A Dozen Great Myths About New Technology

By John Hedtke, STC Fellow

Even if we don't write about new technology for our jobs, we still have to use it to get our jobs done. New technology is frequently surrounded by hype, misperceptions, and outright lies that make it harder for us to use it effortlessly. This article discusses some of the most pervasive myths of new technology.

We'll look at a cluster of general concepts first:

New technology is easier to use than old technology.
This one's pure marketing hype. While it may actually be true occasionally, it's important to factor in the cost of learning the new technology and becoming proficient in it. Perhaps the best example of this is that we all have, at one time or another, chosen to delay switching from one product or technology to another simply because it was going to take time to install/learn/get the new finger rhythms in place. In addition, some old technology is world keeping indefinitely; I still type 30 words per minute faster on keyboards that have the CTRL key next to the "A" and the function keys on the right rather than on the newer keyboards than have the CapsLock key there.

You can still buy keyboards that work the way they used to, but they're a little more expensive. But for me, who learned to use computers when men were men and 640K was enough for anybody, it's worth the money to stay with the older technology.
New technology is more difficult to use than old technology.
Hey, there's no reason that techno-myths can't be mutually exclusive! One of the things that people often expect, as a result of being burned too often, is that new technology is always going to be more difficult to use than what it replaces. But this one is no truer than the previous techno-myth. The driving reason for creating and selling new technology is usually a perceived need for something that works better than any existing technology. While the manufacturers may fail in their delivery, they're going to try to do something that works well and actually has a reason for selling.
New technology is better/faster/cheaper than old technology.
"Ending is better than mending," some say. But just because something is new does not mean it's better. although we do live in hope. The cost of installing and supporting a new technology can be far greater than the cost of the new technology itself. Moreover, many new technologies simply miss the mark; they aren't well designed, they don't solve the real problem, or they don't work as advertised. Some ideas speak for themselves in this regard: consider car alarms.

The key to these three techno-myths is the idea that we can do things better and faster without changing anything. All improvements will result in some measure of change, no matter what we do. It may actually be worth our time to make the change to a new technology and it may be an improvement when we do, but each change should be evaluated in its own right.

With these basic myths out of the way, there are some specific misconceptions you should consider:

New tools will help you get the project out more quickly.
Most new technology will give you only a very slight increase in productivity. (There are wonderful counter-examples to this, however, such as online help tools like RoboHelp or Web development tools versus doing things by hand.) Something else to thin about: Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month, identified Brooks' Law, which states, "Adding more people to a later project will only make it later." Sadly, this can be true of technology as well. Timesaving is a desirable effect of new technology, but it's not to be expected. A technology that bills itself as being a major time-saver may deliver far less than it promises.
New technology will work seamlessly with the older technology.
Hahahahahohohohoheeheeheehee! No matter what the new technology, it won't always work as predicted. One of the best examples of this is "Plug 'n Play" technology for Windows. Supposedly when you install a new video card, hard disk, or whatever, the operating system will recognize the new item and load the right driver—and life is seamless. This is a lovely idea and actually works perhaps half the time, but owing to the vagaries of both software and hardware you frequently must hack on the system to make it all work right. This has a corollary techno-myth—"It's a system problem." They're all human problems, but sometimes it's just hard to track down the human responsible for the problem.
New technology will reduce or eliminate paperwork.
It's possible that the Palm Pilot® has reduced paperwork, but that's probably the first time a new technology has actually done so. Every other technology has actually increased the amount of paper you need to deal with. Want proof? We have spent about a trillion dollars on computers and technology in the U.S. in the past 25 years, but paper use has increased steadily despite the continual incorporation of new technology. (And, yes, there was a paperless toilet invented by the Japanese in the late 1980s, so the old canard about paperless offices did come true.)
Buying the latest thing is a good idea.
Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to rush out and buy the latest, greatest version of technology. Only a fool would install a brand-new version of, say, Windows or Word or even FrameMaker on a mission-critical computer, if for no other reason than it hasn't been tested by the public ("the slow gazelles in the herd"). It's a good idea to wait as long as possible before installing the newest software version—a year is usually about right in my experience, by which time there will have been a couple of service packs that will probably fix the most heinous bugs.

