30 Jun 2024

It’s all coming together. The PC power user is back. In the early days of small business microcomputers, the person with a subscription to Byte, and some knowledge of topics like batch files and how to get support for a printer driver, was able to bring up the value of the office computer from, say, a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10 to maybe a 4 or 5. The desktop PC options kept getting better, though, so by the time Microsoft got to Windows XP in the early 2000s, the small office PC was more like a 6 or 7 without tweaking, and power user skills made less of a difference. No more DIP switch settings to learn! When you plug in a printer it works out of the box! You can get updates over the Internet! And the small business Internet scene, for a while, was solidly in Web 2.0 create more value than you capture territory. All that added up to much less value returned from the time invested to become a power user.

But now the balance is shifting again. Now the small office or home office PC is more of a point of sale device, loaded with surveillance software, compliance risks, and SaaS upsells. The peripherals work, in a sense, but they don’t work so much for you as for some far-away product manager who needs to nail their OKRs to get promoted and afford a down payment on a house.economics experiment I’d like to try: make middle-class housing affordable on an honest IT salary to test my hypothesis that enshittification would go down And the small-business-facing Internet is a more or less wretched hive of scum and villainy, from fairly mild shelfware without the shelf schemes, all the way to actively heinous stuff like sending your marketing budget to terrorists.

But the underlying PC hardware is still getting way better. And Internet service is getting faster with lower latency, and the best of the software you can easily get is still getting way better. Which means a bigger gap between baseline and advanced configuration, so a bigger win from learning power user stuff. Yes, I’m a Linux nerd, but you can probably get your computer into an acceptable state without switching OSs. (I got a Microsoft Windows laptop for work, and the two OSs have gotten a lot more similar. On Linux a video conference is more likely to just work, and on Windows, stuff is more likely to break because somebody got bored with it.) So if in the 1980s you could bring an office PC up from a 2 to a 5, and in the 2000s you might not get much noticeable change, now you can bring your PC from negative territory up to a 7 or 8. Looks like a big win, even if you don’t count the payoff from scam protection. More: effective privacy tips