Software design manifesto - speech by ON Technology Inc. Chairman Mitchell Kapor at Personal Computing Forum 1990

RELease 1.0, Annual, 1990 by Mitchell Kapor

Esther Dyson, EDventure Holdings: Now, Mitchell, software design manifesto. You have to have an installed base, so go to it.

Mitchell Kapor, ON Technology: I have an installed base of 5 million units.

[Laughter]

Kapor: Good morning. It's fun to spend 20 minutes sharing ideas about things important to the pc industry.

I want to tell you how I got my copy of my speech here because it reveals where we are today. I was editing it on a portable computer on the way out here - I also brought a portable printer to print it out. Yesterday morning I realized I had brought the wrong cable for the printer. This sent me into a panic because I wasn't going to set up my Macintosh portable up here and read to you from that. So I decided to figure out the shortest route to getting a hard copy.

I also brought a modem. I realized if I was really lucky, the hotel telephone would support analog phone lines, so I could connect the modem. If I could figure out how to get my Microsoft Word document into an MCI mailer, how to connect to MCI and how to use the FAX option on MCI, I could FAX myself a copy of the speech at the hotel.

[Laughter]

After 45 minutes of fooling around and crashing a couple of times because I had never done this before, I actually did it the copy you see here today is the very copy ! [Laughter and applause]

Kapor: What can we learn from this experience?

[Laughter]

John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers: Bring the right cable.

Kapor: John Doerr says bring the right cable. This is absolutely typical of where we are today in personal computing. If you can get the stuff to work, you can do absolutely fabulous things.

Jim Manzi commented recently about the revolution being won. in one sense that's absolutely true. Pcs have become part of the fabric of the global economy and the mainstream of the computer industry. They're doing wonderful things for lots of people. But the flip side of the coin - revealed by my experience - is that the daily experience of using these devices is still fraught with difficulty.

There isn't one user in a thousand who could have figured out how to do what I did yesterday. No doubt several hundred of you could have done the same thing, granting that we all have a level of expertise. We know how to go into the guts and change the configuration files, the set-ups, the baud rates and an the thousands of details you have to get right to make the stuff perform.

However, tens of millions of people with personal computers can't do that; they don't want to do that; they're never going to learn to do that.

We forget about this, because we are insular and already know how to do it. There's no question people have mastered just enough of 1-2-3 or another spreadsheet or their word processor to get through their daily work. What they've mastered is a teeny-tiny fraction of the features of those programs. And they use a teeny-tiny fraction of the capabilities we've already delivered.

What is peculiar is not the situation, but that we find it so unremarkable. "PC Week" is not writing that, for most people, using the computer is still a pain in the rear unless they stick to the half-dozen things they know how to do.

If you do go to Montana, where Steve is today and where I've been for the last year, and talk to

[Laughter]

Users don't talk about this because they're embarrassed and think something is wrong with them. They think they're stupid. They think they're the only people in the world who have this problem. It's the secret shame of the industry that...

[Applause] ... we've made all this terrific technology and it's being widely disseminated. But for most people the daily experience of using the computer is still very frustrating.

Heave it through the window

The system has begun to accommodate itself to this in corporations with large installed bases. We're re-establishing a brotherhood of computer specialists who come in, install, configure, deal with network and communications issues and bail out people when they get into trouble. Gee, it's just the way computing used to be before pcs.

I deal with this by keeping in touch with a healthy rage about how difficult it is to use computers. Not a week goes by that I don't want to pick the thing up off the desk and heave it through the window.

In this regard we've made tremendous progress. Six years ago a computer on my desk was a 60-pound IBM AT with a monitor. I couldn't heave it through the window even if I wanted to. But today I've got a six-pound Compaq LTE, and believe me I can really chuck that thing. Now the Macintosh portable, on the other hand, has a problem because its performance still isn't up to the point where you can get any velocity when you want to throw it through the window.

[Laughter]

They're saying, We're no longer responsible for manufacturing and marketing. We're focusing on product development." I'm sure they're going to solve that problem.

[Laughter]

A bits-and-bytes orientation

Am I here to complain about this? I am not here to complain or bemoan this fact. I want to talk about changes to accelerate the process of making the technology more broadly usable.