trying to invent them. Because – get ready for some politically-incorrect judgment – they are bad ideas!

Touch screen computers

On a phone, it makes sense. On anything bigger than a phone, up to a desktop computer, it doesn’t make sense.

Hey, prove me wrong. As you read the rest of this post, follow along with your arm stretched out and your finger on the screen running along each line. Click around the site with your mouse with one hand, but keep your finger on the screen with your other hand following along the same gestures, as if your finger were the mouse pointer. Time yourself.

How long did you last? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? You’re arm feels like a swollen football of pain, doesn’t it? Oh, and you were slower than how you usually use a computer, and now you have to mop your smeary fingerprints off the screen. Now imagine that tech leaders think this is a good idea. Things like Microsoft Surface, fueled by some overpaid engineer who saw “Minority Report” and thought it looked like fun. It looks cool, but try standing up and waving your arms around for fifteen minutes.

Animated assistants

Look at this rogue’s gallery! Don’t you just want to take out the whole lot with a machine gun? So does everybody else. Everybody turns them off. Everybody complains about them. Everybody avoids using a tool that has them if there’s no way to turn them off.

So why are we still seeing them deployed in the year 2009? We’ve known that everybody hates animated desktop assistants since at least the Bronze Age. I believe it was Aristotle who, in his “Corpus Aristotelicum” in 320 BC, wrote “This damn animated dog sucks! I’ve been trying for an hour to turn it off, and it keep coming back! My writings will be lost to history at this rate. I’d like to strangle the idiot who came up with this!”

What part of “Everybody hates animated assistants!” needs to be explained to developers?

A new search engine

You have a unique case here: for the first time in history, we have a voluntary, benevolent monopoly. Google got it right in 1997. Google is smart enough to know this. Everybody else’s search sucks, period. If you can point to something that Google does wrong, so wrong that people will come to use your search engine instead of Google’s, then go for it. Otherwise, forget it.

Take a word from the cowboy: “Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.” Hang it up, pardner, you’ve done been beaten to the draw.

HDTV

OK, we admit it: back in the 1960s, you got us with color TV. That’s a huge improvement over black and white. And a few more improvements came along, like going from vacuum tubes to all-digital. But after that, it’s time we faced the fact that seeing moving pictures on a screen with sound just isn’t going to get any better. Not better enough for everyone to throw out their existing sets and pay three times the price for a new set that improves the picture quality by 2%, anyway.

You want to innovate? How about making the programs more intelligent? There used to be a knob on TVs called “brightness”, but it never made the people on TV more bright. How about an IQ button on the remote?

Paid site subscriptions

Hey, here’s something we’ve been getting for free for twenty years now, but now we want to start paying for it. Why? So the old newspaper and television world can move into the Internet medium and still make the same money. Forget it, it’s not going to happen. The Internet made everything free, and it’s not going to settle for anything less.

Live software updates

I hope developers for every platform – Microsoft, Apple, and Linux – are listening: Updates are a PAIN! They hassle you at the worst times, they take up your resources, they nag you with popups, and after you update you barely have time to fix everything that was broken before guess what? You’ve gotta update AGAIN! Whether it’s Windows patches, Linux apt-get upgrades, Firefox extensions, anti-virus-ware, whatever. We don’t want software that constantly whines for attention like a spoiled puppy. We want software that leaves us alone.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The latest buzz in knowledge systems is Wolfram Alpha. Let’s make this clear: it is not a Google-killer and doesn’t claim to be. It is billed as an “answer engine”, instead of a search engine. Search engines give you links to websites that answer your query; answer engines just try to give you an answer, full stop. Just to clear that up.

I’ll try here to find the border of its knowledge, just to have a good idea of what it can handle and what it can’t. So, let’s calculate the odds of a “royal flush” in draw poker:

All it understood was “royal flush”, and gave me odds for five and seven cards. No note as to whether this is natural deal, or discard and draw.

“Which country had the most wars?”

Here’s a more typical Wolfram Alpha experience: it’s stumped. No idea what I wanted. Neither of the provided links lead me anywhere near the answer I wanted. This is an example of a major problem with knowledge systems – they have to be ready for every wacky thing that users will throw at it. And this query is just the kind of thing that would be practical and handy to know.

Other queries which have stumped Wolfram Alpha so far:

• “calories in bat guano” – stumped.
• “world’s oldest piano” – stumped.
• “alternatives to photoshop” – stumped.
• “map of Dictionopolis” (It interpreted it as “Divinopolis”) Dictionopolis is the first city in the book “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.
• “map of Mordor” (did you mean “Gordon, Nebraska”?) Look, if I wanted MapQuest, I know where to find it.
• “number of teeth in adult”
• “who is charlie brown?” It gave me the United States musician Charles Brown, whoever the heck he is.
• “lifespan of a cockroach” – totally stumped!
• “microchip inventor” – stumped. Here’s the exact same string in Wikipedia’s search, with the correct answer as the second result. And just clicking ‘microchip’ gives you only the company, “Microchip Technology”!
• “who is winston smith” – It gave me statistics for both surnames, unware that he’s the protagonist of the novel “1984“.

Now before everybody goes, “That’s not fair! You’re trying to trick it!” Well, the PR has gone out of its way to document these silly Easter Egg examples. Somebody spent far too much time trying to rig this demo and too little time making a useful tool. And before anybody cries foul on my searching for fictional characters, it sure as heck knew “who is john galt”:

You know, because if you want the social web to hype your engine, you’d better cater to the Randroids.

I had better luck with straightforward calculations. But how far could I push that? How about converting between two measures of length, using the most arcane units I can think of…

Ta-daaaaa! I was almost accidentally impressed for just a minute there.

Bottom line: This thing has a long way to go on all fronts before it even comes close to what we want an answer engine to do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Hi, I’m running for the President of Computers! Vote for me, and I promise to:

Remove the ‘forward’ button from every email client.

You should never forward email. Ever. In the history of ever. Not even if it will save the world. The world doesn’t want to be saved that way. Also, everybody doesn’t love you when you forward them this funny thing you found. The exception is, of course, sharing the hilarious and pithy wisdom of the premium content to be found on that pinnacle of website perfection which is askreamaor.com.

Remove the CAPSLOCK key from every keyboard.

Why do we still have to tell people this? It must be that Caps-Lock, like the One True Ring, has a will of its own that will not be thwarted. It’s always there just to the left of your pinkie, whispering “Use me! Abuse me!” with an evil hiss. Yes, just thinking about it makes me want to HIT IT RIGHT NOW AND RIDE, BABY RIDE, BECAUSE IT’S CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! You see? We have to take that thing out. Even Oprah fell for it. It’s like having a wetbar built into the dashboard of every car.

While I’m at it, I would ban Oprah.

Oprah is the female equivalent of Ron Paul. She amasses a huge cult that will do anything she asks, but it’s all composed of cheeseheads who couldn’t think for themselves if you set them on fire and handed them a garden hose. Look, now all of the readers of this site who also follow Oprah will never come back, just because I said this. You see?

Outlaw the ‘NSFW’ tag.

Once upon a time, a real employee of an actual company noticed a link that unexpectedly led to a booby picture (we think it might have been this one), and politely asked the poster to state that it was so. The ‘NSFW’ (Not Safe For Whiners) tag was born. “Oh ho!”, said the Web Trolls Union (local 549), “We can make people attach this tag to anything we complain about! And so they spread out, starting flamewars over every single post on every single site. Everything can be argued that it is indecent to someone, for every possible ridiculous purpose. Forget it! The whole Internet is NSFW. It’s the web; take your chances!

Every web page would have to pass a bench test for load speed, with a cap on memory.

So, these are really good ideas, aren’t they? Aren’t you glad you’re reading them now, instead of waiting for the page to still load while staring at your spinning mouse pointer?

ISPs would make you take an IQ test to join.

Various countries have licenses for everything else. Driving, building, marriage, fishing… An Internet license! One with a test, where you’d have to study a little book, and then pass a little multi-choice quiz. You’d have more web safety, fewer spam, bot, and malware attacks, maybe even people who at least knew some rules of etiquette exist, even if they forget them two minutes after their first click.

See what a better world I can make? cast your vote in the comments.

Popularity: 3% [?]