An internet handicapped person's frustration

I write today, actually on behalf of my dad, who had a serious tiff with my pc & the world of internet in general. This is the list of his complaints:

1. Why google mail, even though it is so fancy, does not print emails as they are shown.

(Explanation: for some reason, tabs, tables and other Html items are fuddled up when printing, and his office emails look like gibberish)

2. Why yahoo mail even after opening an email in another sub-tab (within the webpage) stays on inbox

3. why Firefox opens all the sites it opened previously after i forget to shut it down an earlier time

and so many others follow, including the state of service of internet provider, error messages that bring bewildered look on even our faces (they do much worse to him), etc etc

The point is:

While internet is progressing by leaps & bounds & our rate of INTERNET RELATED INNOVATIONS increases or rather multiplies exponentially, we are becoming slaves of the BETA SYNDROME!!!!

After so many years of existance, Google mail is still BETA. We have found ways of providing freebies (like free email) coz advertising pays for our free email (as it did for cable tv 5 years ago before pay channels came into being) but we in our race to gain advertising revenue and hence leave others behind, we have compromised with two huge (& largely related) concepts:

1. PERFECTION

2. SATISFACTION

I am not saying that both of these should cater to the customer, but i remember how in early days (even i feel old before internet generation kids) we used to patiently keep working on ONE thing till we achieved some degree of mastery over it. We strove for perfection, and that led to satisfaction.

In this day of rise fast, wane fast life & events, we have compromised on both counts in order to be the FIRST to do everything. I must confess that I too, am a victim of the same. I try to be the first to serve my client, or come up with unique gimmicks for profession or personal life, and without even had tried them with some time to, what we said in old days " Sleep over it", i ditch one concept & move to another one.

And hence, in the end what we are left with is BETA versions of everything that we use or see or interact with. I have started meeting beta versions of even people, who say this is just trial and they mite be better at a later time. I mean, come on, where are the good old days!!!

Funnily, and irritably, i remember a movie called THE KARATE KID, where this Japanese karate teacher gives this young American girl a wax and sponge, and tells her that her first lesson in Karate is to wax the teacher's car. He instructs her to wax clockwise & then anticlockwise. When she asks him how long to do it, he just smiles & goes away. 

Whether i recollect the scene truly or not, i'm not sure, but the next scene of the movie that links to it is a scene where the teacher shows her an elaborate kicking trick, and asks her to try till she succeeds. At that moment, her patience delivers and she finally is able to do it after umpteen failures.

We seem to have lost that today. I apologize for generalizing on this concept, but I am speaking as a layperson, and for the layperson. I still come across many such people, like my professor at PG program, who would not let go of a certain thing till he was satisfied with it. Even years later, if one were to meet him, he would recollect the study & what could have been done more on it. I believe, perseverence is a requisite, and my PG program helped me understand some of it.

But largely, i still feel vulnerable to the push of everyone around me, trying to crawl over me & launch some BETA activity. With so many billion of us out there, instead of coming up with everything that we can possibly juggle, maybe we should take ONE thing and pursue it, aiming for perfection, and settling for personal satisfaction.

In the adapted words of my professor: " You should pursue it, till you are sure you can defend it to death. Even after that, if you are to be proved wrong, pursue it again, and revise it, to again defend it to death!"

Two lessons: Perfection / persual and being open to other's ideas in one teaching!

Even though i am not able to do the above, i believe that is the right thing to do, the right path to follow & the right life to live. Maybe, i will have better patience in future to follow my ideals.