This is an extremely common fallacy. The tech to make thin capacitive screen devices didn't exist before the timeframe in which Apple made theirs. They were a little quicker getting it to market, to their credit, but the idea wasn't new to anyone.
I can't really parse your first two sentences. Kind of the whole point of Android phones is the "phones" part -- in that you can select from a wide variety of devices conforming to a common operating environment.
You're saying the inability to a) use non-sanctioned apps, b) replace your operating environment, or c) have any purchasing power to select the device which runs your environment doesn't constitute lock-in? Also, the fact that you can "start over" and buy some other platform is a feature common to many forms of lock-in. You're never physically prevented from selecting another phone, just like you were never physically prevented from installing Linux instead of Windows and using a different browser, and just like you were never forced to keep buying the same razor blades. That by no means keeps it from being an artificially limited environment.
And yeah, it's easy to check out the latest iOS, because there's only one. The fact that there are multiple Android superphones is a feature, but since it's one not sanctioned by your chosen platform I understand that you will fight it to the death. Similar to how in your third paragraph, cancellation fees are supposed to be ignored for iOS, but in the fourth/fifth are some kind of huge blow to Android. It's the same pattern, over and over again.
Yeah, there would have been shouting, and the fact that you don't see the difference really exposes the lengths to which Apple people will use denial as a weapon.
Here, I'll spell it out for you. One of the latest Android phones has an antenna problem. What do you do? Get a different Android. Latest iPhone has an antenna problem. What do you do? Ooooops, your vendor believes in complete lock-in, so you have no equivalent options.
Well, yeah, you can say that, because unlike most languages, the preprocessor in C is part of the standard. Talking about using C without the CPP is like talking about using Java without using the JVM -- it's rather missing the point, I think.
Not that preprocessor use and abuse is a great thing, or that really complicated macros are a generally acceptable solution -- but in some circumstances, when they're clearly documented and everyone knows the limitations, they can save thousands of lines of code.
As an academic exercise, though, you can do PP-free polymorphic objects by having a pointer to a virtual function table at the beginning of a struct and re-declaring inherited members. That actually buys you a little over C++ as you have explicit bitcopy semantics. You get code like: myShoe->v[putOnFoot](myShoe, me); which is pretty readable.
Automatic calling of constructors and destructors are responsibilities of allocators; providing custom malloc and free can solve that, although if you really want 0 lines of preprocessor you'd want to pass it a pointer to a constructor when you initialize.
I have, for clients, written header libraries for C which create fully polymorphic, inheritable "classes" with automatic (for heap allocation) construction/destruction, with comparable-to-C++ overhead. No varargs required. I redid it ten years later in one file using the Boost preprocessor library. Hell, nowadays anyone could do it with some of the stuff in there. Name mangling is trivial. It's actually kind of amazing.
Anyway, C can do everything almost exactly as well as the computer itself can. (Disclaimer: I much prefer writing code in C++ for money or Haskell for fun.)
I should have expected pedantry here. Okay, let me refine that a bit:
How is "pressing a picture of a button" fundamentally different from "pressing a button",? How is "swiping a direction where you press pictures of buttons" different from "pressing a direction button"?
Ooh, bonus points: How is "tapping a picture of a button" different from "clicking on a picture of a button"?
Using pictures of buttons on a touchscreen is the crowning example of obvious implementation. This is just Apple trying to make it more expensive to compete with them, since their market share is eroding and they're being out-innovated in the mobile market. They could have come out of this well, but they're destroying their reputation and their goodwill with other companies and with any consumer that is paying attention and honest with themselves.
Okay, so imagine a world in which the "control to switch apps" is NOT "part of the phone interface". Are you getting static? Because that doesn't make any sense. Controls must, by definition, be part of the phone interface, so no joy there.
Having an indicator that you're on the phone has been done over and over again (see any Palm, any Blackberry, any wifi VoIP solution) and those phones use that indicator where appropriate to return you to a call-oriented screen.
There is nothing non-obvious here. An indicator that you're on a call? Having controls in the interface? Come on. This is ridiculous. It'll get swatted down in court, but it's going to cost an honest company good money to do it.
Yup. "Using apps during calls" has nothing to do with "the process the user goes through to switch back and forth between a call and an app." There are many ways to "use apps during calls" that don't require you to "switch back and forth between a call and an app", after all. Like, uh...... hmm.
