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As far as Cooper is concerned, an Apologist is basically someone who apologizes for bad software by rationalizing it. For example, Microsoft Word has plenty of apologists. They basically admit that the software contains 8 billion more features than 90% of the users can handle, and that those features clutter the application and make it difficult to use. The apologist portion comes in when they say things like "yeah, but..." and then append an execuse, such as "its the most powerful word processor on the market."
The person I was speaking to still didn't quite get it, so I decided to use an analagy. Picture this: You order chinese take-out, and remark to yourself something along the lines of "Damn, thats a lot of food only for $15.00". You eat, then you spend the next four hours in the bathroom. You've got leftovers. You put them in the fridge. Here's where it gets scary: you reheat those leftovers the next day, eat them, and repeat the four-hour visit to the bathroom. Someone asks you why the heck you would've eaten that garbage when it made you sick the night before. You respond "It was so much food for such a low price - I didn't want to let the rest of it go to waste."
Verdict: You, sir, are an apologist. You knew damn well that you were going to suffer a "take-out enema", yet rather than stay healthy, you actually ate that stuff again, and you actually provided a justification for suffering at the hands of bad take-out. And don't try and deny that you've ever done this : substitute chinese take-out with cold pizza and I've just added a few hundred thousand more apologists to this list.
This analagy is a pretty good one that applies to software. End users are so accustomed to being mistreated by the applications they use on a daily basis that they make excuses for the bad behavior and turn that into a justification for using it. Word is really powerful, Excel is designed for programmers, etc - the littany of excuses goes on and on.
When the day comes that the motivation for producing an application is to produce an application that meets the customer's needs, does what they want it to do, does what they expect it to do, recovers easily from user mistakes and the motivation is not about figuring out how many double-shifts you can get a programmer to work to cram in features that will abuse the end user : we might actually have to stop apologizing for the software we use and brag about it.
Here's a little bit of homework: Sit down and write a list of the applications about which you give praise to your friends and peers, and then sit down and write a list of the applications about which you complain and for which you make justifications and excuses. Then - take a look at which list is bigger. If you produce software for a living, then shouldn't it be your company's #1 goal to be the software that everyone praises instead of the software that abuses its victims?
The moral of the story:
