My mom is too smart for your stupid products

[terriko]

Cory Doctorow had a nice little rant about why he doesn't want an iPad, and this paragraph really stood out for me:

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

I'd like to say right now that my mom makes complex egress filtering rules for her firewall. I don't even do that very often, and I'm a security researcher! She has an amazing intuitive sense of good security and privacy behaviour that I wish were common, and often as not when she asks me to explain some new attack I find out she's already doing the right thing.

You wish your users were as awesome at learning stuff and consistently doing the right thing as my mom is. If every user were like my mom, we wouldn't see stuff getting dumbed down. We'd be seeing stuff with more fiddly bits for turning off annoying stuff, and fewer "features" that involve not being able to share neat stuff with your friends.

But maybe certain large companies wouldn't want users like my mom. My mom runs a rogue "Scrabble" program that Hasbro doesn't want her to have, and she wants to know why trademark or copyright law encourages people to ruin her morning coffee and Scrabble game with her friend Bruce. She wouldn't stand for books being pulled out from under her because some big company said she couldn't have them anymore. She makes more use of the public library than her credit card, and even shares the books she gets off librarything for free in exchange for a review.

My mom is too smart for your stupid products. And I'll bet a lot of your moms are too.

Comments

[jadelennox]

Found through Latest Things, and yo, totally. My mum wrote matrix encryption algorithms 15 years before Cory Doctorow was born. My mum tried to get a Mac and gave it up because she couldn't cope with the dumbed down UI.

Rock our mothers, is what I'm saying.

[terriko]

Rock on moms indeed!

Also, I had never used Latest Things, and now that you've reminded me that it exists, I'm browsing through and finding stuff like this Transformers car http://justbolts.dreamwidth.org/4550.html and I think I may be hooked. I don't know whether to thank you or curse you for my future lack of productivity. ;)

So... thank you? Maybe? :)

[(Anonymous)]

Ok jadelennox, I see what you're going for here, but as a Mac user who's also a decently sophisticated Unix user, I find this train of thought a bit offensive. I grew up in a family that used exclusively Apple stuff and I didn't turn out some sort of mentally stunted technophobe. I'm perfectly capable of using other systems (and have for work many times). I just prefer the machines I'm most comfortable administrating in my own home.

Just because you don't like something that Apple made doesn't mean you need to dump on everything they've made or all of their users.

Eva

Yep

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

The whole iPad fancraze suggests that we really ought to have invested in that Pictograms for Peons venture.

It's amazing how many people will sell out for eye candy. Oh, well. I guess not so amazing, eh.

But

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

It's true that there are people (regardless of gender) who do not tinker and do not want to tinker. I can't stop products being made specifically for such people, but it's the willingness of so many people who should know better to endorse the idea that drives me up the wall.

Things like the iPad don't just hide complexity, they actively militate against any expansion of know-how in society. The ideology is embedded in the device, and it's an anti-democratic one.

Re: But

[jrosen]

I absolutely agree.

I've been looking at ebook readers today (I was bored, and I saw an ad for one that Chapters will be selling, so I did some research.) Guess how many different models I could find that were able to read text files -- just plain, simple, .txt files...

One.

Not the Kindle (which is particularly egregious in that it supports only Amazon's proprietary format.) Not the Nook. Not the upcoming Kobo (which is the one Chapters is partnered with.) The only one I found that was able to read plain text was the Sony Reader in its various iterations.

I can only imagine the companies decided that plain text files were too complex for their poor customers to understand. Given what else I've read about ebook readers -- such as their seemingly-mandatory file management/transfer system that prevents you from just drag-and-dropping files from your PC to the reader -- that doesn't really surprise me.

[jrosen]

Hell, my mom was coding before I was born, and if it hadn't been for becoming a full-time mother, she'd probably have kept going. Sadly, that's true of a lot of things my mother did before I was born...

Anyway, I have to wonder if we haven't reached a point of diminishing returns as far as dumbing things down goes -- surely there comes a point where the people you're making the product for just won't want it, whether because of price point (I can't imagine the iPad will be cheap) or their just not having a need for that particular gadget. I mean, I don't need an iPhone/iPad/iAnything, and I'm pretty sure my retired father needs one even less than I.

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

The iPad is not cheap but it will get cheaper the way netbooks got cheap. The good news is that there are less closed tablet PCs in the works with the OS part already pretty much ready for them. The one thing I have to concede to Apple is their pushing of an open HTML5 over Flash. So they aren't actively locking competitors out of the web as such.

I don't think it makes up for the ideological pollution. I've started preferring Modern Family over 30 Rock (which has started getting dumber while MF leaves me rolling on the floor) but the last MF episode was a 22 min un-ironic iPad infomercial and utterly unfunny. Argh!!!!

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

I have a blackberry to web surf and email and listen to audiobooks in transit. BB is also a closed platform in the sense that it isn't Linux, but there's no App Store lock-in and standards-compliant (MIDP) Java apps can run on it directly. It also has the best phone physical keyboard which beats any touchscreen hands down WHICH IS THE POINT IT'S SUPPOSED TO HELP ME TO COMMUNICATE not just look shiny.

If I want to pet something, I'd rather it be a cat.

[puzzlement]

My mom is too smart for your stupid products. And I'll bet a lot of your moms are too.

Some mothers could be reading RIGHT NOW in fact...

That said, I'm not getting an iPad because I know almost nothing about them other than their size and that they're an Apple product. This is mostly due to the time-consuming nature of having a young baby, ssssh don't tell anyone...