I love it every time when Nick Carr pulls out his lighter and sets fire to someone's sacred cow, not because he is always right, but because the ensuing controversy almost always manages to pull some hidden assumptions and disagreements over the status quo out into the light.

I read this recent hit on his new book "The Big Switch" the other day and it helped clarify my own thinking on the matter. It's worth quoting at length:

Today brings black clouds for the IT department in the form of a new book by noted IT critic, Nicholas Carr. Mr. Carr, who made his bones last year with an article contending that corporate IT departments don't provide any strategic advantage, has a new book where he predicts that future IT departments will be operated by one person sitting at a computer issuing commands to outsourced providers via the Internet. Alas, the lonely system administrator gets even less respect and will be the maytag repairman for this century.

This seems to overlook the fact that software and systems have not evolved to be intuitive and easy to use for the end-user. [Sales pitch redacted]

It hasn't? Really? I suppose it depends on your perspective. Certainly that is counter to what big vendors have been claiming for years... every software release is more intuitive and easier to use if you believe the marketing hype. On the other hand, you know and I know that Office 2007 was a train wreck from a usability standpoint, as has been almost every new version of Office.

Still, there was a time when WYSIWYG word processing didn't even exist... are you really going to stand there and tell me computers haven't evolved since then? I think the real problem here is that the playing field keeps changing and we find ourselves facing new challenges that seem as hard as any have ever been, but that does not mean that advances in usability have not been made. If one insists on shackling oneself to complicated software, then it will seem as though nothing has changed... but if you have moved to, say, Google Docs for your word processing, the advances in intuitive software design seem obvious.

There are two factors at work here. One is simply inertia; we are used to complicated systems, and we tend not to adopt simpler ones because they are new. The other is profit motive. Most of the features that most people needed in a word processor were complete in Word 4.0. But Microsoft wouldn't be making any money if it weren't selling you a new version of Office every two or three years, and the vast ecosystem of consultants and IT professionals responsible for recommending, installing, and maintaining all that software wouldn't either. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but a lot of people have a lot of interest in keeping things complicated.

Nick's point is that the market has an interest in those things being efficient, and that it's bound to have its way at some point. The complexity that we see now is in fact disappearing (at least from the user's perspective; see any Web 2.0 site for examples) and the fact that it continues to impinge on users at all isn't simply a Fact of the Universe, but an artificial and transient condition that is rapidly fading.