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Article By: Daniel Krutz (dannyek71)
Article Written: 9th April, 2002

The computer world is very different today than what it was 4 or 5 years ago. It seems as if every man and his mother, literally, have a computer, whereas In the past most of the computer population were "geeks" with a high level of technical knowledge. Today the vast numbers of computer users know very little about the computers that they use every day. Because of this, easy programs are used in place of difficult ones. In many cases, programmers sacrifice stability and quality for the sake of making flashy and easy to use software. One need only look as far as America Online and the Microsoft Windows operating system to see this. If a developer wants to make a popular program, they must not only build a quality, stable program as they did in the past, but they must also make it extremely easy to use.

There seems to be something of a gap in 95% - 99% of the programs available today. They seem to be either written for ease of use, while lacking the quality and stability that every program should have, or written almost exclusively for the geeks amongst us. The programs are very stable and of a high quality, but because of the steep learning curve, they will never become popular.

Why can we not have programs that do both? Why can we not have programs that are easy to use and understand? Why can we not have programs that do not sacrifice quality to attain this objective? I believe that the programs of the future will do just that. The programs that are ported to multiple platforms, Windows, Macintosh, and the Unices will be the programs that are most popular. There will always be exceptions that survive, but they will not be popular outside of their domain.

This change will be caused by two factors: the first being that the "newbie" population of today will become more experienced with computers and will be able to adjust to more complicated programs with steeper learning curves. The second is that as the computer world continues to become crowded with developers producing a greater number of programs, the average computer user will have a larger pool of software to choose from. Because there will be more programs, there will be more competition amongst developers. History tells us that competition frequently leads to greater quality software.

So what does this mean for all the IRC clients out there? First of all, to be a successful IRC client in the future, the client needs to combine stability and quality, but it must also be easy to use. I believe that there will be an IRC client in the future that will be used by the majority of computer users. This client will be available on every major platform. The reason that I believe there will be one major IRC client is because as applications continue to become progressively more complex and hard to program, there will be fewer IRC clients. That is not to say that small, somewhat harder to use, IRC clients will disappear, but these clients will simply not be accepted by the majority of users.

In the future, a war will rage not just between IRC clients, but all programs. The seeds of one of these battles are being planted even today as various high-quality Linux distributions become easier to use. A great battle seems to be looming on the horizon.

Email Daniel