So we clearly haven’t yet mastered the science of user interface here in the 21st century. But what is it we’re striving towards? What’s the perfect user interface? In, say, a thousand years, when we have unlimited computing power and unlimited energy (like the characters of my novels Infoquake and MultiReal), what kinds of user interface will we be using?

Let’s take the question one necessary step further: do we really need user interface at all? Or are we evolving toward the point where intelligent tools automatically understand what we’re trying to do? In a thousand years, will the concept of giving commands be obsolete?

Software developers are taking the first tentative steps in that direction now. Apple’s Steve Jobs has always taken that “benevolent dictator” approach: we’ll decide what you, the user, need to handle, and the machine will just automatically handle the rest. Take disk defragmentation, a software task that only the wonkiest of technowonks has any interest in controlling. There isn’t any standard disk defragmenter for Macs, but that’s not because Mac hard disks never need defragmenting. OS X simply does it for you behind the scenes, as this article on the Apple website makes clear.

Microsoft is moving in this direction too. One of the advantages that Windows users have historically held over Mac users is the fact that it’s generally easier to get under the hood and tweak the gears that make the system work. But that’s going away. Not only because OS X has brought command-line tweaking to the Mac, but because Vista is taking away a lot of tweakability from Windows. Disk defragmentation under Vista is a simple on-off proposition; flip it on, and the OS will handle it as needed. Likewise, throughout the operating system, interfaces that were once cluttered with hierarchical menus and interactive dialog boxes are giving way to much smaller lists of context-sensitive tasks. (For more of my thoughts on this, see old blog posts Don’t Worry, Vista Will Handle It and Look Ma… No Program Menus!)

It’s the same long-term trajectory of user interface we’ve seen in automobiles. Look at the user interface for the Model T (pictured, below; original photo, with explanations and more detail, here). Most modern automobiles have reduced this to a standard set of four controls — the gas, the brake, the steering wheel, and the gear shift. It’s not that the car doesn’t still need all those functions, but now the car handles everything itself. It’s not exposed to the end user. If you believe the so-called experts, we’ll all be zipping around in self-driving robot cars within a generation.

Follow this trend several hundred years, and where does it lead? I talked previously about elevators that automatically know which floor you’re going to via RFID chips in your apartment keys. Why couldn’t that work elsewhere? Maybe you’ll pull into the Starbucks parking lot and find your usual soy milk decaf latte waiting when you get up to the counter. Maybe the refrigerator will automatically order more eggs from the store when you take the last two out. Maybe the polling station will know that you’re a member of the Christian Coalition and have a ballot all queued up with Mike Huckabee’s name checked when you get up to the voting booth.

There’s something very unsettling about these scenarios, and it’s not just the potential privacy hazards. Humans want to be in control of our environment; we instinctively resist environments that control us. Not only that, but we quickly grow bored with environments that coddle us. Humans are designed for dynamism, dissatisfaction, and change; despite the stereotype of modern man as couch potato, as a species we don’t handle stasis well.

So we like to be in control of our surroundings. But how much of this control is just feel-good illusion? When you order a hamburger at Burger King, sure, they’ll make it your way — as long as “your way” only involves their nine predefined toppings. And when you ask for lettuce, you can’t control how much, or whether they use shredded iceberg or delicately layered romaine, or whether it comes from West Virginia or Peru or Ecuador. Burger King’s real slogan should be “Have It Your Way, As Long As Your Way Falls Within the Narrow Parameters of Our Way.”

You don’t have much control over Google search results either. Try searching for “Bob Dylan.” You can choose to click on any one of the 25 million results pages you want — but Google determines the order in which they appear, which is tantamount to choosing your search results. (Try selecting the 4,523rd result sometime.) You can select “Advanced Search” and filter those 25 million results a number of ways, but you can’t choose the algorithm that Google uses to determine search results. Nor would you want to, because you’re not a computer scientist specializing in advanced information processing. If Google allowed you complete and utter granular control over every aspect of your search query, you’d either go insane or you’d never get anything done.

So is the Burger King experience a premonition of our future? Do we need to just trust the benevolent dictatorships of Google, Microsoft, and Apple (not to mention Burger King)? Is the future of user interface just a big pie of machine control with a thin crust of user choice on top?

