Their commercial livelihood depends on it, of course. I suspect that the market of the computer literate has been saturated. The remaining population cannot be bothered with all the techo junk. They want to turn the thing on and it works _ plug and play.
Women, very sensibly, shy away from wasting their time tinkering with computers to make them do things that the manufacturers should have built into them in the first place. Expansion of the kids market will to a large extent depend on women knowing the thing works.
Do you have to read a manual to make a toaster work? No. You put the bread in and press the lever at the side. There is a self-evident knob to turn if you like your toast burnt.
People are rightly demanding their computers do the same.
Also existing computer owners who have done the labours of Hercules to get their present computer going, will shy away from new peripherals and upgrades unless they promise to plug and play.
I advise anyone who has bought a new modem which has worked first time to advise the Guinness Book of Records immediately.
The Plug and Play theory is that Windows 95 will go out and find whatever is hanging off the computer and configure it optimally automatically.
There is a huge market out there for encyclopedias, atlases and the like on CD-ROM. There is a market for $200 modems that send and receive paperless electronic faxes. And dozens of other computer markets await the sellers of hardware and software: printers, speakers, music keyboards etc.
Well, the easy target of patient, technically interested people has been used up. The rest, who can hardly work the VCR, are not going to put up with initialisation strings, ROM drive files and all the rest of it. They want to plug it in and use it.
This is why you can expect to hear more about “”Plug and Play”. I don’t think it will result in the end of the computer widow syndrome, but it might end the excuse for it.