🚀 go-pugleaf

A psychologist friend once told me that the main factor in a person's
perception of stress level is the degree to which that person feels
out of control of a situation. Epidemiological evidence also shows
that people who are successful and wield a lot of power over the
people around them are on average happier, longer-lived, and less
susceptible to stress-related disease.

Having to appeal to a bureaucrat to obtain resources you need to
accomplish work on a daily basis is degrading and stressful. This
is perhaps doubly true for many people of technical bent, who are
often less enthusiastic about playing the socio-political games
necessary for establishing power relationships with other people.
People with a job to do and a distaste for politics will be willing
to pay an extra premium to free themselves from having to beg
every day.

Consider the analogies between transportation and computation
technologies.  In large cities individuals pay a high premium to own
and operate individual automobiles. Parking is a nightmare, traffic
congestion is a disaster, the hardware is idle most of the time and
chewing up scarce space resources. Mass transit, on the other hand,
moves 5-30 times as many people per lane of right-of-way per hour,
does not require parking, gets much fuller use of the hardware, and
(when well-run) offers convenience unmatched by the personal
automobile (the user doesn't have to maintain anything, conflict with
the law, fight traffic, look for a parking space, worry about theft,
etc.). Mass transit systems are also 5-10 times safer than private
automobiles, even when they run on exactly the same infrastructure.

But how many people prefer to drive an automobile instead of taking
mass transit? Why? The same principle is at work here as in the
decline of centralized computing. I still ride my bikes and take the
occasional bus, and live without a car, but the instant I got access
to my first lousy MS-DOS PC I never again did anything on the
University Mainframe unless I had absolutely no alternative. I'm
sure that some corporations have excellent MIS outfits, but once
people get a taste of being in control, they don't give up that
feeling readily.

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu