[Tech Thoughts] When offering new technologies, being ‘options-rich’ is a good thing

As a 40-plus-year-old technology user, I’ve come to see the growth and death of many a piece of technology.

When I was young, people were experiencing the tail end of owning rotary phones, and cable television was only in its infancy. Nowadays, access to high-speed internet and the rise of online gaming and streaming services are the current generation of entertainment technologies that have come into play.

It is with this in mind that I wanted to share one thing I look to when it comes to news about the development of new tech or deprecation of old ones.

Simply put, how many options can I have when it comes to the technology I’m offered?

The options-rich philosophy

It’s hard to explain a term like “options-richness” without some pedantry but I will try anyway.

An options-rich philosophy means that when someone develops a new technology, it tries to ensure that it’s something valuable for people to use because it can be adjusted to suit individual needs, even in the event of its obsolescence or of the seeming obsolescence of older technologies.

The “in the event of obsolescence” clause is important to note here, because as we may have experienced in one form or another, sometimes, a new bit of technology will not be able to do everything a formerly popular piece of technology can do. However, companies will try to shoehorn new technologies into the space of what an older bit of tech used to do so they can make money by selling the new tech instead of something just as reliable that was already there to begin with.

Companies who might support an options-rich philosophy will try to ensure older tech is still usable beyond the point it was originally intended to serve so that people can still pick and choose between the older tech or newer things within reason. They would also try to make the process of engaging with new, unfamiliar technologies less uncomfortable for people who just want to use their good old tech.

Adobe Animate’s maintenance mode and Mozilla’s Firefox AI toggles

The reason behind these recent thoughts about option-richness stem from two news articles I wrote recently, one about the seeming death of a long-standing piece of software, and one about making new features in a different bit of software optional.

First, let’s discuss Adobe Animate, the popular 2D animation software that’s been available in one name or another for around 25 years.

Adobe Animate was originally supposed to sunset in March, but this announcement of its discontinuation was taken back a day later with Adobe opting to place the software in maintenance mode — it would allow people to keep buying and using the Animate software without issues, but there would be no active development towards Animate past a point.

Putting it in maintenance mode was an important step towards keeping the option to use the software alive as many have said there was nothing currently on the market that could do what Adobe Animate does in one piece of software.

Killing Animate to push Adobe’s AI-enabled programs made for bad press — the backlash against the announcement showed that — and people might seek a feature-rich or feature-complete replacement to Animate for 2D animation from the open-source software developers instead, rather than turn to the jumbled hodgepodge of apps Adobe has.

On the flipside of the discussion is how Mozilla decided to lean into a strategy to make AI optional rather than mandatory for its software to build trust among both AI feature adopters and non-AI-using stalwarts like myself.

Mozilla announced that, on February 24, it would be updating its Firefox browser with a set of toggles that would allow users to enable or disable some or all of the AI features that would be in Firefox from that point on.

Firefox head Ajit Varma acknowledged this in Mozilla’s announcement. “AI is changing the web, and people want very different things from it. We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI. We’ve also heard from others who want AI tools that are genuinely useful,” he wrote.

Prior to that, Mozilla Corporation CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo also spoke up about giving people power over the technologies they use rather than forcing people to make uncomfortable compromises.

He said, “Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.”

As such, allowing new technologies to be optional is also a step in the right direction for trying to appease a broad swath of Mozilla’s userbase without hurting its AI-powered browser ambitions.

Forced obsolescence? Have options at the ready!

Forcing a user of a given technology to give up what they’ve been used to for “the new hotness” is the touch of arrogance of a techbro distilled into the technologies he’s funded to bring him wealth.

For instance, when Microsoft formally made its suite of office software (I believe they call it Microsoft 365 now) a subscription service only instead of a one-time purchase, I personally searched for open-source alternatives like LibreOffice for offline document-writing. Some people also may have preferred to use Google’s own suite of tools, but the idea of paying for them to store your data for you rubs me the wrong way though.

In any event, change isn’t inherently bad, but when changes are thrust upon you especially in the technology space, it’s always a good idea to take stock of Anthony Enzor-DeMeo’s earlier quote above, and extrapolate a bit for good measure.

People deserve to know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it, and have options at the ready instead of being forced and trapped towards a seemingly unbending path. – Rappler.com