on 9/7/01 4:11 AM, Richard G. DAVIS at msys1_at_charter.net wrote:
>
>>I do strongly believe, however, the the Newton software engineering design
>>was a major strength, one that is/was superior to most alternatives.
>>
>>Why is it that second rate stuff always seems to prevail over better stuff?
It does seem to be that revolutionary products fail in the marketplace.
There is a principle set forth in _The Secrets Of Consulting_ by Gerald
Weinberg that you should never attempt to implement too much change at
once. There are two reasons for this. First, because New Things Never
Work (or at least they often fail in ways we can't expect because
they're new). Second, because people can't get used to too many new
features, the more new features you pack into a product, the more
bewildered people will be. It does NOT MATTER how many times you
demonstrate that the new feature will save the person time or effort,
99.99% of the time they'll distrust it and go back to their old way of
doing things until they see their friends and colleagues doing it again
and again.
So you end up with a great product that a small number of people claim
is just what they've been waiting for and helps them with their lives,
and 99.99% of the marketplace who A) understands the "second revision"
(product with fewer nifty features) better and B) has fewer actual
"first generation bugs" to deal with. The people in the minority (that
would be us Newt users) sneer at the majority (Palm users) for not
"getting it" that the first product had more better cooler features
while the majority sneers at the minority for not being practical enough
and using some esoteric product that A) is hard to understand (if you
don't already grok all the features) and B) nobody else uses.
There are two effects that come from this: first, product support for
the earlier product disappears, which reassures the second-generation
(less ambitious) product users that they've made the right choice and
makes it even harder to switch to the first-generation product. Real
world example: compare Pocket Quicken for Newt with Pocket Quicken for
Palm. feature-for-feature, PQ for Newt is far richer and more robust.
But which one will actually talk to modern versions of Desktop Quicken?
Exactly. So for most people, starting using Newt in this day and age is
an uphill battle.
The second effect is the good news: in the long run, evolution is more
powerful than revolution, and revolution, while unstable, often plants
the seeds for evolution. Every feature added to the Edsel that wasn't in
previous models of automobiles remains with us in automobiles today. The
Edsel was a flop, but everything that made it a flop succeeded in the
long run. OS/2 was a flop, but Windows 2000 has pretty much everything
that OS/2 users used to gloat that NT would never have. It may be hard
for us die-hard fans of Newt to admit, but the Palm of today has come a
long way toward being Newt-like. I agree with most Newton users that the
Palm has a long way to go, but my point remains: every revision of
PalmOS--and even WinCE--makes it look and behave more like Newt than
before. (really! think back to "oh, my god, how could you use a handheld
with only 512K of RAM?" and "how could you use a handheld without a
backlight?" and "how could you use a handheld without any real
handwriting recognition?" well, two out of three ain't bad <vbg>)
It's kind of elitist to just say "oh, the pioneers are the ones with the
arrows in the back" but in technology, it's really true. The very best
we can do is just understand our own place in history and evolution of
these products and use the products that work best for us. The worst we
can do is blame it on "good products with bad marketing" or "the tragedy
of the commons."
It's pointless to tell the Palm crowd that the features that they gloat
about were invented on the Newt that they make fun of, because really,
as much as we want to believe that we're right in picking the
revolutionary tool, they were right too, in passing on the "superior"
revolutionary tool and waiting for evolution. It's frustrating to hear
them say "oh, he *wishes* it were a Palm" when we get a little
frustrated doing something with Newt that no Palm ever made can do, but
what are you going to do? In another ten years, they'll have Newtons,
but they won't know it.
And probably, neither will we. =^)
Steve
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