There has long been a grip on digital technology, so tight that it has choked much of it. It is the grip of the tinkering geek. Slowly though, this grip is being loosened and the tinkering geek is becoming less and less relevant to technology and to society. And I say good riddance.
The tinkering geek, by definition loves to tinker. They want to be able to open something up, hack it together, use it for something for which it wasn't originally intended. The tinkering geek wants to run Linux on a toaster or use their iPhone as a remote for everything in their house. The tinkering geek is also who designs and makes a lot of digital products.
Now you may think that these people are the sort of people you want working on designing and building this stuff. They know the subject, they have interesting ideas, they know what they want. The reality is these are the worst people to design anything. For all that they do know, they don't know the most important thing: what does a regular person want?
We are brainwashed from childhood that open is good, choice is good, freedom is good. And yes, to a degree all of those are good. But too much openness leads to unhappiness, too much choice leads to confusion and too much freedom leads to anarchy. There's a reason I don't have the freedom to walk down the street killing everyone I see.
Closed isn't inherently bad. Design by committee is open, design by a single person is closed. I can guarantee that the design by committee will produce a worse product. Open is good in some places and bad in others. Lets take software for example. Tell me a good piece of open source software that is a backend product eg server software, framework etc. There are 100s out there that are best in their class. Now tell me a good piece of open source software aimed at regular people. Not all that many.
Closed also leads to things that open can't. Apple's ecosystems are often considered closed. OS X only runs on Macs, iPhone OS only runs on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Compare this to Windows or Android which runs across 1000s of hardware configurations. Well, if we do compare then we'll see that Apple's ecosystems are generally more stable because they have more control.
One example of a closed ecosystem in our products is Code Collector Pro and codecollector.net. By controlling the whole stack we will be able to implement stuff faster than competitors and even add some things that others aren't able to do at all. If we chose to be completely open and let it work with everything, it is more work for us, more code (increasing the chance of bugs) and doesn't really do anything quite as well.
Now I'm not saying everything in the world should be completely closed. I believe that some things need to be open, but most of these are things for people creating products to take advantage of, not for users to care about. A user doesn't care if a file format is an open standard. What they do care about is "can I save this at work and open it at home" and "will I be able to open it in a few years time".
There was a great TED talk a few years ago on the "Paradox of choice" by a psychologist called Barry Schwartz. You should really watch the full video, but in a nutshell he points out that choice makes people unhappy and reduces your freedom. You don't want to spend choosing, you want to spend time doing. The best way to give users what they want is to have a few distinct choices rather than a large range of slightly different choices.
Apple is a prime example of this. Say I want a computer, here is the general thought process:
To the last question if you say power you get a 13" MBP, if you say price you get a MacBook and if you say portability you get a MacBook Air. Yes there is then the case of choosing which model, but again that comes down to a question of price vs power. The rest is just tweaking.
You want to take away the pressure of choice, you want to choose for them. 99 potential customers may want A and 1 may want B. Ignore the one that wants B. Don't even give users the choice between A and B. Sure you've made 1 person unhappy, but you've made 99 people happy.
The only time you should give the choice to your customers is if there is a really significant minority. Say it was 60 people wanted A and 40 wanted B. That is when you should consider whether adding the choice between A and B outweighs having 66% more people buy your product
The problem is that many people who make the decisions about whether to add a choice are tinkerers and often think "we'll I'd like to tinker around so others might". This leads to the technology we have today which does a hell of a lot of stuff, but which most people don't care about.
Bullshit. I hear this a lot and that is all it really is. Lets look at 2 quotes from a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.
The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.
The idea that having a product that you can tinker with is what allows you to be creative or confident is silly. Technology is a tool. Knowing what is in it and hacking around with it is something a small minority have any interest in or find useful. Far more people care about using tools than what makes them.
Sure, tinkering can be fun to many people, but making tinkering easier for a few could make it a worse tool for everyone else. Lets take the example of the iPad. It could be made easier to tinker with, if you added screws to it to take it apart. However, adding screws increases costs, reduces aesthetics and, if you are also going to lay things out best to those wanting to tinker, could increase the size of the product. How many people would want the ability to take something apart over a cheaper, smaller more aesthetically pleasing product? VERY few.
Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
This is just crazy talk. Sure, you could allow user replaceable batteries, but again like above it leads to a worse product. You have to add a mechanism for the battery to go in, to keep it in place and to encase the actual battery itself. This leads to more weight, more parts so more chance for failure and higher costs and also less space for the actual battery, so lower battery life. Now how many people would choose an easily (because you will be able to do it yourself if you really wanted to) user replaceable battery over a lighter, cheaper, more reliable product with greater battery life? Again, VERY few people.
