With respect, I'd argue I hear this all the time from experienced PC pros (including myself in the past I'm sad to say). It misses a vital point. Users shouldn't need to be 'educated' to use a PC. What we should be searching for is a way to make the PC as easy to use as any other appliance.

Any reasonable person can use a dishwasher, washing machine or even a VCR with little more than a seven page manual. Yet software developers continue to make software that appeals to our geeky way of doing things because we understand PCs. 'Oh you need to edit this config file and restart that service, change this setting in the BIOS' - excuse me? Technical support is bad enough for poorly-educated users when you CAN understand the language it's spoken in.

Yes PCs are complex beasts; but for the majority of users that complexity can and should have been abstracted away - they just want to surf the web, word-process and other similar applications.

I neither need to know nor care about the precise pumping mechanism used inside a washing machine; all I need to know is what setting to put it on and run it. If I want it fixed, I ring up someone who does know how it works. The reason why? I have more important things to be doing. It will no doubt irk many PC pros, but most users don't care about PCs with anywhere near our passion, and don't want to know. They just want them to work.

For those who are technically knowledgeable, there are operating systems out there which give the user immense control and flexibility. Conversely, there is no operating system currently available that makes life as simple as possible for the user, not the developer who wrote it. I am a developer myself, so I know I've been guilty of this before now. However until the software community as a whole creates things for users instead of for themselves, we will continue to have these problems.

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