Tragedy of the (PC Desktop) Commons

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It continues to amaze me how “inconsiderate” computer applications are. How many of the programs installed on your PC are are guilty of the following?
  • Scattering shortcuts across the start menu, quick-launch bar, desktop, and who-knows-where-else
  • Unexpected internet browser task-bars
  • Installing into the launch-at-startup or services list
  • Consuming as much of your memory and CPU as necessary to ensure that they run at peak efficiency and can be launched in an instant
  • Bundling mandatory trial applications
A large percentage of my “computer maintenance” time is weeding the garden: removing extra shortcuts, yanking out memory-resident applications, uninstalling bundled extras, then figuring out what else I can remove without killing the OS. How many friend (or parent’s) computers have you seen with a three-column start menu and a 20-icon task bar, because each program think it needs to be pinned in the start menu, on the quick launch bar, and a few places in the start menu… gah.

Unfortunately, it follows the tragedy of the commons very closely, no individual vendor has any incentive to change, and if they did, they would be at a disadvantage to all the others that continued to spam the desktop with computer cruft. I’ve toyed with ideas for stemming the flood, but nothing that would impose the iron fist of centralized resource allocation that will be more and more necessary as vendors get more aggressive with their integration efforts.

Originally Posted: June 28th, 2007

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