Simplicity instead of features
Nick Carr strikes a chord in his post The geek’s paradise.
So what does Gates talk about? The “digital lifestyle” with “software at its center.” Maybe robots want digital lifestyles, but human beings don’t. Human beings want lives. This digital lifestyle, as Gates envisions it, is just another big pile of software features that we have to sort through and make sense of. We get up and stare into a vast computer screen in our kitchen, with multiple video feeds, multiple digital images of our children, and a map on which we can track the moment-by-moment movements of our family members. (What’s next? The Xbox Digital Chastity Belt?) When we get to work we sit down in front of - guess what? - an even bigger computer screen filled with a bunch of software features, not to mention a handy tablet PC to doodle on. Go to the airport? Another big screen with another bunch of software features. As we move between the big screens, we have the little computer screen of our cell phone, loaded with, yes, a bunch of software features.
And Carr is right. We need simplicity in a real sense than the number of envisioned software features, while requiring perfection in those that already exist. I am a firm believer of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous quote: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. But I guess, it’s hard to come by.