Flutterby™! Fanciful musings 2002-07-02 03:17:46+02

A few days ago, I ranted about a blog entry by Arnold Kling about version fatigue. Tom, over at Backup Brain, linked to an expansion of those ideas titled The Programming Soviet, which got me to thinking about what we've accomplished by making software easy enough for lawyers and management to use directly. And then, after a little ranting in response to Meuon's "playing with snakes" entry, it came to me: If, as Edward Tufte asserts, "power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely", how much of the billions bilked by executives at Enron, GlobalCrossing, WorldCom, Xerox, and who knows what else were enabled by GUIs? Is it, perhaps, that, rather than helping boost the economy, MacOS and Windows will turn out to be the biggest indirect drains on the economy in the last decade? Confidential to Dubya, this might be your chance to find a scapegoat that'll keep you from going down in history as the Herbert Hoover of your era...

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