"We have lost control of the apparatus" -- Raganwald

Yet another great post from Raganwald: We have lost control of the apparatus.

Our users are being exposed to applications we don’t control. And it messes things up. You see, the users get exposed to other ways of doing things, ways that are more convenient for users, ways that make them more productive, and they incorrectly think we ought to do things that way for them.

 I sure hope this part is true:

You would things couldn’t get any worse. But they are worse, much worse. I’ll just say one word. Google. Those bastards are practically the home page of the Internet. Which means, to a close approximation, they are the most popular application in the world.

And what have they taught our users? Full-text search wins. Please, don’t lecture me, we had this discussion way back when we talked about fields. Users know how to use Google. If you give them a search page with a field for searching the account number and a field for searching the SSN and a field for searching the zip code and a field for searching the phone number, they want to know why they can’t just type 4165558734 and find Reg by phone number? (And right after we make that work for them, those greedy and ungrateful sods’ll want to type (416) 555-8734 and have it work too. Bastards.)