This is an attitude I see a lot, and it troubles me.
I'm not going to waste a lot of time typing a lot: hard work and/or money invested absolutely does not entitle you to "a lot of money." You are entitled only to the value people perceive in it.
I could go outside and film myself stacking bricks to my cats meowing. Does that entitle me to a lot of money? But at the same time, if it was posted in the right place, it could get half a million hits on YouTube. How does that relate with the money I expected to get? Since lots of people are watching it, I'm entitled to cash, right?
Oh, wait, I didn't invest enough money. Okay, I do the same thing, but this time the bricks are made out of gold. Any better? Am I entitled to riches yet?
Artists are paid to continue to produce work. In simpler times a convenient shortcut was to put a price on the existing works and use that money to fund ongoing development. Due to technological advance, that shortcut no longer exists, and the bitter struggle of old money and old business against that simple fact is costing artists a boatload of money.
+ Having multiple phone products increases complexity and cost. There's an argument to be made that with a dozen major phone vendors, and with some of them offering dozens or even hundreds of different phones, these companies may be pumping out lots of competition to the iPhone, but they're not doing so in a way that is sustainable long term.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Do you have an example of a market in which alternatives are bad? Why is it unsustainable?
The endpoint of that line of thought is "know your sources", which has been sound advice for as long as communication has existed. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but that doesn't keep it from being an amazing resource -- perhaps even revolutionary.
All three conditions were delivered; you could play on PSN and could play games that were released prior to games beginning to require the update. Sony is not obligated to continue to offer PSN or new games for your console. For instance, what if instead of that patch they simply stopped publishing games and shut down PSN? Would that be lawsuit worthy? No, of course not. They ceased support of the Other OS capable hardware, and gave you the option to upgrade it to newer supported hardware for free. That's the end of the story. You are not entitled to anything you didn't get.
If you really want a car analogy (this is/. , I guess) it's more like you bought a car that violates current environmental regulations, and the company offered a free modification that would make it legal but reduce its acceleration. They're just providing you an option.
So what if, instead of the patch that removed Other OS, they simply decided to drop support for the console? Would that be illegal? Of course not. So why are they obligated to support pre-patch boxes?
What you're really talking about there is not "modern word processors" but MS Word. That has pretty much the monopoly. And the open source competitor Open/Libre Office competes as most open source does by copying.
It got to be this enormous monolithic thing because every few years Microsoft wanted to sell an upgrade, and so they added features. For 20 years.
And so now, understandably you find it too complex, and want to hide the things you don't use.
Not at all. Complex and comprehensive word processing predates MS Word by a considerable margin. The primary difference is the shift to the comprehensive GUI. Consider the alternatives: Tex, which, being script-oriented, by default presents only the requested functionality, and no one would waste time learning options for features or packages they don't need. WordPerfect in its prime had a huge number of options, but the display was devoted to the content and the options were accessed through modifier keys; you simply didn't bother with ones that weren't relevant to your task. More modern "small" word processors such as AbiWord and KWrite (Calligra Words now?) similarly have more than any one person needs. The availability of features is not a firm diagnosis of a bloated product. Regarding Word specifically, I don't find it too complex at all -- but I would be more productive if I could collect the features I use in a single area of the interface. That's trivially obvious.
The problem is it tries to do too much. Much of the functionality of office should be catered for by other apps. For example mail merging should be done by a separate app. People that don't do mail-merging won't install that app. So the UI disappears without any need for customising.
Yes, an electric drill is a specialised tool that doesn't require any customising. And a carpenter has a tool box full of many other specialist tools, that also don't need customising. By using them in combination, he does a wide variety of work. That's how computing should be.
This is completely orthogonal to your original assertion that omission of interface customization due to a belief that users could not function effectively in its presence is not condescension. In the interest of discussion, however, there is a gain in efficiency to be had from proper tool specialization. Suggesting that programs only contain features that they can present on the surface, however, takes the idea beyond its ability to contribute to productivity.
Consider, again the electric drill. Why don't carpenters carry an electric drill for each size bit, instead of a drill with an exchangeable bit? Surely customizing the bit indicates that the drill is trying to do too much? Similarly, app proliferation introduces more complexity than it solves when applied past a very coarse-grained threshold. Mail-merging is a fine example. You posit a separate mail-merging app -- one that must be maintained and updated separately. One that must, on its own, parse the file format of the original word processor, and handle its own rendering. What level of editing does it allow? How does it print? What if you want to save a copy of the result? What if you want to change formatting? These aren't "fringe" features. A mail merge is very seldom a matter of simply saying, "okay, merge this stuff." There are editing and formatting considerations, and there is no reason to move the solution outside the domain of the program that can solve them. The existence of the feature need not impact those that don't need it -- as long as they have the option of modifying the shortcuts presented to them.
