Does anyone actually want to interact with their computer like this?

Seems like every few years, somebody pops up and decides that a desktop that looks like your house is exactly what non-computer literate people need to be comfortable using a computer.

I guess I have a couple of problems with this:

1. It’s insulting. It kinda assumes that because someone is not computer-literate, that they are stupid. If you sat my Mum down in front of Windows, she wouldn’t know where to start. But that doesn’t mean she’d be any happier in something like 3DNA. She knows her computer isn’t her living room, and she doesn’t need it to be, she just needs it to be a little more intuitive. Let me give you a simple example. My Mum doesn’t want to have to remember that Powerpoint is for presentations, Outlook is for email, Internet Explorer is for browsing the web, she just wants icons that say "Presentations", "Email", ‘Web". That takes a minute of creating and renaming shortcuts on her desktop, not an investment in some wizz-bang, 3D, virtual reality doo-hickey.

2. It doesn’t work. OK, let’s assume my Mum really does want her PC to look like this. Will this help her get up to speed? I don’t think so. Look at the screen shot on this page. Will a non-computer literate person know that to open a document, they click on Media sign on the wall? Is that intuitive?

3. It doesn’t scale. Ok, let’s assume that 1 and 2 above are wrong, and this IS exactly what my Mum is looking for. What happens once she is comfortable using this interface and wants to get into more advanced stuff. With this, there is not a nice progression over to the "normal" Windows interface. She pretty much has to toss out what she’s learnt and go back to being a newbie.

OK, so that’s 3, not a couple, and given time I could probably ramble on further, but am I off base here? I don’t deny that from a geek perspective the technology in this is pretty cool, and I would never suggest that Windows does a good job in terms of being easy for a novice to use, but I don’t think this is the solution.

I suspect a big part of helping novices is to let them work in a task-based approach, not in an application-based approach (the example in point 1 above). I have nothing but gut instinct to justify this, but I suspect the advances will be made with smaller tweaks to the exisiting UI, not by throwing it out and replacing it with a video game.