"We're getting things ready" - the dumbing down of IT and the cloud software black box

Over the last few years we have seen the progressive introduction of "friendly" messages to software that have progressively made it harder and harder to resolve issues and as IT support professionals, it is making us all look like idiots.

I have just spent 30 minutes looking at a Microsoft dialog box with a color changing "progress bar" that tells me that Microsoft are doing something on my computer.

What it is, is not ever really explained or revealed to the user - only that it seems to have died as nothing should take 30 minutes to do on a new state of the art laptop.

Remember when software installers would show you the different steps that were going on so you could at least see that something was or was not happening.

This is the IT equivalent of boarding the plane, taxiing to the runway and then sitting there for 40 minutes with no explanation of why the plane is going nowhere... a sure fire way to raise the blood pressure of even the calmest and most forgiving of passengers.

It reminds me of the Monty Python "Miracle of Birth" sketch where the mother and father are effectively told to shut up, not ask questions because they arent" involved" in the process - only the doctors are.

In our case, the UX designers/management at whatever software company decided the best way to deal with the growing complexity of IT was to hide everything from everyone or to obcsure it inside 100's of log files scattered across a computer in multiple locations and present the user with a message telling them to be patient, please wait or the most obnoxious of all - we're getting things ready.

As the poor IT support technician who is tasked by the customer to explain exactly what is going on and why, we are being set up to fail by software vendors who insist on not documenting what their software is actually doing when certain processes or components are working.

Things need to slow down, in my opinion, and the people who are designing these processes need to be on the receiving end of their design decisions and spend a bit more time documenting and explaining what their software is doing.

I guess this is part of the reason for what is colloquially known as the Microsoft 3 finger salute - ctl- alt-del or reboot the computer and try again and if that doesnt work, reinstall everything.

As the old joke goes, this is why Microsoft should never build cars - when there's a rattle in the car, the advice would be, pull over, remove the engine, dis-assemble it, re-assemble it and put it back in - then call us if you still have the problem.

Or the Apple approach - your car is 2 years old - time to buy a new one.