Just to pick on Don Larson today, he links to this Mercury Center article on the dearth of home networks — the technology is there, but few people with multiple computers bother to network them. Larson notes that most of his Mac friends have home LANs, while most of his Windows friends don’t.
The basic problem with Windows LANs it that they are pretty much impossible to set up for a normal consumer unless a) the consumer gets very lucky or b) he or she is willing to learn in detail about LANs (which most people simply aren’t).
Take Windows Millenium (please). Windows ME promises to make setting up a LAN completely simple. Okay, I’ve got two HP boxes, both shipped from the factory with NIC cards, one with Win98 and one with Windows ME, and I restored both of them to exactly like they were when I got them out of the box using the included software to do so.
So I click on ME’s nicely, though deceptively, designed Home Networking Wizard, reboot a half dozen times, and I’m set. Windows ME then tells me it can easily get my other computers up and running. Following the directions I insert a floppy, tell it my other computer is a Win98 machine, and it creates a disk — just put the disk in my other computers floppy, it promises, run setup.exe, and it will automatically configure my Win98 machine for the LAN.
Except it doesn’t work. I go through the half dozen reboots, but it still can’t recognize my LAN. Why? In typical genius fashion, a) even though it shipped with a NIC, HP didn’t bother to enable the network protocols I need to access the LAN (and lets face it, for a home machine I’m not going to be using some obscure protocol — just enable what I’m going to need for a typical home network), and b) the Windows 98 ME home networking disk never bothers to do a simple check to see if the proper protocols are installed.
This is a problem I’ve run into repeatedly with Windows where I’m trying to do something that should work only to discover that the MS installation program never bothers to check if the underlying software I need is installed. This makes no sense to me, since how hard can it be to doublecheck and have a dialogue box say something like, “You don’t have this protocol installed. You’ll probably need it for your home network. Would you like to install it now?”
These sort of hidden assumptions render the whole point of a home networking wizard pointless. If I understand all of the things I need to have set up to get the LAN going, I can probably install it without the wizard, and if I don’t, I’m never going to figure out what’s missing to make it work.
Why MS continues to mis-design its software this way continues to leave me scratching my head. There’s no reason installing a LAN shouldn’t largely be plug and play — certainly they can write an installation script smart enough to tell whether or not I’ve got the correct network protocols installed.