[delusional]

Do you disagree that they aren't essential? Can you not do the computing without them?

Obviously you can, although you may not want to. That's exactly the point of the article. You WANT arbitrarily overlapping windows, but that comes at a cost. You HAVE to pay that cost if you WANT the feature.

In the very next chapter, the author even says as much: "Increase in complexity results in large part from our recent penchant for friendly user interaction."

What makes such a realization interesting is that if you don't need the "friendly user interaction", say you're making a POS system or some embedded device, you don't need all that extra complexity.

A lot of POS systems run full Windows systems. Do they NEED arbitrarily overlapping windows? If not, then why do they carry around that extra complexity?

[Koshkin]

"Essential" is such a loaded term, and talking about it can easily get us to a slippery slope. Like much else, this should be taken in context, and contexts abound.

For many use cases the (excellent) interface provided by, say, AS/400 (a.k.a. IBM i) is totally sufficient, but this fact alone does not mean that something like that should be used universally.

[tonyedgecombe]

>What makes such a realization interesting is that if you don't need the "friendly user interaction", say you're making a POS system or some embedded device, you don't need all that extra complexity.

Why would a POS system not require a friendly user interface.

This attitude towards users is why corporate software stinks so much, it's based on the idea that the developers have a captive audience so have no choice in the matter, they should just accept what they are given and stop complaining.

[pc86]

There's a difference between a "friendly user interface" (which is pretty clearly referring to the earliest points about design-heavy skeuomorphic icons and complex window management functionality) and a friendly, e.g. accessible and functional, user interface.

A POS system doesn't need window management, it doesn't need skeuomorphic design, and I'm sure there three or four dozen other features that come along with a full-blown Windows installation that are irrelevant to a functional, usable POS system.

[delusional]

The running example in my comment was overlapping windows. a POS system might not need windows, much less arbitrary overlapping ones. That was the specific "friendly user interaction" i was talking about.

I think you're taking me a bit out of context in order to talk about something you care about. I agree with you, so please don't hold me up as something I'm not.