Geoff Duncan

The longer I've participated in the "high-tech" world, the less interested I am in it. Like the myth of the paperless office, I find way too much effort on technology, services, and products goes into market-ability, whiz-bang "ooh cool!"-ness, and sheer crassness than into making the stuff work in reliable, useful ways.

Why do I bring this up? Because I realized today it's been over ten years since the first releases of the Netscape browser, which was one of the primary products to unleash the so-called Internet boom. And you know what? Browsers are still hard to use, non-intuitive, and horribly broken. Folks creating Web sites have no meaningful way to know whether their content is accessible to visitors, and in many cases (bloggers, I'm talking to you!) have essentially no control over the way their content is presented, repurposed, and distributed. And yet the industry has "moved on" and is now focussing on insipid, inane things like wireless phones, PCs installed in cars to better shove advertisements at you, and instant messaging.

You know what? I don't have an iPod. I don't have a cell phone. I don't have a blog. I don't have a PDA. I don't have Wi-Fi. I don't have a laptop. I do have a computer which, running the very latest and greatest up-to-date operating system available, is incapable of doing the work I was doing on a two-generations-older computer five years ago.

Oooh yeah. Feel the burn. That's progress.