As frightening as that scenario is, the opposite extreme is equally worrisome. It’s the future of total individual control. And boy, would that future suck.

We’re all familiar with the totalitarian sci-fi future where Big Brother boxes you in to a world of limited choices. 1984, Brave New World, Logan’s Run, etc. But what about the world of ultimate choice, where you have to control everything? The world has gotten smaller, our capabilities have grown larger, and the number of choices we have to make is bewildering. Once upon a time, you could choose to be a blacksmith, a farmer, or a priest. Now your career choices expand into the hundreds of thousands. Your parents went to the store and bought apples. Just apples. We go to the store and have to choose between Granny Smith, Macintosh, Fuji, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Red Delicious, Gala, Pippin, and Rome Beauty.

Big deal, you think. So I have to choose between a dozen brands of apples. How’s that a bad thing? It’s not. But what happens in thirty years when you’re expected to specify the size, tartness, color, firmness, ripeness, and pesticide of every piece of fruit you buy? What happens in 150 years when you can bioengineer your own hybrid apple/pear/mangoes right in the store while you wait?

If you want to see the beginnings of the future of total individual control, look at Linux. The Wikipedia list of Linux distributions catalogs around 200 different flavors of Linux. DistroWatch has much more. And these are just the prepackaged bundles of Linux. The hood’s wide open and the tools are sitting right there on the dash, giving you complete and total freedom to replace anything you like.

But who can deal with that kind of freedom? Unless you’re the kind of guy who likes to write display drivers in your spare time, you probably don’t have the time, the resources, or the expertise to make informed decisions about all of that. Perhaps one day we’ll all have neural implants to help us cope with all that cognitive processing. But until then, even the Linux geeks rely on consortiums of developers to make those decisions for them.

My point is not to bash Linux or to get into the whole open-source-versus-proprietary discussion — please, God, I don’t want to get into that right now. Rather, I’m pointing out that whether you use a MacBook Pro, a Dell Inspiron with Windows Vista, or a custom box with Kubuntu Linux, you end up relinquishing control. There’s only so much time you want to spend fine-tuning your computer, so instead of letting Microsoft make your decisions for you, you let a worldwide network of open source developers make them. We can argue about whether that makes a better operating system some other time; the point is that the practical effect of too much control on user interface is… giving up control.

So we’ve got the two extremes of User Interface Hell: the world of the benevolent dictator, where your control over your environment is deceptively limited; and the world of ultimate freedom, where you’ve got so much control that your ability to get anything accomplish is equally limited. Both of those extremes are equally unlivable; and you’ll notice that what those futures share in common is a lack of common-sense user interface.

Obviously we need happy mediums. We need to reconcile these two extremes, and simply, reductive user interface is the key.

The machinery that runs your information technology grows more intricate by the day, as does the machinery that powers your car. (Hamburgers, thankfully, seem to have reached an evolutionary plateau.) Despite what some Slashdot readers may fervently wish, I don’t think we’re headed for a future where everyone tweaks their own Linux distribution. If the freedoms we gain from our technology is the time and luxury of tweaking our technology, then we’ve gained nothing.

What often gets overlooked is that user interface isn’t a technological issue; it’s a sociological issue. Bad user interface limits freedom, it limits capability, it disempowers minorities. Think of how much difficulty your grandma has using the ATM. Technology has become too integrated into our society for us to leave people behind through insufficient user interface.

So what form will these perfect user interfaces take? To be continued…

In my first ramble about user interface, I used the toaster as an example of something that is erroneously thought to have a perfect user interface. Perhaps a more apropos example for most techies is the Internet search engine.

Think of any piece of information you’d like to know. Who was the king of France in 1425? What’s the address and occupation of your best friend from junior high school? How many barrels of oil does Venezuela produce every day? Chances are, that piece of information is sitting on one of the trillions of web pages cached in Google’s databases, and it’s accessible from your web browser right this instant.

You just have to figure out how to get to it — and Google’s job is to bring it to you in as few steps as possible. It’s all a question of interface, and that’s why user interface has been Google’s main preoccupation since day one.

