Our goal is to help more people do more and better Bible
study.
The leading Bible software products available today
(including Logos 3.x) are powerful tools designed 10-20 years ago. I believe
that all the top commercial Bible software companies were started in a day when
every single user owned a screwdriver for opening their computer case, and most
of us had flipped DIP switches or moved jumpers to install something.
Our customers were "pastor geeks." Our software
was designed for people who liked technology, were comfortable with it, and
wanted to have fine-level control over it.
Now that wasn't everyone who wanted to study the Bible, but
it was pretty close to everyone who wanted to study the Bible and owned a
computer.
Today everybody has a computer, and lots of them are not
computer-geeks and don't want to become them. The majority of
"everyone" has something else they want to do -- from Bible study to
photography to cooking to water skiing -- and a computer is just one more tool
in their life for doing whatever it is they want to do. They just want it to
work.
(There are "geek" minorities in every area of interest,
and many of us move across the spectrum over time. In software I've been moving
from geek to user. I used to disassemble software. Now I just want it to work.
In cooking I'm going the other way: I used to microwave plastic food, now I
hand grind spices.)
As computer ownership has changed from being a reliable
indicator of computer-geek status to the equivalent of owning a toaster our
customer base has changed. There's interest in our tool for Bible study from
people who don't have any interest in technology. And we want to serve people
who want to do Bible study -- all of them. Not just the people whose interests are
both the Bible and computers.
To serve them well, we need to get the technology out of the
way.
(There are still open questions of what to simplify, what is
and isn't more powerful, what's easy, what's hard, what settings are and aren't
needed. We won't get that perfect in the first pass, or ever, but we'll keep
adjusting it based on feedback and experience.)
The Mac vs. Windows argument is a great example of what's
happening in computers. The Mac has been around since 1984, and long derided by
"real computer users" as a silly toy that didn't have the power and
control we needed. And it was (and remains, in some ways) true. People
literally open up their PC's and modify them with hardware, add-on cards, special
drivers, connectors, software, etc. Nobody took a soldering iron to a Mac, but many
PC users of the 80's made their own circuit boards. Because if you were
spending $3,000 on a computer, in 1985 money, you had "serious computer
needs."
20 years later the Mac is an overnight success. :-) It's
winning the mind share, it's converting people, and people are praising how
"it just works."
Sure, it's gotten a little more flexible and powerful, but
for the most part the criticisms justly leveled against it in 1984 are still
true. It's a closed system that simplifies things. You're constrained to one hardware
vendor. What's changed isn't the Mac, it's the world. Computers aren't huge
investments by people who really need or like technology. They're toasters;
common household appliances used by everyone.
I know people who like to tinker with cars. Most of them learned
to do that because they had to; the cars required the tinkering to keep
working. Even I was pretty familiar with what was under the hood of my first
car.
Today I drive a car that recognizes my key in my pocket and
opens with a touch, starts with a button, and turns on the headlights and
windshield wipers automatically. I never open the hood. It alerts me when it
needs an oil change. The only way it could be better for me is if it radioed
the dealer about the oil change, sending its GPS location and historical
pattern information suggesting where it would likely be parked for 2+ hours so
the dealer could come and change it in the parking lot while I'm at work. Or,
better yet, if they made an engine that never needed an oil change. Or oil.
Maybe you change your own oil. Maybe you like changing the
oil. Maybe you go out of your way to have an older car you can tune and tinker
without a special programming chip. More power to you; I get it. I don't have
to hand grind spices, I just want to.
But you are no longer the majority of car buyers, and I am
not the majority of spice consumers. People want them pre-ground. Or just
cooked into the packaged plastic food. :-)
I'm not asking you to change, or to stop loving total
control over the technology. I'm just explaining what's happening, and how it's
affecting us. I would encourage you to step back and think about it though. Sure,
you're used to changing your oil. You like the hands-on involvement and the
ritual of it. You did it with your dad or your son.
