In article <+9LD...@xds13.ferranti.com> pe...@ficc.ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:

The "politics" you speak of must result from the enormous artificial
problems vendors create for users by "horizontally" fragmenting a
market. E.g., when 10 vendors create similar products, they have a
very large number of inconsequential design decisions to make, often
of no greater real impact than deciding which side of the road traffic
should use. Apolitical vendors will make these decisions at random,
creating frivolous incompatibilities between competing products in a
given category.

These frivolous incompatibilities destroy incalculable amounts of
user wealth, because they make computers harder to use. Users are as
greedy as vendors, so they understandably have a strong interest in
persuading vendors to behave consistently wherever performance is not
an issue. Since each vendor has an interest in coercing all other vendors
except itself to change, the approach to vendor consistency requires
a political process.

A few MB of RAM is much cheaper today than the productivity loss during
the time for a worker to master a new system of any useful complexity.
The payoff from the new system must be much greater than merely
conserving $200 worth of RAM. (Lots of workers cost their companies
that much in a couple of days or less.)

Users have real work to do. They usually don't care about which among N
largely equivalent windowing systems they use. But they do know that
using more than one incompatible windowing system is a useless
complication that keeps them away from what they bought their computer
to do: creating wealth.

The average information worker routinely manipulates (or routinely
*could profit from manipulating*) chunks of information larger than
2 MB. (However, most of them still do this inefficiently, e.g., with
paper.) As far as most users are concerned, a computer which addresses
a maximum of 2 MB belongs in a museum or a toy store.

Even the best programmers find that to add features, they must usually
add code. However, computer users try to use computers to solve real
problems. Real problems have an infinite number of features. Computer
users tend to reject software that is simpler than the problems they
are trying to solve.

Few mechanics can get by with just one hammer and one screwdriver.
Instead, they have to lug around huge cases of tools, which cost a lot
of money and take up a lot of space. That's because mechanics get paid
to fix things, not to glorify the aesthetics of minimalism.

--
Dan Mocsny                              
Internet: dmoc...@minerva.che.uc.edu