It might seem the model of simplicity to click in a box, type for a search term, and click a button to get your results. But the Google model of searching is still an imperfect process at best. You may not realize it, but there are still a number of Rubegoldbergian obstacles between you and the information you’re trying to get to. For instance:

1. You need to have an actual machine that can access the Internet, whether it’s a computer or a cell phone or a DVR.
2. That machine has to be powered and correctly configured, and it relies on hundreds of other machines — routers, satellites, firewalls, network hubs — to be powered and correctly configured too.
3. You need to know how to log in to one of these machines, fire up a piece of software like a web browser, and find the Google website.
4. The object of your search has to be easily expressed in words. You can’t put an image or a color or a bar of music into the search box.
5. Those words have to be in a language that Google currently recognizes and catalogs (and your machine has to be capable of rendering words in that language).
6. You have to know how to spell those words with some degree of accuracy — which isn’t a problem when searching for “the king of France in 1425,” but can be a real problem if you’re looking for “Kweisi Mfume’s curriculum vitae.”
7. You need to be able to type at a reasonable speed, which puts you at a disadvantage if you’re one-handed or using imperfect dictation software.
8. Google has to be able to interpret what category of subject you’re looking for, in order to discern whether you’re trying to find apples, Apple computers, Apple Records, or Fiona Apple.

Some of these barriers between you and your information might seem laughable. But it all seems so easy for you because you’re probably reading this from the ideal environment for Google, i.e. sitting indoors at a desk staring at a computer that you’ve already spent hours and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to set up. If you’re running down the street trying to figure out which bus route to take, the barriers to using Google become much steeper. Or if you’re driving in your car, or if you’re a Chinese peasant without access to 3G wireless, or if you’re lounging in the pool, and so on.

Even in the best-case scenario, after you jump through all those hoops, you usually have to scan through at least a page of results from the Google search engine to find the one that contains the information you’re looking for. Google does no interpretation, summarization, or analysis on the data it throws back to you. Some search engines do some preliminary classification of results, or they try to anyway, but it’s generally quite rudimentary. Chances are you’ll need to spend at least a few seconds to a few minutes combing through pages to find one that’s suitable, and then you’ll need to search through that suitable page to find the information you want.

I don’t mean to minimize the achievement of the Google search engine. The fact that I can determine within minutes that a) the king of France in 1425 was Charles VII, b) my best friend from junior high school is currently heading the division of a high-definition audio company in Latin America, and c) in 2004, Venezuela produced 2.4 million barrels of oil a day — this is all pretty frickin’ amazing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note the search engine’s shortcomings. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that there are still a zillion ways to improve it. There’s still a huge mountain to climb before we can call Google an example of perfect user interface.

But don’t worry, because Google’s on the case.

Google has been making a mighty effort to break out of the web browser for quite some time. Not only have they been pushing their browserless Google Desktop app for some time, but they’re also quite open in publishing their APIs and trying to get you to hook into Google from other places. Cell phones, iPhones, car dashboards, public kiosks, refrigerators, digital chopsticks, Bluetooth-enabled dog collars, etc.

Why? A few years ago, we might have said that they were trying to escape the monopolistic grip of Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. But now that Firefox has made serious inroads on IE’s dominance — they’ve got around 16% global market share, 20% North American market share, and 30% European market share, if you believe the latest statistics — it’s not such a big concern.

No, the main reason Google’s looking for new avenues for search is that the standard WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing Device) user interface is a dinosaur, and right now it’s late the Cretaceous Period and there’s a big fucking meteor zipping across the sky.

Forget about the distinctions between Mac, Windows, and Linux — they’re all inefficient. While some computer operating systems may work more smoothly than others, they’re all based on the principles developed by Stanford researchers and Xerox PARC engineers in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

What’s wrong with the WIMP interface? It’s a nice all-purpose interface for general tasks, but it falls down on the job on just about any specific task you give it. As software has grown more complicated, the WIMP interface has failed to keep up. Programs like Microsoft Word have become mazes of hierarchical menus and drill-down dialog boxes, and operating such programs efficiently has become an exercise in rote memorization. Shoehorning the computing power of a 2.4 GHz dual-core processor into seven or eight subcategories and a row of increasingly tiny icons is kind of like running an M1 Abrams tank off an Atari 2600 joystick. You’re wasting potential.

