Propped-Up Products

2007.11.11   prev     next

Not long ago, John Gruber quoted Jason Fried in “Why Enterprise Software Sucks”:

About which Gruber commented:

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of a thousand physical objects we had to use when I was in school. The crummy chair depicted above was but one example. (That chair is from a current school — the ones we had when I was that age were even worse.) Everything the school provided — the chairs, the tables, the food, the transportation, the buildings, the bathrooms, the walls, the chalkboards, etc., etc. — all seemed to be designed and manufactured by people who had no interest in satisfying any esthetic sensibilities in the people who would actually be using those things. It all seemed just one step above prison facilities, and in some cases maybe not even that.

At the time when I had to use those nasty facilities and equipment, I was struck with one overwhelming thought: This chair couldn’t possibly survive on the open market. Anyone out shopping, on their own time, for a chair, wouldn’t look twice at this ugly thing. The only reason this miserable excuse for a chair is being manufactured is because the people who bought it aren’t the people who use it. The people who use it are required to use it, whether they like it or not, and in fact are expected not to even protest the quality, else be treated as social disruptors. (Think about it; I’m not exaggerating!)

If you don’t like the design of a chair you see at say, Staples, what happens? You just don’t buy it. The chain of responsibility for the chair’s quality is very short:

you > Staples > manufacturer

And the negative impact of a bad chair starts immediately, and shoots up that short chain very quickly: The chair promptly fails to sell, and Staples shortly stops buying it from the manufacturer.

By comparison, what is the chain of responsibility for a school chair? Something like this:

student > (possibly parents) > teacher > principal > superintendent > school board > state government

And the propagation speed of that responsibility is somewhere between the speed of cold molasses and cold granite. A student who refuses to sit in one of those crappy chairs will be punished and/or expelled (likely a life-ruining sanction). A student who merely complains about the chair will be ignored at best, punished at worst. The complaint will be lucky to make it even one more step up the chain before being actively squelched some other way. And of course, the punishment (or withering verbal treatment) of the complaining student will (as it is very much intended to) have a strong chilling effect on other students who might be thinking about making the same complaint.

This chair would not exist — indeed you would never have seen such a chair your entire life — except that it is propped-up by the system where the chair’s user and the chair’s buyer are two different people, and the latter is in an authority position over the former. The chair is a literal incarnation of that power arrangement: Hideous, esthetically barren — but minimally functional.