10 things advanced users need in Longhorn

Michael Gartenberg | December 09, 2003, 08:28 AM

Actually, this should be called 10 things that Scoble needs in Longhorn. I'm hardly a novice user but I would disagree with at least eight out his ten things. But there's more here than my 10 features vs. yours. Systems need to be discoverable by a wide variety of users, most of whom today are running older systems. Ernst Haeckel the German biologist coined the term "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which for mere mortals means that a new person entering a culture needs to learn everything that culture has assimilated from the beginning of their existence to the present. While users like Scoble have been using PCs from the earliest days, and are fully familiar with the history and nature of why things are the way they are, most users are not.

Making some of the changes that Robert describes would I think actually be a big step backward in getting Longhorn adopted. I would suggest far more radical approaches, for example, getting rid of the need to have a "save" command (why isn't everything I create be default saved in every application instead of existing in some electronic limbo, I love when engineers punish users who do not follow their design instructions). We're still living with OS design limitations that date back to when the state of the art was a 128k Macintosh. OS designers today still mimic that relic of an OS even when the power of today's systems can overcome these design flaws with ease. Longhorn is a chance to fix a lot of PC issues but the designers are going to have to think a lot bigger than this for it be a success. Back when i was a teacher, there was a school that had a novel approach in how they hired. Teaching applicants were to deliver two lectures. One to fifth grade students and the other to the most advanced post graduate students. The topic had to be the same. If you do the fundamentals correctly, you will have a product that is broad enough for everyone to gain benefit from and deep enough that experts can exploit to their hearts desire. This philosophy seems to be missing from Longhorn right now.

My Longhorn Blog: The 10 things advanced users need in Longhorn. A bit controversial, perhaps, but I want a better experience for advanced users (and beginners too!) What do you think? By the way, if you are an advanced user using Windows XP, this list (and instructions for turning on these features) might prove useful.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]