Software manufacturers are now toying with a host of WIMP extensions and alternatives like the Office Ribbon, which try to unearth options that had been buried four menus deep for years. And while the Office Ribbon is pretty nice, it’s ultimately limited. You’re still dividing up a list of possible tasks into seven or eight subcategories, and expecting users to drill down to find the item they’re looking for. The Ribbon works fine for Office 2007, but it’s certainly not going to cut the mustard in Office 2020 (if such a thing even exists then).

But let’s take things one step further. Forget the WIMP interface — the computer itself is just an intermediate step, headed soon for the great Recycle Bin in the Sky.

As the MacBook Air has demonstrated, the physical machine itself is disappearing. People have been talking about the concept of “wearable computing,” and experimenting with gadgets like the Senseboard, which allows you to project a virtual keyboard and type on any surface you like. Computer manufacturers are looking at the mouse and realizing, heck, you don’t need an intermediate plastic device that represents where you want to point on a computer screen. You can just touch the damn thing yourself and make it do what you want. Thus the creation of Microsoft Surface and devices like the iPod Touch.

The point I’m trying to make with all this is that we’re still in the Dark Ages in terms of user interface. You may feel pretty content with your little plastic box showing little two-dimensional pictures on a little 17-inch screen. But it’s just an interface, and a ridiculously inefficient one at that, and it’s going away. Soon.

So if computers are going away, where do we go from here? Do we still need user interface? Coming in the next article…

***

(Of course, let’s not forget that all this time I’ve just been talking about one very narrow application of user interface, and that’s interface as a gateway to information technology. But what about user interface in the real world? After all, your car’s got a user interface, your hedge clippers have a user interface, your TV has a user interface, and so does every elevator you’ve ever ridden.

(Take the standard elevator. Elevators are extremely dumb machines. They spend large amounts of time sitting on the wrong floor. When you walk up to the elevator, the only interface you’ve got is a simple two-button panel that asks whether you’re going up or down. People often end up piling into multiple elevators that are going to the same destinations, requiring all of the elevators to stop at multiple floors. The buttons for opening and closing the doors once you’re in there are a bad joke — by the time you find them, it’s either too late to stop the doors or just an unnecessary extra redundancy.

(How come the elevators don’t know where you’re going already? If you’re in a strange building, that’s understandable — but why should you have to push the same button for your apartment or office every day? Couldn’t the building automatically sense that someone’s waiting for the elevator via motion detectors? And couldn’t it automatically sense which floor you’re heading to by reading an RFID chip in your key? Hell, the elevator should start making decisions about which elevator to send and when as soon as I enter the parking garage.

(So just like computers, these real-world interfaces are rife with inadequacies too. They’re just waiting for a revolution in user interface.)

***

(Sources for the images in this article: “Google Is a Giant Robot” by Stuart Brown; screen cap of Google Desktop from the unofficial Google Operating System blog; and the original WIMP interface for the Xerox Alto, circa 1973, from the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

The new PC is a monster: Dual Core 2.66GHz processor, 3.5GB of memory, a screamin’ video card, and a 360GB hard drive. Not to mention a 24-inch flatscreen monitor big enough for me to view satellite images of entire U.S. states and still be able to make out your house. (Yes, your house. I’m watching you right now, in fact. Does your mother know what you’re doing?)

So the PC is fabulous, but the Windows Vista Ultimate Edition that came pre-installed? Not so fabulous. It’s a shame, because I generally like Microsoft products. Yes, the company’s got its problems — they’ve been guilty of many sins over the years, including bloatware, vaporware, crippleware, and bullying behavior — but overall I believe Microsoft has done about as good a job running 95% of the world’s computer desktops as one can reasonably expect a company to do.

