The “Broken Window” Fallacy
Introduction
Why ongoing and unnecessary problems are likely a net economical and psychological loss.
The text
This is the first in a series of essays about common fallacy patterns in the computer world. The first is what I call the Broken Window Fallacy of computers. As you may know, in the broken window fallacy, one says that if something is damaged then it generates more revenue to the economy, because one will have to fix the damage. However, as is demonstrated in the article, it might as well be a net loss of time and money.
I talked with a few people on IRC about how I hated the fact that most people are still using Microsoft Windows which is quickly getting infected with malware, or Internet Explorer, which is lagging behind Firefox and other browsers in its support for Web standards, and makes the job of the web designer much harder. So they told me that it is actually a good thing because that way someone has to fight the malware (a very uphill battle), and they have more work as web developers.
In a podcast Interview with him, Joel Spolsky said that Open Source Software will reduce the demand for programmers, because they make some tasks easier. And so programmers are happier, but they have to work less. He missed the point that a lot of proprietary software also does that, because it costs a fraction of the cost it would take to develop all this functionality from scratch. But that's not the main thing that is wrong in this argument.
The problem is that tech workers can never run out of things to do. In the time they have to adapt their web-sites for MSIE, they can better spend on things like having better functionality, more web-sites, and more pages. The time people spend making sure their Windows systems are free of malware, is better spent happpily using Linux and getting some actual, productive, work done.
So Windows and MSIE are a huge strain on society. I can never run out of things to do. At the moment, I have an idea for a commercial site, several essays I'm working on, tons of ideas for other essays, open source software to write, and lots of external open-source projects that would love to have me as a contributor. Trying to adapt my sites to broken proprietary software only slows me down. It also slows you down if you're a developer.
Also note that I believe the happiness that programmers feel also counts. As Aristotle said, the ultimate cause of human life is happiness. Thus, what makes most benevolent people happy is moral, and what makes them unhappy is immoral. Moreover, people hate doing a lot of work to handle buggy and/or idiosyncratic systems.
In a previous workplace, I had to do a lot of work getting our card to behave under VMware ESX, and there were many weird problems. This is while Xen and XenEnterprise mostly worked out of the box. As a result, I hated the ESX guts. I had enough to do without having to deal with it.
I don't mean to defame ESX here. It may be a fine system for hosting several virtual machines for the data center. But writing kernel drivers for it was painful.
So don't fall into the "broken window" fallacy. Encourage everyone around you to switch away from MSIE and Windows.
Links
Original version - as a post on my tech blog.
Licence
This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2023, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-by) 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version of that licence).
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