full-disclosure - lame bitching about xpsp2

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From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: lame bitching about xpsp2 

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 20:50:10 +0200, devis said:

> Do the interface of OpenOffice and MS Office looks THAT different to you

To a programmer who's abstracted stuff to fairly high levels, they look pretty
much the same. However...

> ? Hell no. These secretaries are formed to work on an interface, and
> changing a few things in that same interface will not as you think,

Ahem.  Actually, it WILL bring things to a crawl.

If you're steering your usage via "muscle memory" (OK.. third menu from left,
4 items down, then right click - no conscious idea what you're doing), it
hurts a *LOT*.

You don't believe me - program your system to swap mouse buttons 1-3 randomly
each time you logon, or switch the order of the menus around, or change the
keyboard mapping from qwerty to something almost-but-not-quite Dvorak (or back
to something not-quite-querty) once in a while, and see how long it takes you
to get annoyed.  That's what upgrades feel like to a user.

> bring the business word to a crawl. To the reverse, it will make them 
> more proefficient at computer usage, as any human does become better 
> when having to deal with different interfaces / systems.  It will make
> them curious about the new software, capabilities and changes. It voids 
> the 'One way of thinking' that vendors try to impose.

Has it ever occurred to you that said secretary isn't *paid* to be curious, and
has *no interest* in being curious? (Hint - why are they secretaries and not
looking to move into the programming staff?) That "new" software that does
things differently gets them mad, because they knew *perfectly well* how to get
task XYZ done with the *old* system, and the time it takes them to find out how
to do XYZ under the *new* system is time that (in their opinion) probably got
wasted because if they hadn't been migrated, they'd not have had to re-learn
it.

(Not to knock the secretaries - although none of the ones I work with are
blessed with loads of curiosity, they've bailed me out of a number of messes
caused by my doing paperwork "the way it should be" rather than "the way it
is".  If the senior secretary says "I don't understand why, and I don't *want*
to understand what political issue in another department makes it this way, but
you have to do it this way", you *do* it that way.. ;)

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