Nothing New Under the Sun
Microsoft Word was created in 1983 and Microsoft Excel in 1985. Have you ever considered how many people it took to create these tools?
For Word, two men by the names of Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, basing their work on Xerox's Bravo.
For Excel, ten people took on the task, basing their work heavily upon VisiCalc.
The creators of these tools were also producing them for a much more constrained environment than we have today, with their user's computers generally having between 64 kilobytes and 128 kilobytes of RAM, more than an order of magnitude less than what the average person has in their phone.
Notice too that they were building on work done prior to these projects, meaning that the ancestor product had been made in more primitive conditions. Yes, Word and Excel were better, more magnificent in effectively every way, but the key fact is that only a few men were responsible. These men built upon the work of a few other men before them, who built on the work of a few men before them, and on and on we could play this game of regress.
In 1983, Microsoft is estimated to have had around 100 people total in their employ, across programmers and all other company needs.
Nowadays, estimations that bubble out to the public claim that there are easily over 100 software developers that work on Microsoft Word day-in and day-out.
Why does software work require so many people today?
Many reasons are often given to this question:
- Software is visually much more appealing these days and that requires a lot of time and effort.
- A small group of people could not possibly understand all the constraints a product requires. You must have many voices actively involved in the process for the product to be successful.
- The programmers responsible for these early systems were special geniuses of their time, and so we should not compare apples to oranges by pitting modern developers against them.
To be frank, we at Autobutler believe these reasons are nothing more than copium, and are a result of the people working on these products missing the forest for the trees. There are some grains of truth to each of these reasons, but these are not grains of yeast that should have leavened the whole lump.
Rather, the manpower required to create software today is due to constraints that corporations have themselves placed on the consumer.
You don't want to run that software locally, do you? We can make it so you can use it from your web browser anywhere! Don't worry, we will store the files for you in our own computers, and you will just need the internet to access them! Why would you pay for software? Just use our service, and, trust us, we will keep it free...
It is not the software product that became difficult to manage, it is the new product that became difficult to manage, and that is you.
You have to be willing to ask yourself the question, "How is Google Docs free?" It is not altruism, it is not corporate licensing fees, but it is your data. Your data feeds the advertising apparatus that now permeates every corner of the internet.
In order to support this business change, an inordinate amount of work is done behind the scenes:
- Programmers are hired to write the version of these products that require an internet connection
- Programmers are then hired to write the code to collect your data from these internet-bound products
- More programmers are then hired to interpret that data
- Even more programmers are hired to act on that data to guide personalized advertisements to your internet browsing
- Now you need people dedicated to stewarding these large systems, a notoriously risky and stressful job.
- Eventually, there is simply too much data and you must build more datacenters, (which in turn makes it harder for consumers to have their own computers)
- Designers and psychologists are hired to run A/B testing experiments on their users, in order to maximize the data they can collect from your usage of the product
No longer is this about a word processing or spreadsheet product, but now it is all about you and what others can sell to you across the rest of the internet.
You just wanted to take notes during a meeting, or write a letter to your spouse, prepare a report on frogs, and budget for the upcoming year.
What must be done?
Slash and burn.
From The mythical man-month, "As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing cease to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress...A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary." (Brooks, 1995)
I would say data brokering as a whole is a continual "backward step" being taken by these companies. On top of that, when a software product used to live on your home computer you rarely experienced it "being down". Now, multiple major services experience an outage every week, disrupting your ability to use them in the first place.
What is Autobutler doing?
We hope to inspire people to take this issue into their own hands, and for companies to respect the consumer once again. For too long they have created abstractions that benefit them at the cost of the dignity of the consumer. Autobutler is rebuilding data storage systems "from-the-ground-up". These are not cathedrals that will take hundreds of years, however, we share fraternity with the third stonecutter; this is not just a job to us. He was building a cathedral, and we are building the resistance.