Is Nintendo the real threat to 21st century computing?
The computer has created a wealth of new employment opportunities and has changed the working lives of millions.
But so did the invention of the motor car. And perhaps what I am seeing in the workplace today parallels what happened in those first few years of the automobile.
The first drivers were also the mechanics and often the assemblers of their own vehicles.
The first computer users often built or assembled at least part of their machine and wrote the software to run it.
By the time the First World War had begun, the motor car was becoming an almost commonplace sight, but it was still reserved for the rich, the daring and the skilled.
By the time the 286 was on the market, certain far-sighted people were learning new saleable skills on the computer, investing in themselves and the future. Often, what they attempted to do was virtually impossible, requiring workarounds, a little programming knowledge and lots of late nights.
By the mid-twenties, Henry Ford had made the car almost commonplace, at least in America. It required strength and a little skill to get it going, but it ran (slowly) most of the time. It wasn’t a comfortable trip, but it got you there.
The 386 introduced a new dimension to computing. It was priced well, reasonably quick and offered many applications. The complexity of DOS was never far away, but applications were getting easier to use and this new graphical interface thing was well-established and looked like catching on at long last.
By the thirties, the motor car had matured. And the change was amazing. In the space of a few years the car had become a luxurious experience, often powered by sophisticated supercharged engines and driven through exotic transmissions. Ordinary people had ordinary cars, and at the higher levels of society, professional chauffeurs were common. These chauffeurs were skilled drivers and able mechanics. Those less professional souls who owned or drove an automobile in the course of their business or pleasure were now required to be licensed. Skills in carburettor tuning, distributor sanding, tyre changing and general maintenance were still mandatory.
Where are we now in computing? In my opinion, somewhere between the twenties and thirties.
The average workers believe that by some magical process, sitting down in front of a computer and turning it on will somehow create a magic “knowledge transfer beam” that will shoot information into their heads. With a wave of the mouse, they believe everything will become clear. That by sitting in front of the PC they will absorb all the knowledge they need through osmosis. These people, as far as I can see, constitute the majority of all office workers, and the greater majority of the Public Service in NSW.
The trouble is that they don’t have to be licensed to drive, they don’t have enough interest in themselves or their job to master the programs they use, they refuse to put any of their own precious time into developing the skills they need, and they are constantly calling for the NRMA (our AAA, a.k.a. the PC support person) and telling them that the damn car is broken.
The NRMA of course, discovers that they’ve left the handbrake on, or have let the car run out of water or oil.
We’ve given the people new tools, but those tools still require skills that the average office worker isn’t prepared to develop. It’s a problem that only enforced training will alleviate, and only if the employees actually decide that it is in their best interests to LEARN, but I would suggest that the money spent on training will be the best money a business can ever spend.
What really irritates me, though, are the people who are passing themselves off as computer professionals. In my own business I’ve seen PC support people who knew nothing about software, I’ve seen supposed illustrators who were flummoxed if you gave them an unusual graphics file, and I’ve seen operators of all kinds of programs who never learned the shortcuts, never picked up the speed and never bothered to learn anything at all about the “car” they were driving.
And it really irritates me to pay a “chauffeur”, then watch him buck, jerk and weave the car down the road at two kilometres an hour.
I’d really like to believe that the next generation will be more skilled — but I think, increasingly, we’ll be faced with Nintendo-taught “experts”, and corporate training will become even more critical.