An interesting editorial by Preston Gralla over on the O’Reilly Windows Dev Center asks, Why Has Microsoft Abandoned the Power User?. Preston writes:
The upcoming final releases of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 make one thing exceedingly clear: Microsoft has abandoned the power user, allowing fewer and fewer customizations and tweaks. By doing this, they’re leaving behind a very loyal audience.
On the one hand, I agree with Preston that this is a sad trend for computer users. Systems that make easy things easy, and hard things possible (as Larry Wall famously said about Perl) are the best possible systems.
I remember when I wrote Windows 95 in a Nutshell (now Windows XP in a Nutshell, although I didn’t write that version.) I approached the task the same way I approached Unix Power Tools, looking for all the cool, undocumented features, and tricks for getting more out of the system. And I found a lot. Windows 95, 98, and XP all had all kinds of power user features, even though they weren’t well documented. Learning all the stuff that Microsoft didn’t tell me made me like the system, since I could make it work for me, rather than the other way around.
But at the same time, I wonder if Microsoft throwing in the towel on customization isn’t a symptom of deeper changes in the computer industry. After all, in the 50’s, every red-blooded young man hacked on his car. As they became ubiquitous, the hacker frontier moved on, and cars became less hackable. (Although there are always new ways to bring hacking skills even to a closed ecosystem. See for example Car PC Hacks, as well as the rich ecosystem of hacking on auto electronics.) We used to hack our PCs by writing assembly code, then with the registry, and now, perhaps not at all — except by ripping out the OS that comes with it and putting in a more powerful one.
It could be, as Preston suggests, that Microsoft is trying to lock down their users. But in some ways, you can see this move by Microsoft as throwing in the towel, and admitting that the PC is now furniture, and that the frontier of innovation has moved on. Seen this way, it’s one more sign that the web is becoming the platform.