Comment on Dave Winer's iPad/Netbook Piece: "Deliberate Degradation" Has Been Going on for a Long Time
Dave Winer, for those of you unfamiliar with the name, was a pioneer of many of the technologies we use today including RSS and podcasting. So, when he has a strong opinion on a topic, I tend to listen/read-it. However, I disagree about a pair of related points in his recent blog entry titled:
Throwing out software that works
Dave blog item is itself a response to another blogger’s thesis that the iPad is not only transforming the tablet market but also the netbook market. In the course of this commentary, Dave writes:
1. The key difference: There was no bottleneck for software in the pre-iPad netbooks
2. We’re entering an era of deliberate degradation of the user experience and throwing overboard of software that works, for corporate reasons.
There definitely was and still is a software bottleneck for existing netbooks. For example, many interactive web sites do not scale down to the netbooks’ relatively low resolution display of 1024×600 (ot 1024×576). Yahoo! Mail, for example, still warns today about not supporting that screen resolution. Numerous software applications do not scale to the netbook’s low vertical pixel resolution. The result is that dialog boxes and other screen elements appear below the display’s border and are invisible and unclickable.
“Deliberate degradation” has always existed. Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser and Office mobile components on Windows CE and Windows Mobile, for example, has always only provided a subset of features found on the desktop. The awful Windows Mobile web browser is, I believe, one of the reasons so many people abandoned the platform in favor of the iPhone or Android as we became increasingly dependent on a good mobile web experience.
And, Microsoft itself created a degraded netbook experience when they tied licensing Windows to limited hardware resources defined as no more than 1GB RAM and no more than 160GB hard drives. They currently also push Windows 7 Starter Edition with its unnecessary limitations on simultaneous processes.
The iPad’s impact on netbook sales can be partly attributed to Microsoft’s limitations placed on that hardware category. The 1GB RAM/160GB hard drive specification has essentially remained unchanged since netbooks first gained wide attention in the summer of 2008. The 2010 iPad is essentially competing against 2008 netbooks.
