Perhaps technology is just maturing, but the questions installers and other computer programs ask for “advanced users” have decreased significantly in difficulty. Whereas 10 years ago, an “advanced user” may have been expected to manually specify IRQs of legacy devices such as soundcards in something as simple as a game, there are a number of installers today whose “advanced” options simply allow the user to specify the installation directory.

Much of the complexity is being hidden within the operating system as well; with every new version, Windows hides more and more of what is going on under the hood. This is fine as a setting; it is extremely annoying (to people who understand what is going on) as a standard way of doing things. Windows 7 Explorer no longer even shows you which folders it is copying files from when performing a recursive copy or move.

I can’t help but think that the end result of this is something out of “Idiocracy”, where the only requirement for being a “computer technician” is knowing what a directory is and everyone stares in amazement at simple file system navigation.