From the Editor’s Desk: Think (Premium)

Everyone remembers Apple’s iconic “Think different” ad campaign, and many probably know that this phrase is grammatically incorrect. As a writer, that should bother me, but I always felt there was something purposefully sly happening there. Perhaps Apple was riffing on the old IBM slogan “THINK,” given the adversarial history. Or maybe Jobs and company were aware that language is arbitrary and changes constantly, and that its unique alternative might become popular enough to be accepted as correct over time. Or less creatively, perhaps it was just about obtaining a trademark.

But I will posit a world in which each of those factors—and perhaps others I don’t know about—could all be true. This is the type of nuanced thinking I feel is sometimes lost on those who are too technical. We tend to see the world in black and white, in ones and zeros. In struggling with this, I try to remind myself that not everything is mutually exclusive. The classic example being that Google can have the best search engine quality, but it can also be a predatory and anticompetitive service that needs to be regulated and changed accordingly. Both of these seemingly different takes on the same thing can be true. (That doesn’t mean they are true.)

Thomas J. Watson, who invented the THINK slogan and turned it into a one-word sign before he led IBM in the early 20th century, didn’t believe it needed any explanation. Then again, if it was obvious to everyone, the slogan and the resulting sign wouldn’t even be necessary. And so he finally elaborated on it a bit. Not coincidentally, it’s really about nuance.

“By THINK, I mean take everything into consideration,” he said. “I refuse to make the sign more specific. If a man just sees THINK, he’ll find out what I mean. We’re not interested in a logic course.”

To my mind, this is about focus, about not getting distracted by the unimportant. And think differently, or thinking differently if that still bothers you, isn’t so much about being different just to be different. It’s about opening your mind. It’s about being different to be better. To bring this closer to our community, this was the rationale behind Windows Phone back in the day. These days, it’s the rationale behind the Arc browser. In both cases, established products all looked and worked the same and potential innovation was never going to come from the established players. More often than not, only those on the outside, with nothing to protect or lose, can think differently. (Thinking differently doesn’t always lead to success or change, of course.)

But because we live in a world that is nothing but distractions, it’s harder than ever to focus. We’ve lost our ability to read long-form content, and our attention spans are almost vestigial at this point. The technological wonders that democratized content creation and distribution across the Internet have also led us down dark paths, the wrong choices for the right reasons. This is a modern example of my McDonald’s theory, that the inventors of that company never intended to make the world obese. They were thinking differently and addressed what was, in the 1940s, a new need for food that hadn’t existed before the success of automobiles and expansion of the U.S. interstate highway system. Good ideas can have bad outcomes too. Nuance.

With the Internet, allowing any individual to publish any content in any form seemed like a good idea, is a good idea. As is this notion of personalization, that among other things, I can as a consumer of content specify that I only want to see news and other content about the topics I care about. But those capabilities have led to dark paths too, paths in which our minds close as we become increasingly hostile to opinions we don’t share. It leads to this notion of them, the others, those who in many ways are no people to us anymore, not human. Demonizing them is the opposite of nuance. It’s calcification, and it’s not healthy.

And we all do it. Sometimes in big, ugly ways. But more often in the day-to-day, minor incursions of simple-mindedness and unthinking that serve only to prove that we’ve turned off our brains. We’re on cruise control, heading down a single lane, not enjoying the wonder of the diversity all around us. And to be clear, I do mean we here. We all do it. Me too.

And so I try. And you can see the ways I do so. For example, I describe my process of continually testing alternatives to the products and services I use. I write about how valuable this can be because sometimes you find something new and better, while the most common outcome, in which one makes no changes at all, is also good because you’ve verified the quality of a previous choice. This happens with small things—the newsreaders I read each morning, perhaps—but it can also lead to radical changes in more important areas, like my pushing back on OneDrive’s user-hostile behaviors and switching to Google Drive. These things can’t happen if you don’t think differently, if you can’t see nuance.

Last Friday, we published a story about a new ad that Microsoft is testing in the Windows 11 Start menu. This is a minor offense, at best, a feature that first debuted years ago in the Windows 10 Start menu, and still exists there. It’s so minor that it doesn’t make my Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist, in which I stepped through the worst offenses of that system and assigned each a severity level. I don’t personally want a recommended app advertisement in the Start menu, but this is an annoyance, not a real problem. You can disable it easily, for starters. In fact, that UI has been in Windows 11 since the system debuted in 2021, as it applies to other similar recommendations and suggestions in the system. Ads.

But the reaction I saw to this minor annoyance was incommensurate. I’ve spent my adult life–literally 30 years now–documenting the problems with Windows and helping others fix or work around them, and I’ve watched the steady enshittification of this platform accelerate in troubling ways with each passing year. From the slippery slope of ads in Windows 8 (nailed it), to the forced telemetry of Windows 10, to the unpredictable updating and forced Edge and OneDrive usage in Windows 11, I’ve seen real problems. This recommendation thing barely rates.

And if you found my use of the words ads and advertisements there bothersome, maybe work on that. Describing something clearly and accurately is a goal for any writer, and calling these things what they are, ads, is nothing but concise. Debating whether an annoyance is a recommendation, a suggestion, or an ad isn’t just semantics, it’s a distraction. In arguing otherwise, you’re just getting in the way by distracting me and others from the topic at hand, the real problem. That’s not acceptable in any human interaction.

This worries me. As the proverbial canary in this coalmine we call Windows 11, I’ve tried to responsibly call out its worst behaviors as loudly as possible and as quickly as they appear. And I feel like I have a great handle on what matters and what doesn’t. We may all differ on the details—perhaps you’re offended by forced telemetry, an issue I find minor for the most part—but our overall scorecards should be similar. We should all agree on the big picture issues. And that fixing them is job one.

But we don’t. And if we allow ourselves to be outraged over a recommended app icon that we can easily remove, a distraction, but are not outraged by real problems like Microsoft Edge ignoring our explicit choices in a product we pay for and popping up unwanted so that it can steal our personal data and sell it to advertisers, we’ve already lost. As individuals and as a community. If bad behavior doesn’t outrage us, then we’re not thinking clearly.

Go figure, but Mr. Watson had it right from the very beginning.