<story><title>An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company</title><url>https://www.shyamsankar.com/p/technology-is-the-problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>There have been systematic studies of this.  UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s.&lt;p&gt;So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.&lt;p&gt;People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”.  That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.</text></item><item><author>candiddevmike</author><text>The Costco screenshot is really interesting.  The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast.  A non-technical worker wouldn&amp;#x27;t take long to understand the system and the keys&amp;#x2F;shortcuts to do something quickly.  I remember having to sit with a few folks when we were looking at modernizing an app, watching them with a few key strokes process a record or something and thinking &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll never match this speed&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Analemma_</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re zeroing in on the actual answer to &amp;quot;why did we replace these awesome high-speed text interfaces with slow GUIs?&amp;quot; Businesses aren&amp;#x27;t stupid or irrational: they switched because they moved to an employment model based on a disposable labor force, where workers wouldn&amp;#x27;t be expected to stick around long enough for training to be worth it, so it was more important to make an interface that was good enough for the endless revolving door of untrained users.</text></comment>
<story><title>An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company</title><url>https://www.shyamsankar.com/p/technology-is-the-problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>There have been systematic studies of this.  UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s.&lt;p&gt;So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.&lt;p&gt;People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”.  That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.</text></item><item><author>candiddevmike</author><text>The Costco screenshot is really interesting.  The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast.  A non-technical worker wouldn&amp;#x27;t take long to understand the system and the keys&amp;#x2F;shortcuts to do something quickly.  I remember having to sit with a few folks when we were looking at modernizing an app, watching them with a few key strokes process a record or something and thinking &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll never match this speed&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.</text></comment>