You should know that already!
If you're reading this (and it's not clear why you are) you probably know that my day job is at a Large Software Company Near Seattle. While you might expect that this would make me some kind of apologist for our allegedly monopolistic business practices, I'm not. I don't know whether we've competed unfairly, or whether that warrants the proposed penalties (and, frankly, I don't care). Nor do I know whether those practices are worth all the hate we seem to be on the receiving end of, these days (I doubt it).
What I do know, however, is that there are plenty of things we do badly that are worth getting on our case about, and those things seem to be ignored in the storm and fury of the legal proceedings. Most of what we do is what Alan Cooper calls "dancing bearware" -- the impressive thing is not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all.
What's annoying me this morning, and what set off this particular rant, is the password entry in Windows 2000. If you mistype your password, as I did when logging on this morning, you get the following message:
The password is incorrect. Please retype your password. Letters in passwords must be typed using the correct case. Make sure that Caps Lock is not accidentally on.
Now, this is certainly good advice. My keyboard is designed so that it's easy for me to hit the caps lock key instead of shift, and there's no feedback other than a little LED approximately 2 feet from where my focus is (which causes me all kinds of grief when I'm using Photoshop, but that's another rant). My current password is case sensitive, and sometimes I can't log in because caps lock is on.
Let's think this through further, though. Why is the caps lock a problem? 1) Because I don't notice when I turn it on. 2) Because it means I type the wrong password into the computer.
Hey, the computer knows what I typed... and the computer knows caps lock is on. Why doesn't the freakin' computer tell me caps lock is on, instead of making me figure it out for myself? It's the computer! It knows already!
Now, this is a tiny point, to be sure. The difference between "Caps lock is on, maybe you should turn it off" and "Make sure that Caps Lock is not accidentally on" is marginal. But it is indicative of larger problems in how we build software.
Ever tried to troubleshoot printer problems on a Windows system? Plug and play works great when everything works, but when it doesn't... whoa nelly. I've seen people reduced to tears by the process. Most of the time, the trouble has to do with settings on the computer that don't match features on the printer, like how much RAM the printer has -- if the computer assumes the printer has more than it does, the printer can puke if it's sent a file that's too large (I used to work in a print shop where we had an old TI laser printer; it needed to be rebooted every afternoon because of a memory leak, which we'd notice when documents started coming out missing the lower case "i". Everywhere in the document.)
I should never, ever have to tell the computer what the printer has. I should never, ever have to run back and forth between the printer and my computer to make sure that all the settings match. The computer knows what settings it needs to know about. The printer knows what those settings are. The computer should handle all of this.