What the Bar Means
A Rant by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu)
Created:  May 13, 2005
Updated:  May 16, 2005
http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/barnone.txt

A long time ago, I installed Microsoft Office for the first time.  The 
most amazing bit about it was ... the progress bar.

The progress bar started at the left and moved to the right.  I
thought, naively, that when the bar had moved all the way to the right,
the install would be complete.  I was floored when it just started over 
again from the left side.  

Ah, I thought, it's not really a progress bar in the sense of %
complete, it's a progress bar in the sense that the installer or
Windows hasn't crashed, i.e., it's still making progress.  A ruddy
stupid design decision, certainly, but I thought I understood the idea 
behind it.

I didn't and still don't.

Here is an experiment.  Uninstall Norton Anti-Virus CE 7.61 (which uses
the Windows Installer) on an older machine.  You'll notice two things:

1) The progress bar restarts many times.
2) Near the end of the install, the "time remaining" will be something like
2 seconds.  Then, for 10+ minutes, the disk will spin, the bar will not
move and the "time remaining" will not change.

So what does the progress bar really mean?  The answer appears to be 
nothing.

It doesn't measure progress in any meaningful way, since one doesn't know
beforehand how many times it will start over from the left side.

It doesn't measure activity, as it can stop dead for minutes at a time,
complete with a wildly inaccurate estimate for completion.

So, we have a feature that subtracts value.  Anyone want to write the punch
line?  Here's mine:

My old boss once joked about constructing an answering machine message that
said:

"If you want to press 1 now, please press 1."
"If you want to press 2 now, please press 2."

The "progress" bar is the software equivalent of this.