Tedium - Respect Your Power Users 🔌

Today in Tedium: When a big company launches or acquires a tool well-suited to its most faithful users, it can go one of two ways. First, the company can invest in the tool, improve it, and help build up the audience for that product. Or, after a couple of years, with shifting priorities and maybe a departure or two at the executive level, that niche idea might be allowed to die an unceremonious death—even with a quietly dedicated fan base behind it. And it happens over and over, with power users feeling disillusioned in the end. I have been on the receiving end of this “niche app by a large company shuts down” routine more times than I’d like to count, and I feel like, every time it happens, it just ends up hurting a broader ecosystem. It’s something I think about a lot when a big acquisition hits, such as Twitter’s recent buy of the newsletter tool Revue this week—the odds that something goes south and a big company ends up burning some incredibly passionate users. With that in mind, today’s Tedium speaks up for the power-user experience. Someone is holding a candle for Google Inbox somewhere, and it’s me. — Ernie @ Tedium

A German kid rocking out an old IBM PC back in the late ’80s. (Wikimedia Commons)

Where the heck did the power user come from, anyway?

Power users have been both a major goal of many tech companies and, alternately, the bane of their existence. They both foster deep interest in what a creator is doing … and test the limits of what that creator’s tools can do.

They are the weekend warriors, the stress testers, the overly ambitious creators, the ones who will break things because they don’t care about limits. They are your best resource for quality assurance and your worst nightmare on a holiday weekend.

They are the power users, the ones who know every detail in every menu and three ways to do the same thing in every app.

And they most likely are the invention of a marketing department in the early-to-mid 1980s. A quick analysis of the Internet Archive finds that the term suddenly exploded in use in magazines such as Byte, Popular Computing, and PC Magazine in the fall of 1984. The earliest such use I can find comes from an April 1984 issue of InfoWorld, in which Robert M. Carr, chairman of the company Forefront, dropped the term to describe a user who accesses menus in multiple ways.

By the last few months of 1984, the term was everywhere in the tech press, to the point where John C. Dvorak—in the pages of InfoWorld—had described the phrase as a “dubious new buzzword” in his 1984 Dubious Achievement Awards:

Each year, I reserve a special category for dubious new buzzwords, or catch phrases, which should be avoided at all costs. This year’s grand prize goes to power user, which refers to a supposedly abnormal computer nerd who likes to impress people with convoluted computer commands. It was coined by a marketing guy who couldn’t figure out how to get a directory listing on an IBM PC. (Hint: DIR.)

The funny part about this is that, a couple weeks after Dvorak gave his award out, an InfoWorld reader pointed out that the trade magazine was largely responsible for its overuse—with one article in the very same issue using the term seven times.

“Here’s to Dvorak for his tongue-in-cheek style and to your article for playing right into his hands,” wrote Jay K. Joiner.

It’s worth remembering the software of this time often came in a box and relied on printed manuals to teach you much of what you could do with said software. When you bought a piece of software, you were likely going to be living with it for a while. The financial motivation was different back then—but not too far off what you might find from a modern SaaS tool, except for the fact that, shareware notwithstanding, you weren’t getting a chance to kick the tires on a piece of shrink-wrapped tool.

Muscle memory was the goal, and that encouraged tools to have some depth. Think of classic word processors like WordStar or WordPerfect, for example. These text editors, complex by today’s standards, fostered superfans who knew multiple ways of doing everything, giving them flexibility and encouraging future upgrades. The problem? If you changed the app too much, you risked making those power users upset and unwilling to upgrade—which might explain why WordPerfect was purely text-based well into the GUI era.

But with the rise of the internet and large monolithic companies, power users increasingly became a liability—in part because many of the tools that they used were offered for free or low-cost, without a business model, meaning that every new app was a risk, whether or not it was a success in the long run.

That meant it was the end user rolling the dice, whether or not they realized it at the time. And sometimes those power users bet wrong.

A few years ago, I got really into this text-editing tool called Editorially, which I found to be a great solution to managing a copy editing team with a digital-first approach. (Also helping: The people that made it were really good designers—and despite their site not being touched in about six years, it still looks like it could have been made yesterday.) The problem was that the company never had a business model, and eventually the company chose to shut down via acquisition rather than create one. Startups are a risk, and sometimes a risk doesn’t pan out.

The problem is that, in the modern day, this is even true of large companies. Like Google.

(via Feeder)

The death of Google Reader may have been a turning point for how companies perceive power users

People still remember what happened to Google Reader, in part because it was so unexpected that it could have gone a completely different direction.

The murder happened almost eight full years ago, a quiet mention in a blog post announcing “spring cleaning,” but the pain of the loss of Google Reader, the RSS reader du jour, hangs heavy on a whole lot of users, even all these years later.

Depending on who you ask, you might hear arguments that it was the moment that the internet changed for the worse.

I’m sure, if I was a Google executive, I probably could validate the reasons for getting rid of it. It discouraged people from using tools that could potentially make Google more money, or Google tools that were more modern and centralized. (Looking at you, Google+.) It was very sticky, but it was hard for Google to figure out quite what those users were sticking to.

And the financial benefits of offering advertising to bloggers within their RSS feeds perhaps weren’t as lucrative as other options.

But in many ways, this betrayal forever changed the relationship that many dedicated users had with Google, and likely damaged content consumption models for years after the fact. Some people will say it was a necessary shift, that RSS readers in general were on their way out.

The solution, to lots of other people, seemed obvious: If you can’t justify keeping the tool around for free, charge people money! But some noted that it simply didn’t seem to be in the Google ethos. Writer Ben Brooks, in a post titled “When Even Billions of Dollars Won’t Support Free,” noted that years earlier, he made the case that Google wouldn’t be immune to even shutting down popular tools like Gmail if they didn’t meet their business goals. And Reader proved it.

“So if faced with charging for Reader or shutting down Reader, shutting down Reader fits the Google mantra better than the former,” Brooks wrote.

If there’s any cold consolation, it’s that Google eventually understood the importance of charging for services people used—be they Stadia, Google Drive, or YouTube Premium—but it was still not enough to save a tool with a dedicated fan base, no matter how many petitions were created. With every new initiative, Google has had the shake off the reputation that, when it gets bored, it will kill something people like.

But back then, at least, the Google Reader saga gave the impression that Google didn’t charge money for its tools because it made it easier to let go of something that didn’t fit the company strategically. That because it wasn’t selling anything, there was nothing users could get upset by if they could no longer buy. (Right?)

But just because there was no shrink wrap doesn’t mean that this theory was true. Even with worthy replacements like Feedly or Feedbin, people still lament this loss. Google broke our hearts.