The lesson most people are taking home from the twentieth century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility toward, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people absorb, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough.
For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and their customers that operating systems was doomed, and that they would eventually need to be ditched and replaced with completely fresh ones. During the late eighties and early nineties, Apple launched a few abortive efforts to make fundamentally new post-Mac OSes, such as Pink and Taligent. When those efforts failed, they launched a new project called Copland—which also failed. In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring Be, but instead they acquired Next, which has an OS called NextStep, which is, in effect, another variant of Unix. As these efforts went on, and on, and on, and failed and failed and failed, Apple’s engineers, who were among the best in the business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely trying to turn the little toaster into a multitasking, Internet-savvy machine, and did an amazingly good job of it for a while—sort of like a movie hero running across a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles’ backs. But in the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles, or step on a really smart one.
I’m writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.