THERE has never been anything quite like information technology before, but there have certainly been other complex technologies that needed simplifying. Joe Corn, a history professor at Stanford University, believes that the first example of a complex consumer technology was clocks, which arrived in the 1820s. Clocks were sold with user manuals, which featured entries such as “How to erect and regulate your device”. When sewing machines appeared in the 1840s, they came with 40-page manuals full of detailed instructions. Discouragingly, it took two generations until a trade publication was able to declare in the 1880s that “every woman now knows how to use one.”

At about the same time, the increase in technological complexity gathered pace. With electricity came new appliances, such as the phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison. According to Mr Norman, the computer-design guru, despite Mr Edison's genius for engineering he was a marketing moron, and his first phonograph was all but unusable (in fact, initially he had no particular uses in mind for it). For decades, Mr Edison fiddled with his technology, always going for the most impressive engineering solution. For instance, he chose cylinders over discs as the recording medium. It took a generation and the entry of a new rival, Emile Berliner, to prepare the phonograph for the mass market by making it easier to use (introducing discs instead of cylinders) and giving it a purpose (playing music). Mr Edison's companies foundered whereas Mr Berliner's thrived, and phonographs became ubiquitous, first as “gramophones” or “Victrolas”, the name of Mr Berliner's model, and ultimately as “record players”.

Another complex technology, with an even bigger impact, was the car. The first cars, in the early 1900s, were “mostly a burden and a challenge”, says Mr Corn. Driving one required skill in lubricating various moving parts, sending oil manually to the transmission, adjusting the spark plug, setting the choke, opening the throttle, wielding the crank and knowing what to do when the car broke down, which it invariably did. People at the time hired chauffeurs, says Mr Corn, mostly because they needed to have a mechanic at hand to fix the car, just as firms today need IT staff and households need teenagers to sort out their computers.

By the 1930s, however, the car had become more user-friendly and ready for the mass market. Two things in particular had made this possible. The first was the rise, spread and eventual ubiquity of a support infrastructure for cars. This included a network of decent roads and motorways, and of petrol stations and garages for repair. The second was the makers' increasing skill at hiding the technology from drivers. Ford proved particularly good at this. Ironically, it meant that cars got hugely more complex on the inside, because most of the tasks that had previously been carried out by drivers now had to be done automatically. This presented drivers with a radically simplified surface, or “interface” in today's jargon, so that all they had to do was turn the ignition key, put their foot on the accelerator, brake, steer and change gear—and after 1940, when automatic transmissions were introduced, even gear-shifting became optional.

Another instructive technology is electricity. In its early days, those firms and households that could afford it had their own generators. Keeping these going soon became a full-time job. In the early 20th century, writes Nick Carr, the author of a book entitled “Does IT Matter?”, most companies had a senior management position called “vice-president of electricity”, a rough equivalent of today's “chief information officer” (CIO) and “chief technology officer” (CTO). Within a generation, however, the generators and vice-presidents disappeared as electricity became available through the grid, leaving users to deal only with the simplest of interfaces, the power socket.

Out with the nerds

The evolution of these technologies holds some lessons for the IT industry today. The first observation, according to Mr Norman, “is that in the early days of any technological revolution the engineers are in charge, and their customers are the early adopters. But the mass market is the late adopters. This is why Thomas Alva Edison, an engineering genius, failed miserably in business.” Similarly, in IT today, says Mr Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems, “the biggest problem is that most of the people who create these artefacts are nerds. I want to see more artists create these things.”

The geekiness that predominates in the early stages of any new technology leads to a nasty affliction that Paul Saffo, a technology visionary at California's Institute for the Future, calls “featuritis”. For example, Microsoft in a recent survey found that most consumers use only 10% of the features on offer in Microsoft Word. In other words, some 90% of this software is clutter that obscures the few features people actually want. This violates a crucial principle of design. As Soetsu Yanagi wrote in “The Unknown Craftsman”, his classic 1972 book on folk art, “man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs.” The most immediate problem with IT today, as with other technologies at comparable stages, says Mr Saffo, is that “our gadgets are so disproportionate”.

A second lesson from history, however, is that a brute cull of features would be futile. As technologies, the sewing machine, the phonograph, the car and the electricity grid have only ever grown more complex over time. Today's cars, in fact, are mobile computers, containing dozens of microchips and sensors and other electronic sub-systems that Henry Ford would not recognise. Electricity grids today are as complex as they are invisible in everyday life. Consumers notice them only when things go wrong, as they did spectacularly during last year's power cuts in north-eastern America and Canada.

“You have to push all the complexity to the back end in order to make the front end very simple,” says Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce.com, a software firm that will be examined in a later article in this survey. This migration of complexity, says Mr Benioff, echoes the process of civilisation. Thus, every house initially has its own well and later its own generator. Civilisation turns houses into “nodes” on a public network that householders draw on. But the “interface”—the water tap, the toilet flush, the power switch—has to be “incredibly simple”. All the management of complexity now takes place within the network, so that consumers no longer even know when their electricity or water company upgrades its technology. Thus, from the user's point of view, says Mr Benioff, “technology goes through a gradual disappearance process.”

From the point of view of the vendors, the opposite is true. “Our experience is that for every mouse click we take out of the user experience, 20 things have to happen in our software behind the scenes,” says Brad Treat, the chief executive of SightSpeed, a company that wants to make video phone calls as easy for consumers as e-mailing. The same applies to corporate datacentres. “So don't expect some catharsis in eliminating layers of software,” says Mr Papadopoulos. “The way we get rid of complexity is by creating new layers of abstraction and sedimenting what is below.” This will take different forms for firms and for consumers. First, consider the firms.