[cwyers]

What's so easy about driving a car? Over 30,000 people die per year in the United States due to automobile accidents. And that's after requiring every driver get a license, and teaching basic driving skills as part of our high school system. Driving a car isn't all that easy, and we're terrible at it. There's a reason that Google is inventing self-driving cars, not personal airplanes.

And the amount of possible simplicity is constrained by the problem you're trying to solve -- you can't manage to make a plane as simple as driving a car, because the car only has to navigate in two dimensions while the plane has to navigate in three. If a car stops, the car's just sitting there, whereas if a plane stops gravity is going to pull you down in a likely to be fatal incident. You can't make a plane as simple to use as a car without changing it into something other than a plane.

[Jedd]

I suggest the car / airplane analogy was already strained before we got here.

Driving a car is easy, as evinced by the large numbers of people that are capable of it. Whether driving a car successfully (ie. without dying) is easy is obviously a matter for debate. With 0.000015% failing in this severe way, it might be argued that driving a car and dying is not particularly common, and could (no disrespect to the people involved) be thought of as a rounding error.

We have no evidence that Google isn't trying to invent self-driving or personal airplanes.

Try suddenly stopping your car on the autobahn, and see how tranquil the 'just sitting there' experience is.

Anyway, perhaps we are all missing the underlying point - an overly complicated solution (to an otherwise straightforward problem) has been the received wisdom for decades, and a re-think from fundamentals is almost definitely worth the effort.

[cwyers]

"Anyway, perhaps we are all missing the underlying point - an overly complicated solution (to an otherwise straightforward problem) has been the received wisdom for decades, and a re-think from fundamentals is almost definitely worth the effort."

I don't know that the solution is overly complicated or that the problem is straightforward. Think of every human being as their own little Y Combinator startup -- everybody is their own little Me, Inc. Or Me, LLC. Whatever. Most people follow SOME version of "outsource everything that isn't a core competency." Like, it varies a lot from person to person -- some people go to McDonalds, some people are making their own meals from ingredients picked up at the local farmer's market, but very few people (not even most farmers) are fully self-sufficient farm-to-table for most of their meals.

So as a result of this, most people don't think of their computer in terms of it being a computer. And that's the most obviously computer computer they interact with! There's all sorts of even more abstracted away computers they deal with -- smartphones, cloud computers, etc. Most people don't care about computers, and don't in and of themselves want computers. They want to do things like "write a document," "share some family pictures with friends and relatives," "play a video game," so on and so forth. For those people, not only don't they CARE about HOW the computer is accomplishing those things, they get very upset whenever they see the wizard behind the curtain. They want all of those things abstracted away from them. From the point of the view of the most typical use case, trying to make computers easier to use by making sure the specification fits on a t-shirt seems to be rather besides the point.

[Jedd]

Sure, I entirely agree that there's a large spectrum of user types (or people) out there.

You used the phrase 'most people' three times there to describe a quite likely common user type for off-the-shelf consumables. I am quietly confident the guys working on this are not targeting 'most people'. Or if they are, they are quite candid about it not being ready for them yet.

[cwyers]

The analogy that kicked this all off:

"An ordinary user can no more drive a Linux box in the cloud than fly an A320."

Maybe they aren't targeting most people, but if not, why are they talking about the ordinary user?

[urbit]

It's not ready for them yet. :-)

[djeikyb]

Is it common these days to have a drivers ed class in high school? My city's (pop ~1/2mm) high schools didn't, circa 2003ish.

[grayclhn]

I think it still probably depends on whether it lowers the cost of car insurance, which probably varies state by state.