Quoting Adam Ierymenko, Hacker News, 2024

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a ton of very interesting work done on deeply thought out user-centric software designed to augment human intelligence and give people maximum control over what they were doing while still being approachable. The Smalltalk stuff was some of it, but there was some pretty spectacular stuff back in the old Windows 3.x, macOS classic, and even MS-DOS days where apps would interact richly and you had document-centric customizable work flows. You even had things like (gasp) composability of applications in GUIs.

I mean look at this stuff you could do on a machine with 256KiB of RAM and an 8086

All of this was completely abandoned and forgotten because there’s no money in it. Make software like that and there’s no moat, and make it local and people will pirate it. Lock it down in the cloud and lock down the data and people will pay you.

That which gets funded gets built. We get shit because we pay for shit. People won’t pay for good software because the flexibility and user-centrism of good software allows them not to.

— Adam Ierymenko, Hacker News, 2024

11:44pm on October 30, 2024 from Istanbul, Turkey.


uid: 4aa955f8-9600-4548-9632-5f2ddf364d18
creator: Silas Jelley
primary: references
secondary: quotes
available: 2024-10-30 23:44:05
created: 2024-10-30 23:44:05
updated: 2024-10-30 23:44:05
slug: 2024/10/30/234405
source: {'creator': 'Adam Ierymenko', 'published': datetime.date(2024, 10, 24), 'publication': 'Hacker News', 'url': 'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936789', 'text': "In the 1980s and 1990s there was a ton of very interesting work done on deeply thought out user-centric software designed to augment human intelligence and give people maximum control over what they were doing while still being approachable. The Smalltalk stuff was some of it, but there was some pretty spectacular stuff back in the old Windows 3.x, macOS classic, and even MS-DOS days where apps would interact richly and you had document-centric customizable work flows. You even had things like (gasp) composability of applications in GUIs.\n\n[I mean look at this stuff you could do on a machine with 256KiB of RAM and an 8086](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMUT9TEoe4Y&pp=ygUYbXMtZG9zI)\n\nAll of this was completely abandoned and forgotten because there's no money in it. Make software like that and there's no moat, and make it local and people will pirate it. Lock it down in the cloud and lock down the data and people will pay you.\n\nThat which gets funded gets built. We get shit because we pay for shit. People won't pay for good software because the flexibility and user-centrism of good software allows them not to.", 'wordcount': 186, 'html': 'In the 1980s and 1990s there was a ton of very interesting work done on deeply thought out user-centric software designed to augment human intelligence and give people maximum control over what they were doing while still being approachable. The Smalltalk stuff was some of it, but there was some pretty spectacular stuff back in the old Windows 3.x, macOS classic, and even MS-DOS days where apps would interact richly and you had document-centric customizable work flows. You even had things like (gasp) composability of applications in GUIs.
\nI mean look at this stuff you could do on a machine with 256KiB of RAM and an 8086
\nAll of this was completely abandoned and forgotten because there’s no money in it. Make software like that and there’s no moat, and make it local and people will pirate it. Lock it down in the cloud and lock down the data and people will pay you.
\nThat which gets funded gets built. We get shit because we pay for shit. People won’t pay for good software because the flexibility and user-centrism of good software allows them not to.\n'}
filename: /home/silas/notes/2024/10/30/234405.md
title: Adam Ierymenko, Hacker News, 2024
interlinks: set()
backlinks: set()
tags: []
wordcount: 0