No one had come up with a perfectly flat, thin tablet because the technology was still developing. It has not been shown that a supposedly infringing tablet would not have existed sans Apple, with merely access to the technology. All tablet manufacturers pre-iPad were expressing, publicly, the desire to make a thin, light tablet. All the features of that patent follow that pattern -- touch gestures benefit from a flat bezel, structural strength and ergonomics are vastly improved by rounded corners, the touchscreen removes the need for buttons, etc. They didn't exist pre-iPad because the technology to make them exist wasn't there yet.
Apple did do something savvy, in spotting when the technology had matured enough to make a mass-market appeal item -- that's historically what they're good at (iPhone, iPod, etc.) They did not, however, demonstrate innovative or non-obvious design; they merely built the device everyone had already envisioned first, and attempted to lock it up in patents which are now coming into question.
It doesn't matter when the patent was granted. The patent is absurd. Most of its stipulations are extremely obvious design directions for a tablet computer -- directions all manufacturers were moving in anyway. The reason "before iPad" looks different from "after iPad" is because of technological advance -- it has nothing to do with Apple's misguided claims that it invented thin.
I agree that a dedicated GPS unit is far and away superior, but my navigation needs aren't terribly complex... trips within twenty miles of town, mostly, with one ~300mi trip and one ~1900mi trip. Google Maps is much better in the United States vs. elsewhere, as well; that may be a factor in our differing experience using it.
To read the forums, all of the Samsung phones have crappy GPS *grin* I do look at mine askance sometimes, but again, it's never seriously let me down. The big sell to me is it's 100% free after having a data-capable smartphone.
I didn't say that, so don't use quotation marks. It's your opinion that not giving customisation options is "condescending". I don't agree. If you buy an electric drill from a hardware store, do you expect a choice of colours? Tools don't need customisation.
First, changing buttons around on a toolbar is nothing at all like changing colours on a drill. Changing buttons/menus/other layout is a functional difference, not a cosmetic one, reflecting changing the patterns in which functions of the tool in question are accessed. Changing the color of the drill would be much closer to... changing the color of the toolbar, and that's still not quite there, because the drill doesn't glow in your face while you're working. Maybe changing the color of your mouse?
Second, an electric drill is pretty much in no way comparable to a software product. They are both tools, true, but the solution space of an electric drill is a tightly-closed one-dimensional interval, and everyone who needs an electric drill has a lot in common in their problem space, i.e. they need to drill a hole. Since you know almost every detail of the use case, you can specialize ruthlessly, and so I agree that electric drills don't need a lot of flexibility. But word processors are used by a tremendously wide variety of people for a staggering array of tasks -- some of them will never, ever need to print, and some will never, ever need to fool with drawing, and some will never, ever need to fool with scripting, and so forth.
The whole premise of a modern word processor is that each person needs a subset of advanced editing functionality, non-aligned with someone else's subset; forcing a user to sift through features that are of absolutely no value because you feel they would waste time if they were given the opportunity to customize the layout is, exactly, condescension.
And then when you've finished you need to inform the user how to change back to their customisations, otherwise they're pissed that you broke their app. Two extra things that need doing. And all for nothing.
Customisation is such an all round waste of time.
Options->Interface->Revert to personalized interface. Done!
Of course, profiles would be better, but would need to be transparent and have a really obvious shift to default settings. Just because an interface requires some thought doesn't mean the functionality it represents isn't worthwhile.
Aren't you the guy carrying on elsewhere about how programs can't be condescending? And here you are describing the very process by which a condescending UI is designed. "Well, the users can't handle that, so we'd better not give them the option."
Doc and support is a non-issue. Support request? Options->Interface->Change to default interface. Done!
Slashdot Mirror
This is an extremely common fallacy. The tech to make thin capacitive screen devices didn't exist before the timeframe in which Apple made theirs. They were a little quicker getting it to market, to their credit, but the idea wasn't new to anyone.
