We live in an era of great technological progress. Nowhere is this more evident than in the computer industry. New types of hardware are constantly being invented, existing machines are getting smaller and cheaper, and newer and better applications are always upon us.

Or are they? There is now doubt that hardware continues to improve, driven by the inexorable forces of Moore's Law. (Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, famously stated 30 years ago that processing power would double every 18 months).

There are other laws to describe improvements in networking (Metcalfe's Law "The utility of a network expands by the square of the number of users") and Internet access (Neilsen's Law "The speed of your Internet access grows by 50 per cent a year").

Not to be outdone, I have even developed my own law, modestly named Philipson's Law, to describe the changes in the corporate computing environment "The number of end users of a corporate computer system grows tenfold each decade".

But there is no such law in the software industry. No-one has been silly enough to postulate one, for the simple reason that it is difficult to argue that software is getting better, and even more difficult to determine metrics by which you would measure whether it is or not. Indeed, it is possible to argue that software is getting worse.

This is true of many types of software, such as operating systems and large-scale applications. But let us confine our discussion to and use as an example PC applications software, the sorts of programs most of us use most of the time. This includes word processors, spreadsheets, email and Internet software, and a whole range of other stuff used essentially by individuals rather than organisations.

And nowadays this domain is almost totally the preserve of Microsoft, whose products dominate this field. I write for a living, and I consider myself a power user of Microsoft Word. I have used it extensively since its early days, having come to it from Zardax on the Apple II and a couple of early PC applications whose names I mercifully forget.

I'm also an extensive user of Excel, which I use for my market research analysis activities and as a quick and dirty database, and of Powerpoint, which I use to illustrate the interminable talks I give about different aspects of this industry. They are all good programs, though I consider Word to be vastly more difficult to use than it needs to be.

Excel is fabulous, and Powerpoint pretty good. But none of them is vastly better than the old MS-DOS programs I used years ago. As long as I can cut and paste and search and replace with a word processor, and work on rows and columns with a spreadsheet, and throw a few slides together with presentation software, I am happy, as are most other people.

The enormous amount of functionality built into these applications nowadays can be useful, but it comes at the expense of simplicity and usability. These software programs now take up vast amounts of space on a hard disk, and are extremely poorly written, with atrocious documentation.

Microsoft Word in particular is a disgrace to the programmer's art, patched together over years with useless add-ons written in sloppy code.

But the worst piece of PC software currently inflicted on the user community is Access, Microsoft's poorly named (because it's well-nigh inaccessible) database program. I can only believe that Access is the work of the devil, it is so poorly structured and hard to use.

Now I am reasonably intelligent and computer literate, but I have never been able to work it out. I still use an old database program from years ago which beats it hands down.

That program is called Q&A. It does everything I and most people want in a database program. It's simple to set up, it's simple to change fields, enter and extract data, it's simple to report on. Access is a nightmare. Most people want databases for simple things like address books and CD catalogues, and Q&A does that in a breeze. Access, with its vast complexity and user-ugly interface, drives people away.

This is not progress. There is a place for software like Access, but that place is not end-user land. Microsoft's software is well known in the industry for being poorly written and inelegantly designed, and Access takes the cake. A new word, "bloatware", has entered the lexicon to describe this sort of software. The attitude seems to be that processing power is now so great, and disk drive capacity now so large, that it doesn't matter if software is poorly designed.

Part of the problem, too, is the operating system. The graphical user interface, of which Microsoft Windows is the most popular example, was in many ways a vast improvement over the text-based interfaces that preceded it.

But not in all ways, and not all times. Windows has bought a welcome uniformity to software, but at the cost of increased complexity.

For many tasks, especially data entry, a text interface is better. It drives me crazy when I see people use complex windows-based PCs to do simple tasks that would be easier on a green-screen terminal. Newer is not always better.

geepee@philipson.com.au

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