Which Extensions Does Grandma Want?

I have an early memory of standing on tip-toes by the Linotype machine in my grandmother’s print shop. My grandmother owned, printed, and published the newspaper for the town of Metamora, Ohio. That’s how she kept her family safe during the Depression — she owned a business.

The Linotype machine was big and intimidating, but I couldn’t resist peering into the little compartments of letters. “Mind your p’s and q’s”: ever wonder where that expressions came from? It’s easy to confuse those p’s and q’s and put them into each other’s compartment.

My favorite moment was when the liquid lead came down the channel and into the mold to make a slug. The typesetter — who I watched with wonder and adoration — would decide how far apart he wanted the lines of type to be, and then he’d mold a strip of lead just the right thickness to place between the lines. Leading.

Let’s leave aside for the moment any worry about permitting a small child to stand next to a bucket of molten lead. Clearly, I survived. (Insert joke here: “So that explains why you’re so weird!” Yeah, well, I also played with a jar of mercury I found in my dad’s workshop, but that’s another story.)

The point is, I’ve seen a lot of change in my life. I’m not old, but I’m old enough to be a grandmother. In fact, I just recently became a great aunt.

My brother — “grandpa” now — played in that print shop, too. He remembers it better than I do. He developed his love for technology in that print shop. As a kid, he built shortwave radios. When I was small he told me he had wired up the TV so if I tried to change the channel to one of my programs (say, Captain Kangaroo), the TV would electrocute me. I believed him, because he was so good at electricity and stuff. When personal computers came along, he built his own from parts.

For years now I’ve been working for computer hardware and software companies. I’ve been at a lot of meetings where someone asks that inevitable question:

“This is great, but can my mom understand it?”

These days when someone talks that way, I cringe a little. Don’t get me wrong — I asked that question myself, many times. But now I am a mom of people old enough to work in software companies, and I feel just a little defensive about that question. OF COURSE I understand your freaking product! What do you think, I’m stupid or something??!

Ahem. Anyway, I also think about my brother when I hear that question. And I wonder, is there perhaps just a little bit of condescention in that question? I realize that it can be asked with great respect — as in, “we must make this product so good that all our non-technical relatives can use it” — but still, I wonder if there isn’t just a teensy bit of arrogance in that question.

Lately I’ve heard and read, more than a couple of times, comments along the line of, “These tools are for the open source community. The technical elite. Regular people won’t use them anyway.” I’ve heard it said that people who use Firefox are smart, and people who don’t, aren’t. (I’m simplifying a little, but that’s the gist of it.)

Well let me tell y’all something. Lots of smart people use, dare I say it, Internet Explorer. People like my brother — grandpa — who is now a neuroradiologist. He diagnoses diseases of the brain. Or my sister, a neuropsychologist, who works with developmentally disabled children.

These people aren’t dumber than software engineers, they aren’t dumber than open source affectionados, they aren’t dumber than anybody. They use bad software because as bad as it is, it’s better than investing a week or two into learning how to download and use some of the other products. If they have a week or two, they want to go on vacation. Not download and learn new software applications.

So for me, the real question is:

Do we abandon our moms to bad software?

And the answer is: OF COURSE NOT. We make the software we love so good, so obvious, and so easy that our moms, aunts, uncles, and siblings prefer it.

And why is this important? Simple: we want to win. We don’t want megacorporations controlling technology.

We live in a world where my grandmother’s print shop cannot exist, because a big company came along and bought it out and now the newspapers are controlled by a very few large corporations. For me, working on open source — advocating that it be simple and easy to use — is a way to swim against that tide.

So which extensions does grandma want? She wants any of them that will make her life easier, because she’s spending a lot of time at work.

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