American Airlines has decided to charge $15 for the first checked in bag. As a not infrequent air traveler, this strikes me as the ultimately boneheaded move. Most of the flights I am on are fully oversold already, and one of the more annoying issues is that the overhead storage always gets filled with luggage halfway through boarding. People just don't like checking in their luggage - overstuffing a carryon (or carrying a bigger one onboard) is much more convenient.

If capitalism has taught anybody anything, it is that usually businesses get ahead by offering convenience; they make profits by taxing convenience. People will pay for something that is perceived as having value, and will resent a price increase on a bad service. Most of my fellow business travelers resent having to check in a bag because of the additional time required to retrieve it, as well as an increased risk of losing the bag in transit - and the US airlines' track records on lost luggage are particularly appalling. The delays caused during the boarding process by too many carryons again translate in more money lost for the airlines, as pilots have to make up the lost time by flying faster and burning more fuel. I doubt that a $15 tax on the first checked bag - something people avoid doing already - will recover any of that cost.

If somebody at American Airlines would be smart, they'd put a tax on the large carryons. The perception of paying for convenience would be kept intact, business travelers would be happier because (maybe) the overhead bins would be able to accommodate their luggage, and airplanes would manage to leave the gate ontime in maybe a higher percentage, letting pilots fly at a more leisurely pace. I'm just wondering what sort of McKinsey alumni Harvard grad it took AA to come up with their current proposal...

One of the more annoying pieces of crapware I have to remove from the manufacturer's Windows preloads is Norton Antivirus. That's not because I hate it on principle - that is because I hate it based on my own usage experience. I (have to) use Windows for maybe one hour every couple of months or so. Even with that limited usage pattern I managed to develop a deep resentment to this worthless antivirus "solution" - for the way it immediately hogged all my available bandwidth on bootup to download enormous updates, for the way it didn't let me cancel that, for the way it stopped my work until the updates were installed, and for the way it required a reboot or two just before continuing. Ultimately, for the way it used to make "boot into Windows" a 30 minute affair before the damn thing got out of my way.

I thought I was alone wondering in amazement how people can charge money for it, until I read somebody else's perfect description of how I feel about it:

If ever a class of software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of Hell and run on Satan's own desktop, it is this. Performance- sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating and prone to inducing just as many problems as they purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of support engineers in business and home users in tears.

That's part of a good article about how software should not work. Actually, the software itself is mostly fine, it is the surrounding packaging and integration into the operating system that sucks by being invasive, obnoxious and/or just plain annoying. In the world of Linux distributions and free software we have been spared the whole mess created by having every single application handle its own install, update/upgrade, dependencies and uninstall. Can you imagine the horror?