Now let's think about something fundamental to economics: what are we buying? Contrary to popular belief, we are rarely buying a product. What we are buying is experience and knowledge. When I buy a mobile phone, I am paying for the experience and knowledge of the people that designed it and assembled it. I could, if I really wanted go and design and build my own. But my time is worth more to me than that.
An even better example is visiting a doctor. Why do I go and see a doctor rather than treat myself? Because they have done 5+ years of learning and experience. They know a hell of a lot more than I do. Sure I could go on the internet to find out why I'm ill, but is it really worth it if I'm wrong?
People are willing to pay for stuff that makes their life easier, that means they don't need the knowledge and experience themselves. This is why people pay a mechanic to fix their car or pay a chef in a restaurant to cook a greta meal or pay a company to replace a battery.
As much as some people like to try and convince you that tinkering is key to our freedom, our progress and our existence, they really mean "tinkering is key to my hobby". You don't need to tinker to learn something. Most of my learning was done through reading, watching and listening. Sure it is a way to learn, but it is far from the only way.
People who want to tinker will find a way to tinker, even if it is harder. I can still open an iPhone if I want to, I can still install different software. It just isn't easy and for that I am grateful, because it means that what came out of it was a product that I care less about how it works and more about what I can do with it. The sooner we get more products like this, the sooner we can have technology that is made for the majority, not the minority of tinkering geeks.
Doctorow’s tinkering idea is especially confusing given the fact that electronics repairmen have know for *years* that technology is moving toward “disposable” over “repairable.”
In 1997 I was in avionics school and it was pretty much a given that microprocessor-based radio equipment meant we should mostly learn to detect failed hardware, not try to fix surface mounted parts by hand.
And yet, people who want to tinker with hardware have many more options now. You can buy an Arduino or an ARM kit and build things the Homebrew Computer Club would have drooled over.
Pilky,
It’s better to separate the discussion of whether it’s valuable to hire or relying on a tinkering geek to work on a product, with the discussion of open vs closed system.
To invent or to initiate any type of new product we need tinkering geeks (as long as they’re smart and willing to cooperate).
Not all non-geeks know how to design, and build a product. I assume that you yourself is a tinkering geek (all developers are), but it turns out that you were able to create a great software.
Without the passion of a tinkering geek, there will only be people who talk about ideas, design, and stuff, without knowing how to work on them or realizing it in the best quality and most efficient way.
Not all people who doesn’t know a thing about iPhone OS, apps development, and its design, know how to design apps. They probably know the functionalities that they need, but they may not have a clue to design it.
So there, you need tinkering geeks at some level in order to work on it.
To the extent that Apple products really are closed, they are successful because Apple does such a good job of designing them. They are not closed simply for the sake of being closed.
The way technology has changed you can’t tinker much even if you can open the case. Now everything is on one or two chips. My first minicomputer was built with 7400 logic on a series of boards stuck in a rack. You could access every signal in the whole machine. I once built from scratch a hex keypad and display to inspect and modify address locations in that machine. That is history. It is a different world now
@Jesse: “Without the passion of a tinkering geek, there will only be people who talk about ideas, design, and stuff, without knowing how to work on them or realizing it in the best quality and most efficient way.”
I didn’t tinker with much stuff when I was younger. It is this idea that the only way to learn something is tinkering. Few people learn that way. When I wanted to know about something I would read, listen, watch any info. When I wanted to program I got a book and learned that way. I didn’t try opening something up and tinkering, I don’t have enough time for that.
I agree with Jesse, Apple was founded by two tinkering Geeks. The whole software and hardware industry were founded by tinkering geeks. As far as I can understand all the great (and once great) IT companies like Oracle, Sun and MS were founded by a bunch of tinkering Geeks. It is true that closed systems will soon dominate the consumer market but the result is, it encourages the next generation, our children not to be curious creators but passive consumers.
I think what Pilky meant by “tinkering” geeks are limited to people who took apart and open up things in order to learn it and to create a new product.
In the case of Mac/iPhone software development, the resource to create software are great. Because there are developers who write a book, speak at conferences, and write open source code. Apple themselves are great with their documentation and their talks. So if you participate in the culture that Apple had created, you don’t need to be a tinkering geek in order to create great Mac/iPhone software.
While that may not be the case with other “non-popular” platforms. Which is where tinkering geeks “may” be needed.