I can't really parse your first two sentences. Kind of the whole point of Android phones is the "phones" part -- in that you can select from a wide variety of devices conforming to a common operating environment.
You're saying the inability to a) use non-sanctioned apps, b) replace your operating environment, or c) have any purchasing power to select the device which runs your environment doesn't constitute lock-in? Also, the fact that you can "start over" and buy some other platform is a feature common to many forms of lock-in. You're never physically prevented from selecting another phone, just like you were never physically prevented from installing Linux instead of Windows and using a different browser, and just like you were never forced to keep buying the same razor blades. That by no means keeps it from being an artificially limited environment.
And yeah, it's easy to check out the latest iOS, because there's only one. The fact that there are multiple Android superphones is a feature, but since it's one not sanctioned by your chosen platform I understand that you will fight it to the death. Similar to how in your third paragraph, cancellation fees are supposed to be ignored for iOS, but in the fourth/fifth are some kind of huge blow to Android. It's the same pattern, over and over again.
Yeah, there would have been shouting, and the fact that you don't see the difference really exposes the lengths to which Apple people will use denial as a weapon.
Here, I'll spell it out for you.
One of the latest Android phones has an antenna problem. What do you do? Get a different Android.
Latest iPhone has an antenna problem. What do you do? Ooooops, your vendor believes in complete lock-in, so you have no equivalent options.
Well, yeah, you can say that, because unlike most languages, the preprocessor in C is part of the standard. Talking about using C without the CPP is like talking about using Java without using the JVM -- it's rather missing the point, I think.
Not that preprocessor use and abuse is a great thing, or that really complicated macros are a generally acceptable solution -- but in some circumstances, when they're clearly documented and everyone knows the limitations, they can save thousands of lines of code.
As an academic exercise, though, you can do PP-free polymorphic objects by having a pointer to a virtual function table at the beginning of a struct and re-declaring inherited members. That actually buys you a little over C++ as you have explicit bitcopy semantics. You get code like: myShoe->v[putOnFoot](myShoe, me); which is pretty readable.
Automatic calling of constructors and destructors are responsibilities of allocators; providing custom malloc and free can solve that, although if you really want 0 lines of preprocessor you'd want to pass it a pointer to a constructor when you initialize.
Perfectly possible. Easy, even.
I have, for clients, written header libraries for C which create fully polymorphic, inheritable "classes" with automatic (for heap allocation) construction/destruction, with comparable-to-C++ overhead. No varargs required. I redid it ten years later in one file using the Boost preprocessor library. Hell, nowadays anyone could do it with some of the stuff in there. Name mangling is trivial. It's actually kind of amazing.
Anyway, C can do everything almost exactly as well as the computer itself can. (Disclaimer: I much prefer writing code in C++ for money or Haskell for fun.)
I should have expected pedantry here. Okay, let me refine that a bit:
How is "pressing a picture of a button" fundamentally different from "pressing a button",?
How is "swiping a direction where you press pictures of buttons" different from "pressing a direction button"?
Ooh, bonus points:
How is "tapping a picture of a button" different from "clicking on a picture of a button"?
Using pictures of buttons on a touchscreen is the crowning example of obvious implementation. This is just Apple trying to make it more expensive to compete with them, since their market share is eroding and they're being out-innovated in the mobile market. They could have come out of this well, but they're destroying their reputation and their goodwill with other companies and with any consumer that is paying attention and honest with themselves.
Okay, so imagine a world in which the "control to switch apps" is NOT "part of the phone interface". Are you getting static? Because that doesn't make any sense. Controls must, by definition, be part of the phone interface, so no joy there.
Having an indicator that you're on the phone has been done over and over again (see any Palm, any Blackberry, any wifi VoIP solution) and those phones use that indicator where appropriate to return you to a call-oriented screen.
There is nothing non-obvious here. An indicator that you're on a call? Having controls in the interface? Come on. This is ridiculous. It'll get swatted down in court, but it's going to cost an honest company good money to do it.
Yup. "Using apps during calls" has nothing to do with "the process the user goes through to switch back and forth between a call and an app." There are many ways to "use apps during calls" that don't require you to "switch back and forth between a call and an app", after all. Like, uh ... ... hmm.
Which part of Apple's patent is non-obvious?
So, explain to me two things:
How is "picture of button" different from "button"?
How is "swipe a direction" different from "press a direction"?
This is an attitude I see a lot, and it troubles me.
