Go With the Defaults

Written on 2012-12-22 • conversation (2) • Read in: 1′32″

I am a kid of the Microsoft Windows generation. I grew up with it. From 3.1 through NT4 right up until Windows “FCKGW” XP. I loved optimizing the settings. Control Panel and Regedit were my playground. I have installed and re-installed many, many times. I would have a set of settings and required software hard-wired into my brain. It would take me about a day to get you the most optimized Windows XP installation. Fast, secure and neat. The way it should be, right?

Until I realized that what I was doing, was total madness. I just did not know any better. I got so carried away in my optimization process that I didn’t realize there might be another solution to the flaws of the OS at that time; switch to another operating system. And that is precisely what I did. The upfront cost was a bit bigger, but it has saved me a ton of time.

This post is not about operating systems. The lesson I learnt then was not about software, it was about something bigger. It was about choosing the right defaults.

Whenever you choose a tool to work with, you are almost always better off with a product that is less configurable, but has better defaults. Your cost of ownership—rightfully taking man hours into account—will be a fraction of the cost of ownership of a lesser, more configurable product.

I recently wiped my computer clean and re-installed OS X. Whenever I would get the urge to configure something, I would ask myself “is this because I need it to be this way, or because I have developed a certain habit?” I have changed many habits since then, not so many options.

When in doubt, do yourself a favour. Go with the better defaults.

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Nonsense; of course there are tons of optimizations to be done even in MacOS, and AIX (one of IBM’s UN*X) is all about making sure you can pipe the same options through named bash pipes in a thread-safe way. You could as easily have selected MacPup (it’s a LiveCD/LiveDVD) to claim this stuff. Or instead, maybe I should ask what shells you used? Object Desktop? If you want to make a case for sensibilities shining through without dodgy-at-best help from vendor partners, or trading vendor stakes in under 3 years, or bsd#perl environs rather than large scripting environments (that is, Microsoft WSH, MOM, etc. before PowerShell II came out) go on ahead. Defaults imply some inconsiderate elections of the user; they often disappear in a haze of security-driven decision database now, other times at the control of camera, conferencing or context-control UI and UX, but they were never good (or good art direction.) Moreover I should be somewhat allergic to the way MacOS has its own subtly-off-standard SVG and DOM3 SVG and retains rabbitholes for schlepping that dogfood back and forth from iOS, providing its own publication pressures. You can create editable objects whose edits are always ignored so easily… Also, you saved yourself orphaning a G5 Mac waiting so long, so congratulations.

— Steve Nordquist · Tue 5 Mar 2013 · #