Why would non-technical users want computing under their control? Isn't the market going the other way, more and more towards walled gardens? Seems like a Chromebook or iPad would have far fewer headaches for the typical user who just wants Facebook and email.
The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.
"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.
If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.
Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.
Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.
Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.
If someone is going to naively brute-force your login screen, it's safe to assume they're going to look at the sign-up password requirements anyway. Nobody is just going to throw the whole unicode character set at your password field and go from 1 to infinity characters in order to guess your passwords.
More likely a hashed table gets leaked and they just compare it with existing rainbow tables. Password hints do nothing to protect against that, while inconveniencing your real users.
For a real user trying to guess their password, providing hints (that already match your signup rules) might take them down from 10 wrong guesses to 2 or 3, a huge improvement. For brute-forcing bots, it might take them from 5 years to 4.5 years per password. So what?
If it's another human trying to guess someone's password, again, the requirements are already there in the sign up screen. Also, it's probably easier just to spearphish them with a fake email or try to answer their (not-so) secret questions based on public records and whatnot.
That's the one UI control I hate the most. Please don't do that. It replaces 3 seconds of typing 1 (tap) 15 (tap) 1969 into a tedious thumb game, especially if you have to scroll through three decades of years. Even Apple recently replaced it (https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/08/12/redesigned-date-tim...), thank god.
Pleeeeeeeeease don't do that. The dropdowns are fine, and much superior.
I realize this isn't data. What you call "awesome" I call "nightmarish". I would love to see actual research on the usability of that particular date picker scroll widget... maybe most users prefer it? I dunno.
No idea to be honest. I rather like it as an iOS user and our iOS users never - and I do mean 0 times - complained, while our ticketing system was full of Android users complaining about picking their birthday.
With our [day][month][year] dropdowns we have no more complaints on picking date times. But I have a feeling the iOS experience took a hit. Again, this is personal and not backed by data (because we simply have no more birthday picking complaints).
The digital marketers I've known typically just configure ads in marketplaces not controlled by them, plus use questionable (both in terms of ethics and impact) SEO practices and dubious statistical analysis of poorly verified third party analytics to fool clients into thinking they're doing useful work. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors with a sheen of respectability because it's backed by household tech company names. But there's rarely with a sufficient look at the funnel or actual user/customer/market research or weeding out confounding variables. They mostly just do the sorta stuff you can do yourself after a few hours on LinkedIn Learning. IMO doing this the right way takes someone who both understands the tech stack of it, including tracking prevention nuances, and the marketing side of it, and the statistics side of it, and the business side of it. People like that are rare to come by and don't typically enjoy working for advertising firms for small time small business clients because it's mostly just tedium and limited room for innovation and growth. Like managing the back pages of a local magazine, I imagine.
I've spent years at the intersection of dev work, marketing, advertising, analytics, SEO, etc. for small businesses. Now the I know how terrible a job they usually do, I'd never pay a consultancy to do that work. I probably wouldn't even bother with it myself. It's mostly just faith based prayers to a few ad marketplaces who's interests are inherently in conflict with yours. It's a shitty marketplace all the way around.
Dev work has a higher barrier to entry, for now, so it's less easy to bullshit your way through with clients. The resulting software either does what it's supposed to (with bugs, of course) or not. Whereas the successful or failure of many digital marketing campaigns are largely matters of faith and not evidence.
You'll find bad professionals everywhere you'll look. The difference is that a marketers job is more visible then a devs, because most of it is to get in front of people's eyes balls.
That's why it's easy to perceive that marketing is mostly shit... because it is, and no wonder, it's not "hidden" in the backend or in some git repo.
Ads live in public scrutiny.
A lot of the dev work would probably just make you cringe just like many ads. You just don't see it.
With that said, you're right that the barrier of entry it's lower, and I don't think the hard part of marketing/advertising is the campaign setups - that's mostly being reduced to a step-by-step wizard. Thankfully! But that won't make marketing any good, in fact, you'll just see more of the bad stuff.
It's less about transparency and more about the culture. Developers sell deliverables and marketing consultants sell attempts. As the GP said very few are actually willing to charge based on conversions, because they know they won't make many. Smoke and mirrors.
As someone in marketing. You are right. Many in the field only understand promotion. And that doesn’t make a good marketer. Sometimes it is intentional sliminess, but often it is just a lack of understanding how everything fits together. It is compounded because every client thinks marketing is advertising and advertising is 1:1. It rarely is, but no one wants to hear it. So agencies lie and say it is to get your business, because if they don’t the client will go to the person that tells them biggest lie most convincingly. No one can promise results. It is impossible to say an ad spend of X will lead to sales of Y unless they have already run a similar campaign with your business or product before. Even then it is merely an educated guess.