Here are my first impressions of the good stuff and the bad stuff with Windows Vista:

First, the bad stuff:

• User Account Control sucks. Yes, Windows Vista’s new access controls are just as bad as you’ve heard. I don’t mind the concept of clicking through approval dialog boxes when I’m doing something that could potentially disrupt my system. The problem is that Vista gives you multiple dialog boxes, sometimes three or four in a row. You’ll get a dialog box saying that you need to give Windows permission to continue — and then you’ll get another dialog box actually asking for your permission to continue. Wha? It doesn’t help that these dialog boxes are poorly designed so it’s difficult to see at a glance what you’re trying to approve or deny. (See above.)
• The Sidebar sucks. Well, perhaps it’s not the Sidebar itself so much as the gadgets that ship with the Sidebar. Sidebars are great in theory, as Apple users (and Google Desktop users) (and Yahoo! Widget users) can attest. But the built-in gadgets that come with the OS are terrible. You can’t resize them. You can’t cut and paste from them. You can’t sort them. You generally can’t right-click on them. And there are generally only one or two options for customizing them. Why would I want a postage stamp-sized display of four RSS articles that I can’t sort, resize, cut-and-paste, e-mail, or bookmark?
• The new Start menu sucks. I can understand why some people would get irritated with the scrolling menu hell of Windows XP. But with the new Vista Start menu, programs are simply hidden, and you end up using the Search feature all the time. There’s much less visual clutter, but things don’t feel any better organized. Plus… why is it that with a smokin’ nVidia graphics card and over three gigs of RAM, it still takes TEN FUCKING SECONDS for the Control Panel menu to cascade off the Start menu EVERY FUCKING TIME? Honestly, people.
• The new Explorer windows are confusing. Explorer windows really should come in two sizes: one standard size for browsing files in a stand-alone app, and one standard size for browsing files in open/save dialog boxes. But there are so many options now that I’m easily confused. The different configurations appear to be somewhat random — sometimes you’ll get a super-compact save dialog, sometimes you’ll get an extended dialog with all of the folders and favorite places in it. Come on, dudes — I don’t need to compile a C++ program here, I just need to find the file I’m looking for so I can open or save it.
• Aero transparency is confusing. Sure, the new look and feel is very clean. But the transparency effect on all of the toolbars and window edges leaves something to be desired. I often find myself in the situation where the windows underneath the top level are darker than the window that’s on top. I’ll often be staring at a stack of windows and click on the wrong one, because I simply can’t tell which one’s the active window. (See screen shot to the right.) (One good thing about Aero is that the aliasing effect you’d get in earlier versions of Windows where part of a window would remain onscreen for a few seconds even after you moved it is gone.)
• You’re going to get compatibility problems. Some of my standard apps, like the Eclipse software development environment, the Irfanview freeware image viewer, and Virtual PC, won’t install correctly or only run with certain limitations in Vista. For instance, every time I try to open Eclipse, I get a warning message asking me if I know what this piece of software is and if I trust it. If there’s a way to permanently trust a piece of software, I haven’t figured out how yet.
• First Boot Window Explosion Hell. I don’t know if there’s a term for the explosion of crap you get when you boot up a new system for the first time, but there should be. Booting up Vista for the first time, I was bombarded with a gajillion messages and dialog boxes that took me ten minutes to sort through. Anti-Virus isn’t installed! The Roxio software that came with your Dell isn’t working properly! You’ve got important Windows Updates to install! Here’s an introduction to Vista! Blah blah blah. Shut up and let me get to work already.

I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that Vista is all bad. There are some good features that will make my life easier:

