From the Editor’s Desk: Missing the Point ⭐

In the early 1990s, my wife and I moved to the Phoenix area so that I could go back to school to study computer science and pursue a new career in software development. Life had other plans for me, of course, but during those first few years in Arizona, when friends and family would visit for the first time, we'd often take short trips to notable sights elsewhere in the state, too, like the Grand Canyon.

On one such trip with a good friend and his brother, we parked the car and walked across the lot to the gaping maw of the Grand Canyon, a view so astonishing in depth and breadth that it's impossible to fully capture in words, photos, or videos. The reality of this place is so mind-bogglingly impossible that your brain almost switches off. As we walked down the steps to the viewing platform, mouths agape, trying to reconcile what we were seeing with our sense of reality, a cry rang out.

"Mommy! Mommy!" a young girl yelled from the platform. "Look!! A puppy!!"

We lost it. The three of us all doubled over in laughter. Here we were, at one of the earth's greatest sights, a literal natural wonder, and all this child saw and could think about was ... a puppy.

In our insular little world of technology enthusiasts, we see a similar lack of focus, an inability to see what's truly important. Or even what's really happening.

It's everywhere.

You see it in the outrage over the Control Panel, a legacy interface that almost no one sees and doesn't impact our day-to-day experience in Windows 11 in the slightest.

You see it in the complaints about the PlayStation/Xbox "duopoly," despite those products being dominated by the Nintendo Switch and the relative tininess of this market compared to those for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, markets where real abuses occur.

You see it in how obsessed people are with web apps, their supposed limitations, and how these things will never be "real" apps because they're not “native” apps. Whatever that means.

Again and again, we ignore the real problems in our world, and instead of collectively agreeing on the important points, we focus, like that little girl at the Grand Canyon, on the ridiculous and superficial. Indeed, some seem almost diabolically incapable of not voicing an opinion, no matter how off-topic and underdeveloped. The discussions that accompany anything related to antitrust are cesspools of this nonsense. Instead of celebrating that the world's regulators are finally doing something, anything, about these monstrous superpowers that have gone unfettered for far too long, we debate minor points and worry about the government's role in app design.

But I'm especially freaked out by people with strong opinions about things that do not impact them, like all the Sonos complaints coming from those who don't even own any Sonos equipment. Or even worse, the complaints about changes in whatever products or services that won't impact them but will help others.

No opinion is...