This sense of caution doesn't apply just to software. Buying the latest and greatest hardware is going to cost you as much as twice what the next older version costs for only an incremental increase in performance. There are dozens of examples of this, including the latest CPUs, DVD writers, large-screen monitors, wide-screen TVs, and microwave ovens. If you can afford to wait or you don't need the hottest version, you'll save money and get something more mature. You'll also avoid a lot of compatibility problems (for example, not all DVDs play on all DVD players).

What distinguishes these techno-myths is that they're primarily extensions of marketing hype. They may actually be true, but there's a good chance that they're mere canards. New technology isn't going to be seamless, but it may well be worth it if you keep an eye on what's real.

This article wouldn't be complete without a few of the great corporate techno-myths:

With the new support system in place, our support volumes will decrease 50 percent.
Just as your productivity won't go up by leaps and bounds with you add a new technology, the call load in support isn't going to drop by massive amounts, no matter what technology you implement. You may cause gradual decreases in the support call volume by improving the product, the documentation, or the marketing, but it's not going to happen overnight. (You can also increase the call load by messing up any or all of these things, but there's probably no value to you in doing so.)
All artists use Macs.
There used to be a significant difference between Macs' and Windows-based computers' capabilities. Some of this was definitely real—Macs really did do graphics better and they were certainly lower maintenance and friendlier than DOS or Windows—but some of this was marketing hype. While a case could be made that Macs are still friendlier and more stable, Windows computers are what 94 percent of the market uses. (For the record, I have always thought that Macs are better computers in general but I can't stand 'em personally.) Nevertheless, the techno-myth remains that creative types use Macs by preference. The bottom line for this techno-myth is that you should use whatever computer suits you best.
Everything is intuitively obvious.
Also: "Oh, our users don't need that—they'll know exactly what to do," or "It's so easy anyone can do it." This is one of the best corporate techno-myths of all. In college, we learned about hubris as the driving force behind ancient Greek tragedies, but most of us thought we'd never actually see it for ourselves. But then we got jobs in high technology. New technology is almost never "intuitively obvious." The fact that new technology will involve learning new concepts and possibly a new way of thinking about something is in direct opposition to "intuitively obvious." More likely, this just means that the developer or engineer has a clear idea of how he (it always seems to be a guy who says this) thinks the product will be used and he doesn't want to hear anything that counters that.
Microsoft did it that way, so we should/should not do it that way, too.
Unless your company is alto a multi-billion dollar company with more marketing muscle than anyone else, it's probably a bad idea to use Microsoft as a primary justification for pursuing (or not pursuing) a course of action. Microsoft can command economies of scale and marketing budgets that the rest of us only dream about, but that also makes them farsighted; it's simply not worth their time to pursue a product that won't generate at least $20 million in revenue. The rest of us are usually quite willing to work very hard for even a couple million bucks and should plan our actions accordingly. Microsoft is Microsoft, you are you: the twain shall not meet.

These techno-myths demonstrate that companies are prone to falling for classic lies, too. While you may not have great luck in convincing the powers that be that they're making a mistake in their reasoning, you can be prepared for the outcomes and avoid the fallout.

This brings us to the greatest techno-myth of all:

Computers are easy to use.
My all-time favorite techno-myth, this one probably causes more frustration than any other. Regardless of our skill levels, we are all frustrated by our computers, frequently quite audibly. This is because, even if we've never used a computer ourselves before, we already know what computers are like; they're just like they are on Star Trek. You can talk to them, they understand whatever garbled, inexact, ambiguous questions you ask, they keep track of where everyone is and where to find their socks, and they never, ever crash.

Unfortunately, we come to using computers with this picture in our heads and the reality is a good deal less pleasant. Our computers don't respond well when we talk to them (even if we have voice recognition software); they're clunky, and you constantly have to mess with installing new software and doing nitty little maintenance tasks. For the record, I'd love to have a computer that was smart enough to understand what I said and could also tell me where I last left my car keys, but they're not available yet.

Despite all the comments to the contrary, techno-myths are occasionally true. New technology sometimes will work as advertised and be cheaper, faster, and better. Our laundry and teeth will be cleaner and brighter and we'll save money and resources, too. We'll fall for techno-myths occasionally no matter what we do, but if we keep our eyes open, we won't do it often. Furthermore, by looking for the techno-myths, we'll be able to adopt the new technologies that will really help us and can avoid the dead ends that can only waste our time.

John Hedtke's article originally appeared in Technicalities, the newsletter of STC's Rocky Mountain Chapter.

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