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The Curse of Knowledge Bogs Down Innovation
Secret of Raising Smart Kids writes ""I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too," says David Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." The "curse of knowledge," is the paradox that as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off because the walls of the box we think inside of thicken along with our experience. An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems." Another solution is to force yourself to become a beginner again like making yourself shoot basketball left-handed."
This isn't meant to troll Microsoft but I've spent the night fighting with a Microsoft Firewall and various other XP related hassles. I really seriously wonder if it wouldn't do their engineers some good to force them to use DOS 6.2 and a Unix based system for a week a month. Windows has gotten so bloated and cumbersome I think it'd do them some good to see how a more straightforward OS functions. What they seem to have into their heads is we all can't wait to get the new version of Windows. The problem is most of us don't use an OS we use software and all the bloat is slowing down the software and creating nightmarish stability problems. My windows software crashes several times an hour on average where as the Mac it's several times a month. This isn't trying to troll Windows in favor of Mac but Mac went back to a Unix type OS and gained a lot of stability doing it, not to mention security. The more crap you pile ontop the more holes form. They need to strip it back to the bone and preferrably take a page from Apple and start over. They're kind of like a frieghter at this point so turning around will be slow and painful but they blew their chance with Vista so instead and following Mac they kept piling on the code and now it takes up drastically more drive space, ram and it's slower. Why is this a surprise? I still say NT 3.51 was the best OS I ever used. It was stable and for the time fairly easy to use. They were headed in the right direction but they strayed off the path. I was a devoted Windows user back then and laughed when my Mac friends tried to convince me it was superior. It wasn't back then but a lot has changed and Windows needs to get back to it's roots. DOS may not have been user friendly but it was lean and stable.