• 3D Flip is cool. The 3D flip thing is a lot more useful than it sounds. It’s very helpful to be able to scroll through your running applications by seeing 3D thumbnails of them. Plus it’s remarkably quick. (At least it is on my system. I’d hate to see how it runs on my home desktop.) If you’re not up for 3D flip, the old-fashioned Alt-Tab flipping is much improved as well — and even running your mouse over the items in the taskbar gives you live thumbnails of your running apps.
• The RSS store is cool. All of the RSS feeds you subscribe to through Internet Explorer 7 don’t get stored in the browser, but rather sit in a common RSS feed store that other applications can access. So the feeds you subscribe to IE7 will automatically appear in Outlook 2007 and your Sidebar gadgets. Unfortunately, there aren’t many apps that can tap into this right now, but eventually it’ll be a good thing. This RSS store will also propagate with you if you have, say, a roaming profile, which means you’ll be able to take your RSS feeds with you to any Windows desktop. In theory.
• The Network and Sharing Center is cool. Networking has always been extremely cryptic in Windows. It’s amazing how much hassle you need to go through just to get a wireless network up and working in XP. I haven’t tested the wireless capabilities of Vista yet, but the general networking controls are much simpler and more intuitive. Vista will actually draw out a cool little network diagram for you, including the routers and hubs, that can help you figure out the lay of the land.
• Help has improved. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent any time in the Windows Help files. Now with Vista, I find myself running to the system help every few minutes trying to find out how to do something in the new UI that I was used to doing in the old UI. Microsoft’s obviously spent some time cleaning up the Help system and making it more comprehensible, and I seem to be finding answers much quicker now.
• Better folder organization. No more “Documents and Settings” folder — now all of your personal settings are stored in the much more intuitive “Users” folder. Under that are clearly labeled folders like “Documents,” “Desktop,” “Contacts,” “Favorites,” and “Mail.” And yes, if you use the built-in Windows apps, contacts and e-mails are actually stored in individual files, as they should be, rather than in an easily corruptible database. (If you’re using Outlook 2007, however, you’re SOL.)

So overall, I’d say that Windows Vista is… okay. Perhaps a B-minus or a C-plus. I expect that as I learn the ins and outs, I’ll get used to it and my opinion will improve. Let’s hope so. I spend too much of my day in front of computers to dislike my operating system.

In all that time, I’ve never been hit by a computer virus, worm, or malicious piece of spyware. Once, not too long ago, I actually double-clicked on a virus-infected e-mail attachment without thinking, but my computer security package quickly caught it and disabled it.

That’s not to say that I’ve never received a virus over e-mail, or suffered an attack on my firewall. These things happen all the time. I’ve been to web pages that could conceivably have launched various bits of nastiness onto my machine had I not been running Firefox with a pop-up blocker and lots of Javascript restrictions. I’ve just never suffered the effects.

And why have I never suffered from a virus outbreak? Because, despite what you see and hear all over the Internet and the media, the security problems of Windows are vastly overblown. Windows is and has always been a fairly secure operating system, if you know what you’re doing.

True, I’m what they call a computer professional, meaning that I make my living on these things. I can program PHP and ColdFusion. But when it comes to the operating system, I’m not some technical uber-wizard that can pinpoint obscure DLL failures using the command line. I know how to edit the Windows Registry, I know how to start and stop Windows Services, I know how to use the Event Viewer. These are all fairly basic computer troubleshooting skills, and yet these skills and some readily available off-the-shelf security software are all it’s taken for me to keep my computer safe for nearly 20 years.

(And no, this is not an invitation for someone out there to try and craft something that will infest my computer. I’m sure you can. But the point is that you haven’t bothered to try yet.)

The security problem, therefore, does not lie with Windows software. The problem is with Windows usability.

Most of you reading this blog may be astounded to realize this, but Microsoft’s most pressing problem is not the encroachment of free and open source Linux. It’s not the growing popularity of the Firefox browser, or the lagging performance of its online properties in relation to Google’s and Yahoo’s, or the activities of a small population of malicious hackers and crackers. The thing that keeps the Microsoft brass up at night, believe it or not, is that most people feel like Windows is too darned hard to use.

To us in the tech world, it seems like every Joe and Jane you pass in the street reads Slashdot and has contemplated switching to Ubuntu. But the vast majority of people aren’t nearly that technically savvy. I found a study from 1997 that gives the number of IT jobs in the United States at 2,063,000. Even if we’re charitable and say that, despite the IT bubble burst, the number of tech jobs has doubled since then — or even tripled — we’re still only talking about roughly 2% of the U.S. population. We’re a lot more computer-literate than we were a decade ago, but I’m willing to bet at least 70% of the Windows users in the United States have never even heard of the Registry.

And so these are the people that your standard Russian underground hacker types devote their energy to attacking. After all, if you’re a burglar, why bother carrying around lockpicks when two-thirds of the houses in the neighborhood leave the back door unlocked? When you read about zombie PCs that are unknowingly sending out tens of thousands of spam e-mails every hour, you never hear that the victim was a sysadmin for Smith Barney. It’s the people with the usability problems. It’s the guy who downloads porn screen savers from untrusted sources. It’s the guy who believes that Chase Bank really did just send an e-mail requesting that he go to www.chase-banc.com and reset his password. These people don’t know how to secure their computers.

