You are not the problem, your computer is

Computers are hard to use.

I am "Tech Support" for a half a dozen different folks (In quotes because my minions think my knowledge is vast and magical, it is neither)

 Based on feedback I am guessing a fair number of you dear readers do the same for folks in your lives.  It is astounding to me how difficult it all is.  I mean here we are, 30 years, into the personal computing revolution (whatever that is) and computers are still so hard to use for so many people that much of the time they just give up.  

The irony is that despite huge advances in hardware and software in terms of capacity, speed and cost (faster, better, cheaper) it is often times more difficult to do things today than it was 25 years ago. 

My Buddy Andrew is a writer.  He is old enough to know better but young enough to still try new things.  I work with him about an hour a month just finding documents, reseting menus adding subversive links to his browser window.  Heres a question, WHY after 25-30 years of producing Word does Microsoft lose "Normal" and replace it with "Draft".  Even if it is more "Correct" Don't you think that after 25 years folks had likely adapted? 

If there were a way to have one computer, that you could use forever, that would be cool.  Because whatever the failings of the machine you would have long ago adapted to the particular way it wants to do things.  Even if it were just metaphorically, you could work in OSX with Word with a 1983 Wordperfect menu system...Cool.

How many people do you know use style sheets? (2 and you don't like them) Use Excel for everything from lists to letters?  (oh my god half the office?) Use keyboard shortcuts? Backup? 

The really funny thing is that we are willing to tolerate old things that work in proprietary products.  For Example HP has been selling the HP-12c financial calculator since 1981.  It still sells well for 70 bucks a pop and likely costs about 3 bucks to make.  

I guess what I am saying is that however far we have come. And it does seem like a ways.  Is NOTHING compared to where we are going.  Good Design is astoundingly difficult.  Someday tech will progress to the point where things really are "easy" to use for everyone. But that day is a long way off.

iPhone IS the mobile internet

Engadget who has gone out of their way to mention they had no intentions of writing any proprietary access programs for mobile devices today announced an iPhone specific Application/browser as a result of research that showed that more than 95%! of all mobile traffic to their site is iPhones (iTouch count too).   LINK

Interweb smack down

Given the current crop of mobile computing devices and even some of the ones in near term development.  who will make the product people are more or even AS likely to use on the interWebs as the iPhone? The top Win Mobile phone is the HTC Touch Cruise and by my feeble math the TOTAL use share on Engadgets web site of all Win Mobile phones represent only 1%.  Maybe Microsoft is emulating Apple by being the “The super-small market-share guy”

Network Externalities are the path to dominance in a format war (see evil empire vs. Apple mid 80s to …) and Apple is out to a huge early lead in the mobile computing marketplace, Blackberry notwithstanding.  Businesses and individuals will find the choice to use an iPhone easier as time goes on because it will do more than other phones just because it already does it.  There is no Technical reason Engadget could not build software optimized for another device but they won’t.  They won’t because there will be no reason to and the people buying a mobile computing device that want access to Engadget ( or any of the other gazillion iPhone accelerated web sites) will find that iPhone is the only one that gives them what they want.

Apple will dominate the mobile computing space, the questions are by how much and who will be the alternatives.  The only current promising player seems to be Android but not for a while.  WinMobile is DOA so Microsoft could (not really) give up and start over with a real competing product but that would be years away.  Blackberry is a wildcard clearly a great device but the lack of a real computing/browsing environment mean it cannot win longer term (unless they do he said humbly).

The competition has a little time the market will move slowly to iPhone but there could be 50 million on the street by the end of next year.  Remember Jobs pointed out that 1% of the 1 billion unit per year market by the end of 2008.  10% world wide or 100 million a year will not happen overnight but the forces that could lead to that conclusion are undeniable and very powerful.