Angry Old Fat Dude here, and I've been especially steamed recently. Why? Because computers suck and everybody knows it, that's why.
How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you've ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn't really easy to use.
You don't need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.
How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.
Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn't change for over 100 years.
Now, hold on, you're probably saying "But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They're not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!"
Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It's a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices - the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer - or propose an entirely new device - another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.
Add to this the respective intellectual property rights of all the hardware and software AND the "freedom" of giving the user at least four different (but all as unintuitive as Chinese algebra) ways to accomplish a single task, and you land straight into machine hell, where you burn in hair-tearing, eye-bleeding, screaming frustation.
I visit that hell often, but I was in a particularly hot section the other night when I wanted to watch a DVD on my computer. Blade Runner Director's Cut, to be exact.
I had a functional DVD drive in my computer; it copied data beautifully. I had fully upgraded Windows XP installed, works like a charm. At one time in the past, I had been able to just pop a DVD in the drive, and it would play just like it was in a dedicated DVD player.
But not that night, oh HELL no.
I had been swapping out DVD drives to fix a problem with my oldest son's computer a few weeks before. I never got his problem sorted out, but I decided to keep the drives in their new locations and load the appropriate software to let mine play DVDs. Because hey, that's what a DVD drive does, it... plays... DVDs!
But not that night, oh HELL no.
I tried everything I knew to fix the software. I uninstalled all DVD related software and reinstalled only the program that I thought would work, which I had actually paid for as opposed to the limited programs that came with the drive. I tried downloading free programs that specifically promised to play DVDs, which they didn't. Finally I remembered a free program from my workplace that everyone seemed to have, VLC Player. I loaded it up, put the DVD into the drive, and it just worked.
This excursion into the fiery depths of digital Hades made me realize why the e-book readers were so popular, and why computers as personal devices are on their way out. E-readers have a consistent interface where you can accomplish a task in only one way, and with few exceptions they just work, dammit.
And that's all you really need.