You think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go ahead and add a little of each to all of them?
More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".
(edit... sorry, don't know how this turned into a long rant. Started typing over lunch and just couldn't stop... feel free to skip this, just a stream-of-consciousness dump.)
Somewhere between Japanese idiosyncrasies and American exceptionalism, we could learn a lot from other developed societies. We just don't, because we're arrogant, ignorant, and proudly so. We mask our social ills with flags and nationalism, even though there's hardly a cohesive America left to be proud about.
IMO this isn't some academic problem like fusion, but a problem of people and politics. Speaking of values, there's a good values overlap between the police, the military, Scouting, religion, gun culture, and conservative politics & politicians. All are hierarchical, patriarchal, heavily focused on in-group loyalty and proud displays of status and power. It's a self-reinforcing good-ol-boys network that's fighting back against cultural extinction. The thin blue line, the whatever %ers, the MAGA folks... all are part of the same general in-group. To them they are the only legitimate America, and everyone else is an outsider, intruder, imposter, hellbent on destroying everything they hold dear. They don't want a multicultural America; multi-ETHNIC might be OK, but only if they fall in line and know their place.
This is not really about the tactics of policing, or training, or body cameras, but about people whose identities rely on power, status, and tradition rather than collective well-being and social innovation.
Japan is on the other side of that spectrum of collectivity. Japan is lucky (in this context) in that they are also overwhelmingly homogenous, so there isn't much of a outgroup to rebel against. They have plenty of social problems but militarized policing isn't one of them.
To the Western world, aside from its bleeding-edge aesthetics, Japanese society is heavily hierarchical, traditional, patriarchal, conservative, orderly... similar to the good-ol-boys we have here, except there, there isn't really much of a challenge to that power structure. There's no Japanese BLM equivalent to put that in sharp contrast with other elements of their society (which exist only on the fringe).
American culture, in contrast, has largely moved on (by % of population) from the good-ol-boys lifestyle, but those elements in our society are still there, and still clinging on, and hold a disproportionate amount of political power and an overwhelming amount of the firepower. Everyday, centrist Americans without significant exposure to violence and crime tend to be more welcoming of outsiders than the conservative elements, but can be easily swayed in both directions by political propaganda.
Long ago the movements veered from discussions about tactical reform and into basically mass marketing with gospel-like, life-or-death overtones and tidy slogans and us-vs-them mentalities. There's no coming back from that... you can go from "police reform" to "culture war", but it's much harder to de-escalate from that and ask about, "Wait, wait, instead of getting rid of police officers, what if we provided community specialists alongside them..."
Trump purposely escalated it into a us-vs-them thing, all the time, everywhere, across any divide he was able to weaponize, because it suited his campaign. We now pay the costs, as a society, with Biden sitting as a lame duck in the middle of it all, begging people to listen to him and be reasonable... but nobody does anymore. There's no one America anymore, just warring factions bound by a shared economy but no shared values.
shrug
Fundamentally a country this heterogenous is difficult if not impossible to govern. Maybe a EU-style model with more local autonomy would be more appropriate than federalism with supremacy. Our real flags now are either black, white, and blue or rainbow-colored, and the ol' stars and stripes are just hanging in tatters in the no man's land between them. Why not just acknowledge the reality and secede into more autonomous, culturally compatible regions and stop fight each other? There's room enough in the world for different societies & values systems, but not if they are forced by external factors to live by the same set of values against their consciences.
This is actually SUPER useful because it means you can upload one master image and have the API automatically generate thumbnails, hover states, text overlays, face-detected cropping, effects, shapes, source sets, WEBP versions, etc. And then it manages all the caching, invalidations, CDNs, etc. too. It fits really well into serverless architectures where you don't want to have to maintain and scale your own backend instance of ImageMagick or similar. It turns hours of work into seconds.
But it's also a pretty mature field: Imgix and Cloudinary both do this much more powerfully and much cheaper. 10,000 cropped images (say, for thumbnails) would cost $100 on Micro but be free or nearly so on either Imgix and Cloudinary.
For the more complex APIs (like images, ironically), I would rather trust one of the bigger companies that have been doing that -- and only that -- for years, with more forgiving pricing.
For simpler APIs, I'd just build it as a serverless functions straight in Cloudflare Workers or similar. Much cheaper, probably faster and more reliable infrastructure, and scalable.
The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.
"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.
If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.
Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.
Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.
Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.