On Simplicity Part 2
There are a lot of tech tools that "everybody uses." That's the conventional wisdom. Even Paul Krugman, whose area is economics rather than technology, has pointed out that "Few people love Word, PowerPoint or Excel, but most people, myself included, use them because they’re so widely used that it’s hard to do anything different.". Economists like Krugman call this effect "network externalities." It's when "the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."
Sure, there are products or services that depend on the other users, but those are mostly the social networks like Facebook where the "utility" is the connection. When it comes to tools like Word, it's not the tool itself that's important; it's the file format. If you send me a document in Word's file format, you don't know or (I assume) care how I read it; what's important is that I can, somehow.
This is a lot easier than it used to be. A long time ago, file formats were a complication. It could be pretty difficult to share documents because as soon as computing began to be dominated by software you bought instead of software you made (or shared), many of the sellers figured out that if their version of a standard utility program (like a word processor or spreadsheet) was the only one that worked with their file format, they made that file format as mysterious as possible. They wanted walls around their products so once you were "in" you couldn't easily escape.
File formats have never been the only wall around computer products, but they were an important one. Also one that I've resisted from the start. It was all the way back in the days of the Apple II computer that I saw file formats as a problem to be solved. There were far more choices, in those days. If you just wanted to share documents with your friends in the local computer club, it was already an issue. That was because while lots of those clubs were brand-specific and you were all Apple II users, there were still dozens of word processing products, and many of them had unique file formats. The walls went up pretty quickly, even when "sharing documents" meant trading floppy disks or posting on a "bulletin board" using a modem and your land-line telephone.
Worse, even if you and your friends mostly settled on one utility program and its file format, you had to worry about versions. Sometimes the file format changed, and if you didn't buy the new version of your utility program but your friends did, once again there could be a wall blocking your interaction. Not only that, but it would be more difficult to open your own documents that you created with previous versions. And when the old 8-bit hardware systems everybody used began to be superseded by new, more capable computers there were multiple walls to find your way over. Floppy disks changed formats, became double-sided rather than single-sided. Changed size so your old disks wouldn't even fit in your new disk drives.
All these things were complications. The solution was simplicity in file formats. Plain text was, and is, the simple choice. Every computer (well, OK, almost every computer) could open and save plain text files. And a weird thing happened. Plain text was the way file formats started, at least in personal computing. Then we wanted to do more complex things with documents, like boldface and italic text, headings that stood out, and more. For a little while users were seduced by "desktop publishing," where we suddenly had the ability to do the kind of fancy layout and typography we saw in the paper-based magazines we used to read.
For a while, typography ("fonts") got important to vastly more people than ever before. I remember obsessing over placement of illustrations on a page, the way the text was wrapped around a graphic element, and so on. It was...complicated. The utility programs we used for all that also had their own mysterious file formats. And the formats were more mysterious because they accounted for more complexity.
Nowadays the question of file formats is much less problematic. If you want to share information, you can just enter text into a web page, and it's stored (usually) as plain text interspersed with formatting instructions in HTML. There's (still) some complication around images and image formats, not to mention audio and video, but unless you need specific resolution or individual features, the whole operation of sharing information is pretty simple.
In large corporate settings it can be different — and here I'm talking mostly about sharing inside the corporation. There are usually standards, but they change. Network effects can be very fast and very extreme inside a corporation, which traps employees inside different sorts of walls. With no warning, a new utility program can become "the thing to use," regardless of whether it solves a problem or essentially causes new issues. (It probably does both.) The ongoing effect inside the corporation is usually ongoing complexity.
There's a funny thing about complexity; people often like it, as long as they've mastered it. Or at least are further along in mastering it than others are. There are entire fields of activity that have gradually constructed walls of complexity. The walls are constructed out of language (jargon), utility software that might be very expensive in addition to being very complicated to use, professional associations, and even degrees or certifications. Here I'm not talking about field that require knowledge and skills that are inherently difficult, like physical science or medicine. Technical writing is an example. The basic skill is something everybody learns in elementary school: write things down so other people can understand. Most people can do this at least at a basic level. But when technical writing becomes your job, I think complication becomes attractive. It makes your job feel more like science or medicine; more important, and something that not everybody can do."
People seem to like walls of all sorts, especially when the walls confer some sort of exclusivity. Few people can afford hypercars like Bugattis and Lamborghinis, so if you own one, maybe you "feel special." In a less flamboyant way, you can "feel special" if you can format simple instructions in a fantastically complex way using, say, very specific XML codes. Complexity can exist as a wall to exclude everybody else. Simplicity is the opposite; simplicity includes.