What can users do? [was Re: [Sigiii-l] plaza please post]

[Peter Jörgensen]

It seems to me that much of the upgrading that users do is not really 
necessary. The manufacturers of IT are competing in a growing market. 
This means they need a good deal of differentiation to attract the new 
buyers. This differentiation takes the form, from most companies, of 
added features, rather than style. A mature industry (e.g. the auto 
industry) adds relatively few features each year but does a lot with 
stylistic (read aesthetic) aspects of their products. A 1960's (or even 
probably earlier) car is completely compatible with the current roads 
and driving protocols. It is fast enough to keep up with traffic on the 
highway, it has the necessary lights and license plate mounting 
technology, it's about the same size as other cars on the road, etc. 
Even a 1910 car can still drive on the highways without too much 
"incompatibility". Now, let's look at equivalent IT. Can you do the 
word processing you need with a 1985 system? You bet! Lots of people 
produced lots of complex documents (like PhD dissertations) using those 
systems. Can you do sophisticated what-if analyses with a 1985 
spreadsheet? Of course you can. So why do we all think we need the 
latest versions of these and other IT tools? I'll leave that question 
for you to decide for yourself.

I'll finish with the following thoughts more directly (perhaps) related 
to Charles' question:

On Saturday, Oct 12, 2002, at 10:59 US/Eastern, Charles Lam wrote:

> The question is: what can end users do to help ourselves, to
> improve the utility, cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness of ICT?

To improve the:
Utility:
	Most ICT has more utility than we need already, we need to learn how 
to use what's already there.

Cost-effectiveness:
	Stop upgrading unnecessarily. Adopt open-source standards.

User-friendliness:
	Scale back your expectations for features. Every feature (whether you 
use it or not) adds complexity and therefore reduces user-friendliness.



Dr. Peter Jörgensen [LIS 4482 and 4488/5489]
Visiting Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies -
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
850-644-8116 (work)
850-574-0776 (home)
pjorgensen at lis.fsu.edu