So it strikes me that Microsoft has, on the whole, emphasized the right things in the development of their new Windows Vista operating system. They’ve concentrated on security, usability, and reliability. They’ve added in long-needed User Account Control, which will pop up a big, flashy warning message when your 73-year-old grandmother tries to add a worm to her Startup folder. They’ve built in anti-spyware, a stronger firewall, phishing protection, desktop search, and parental controls. Similarly, their workover of their Office software package has focused on cleaning up the user interface and bringing little-used features that have skulked backstage in sub-menus up to the spotlight.

Now whether Microsoft has actually done a good job is another question altogether. All of the early indicators say that Windows Vista is a less user-friendly operating system than XP was. They also point out that, since Microsoft spent so much time rewriting things from the ground up, there are bound to be a rash of new security holes in the first few months. (And I’m not even going to get into the whole Windows-vs.-Mac-vs.-Linux thing here.)

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to judge Vista first-hand until I either a) get the free reviewers’ copy that Microsoft is supposed to be sending me, or b) bite the bullet and buy that new laptop I’ve been talking about buying for months now. And if option a) comes first, I won’t be able to give a full review, because neither my desktop nor my laptop have strong enough video cards to handle the new Aero interface.

But our opinions aren’t necessarily the ones that matter in the grand scheme of things. No matter how convoluted the new user interface is, us relatively knowledgeable folks will get used to it pretty quickly. If Microsoft can help that 70% of people who’ve never heard of the Windows Registry to take better care of their computers — and maybe throw in a few goodies for the rest of us — they’ll have achieved what they set out to do.

It starts by making it easier for people to lock their back doors.

By program menus, I mean that narrow bar at the top of every program in MS Windows which usually starts with “File” and ends with “Help.” These menus have been a part of day-to-day computing experience since the first Macs in the ’80s, and have a history that extends back to Xerox PARC in the early ’70s. And now Microsoft is putting them out to pasture.

I’ve got several of the new breed of Vista-related betas installed on my desktop — Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11, Windows Defender, and Windows Live OneCare — and the menus are tucked away in places where the ordinary user isn’t likely to encounter them. In IE7, you need to click on the Tools icon and select “Show Menu Bar” in order to see them. Windows Media Player makes things even more difficult; unless you want to dig through the multi-tabbled Preferences window, you need to right-click on a blank patch in the top or bottom of the screen and select “Show Classic Menus.” Defender and OneCare lack menus altogether. Look ma… no program menus!

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I can see what Microsoft is trying to accomplish, and in theory it’s a laudable goal. Microsoft is trying to change the standard paradigm of users commanding their software; instead they’re creating software that pre-emptively responds to users. Instead of hunting for the command to Burn a CD in the menus, the software should anticipate that you might want to burn a CD and present the option in a big shiny button that’s hard to miss.

Software is growing more complex every year, and the day is rapidly approaching when it will be ridiculously unwieldy to try to wedge every little bell and whistle for Microsoft Word into seven or eight menus. Already you need sub-menus and sometimes sub-menus scrolling off of those sub-menus. Clearly the software needs to grow more intelligent about what the user wants.

But here’s the problem: the software doesn’t always anticipate what you want. Then what?

Windows Media Player is a good example. It’s a relatively chunky piece of software that lets you rip music from CDs, burn music to CDs, sync music to mobile devices, organize your music, etc. Most of the basic features are pretty intuitive, to Microsoft’s credit, and although the program isn’t particularly speedy, it’s plenty stable.

But there are a number of annoying little things that I just can’t figure out how to do. For the longest time, I would select a group of songs in an album, right-click and select “Play,” expecting them to play in order. But no — the songs would inexplicably shuffle into a random order. There’s nothing in the right-click menu that indicates these songs should be shuffling. So I learned to select “Add to Now Playing” instead of “Play.” Which worked fine most of the time, except sometimes the list in the right-hand side wouldn’t change over to show the Now Playing list for some reason, and I’d have to switch views to edit it.