I'm not going to waste a lot of time typing a lot: hard work and/or money invested absolutely does not entitle you to "a lot of money." You are entitled only to the value people perceive in it.
I could go outside and film myself stacking bricks to my cats meowing. Does that entitle me to a lot of money? But at the same time, if it was posted in the right place, it could get half a million hits on YouTube. How does that relate with the money I expected to get? Since lots of people are watching it, I'm entitled to cash, right?
Oh, wait, I didn't invest enough money. Okay, I do the same thing, but this time the bricks are made out of gold. Any better? Am I entitled to riches yet?
Artists are paid to continue to produce work. In simpler times a convenient shortcut was to put a price on the existing works and use that money to fund ongoing development. Due to technological advance, that shortcut no longer exists, and the bitter struggle of old money and old business against that simple fact is costing artists a boatload of money.
Samsung smartphones outsell Apple smartphones
+ Having multiple phone products increases complexity and cost. There's an argument to be made that with a dozen major phone vendors, and with some of them offering dozens or even hundreds of different phones, these companies may be pumping out lots of competition to the iPhone, but they're not doing so in a way that is sustainable long term.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Do you have an example of a market in which alternatives are bad? Why is it unsustainable?
The endpoint of that line of thought is "know your sources", which has been sound advice for as long as communication has existed. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but that doesn't keep it from being an amazing resource -- perhaps even revolutionary.
All three conditions were delivered; you could play on PSN and could play games that were released prior to games beginning to require the update. Sony is not obligated to continue to offer PSN or new games for your console. For instance, what if instead of that patch they simply stopped publishing games and shut down PSN? Would that be lawsuit worthy? No, of course not. They ceased support of the Other OS capable hardware, and gave you the option to upgrade it to newer supported hardware for free. That's the end of the story. You are not entitled to anything you didn't get.
If you really want a car analogy (this is /. , I guess) it's more like you bought a car that violates current environmental regulations, and the company offered a free modification that would make it legal but reduce its acceleration. They're just providing you an option.
It won't go outside and mow your lawn, either. Is that not part of 'everything'?
If that was a major feature, why on earth would you install a patch that removed it?
So what if, instead of the patch that removed Other OS, they simply decided to drop support for the console? Would that be illegal? Of course not. So why are they obligated to support pre-patch boxes?
They didn't remove it. They offered you a patch, one effect of which was disabling it. You accepted the patch.
Knowing the answers to the questions doesn't affect the outcome of the test.
What you're really talking about there is not "modern word processors" but MS Word. That has pretty much the monopoly. And the open source competitor Open/Libre Office competes as most open source does by copying.
It got to be this enormous monolithic thing because every few years Microsoft wanted to sell an upgrade, and so they added features. For 20 years.
And so now, understandably you find it too complex, and want to hide the things you don't use.
Not at all. Complex and comprehensive word processing predates MS Word by a considerable margin. The primary difference is the shift to the comprehensive GUI. Consider the alternatives: Tex, which, being script-oriented, by default presents only the requested functionality, and no one would waste time learning options for features or packages they don't need. WordPerfect in its prime had a huge number of options, but the display was devoted to the content and the options were accessed through modifier keys; you simply didn't bother with ones that weren't relevant to your task. More modern "small" word processors such as AbiWord and KWrite (Calligra Words now?) similarly have more than any one person needs. The availability of features is not a firm diagnosis of a bloated product. Regarding Word specifically, I don't find it too complex at all -- but I would be more productive if I could collect the features I use in a single area of the interface. That's trivially obvious.
The problem is it tries to do too much. Much of the functionality of office should be catered for by other apps. For example mail merging should be done by a separate app. People that don't do mail-merging won't install that app. So the UI disappears without any need for customising.
Yes, an electric drill is a specialised tool that doesn't require any customising. And a carpenter has a tool box full of many other specialist tools, that also don't need customising. By using them in combination, he does a wide variety of work. That's how computing should be.
This is completely orthogonal to your original assertion that omission of interface customization due to a belief that users could not function effectively in its presence is not condescension. In the interest of discussion, however, there is a gain in efficiency to be had from proper tool specialization. Suggesting that programs only contain features that they can present on the surface, however, takes the idea beyond its ability to contribute to productivity.
Consider, again the electric drill. Why don't carpenters carry an electric drill for each size bit, instead of a drill with an exchangeable bit? Surely customizing the bit indicates that the drill is trying to do too much? Similarly, app proliferation introduces more complexity than it solves when applied past a very coarse-grained threshold. Mail-merging is a fine example. You posit a separate mail-merging app -- one that must be maintained and updated separately. One that must, on its own, parse the file format of the original word processor, and handle its own rendering. What level of editing does it allow? How does it print? What if you want to save a copy of the result? What if you want to change formatting? These aren't "fringe" features. A mail merge is very seldom a matter of simply saying, "okay, merge this stuff." There are editing and formatting considerations, and there is no reason to move the solution outside the domain of the program that can solve them. The existence of the feature need not impact those that don't need it -- as long as they have the option of modifying the shortcuts presented to them.
No one had come up with a perfectly flat, thin tablet because the technology was still developing. It has not been shown that a supposedly infringing tablet would not have existed sans Apple, with merely access to the technology. All tablet manufacturers pre-iPad were expressing, publicly, the desire to make a thin, light tablet. All the features of that patent follow that pattern -- touch gestures benefit from a flat bezel, structural strength and ergonomics are vastly improved by rounded corners, the touchscreen removes the need for buttons, etc. They didn't exist pre-iPad because the technology to make them exist wasn't there yet.
Apple did do something savvy, in spotting when the technology had matured enough to make a mass-market appeal item -- that's historically what they're good at (iPhone, iPod, etc.) They did not, however, demonstrate innovative or non-obvious design; they merely built the device everyone had already envisioned first, and attempted to lock it up in patents which are now coming into question.
It doesn't matter when the patent was granted. The patent is absurd. Most of its stipulations are extremely obvious design directions for a tablet computer -- directions all manufacturers were moving in anyway. The reason "before iPad" looks different from "after iPad" is because of technological advance -- it has nothing to do with Apple's misguided claims that it invented thin.
I agree that a dedicated GPS unit is far and away superior, but my navigation needs aren't terribly complex... trips within twenty miles of town, mostly, with one ~300mi trip and one ~1900mi trip. Google Maps is much better in the United States vs. elsewhere, as well; that may be a factor in our differing experience using it.
To read the forums, all of the Samsung phones have crappy GPS *grin* I do look at mine askance sometimes, but again, it's never seriously let me down. The big sell to me is it's 100% free after having a data-capable smartphone.
I didn't say that, so don't use quotation marks. It's your opinion that not giving customisation options is "condescending". I don't agree. If you buy an electric drill from a hardware store, do you expect a choice of colours? Tools don't need customisation.
First, changing buttons around on a toolbar is nothing at all like changing colours on a drill. Changing buttons/menus/other layout is a functional difference, not a cosmetic one, reflecting changing the patterns in which functions of the tool in question are accessed. Changing the color of the drill would be much closer to ... changing the color of the toolbar, and that's still not quite there, because the drill doesn't glow in your face while you're working. Maybe changing the color of your mouse?
Second, an electric drill is pretty much in no way comparable to a software product. They are both tools, true, but the solution space of an electric drill is a tightly-closed one-dimensional interval, and everyone who needs an electric drill has a lot in common in their problem space, i.e. they need to drill a hole. Since you know almost every detail of the use case, you can specialize ruthlessly, and so I agree that electric drills don't need a lot of flexibility. But word processors are used by a tremendously wide variety of people for a staggering array of tasks -- some of them will never, ever need to print, and some will never, ever need to fool with drawing, and some will never, ever need to fool with scripting, and so forth.
The whole premise of a modern word processor is that each person needs a subset of advanced editing functionality, non-aligned with someone else's subset; forcing a user to sift through features that are of absolutely no value because you feel they would waste time if they were given the opportunity to customize the layout is, exactly, condescension.
And then when you've finished you need to inform the user how to change back to their customisations, otherwise they're pissed that you broke their app. Two extra things that need doing. And all for nothing.
Customisation is such an all round waste of time.
Options->Interface->Revert to personalized interface. Done!
Of course, profiles would be better, but would need to be transparent and have a really obvious shift to default settings. Just because an interface requires some thought doesn't mean the functionality it represents isn't worthwhile.
Aren't you the guy carrying on elsewhere about how programs can't be condescending? And here you are describing the very process by which a condescending UI is designed. "Well, the users can't handle that, so we'd better not give them the option."
Doc and support is a non-issue. Support request? Options->Interface->Change to default interface. Done!