noise to signal

Customers don't customize

There's an ongoing debate in the software industry, which can be broadly summarized this way: One camp believes that most customers, given the option, will customize every aspect of their computer as a form of personal self-expression: color themes, desktop images, program skins, custom MyWay/My Yahoo/My MSN home page, and so forth.

The other camp (which your author is in) thinks that, although there is definitely a group of people who will be obsessive about customization, and despite the fact that some of us customize our environments (I can't stand the standard windows XP blue color scheme), that behavior isn't generalizable to the population at large. Most people seem to think of computers as useful tools at best, and any time spent fussing with customizing their computer is time taken away from the tasks they need to complete on the computer so they can go do whatever it is they really enjoy doing.

Anecdotal case in point (and the inspiration for this morning's rant): The Disney Tattoo Guy (one of this week's Yahoo Picks).

Mr. Reiger claims to be Disney's number one fan, and judging from his site I'd guess that's a pretty good claim. Not only does he have 1500+ tattoos of Disney characters covering 85% of his body, but his custom-built house is filled with Disney artifacts. He claims to have spent over US$900,000 on "his Disney love".

Imagine my delight, then, to find this piece of anecdotal evidence among the photos of his Disney-fied living room:

This is a guy who has more Disney knick-knacks in his house, and on his body, than Walt himself.

And yet... his computer, where he undoubtedly spends a lot of time (I'm guessing he's a big eBay user, as most collectors are these days) uses the default windows desktop and color scheme.

Thank you, your Honor, no further arguments.