The election's over, and what have we learned? First-time voters had the opportunity to learn the physical pleasures of voting: the use of the large muscles of the arm, the guillotine-like action of the voting machine, the satisfying ka-chunk as they punch in their votes. They might wish that, instead of punching holes next to the names of people they decide they can tolerate, they could punch out the names of those they can't, but that's a quibble. By and large, the user interface seems well suited to the task, or at least to the state of mind that most voters bring to the task. Let's hope that the voting machine is not replaced any time soon by the TV remote.
Speaking of TV remotes, we need to give some thought to the politics of these devices before they take over our lives completely. Before remotes, there was a democracy, or at least an anarchy, to changing channels that is lost now that the device can be hidden in the couch cushions. I suppose we've gone too far to turn back now, in which case the only way to return some democracy to the process may be to give everyone their own remote.
Speaking of democracy and process, this election also taught us some things about how people become candidates. We saw how quickly a grass-roots campaign can put a popular individual on the ballot in all 50 states, how effectively a few million dollars can put him in contention, and how equivocally his equivocation can take him out again. That's probably too many lessons for one candidacy. Certainly too much equivocation.
Speaking of equivocation, John Sculley is waffling about PDAs, or personal digital assistants. He now feels that these handheld electronic address books are actually executive toys, as most people who have seen the things knew from the start, rather than a key element in Apple's strategy to get into the home. Meanwhile, Kaleida, the joint Apple-IBM venture in multimedia technology, is under intense pressure to produce the software tools that will let Apple and its Asian partners put CD-ROM-based products and titles into the home next year. Sculley seems to have learned an important lesson in family values: If you want an American family to plunk down thousands of dollars on an electronic gadget during a recession, it had better be capable of showing Michael Jackson videos.
Speaking of family values, we heard a lot during the campaign about the influence of special interests on the political process, but I was surprised to see how bluntly one of those special interests was identified: Christian fundamentalism. I thought it was political suicide in this country to hold churches accountable for their political actions. It's not artistic suicide, of course, and Irish singer Sinead O'Connor proved this by tearing up a picture of the Pope on American television. Dramatic, yes, but I still prefer the ka-chunking hole-punch gesture.
Speaking of gestures, I recently saw a demonstration of yet another beta-version pen computer. What made this demo interesting was the feedback from the audience, which included at least one professional writer. She couldn't see writing on a pen computer regularly, but saw great potential in it as an editing device. Potential is the word: One has to overlook a lot of errors on the part of the recognizer in these demos, and thus far I have not seen recognition good enough to use routinely for writing or editing. The writer really perked up, though, when the developer talked about using a few character-recognizer-interpreted keywords to link files of mostly uninterpreted ink. This possibility intrigued me as well, since it presents a way to create hypertext links among documents without requiring any better recognition rates than we have today. This could be a huge opportunity, and I expect it to make a lot of money for someone.
Speaking of making a lot of money, Bill Gates became the richest person in America this year, topping $6 billion in net worth, which seems excessive. Seriously, what can you do with $6 billion? Well, yes, there is 1996. That was one of the lessons we learned from this election, wasn't it, that earned wealth qualifies one for public service. So, let's see, Bill is three times as qualified as that mere $2 billion man, Perot, if we listen to the vote of the cash register. Ka-chunk?
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal