Sunday, October 3, 2010

President Obama vs. QWERTY keyboard

Look at your keyboard and you'll know why President Obama has failed.
Your keyboard is the QWERTY keyboard, a legacy of the early typewriter, designed in the 1870s. We don't have typebars inside our computers to produce letters, but the QWERTY keyboard lives on.
Your grandmother or great-grandmother might not know how to operate a computer, but they would know how to type on one. The keyboard has basically been the same for 125 years.
President Obama rode high in 2008, promising "Hope and Change". Change ran into legacy systems. And legacy systems are winning.
How does QWERTY survive? Everyone who types knows it. They learned it when they were young. Once you've learned it, you barely have to think of it. It's natural.
Another keyboard system would bring tons of errors. The fastest typists would take lots longer to type until they learned it. And would be extremely unhappy at whoever forced them to change from what they learned and knew so well.
In his campaign, President Obama's rhetoric focused on the imagined "nefarious cabal" who led the country into the ditch. Change the leadership - to him - and the country would change.
He forgot the legacy systems. They stay not because of the decisions of a "nefarious cabal," but because they've worked for years. The newer alternatives can't overcome their problems. Instead, President Obama leads the "nefarious cabal" trying to disrupt everyone's life.
Think of all the things you remember from your childhood. Even if you're in your 70s, you remember plenty of what you learned in those early days.
You're comfortable with them. Even if you're a hunt-and-peck typist, you have a certain level of comfort with the QWERTY keyboard. Something new would disrupt you.
In the Oval Office, President Obama must use a QWERTY keyboard. He should look at it sometime.
Every day, thousands of journalists sit at their keyboards and write about politics. The reason for the Democrats' failures is right under their fingers.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers and commenters.
UPDATE2: Ed Driscoll links.

9 comments:

happy tic said...

I understand what you're getting at, but the metaphor isn't as strong as it could be. In fact, the Dvorak layout is growing in popularity, and only takes a few weeks to learn. Benefits of switiching include much faster typing and lower rates of repetitive stress injury. Give it a shot!

And about Obama, I agree wholeheartedly!

happy tic said...

I understand what you're getting at, but the metaphor isn't as strong as it could be. In fact, the Dvorak layout is growing in popularity, and only takes a few weeks to learn. Benefits of switiching include much faster typing and lower rates of repetitive stress injury. Give it a shot!

And about Obama, I agree wholeheartedly!

Anonymous said...

Any comment by me might be considered to be biased.

==Etaoin Sherdlu

Anonymous said...

This is not a new problem however, and it is one that will face Republicans, Tea Party folk, and Libertarians just as much. All of those talk of changing or dismantling Social Security, Medicare, etc. Those are just as much legacy, as anything Obama has sought to change.

If we don't like the current status quo as it is, which seems to an ever increasing (if not slowly increasing) government that slowly consumes us to submission, then small gov't folks will have to deal with Legacy Systems, as you call them, as well.

Robert Arvanitis said...

Regarding legacy systems - there is a far broader point.

One hundred thousand years of human evolution have "legacy systems" that include traditional marriage and a host of related values. Values which helped the race survive.

We discard these at our peril.

Welcome the opportunity to discuss in detail for the short-termists.

Anonymous said...

I'd say QWERTY is more of a "standard" than a "legacy" system.

For programmers, it might be nice to have parens without the shift key and various minor things like that, but for the most part I think it's as good as any. It's certainly better than an "abc" keyboard which might be friendly to newbs (and nobody else), and has been shown in studies to be as fast as its more modern competitors. All the programmers I know who went to a new layout eventually went back, that says a lot to me.

Rick Caird said...

yep, makes sense to me. Obama is a qwerty keyboard.... or, an old time socialist who espouses a philosophy which has never worked, anywhere.

Anonymous said...

The problem with those Dvorak keyboards is that they can lead to double-posting.

Phelps said...

I was going to post the same thing about Dvorak. There is one thing, about it though -- it only takes a week if you want to switch. If you don't, you can fight it for a long, long time. Trying to force an entire office to switch when have of them have said, with conviction, "I want QWERTY?" Insanity.