But really, wouldn't an oil-free car be nicer for everyone?
Does the next generation want to mess with it?
At Logos we spend approximately $1 million per year on customer
service and technical support. The majority of that expense goes to supporting activation,
installation on more than one machine, and "where are my book files / my
book files are out of date".
So in Logos 4 we tried to eliminate as much as we could of
all those things. We're replacing activation with an email address and password,
even if you rarely/never use email. We're simplifying multiple machine
installation by simply synching all your settings and data. We're avoiding
missing/old resource files by having the software automatically download
missing and updated resources and manage them for you.
Are some people going to hate it? Yes. Some people refuse to
have an email address. Some people want to manage every file on their system.
Some people use filters to control every byte in and out of their machine to
the Internet. Some people open up Logos 3 XML data files and hand-hack the
contents.
And maybe that's you. If so, I've got two questions: Do you
think it's the majority? (I'm guessing not. Well, not guessing. I've got the
data, the feedback, and the frustrated calls to tech support on my side.)
And secondly, do you really care? Or are you turning
something we did because we had to into something we want because we've always
done it that way?
(I used to be forever deleting files and pruning my
directory tree because my hard drive ran out of space and I had to do backup on
floppy disks, and I needed to organize files to find them. My kids save
everything, throw it all in one directory, and use search when they want to
find it. We don't use half the hard drive, and they get bigger each year.)
We're always stepping up to higher levels of abstraction.
You want to control where your files go, but do you really? Do you know that
the operating system breaks your 1 meg file into lots of chunks and scatters
them around the hard drive? Do you care? I used to. I used to run checkdisk,
undelete, and defragmenters all the time. I worried about contiguous chunks and
wrote software that was disk-sector-size aware. Now I let the OS deal with it,
though I still organize my folders.
What if you bought a new computer at BestBuy, took it home,
turned it on, and after entering your name and password found that it brought up
every application, photo, video, and music file from your old computer. Would
that be cool?
Well, it'd be scary, to you and me. How did it work? How did
it know? Did it store it on the server or use wifi to take it off the old
machine? Is it secure? etc. But what about our kids? Would they get nostalgic
for a null-modem cable and manually moving every file between systems? Would
they worry about whether moving an application directory brought over the
settings and registry keys?
Or would they just think "well of course, it should just
work, and it did."
With all that said, I know we need to make it work. We need
your feedback to know what's a good streamlining and where we need to leave
some user control. It's clear we can't assume your C: drive has enough space;
but I don't think that means we need to bring back the Location Manager report
and tell you file sizes and version numbers.
And we need to respect the fact that some people want to
tinker with their car, and some people want to "reveal codes" in
WordPerfect, and some people want to write JavaScript macros on their Logos
custom toolbars.
That's why you can buy and keep an old car, and that's why
we very intentionally did not make Logos 4 replace Logos 3. You can keep Logos
3, and every feature that worked there is still there, just as it was. We're
even ensuring it keeps running on Windows 7, etc.
Logos 4 isn't a mandatory replacement, and it doesn't take
away anything you have invested in. It's an optional new product that works
with the content you've invested in. I hope you'll like it, and I hope you'll
help us make it better. But if not, I hope you'll still realize that it has
value for a new, different user, and that, correctly done, it can help even
more people get into better Bible study.
(Last analogy: digital cameras. Early on they didn't offer
the power and flexibility of analog cameras. But they took photography from an
intentional activity that required expertise to something people do all the
time -- off cell phones! And as they improve they're offering even better
customization and power. But the funny thing is, people are caring for that
power less and less. Did you really want to mess with the exposure? Yes? Okay.
But what if the camera picked for you? What if it guessed, but then backed
itself up by taking every photo simultaneously at 15 exposure settings and letting
you pick the best result anytime later? Isn't that better? For some experienced
photographers, even that will probably never beat having "control".
But for most people? Simplicity backed up by power....)