The point is, without an orderly system of menus, we’re back to trying to figure out the logic of each program one at a time. We no longer have the simple mnemonics of “File/Print” or “Tools/Options” to guide us. And I bet that this lack of uniformity will hurt user productivity more than the menu clutter did in the first place.

I applaud the effort for software to anticipate what we want to do, and I look forward to seeing how good software can get at this. In fifty years, I’m betting that we won’t need program menus. But in the meantime, software programs should have an easily accessible index of commands. Maybe this could be a standard button that appears in the top right of every program, next to the question mark for help. And you’d be able to click on this button and get an alphabetized list of commands. I can’t think of any program offhand that has a feature like this, but it’s sorely missed.

Oh, and the shuffling thing? It turns out that there’s a button on the bottom of Windows Media Player with three parallel lines that turns shuffling on and off. The button isn’t labeled, and I don’t ever remember turning it on. Isn’t that intuitive?

Sigh. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Disregard that old phrase about how you can’t judge a book by its cover when you read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. The 33-year-old Canadian’s novels are so accurately conveyed by their packaging that sometimes I wonder whether Coupland’s just hacking out text under the whip of a nefarious cabal of publishing art directors. This would, of course, involve a cross-corporation conspiracy between St. Martin’s Press, Simon & Schuster and publishing magnate Judith Regan (who has brought us, among others, Beavis & Butt-Head’s Ensucklopedia and Robin Quivers’ bio). But that doesn’t hurt my theory a bit.

Take 1991′s Generation X, for example. In order to appeal to a new generation that’s a notoriously bad market for books, the publishers printed Coupland’s debut novel in a large, unconventional size that juts a few inches beyond just about every trade hardback in existence. The story, too, is loud and filled with large pronouncements about the status of a generation and padded with flip pop culture references.

Then there’s last year’s Life After God, small and unassuming in size with a swimming baby adorning the front cover. True to form, the eight modest stories inside are brief and consciously childlike in their directness. Life After God is a vacation from Coupland-as-usual — less sarcasm, less name-dropping, less stylish than either Gen X or its 1992 follow-up, Shampoo Planet.

So where does that leave us with Coupland’s new novel Microserfs? Well, it’s flashy and glaring and bright like its tinfoilish cover. It’s populated with too-quirky-for-their-own-good characters like the hip twentysomething Lego businessman in the bottom right corner of the book jacket. And, with a few exceptions, it’s as thin as the compressed bible paper it’s printed on.

The narrator of Microserfs, one Daniel Underwood, is a software bug checker at Microsoft who types out his story in the form of journal entries on his Apple Powerbook. He works long nights for little pay or prestige, chats incessantly with his buddies via e-mail, and plays parent to his aging Boomer parents. (Dad has recently been laid off after a score of productive working years at Big Blue.)

Then Daniel and half-a-dozen or so of his fellow Microserfs strike out on their own for new territory. They form a company called Interiority and begin designing its flagship product: a virtual Lego block tool they call “Oop!” Steering through the obstacle course of venture capitalists and Las Vegas trade shows and programming glitches, the Oop!ers spend the remainder of the novel discussing television, coming out of the closet, starting and ending romances, and behaving in those stereotypical ways you see Generation Xers behaving on MTV and Zima commercials.

Coupland goes a long way toward redeeming Microserfs in his last chapter, when his characters finally stop talking so much about the computer revolution and start showing us what it’s all about. The book’s last few pages in particular reveal a surprisingly touching vision of cyber reality where the boundaries between human and machine have become suddenly nonexistent. It feels like a larger metaphor has just snapped into place for the plodding 250 pages that preceded.

Well, maybe Coupland doesn’t deserve so much cynicism. You can open just about any page at random and find a nice, pithy slogan for our culture as it heads to the next millennium. Like this one, which I’ve picked at random: “The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth — it’s about the redistribution of time.” Or this one: “What if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)?”

But a novel is not a 365-Days-a-Year desk calendar, and you can’t help but wonder after a while if Coupland had a master plan or scheme for his book, or if he just wrote the thing in one protracted burst of energy. Or if he’s in cahoots with the art department to come up with marketing profiles for Generation X to be sold to MTV, Zima, and the Rollerblade Company.

Sounds plausible to me: a TV show for Microserfs is already on the way.