“With great tinkering power comes great design responsibility”, I guess 
Apple designs its consumer electronics products as closed as it thinks we can tolerate, and as limited, too, in order to make them as profitable as they can (say, make all peripherals go through a single proprietary connector, release new versions with the obvious features you left previous ones without, etc.). It is one end of an spectrum. We need the Doctorows at the other end, or we’ll get to know “why 1984 won’t be like 1984” but like Huxley’s Brave New iWorld.
There will always be tinkering geeks and tools for them to use. The point is that most companies design for the tinkering geek when they should be designing for the rest of society. So, alpha geeks look at the iPad and think - “oh, I can’t replace the battery” - and dismiss how amazing it really is.Then the press parrots it - as if most press guys care about deep electronics or code. If you want to tinker, download the SDK and make up some really cool stuff using your imagination, the accelerometer, the touch-based interface, the WIFI, the connection to a global marketplace and global network. It’s a tinkerer’s dream!
Also, the choice is not between “tinkering geek” and “passive consumer” - you are making the false assumption that all the content on the iPad is passive. What about a neurologist pulling up brain imaging on it, or a kid painting with her fingers, or someone making music on it, or a college student studying Vector Calculus on it - are these things passive? There will be plenty of text editors and IDE’s for are kinds of computer languages, I’m sure.
Just because a person’s tinkering has brought them knowledge, and over the years a certain expertise, does not mean that their opinion applies to all. It rarely does.
In my 10 years of experience I have seen wealthy tinker types create technological puzzles that don’t add convenience or value to a vast majority of peoples lives, just a specific subset of folks who tinker. Tinkering is a good thing but it is either under research and development or hobby, not product development. Product development for people is a very different process that is more of an “outside inwards” approach.
This piece is written by a hardened consumerist, it seems to me. Phrases like “regular persons” politicizes the world into “geeks” and “regular people”. Something “tea-party"ish about this stance. If I weren’t a tinkerer, I wouldn’t have been able to help countless “regular people” in their introduction to computers, explaining how to unravel Steve Jobs’ “flat-land” mind-set in the confusing and paradoxical software constructs that Steve Jobs thinks is “oh so good for regular people”. No, I think we need more “real geeks” so that the oceans of disposable consumerist computer equipment, closed, opaque, in most cases can be made easy use by “regular persons” some of whom are my clients, and they cringe at Apple’s decision-making process, shrug their shoulders, and close the computure, or put the iPhone down. The nouveau “geeks” are the Apple fan-boys-and-girls who stab and peck at their Apple products like chickens in a well-endowed barnyard. And it will be the “real geeks” who will make your movies and other major entertainment products cobbling together equipment to do computer heavy-lifting which you can never buy on the iTunes store, and which to date, Steve Jobs hasn’t realized, much less explored. Take a look inside the real heavy-lifting MacPros and you’ll see startling modifications…
An unabashed ex- and present-geek,
VV
Apple isn’t the only vendor out there. Apple has tinkering geeks who build stuff for everyone. Other companies have tinkering geeks who think they are building stuff for everyone, but they really are only building stuff for tinkering geeks to the detriment of everyone else.
Not everyone needs to be a tinkering geek in order to be curious and creative. Especially not everyone needs to be a tinkering geek who tinkers with hardware and low-level software.
The iPhone/iPad/iPod touch is a product that makes it very attractive for software tinkering geeks to develop software for it. It does though require them to buy the proper tool for the tinkering geek, the Mac.
@Vladimir: The thing I take issue with is the idea that those who tinker with stuff are somehow superior, how being able to tinker makes you able to better understand technology or become more creative or more confident. The idea that you should be able to tinker with technology is going away, in favour of things well designed for the majority.
Now when I say a regular person, I mean the vast majority of people that don’t care about how something works, but how it helps them. I’m a software developer and for the most part I don’t care how a CPU works, just that it does and it lets me do my job. Now I do know how a general CPU works because that does interest me, but I didn’t need to tinker to find out and I don’t want to tinker with one.
It is a similar argument I hear people make about Macs vs PCs: “You can upgrade PCs”. Question is, how many people do? The vast majority buy a computer, use it and when it is too old they buy a new computer. A prime example is OS upgrades, by far the majority of Windows users don’t buy a Windows upgrade, they buy a new computer that happens to have Windows installed.
But the idea that being closed limits creativity is wrong. I can potentially paint, draw, make music, make a movie etc on the iPad and I’m free to write code for it. I can sell only certain stuff but I can write and install almost anything I want on it.
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