I'm writing this column in Notepad. Why? Have you tried writing an outline, end notes or an indented bulleted list using the latest word-processing software? Wizards and autoformatting tools try to anticipate what you're typing and in the process irreversibly scramble your work.
Our modern operating systems contain vast numbers of CPU-consuming add-ons: a wagging dog that searches for your files, invisible background processes that constantly download patches and user-interface tchotchkes such as thumbnail previews of your multimedia. With all this increased complexity comes a lack of reliability, perpetual security holes and poor performance. Boot times are long, lockups are frequent, and viruses are epidemic.
Although my computer today is 100 times more powerful than what I had in the late '90s, my current environment has less speed, lower productivity and higher cost of ownership than my Pentium running Windows 98 Second Edition and Microsoft Office 97.
In my view, it's time to rethink what the industry is producing with thick-client software, bloated with a spiraling number of esoteric features. What we need is " Google Office With Ajax for Linux" or "Microsoft Office Lite" -- a Web-based, server-centric, thin-client application suite that isn't perfect but is good enough.
This is not about Microsoft vs. open-source. It's about creating highly reliable, usable tools that run anywhere, anytime. It's about reining in the sales and marketing departments of software vendors whose revenue-growth targets propel them to offer feature-filled upgrades more often than the customer base desires.
Here are a few examples:
-- In Massachusetts, 500 doctors were offered their choice of electronic medical record systems at no cost. They were given a menu that ranged from thick client/server applications to hosted solutions based on Citrix to thin-client applications hosted entirely by an application service provider. Amazingly enough, nearly 100 percent of the doctors chose a thin-client, Web-based application, hosted and maintained entirely on the server side. They felt that less infrastructure, less installation and less local patching was ideal.
-- As CIO at Harvard Medical School, I provide e-mail to 10,000 faculty members, students and staffers, nearly half of whom run Apple hardware. Entourage, the Outlook equivalent for the Macintosh, lacks just enough important features to keep my Apple users unhappy. Google's Gmail isn't perfect, but it's certainly good enough for most users and runs with the same features everywhere.
-- The iPod ClickWheel is a perfect example of less being more. In the latest version of the iPod, buttons have been removed, and what remains is a simple, intuitive, highly usable interface that gets the job done.
At dinner with Microsoft executives last year, I asked them to consider a lighter, cheaper, highly reliable version of Microsoft Office. They responded that surveys indicate that corporate customers use 90 percent of Office's features, so there is no one set of minimal features to include in a simplified product. I suspect that a closer look at this data would illustrate that a very few power users need advanced features but that the vast majority need the type of features included in the Gmail editor --fonts, colors and basic formatting.
In 2006, let's break the cycle of creating more complex, less reliable, less usable software and agree that less is more. I encourage the software industry to take a lesson from Gmail and other successful thin, good-enough applications. Do we need Longhorn/Vista and a new 3-D graphics engine-driven user interface with so many lines of code that it will be a challenge for even the most brilliant programmers to maintain?
We need the Toyota Prius of software -- "Google Office With Ajax for Linux" or "Microsoft Office Lite" -- and not the Hummer.
-- John D. Halamka is CIO at CareGroup Health System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School, chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network, CIO of the Harvard Clinical Research Institute and a practicing emergency physician. Contact him at jhalamka@caregroup.harvard.edu.