0.1% for 99.9%

Today Todd and I had lunch with Niel Robertson of Newmerix. In conversation we hit upon an interesting rule.

Niel mentioned Zingfu.com, a site that can put your friend’s face on the cover of a magazine or in a hundred other funny situations. “It’s a like they took automated a bit of photoshop and turned it into a business.” I remarked. “Yeah,” replied Niel, “They used 0.1% of the functionality to appeal to 99.9% of the population.”.

Blogs are the same way. You have a lot more power by writing HTML in a text editor, of course. But blogging software eliminated most options and automatated a few common tasks, and thus got 75 million people to join the fun.

0.1% of the functionality for 99.9% of the people.

Taking this further, this is what graphical operating systems do as well. As any Linux fan will tell you, you have a lot more power from a command line than you do dragging icons around. But this reduction in power and automation of most common tasks is exactly what most people want.

0.1% of the functionality for 99.9% of the people.

This last point was made best by Niel Stephenson (a different Niel) in his prophetic essay “In the beginning was the command line“:

Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the chip that’s doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates’s fortune.