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Walter Watts
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Officious Office
« on: 2007-04-05 19:42:25 » |
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Forbes.com
Technology
Officious Office
Stephen Manes
02.26.07
Microsoft Office 2007 takes its unspoken theme from the psychedelic 1970s comedy troupe Firesign Theatre: Everything you know is wrong. The old menus are gone, arrogantly abandoned without a way to get them back even as a "classic" option. Instead you see a "ribbon," a big, ugly tabbed panel of icons and labels that can hog more screen space than your work and sometimes even hide it. You can minimize the ribbon, but you can't avoid it completely or go back to what you know. Just about everything is different, except for keyboard shortcuts and legacy-settings screens buried a few clicks deep.
Not only do the sprawling ribbons take a lot of space to deliver little information, they annoyingly change depending on screen resolution and the size of the window you're using. In a wide window the Find, Replace and Select commands turn up near the right edge; narrow the window a bit and they disappear beneath an "Editing" panel you have to click first. It's just one of many irritations created in the name of innovation.
The Office file formats that have been around since 1997 have become something of a lingua franca in computerdom. They're still available if you explicitly choose them, but Microsoft encourages you to use new formats that require special conversion software (some of it not yet available) to work with older products--including every previous version of Office and recent mobile versions. Recipients of such potentially unreadable documents may not be amused.
There are a few useful new features, like the ability to save files directly in Adobe's Portable Document Format. (Competing products have done this for years.) You can put icons for functions you use a lot in a single task bar above or below the ribbon, which can't be otherwise customized.
But some things haven't been fixed. In a world of wide displays, Word still can't automatically arrange more than two documents side by side. And Excel still doesn't understand (as Lotus 1-2-3 did more than 20 years ago) that when you type 2+2 into a cell, it should automatically add the numbers, not treat them as text.
Users: Adapt or die. Or stick with older versions that do most of what this one does and work the way they taught you to.
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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Hermit
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Re:Officious Office
« Reply #1 on: 2007-04-05 23:46:16 » |
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Or switch to Open Office which, aside from its absense of crashes and attractive price is much more compatible:- With documents from previous versions of MS Office
- In terms of UI with previous versions of MS Office
- With users of previous versions of MS Office
Than Microsofts latest expensive disaster
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Walter Watts
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Re:Officious Office
« Reply #2 on: 2007-04-06 01:47:34 » |
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You read my mind, Hermit.
>Posted by: Hermit Posted on: 2007-04-05 22:46:16
>Or switch to Open Office which, aside from its absense of crashes and attractive price is much more compatible:
> * With documents from previous versions of MS Office
> * In terms of UI with previous versions of MS Office
> * With users of previous versions of MS Office
Open Office was the first app installed on both new Macs.
Now what is it again that great minds do............?
;)
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Officious Office
« Reply #3 on: 2007-04-08 01:29:06 » |
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[Blunderov] I suppose I must be falling behind; all my apps are on still my desktop.
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Microsoft is Dead
April 2007
A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?
Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.
Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.
But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world.
What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward.
When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.
Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.
The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.
The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way.
I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.
Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.
The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Microsoft. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.
I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.
Notes
[1] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is exactly analogous to the writing of bogus literary theorists. Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay.
[2] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.
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Blunderov
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Re:Officious Office
« Reply #5 on: 2007-04-17 08:54:26 » |
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[Blunderov] "It's one of the unwritten laws of computing: All versions of Windows are annoying."
How very true that is. I recently made the grave error of installing Windows Vista. Just about every thing attached to, or installed in, my computer ceased working altogether. I couldn't even connect to the internet anymore. I can't remember when I last felt so alone.
I demanded a refund the next day. The logic of paying lots of money to have my computer collapse completely eludes me yet.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130638/article.html?tk=nl_wbxnws
The 20 Most Annoying Tech Products
Obtrusive behavior, irritating habits, constant nagging--crummy products have bugged you for years. Here are the ones you say have bothered you most.
Dan Tynan, PC World
Monday, April 16, 2007 01:00 AM PDT
Artwork: Chip Taylor
Some things are annoying by their very nature--spam, your in-laws, comedian Gilbert Gottfried. But when the annoyances stem from stuff you've paid for or products you rely on to get things done, that really takes the cake.
Unlike PC World's 25 Worst Products of All Time, irksome products aren't necessarily bad, buggy, or dangerous. But they all have one or two traits that make you want to wrap them in 200 pounds of steel cable and toss them off the side of a boat. From stupid features and rude behavior to brain-dead design and poor corporate policies, these 20 products have truly annoyed us over the years, and some continue to do so.
This list hardly covers every annoying tech product ever made. But where did this list of 20 come from? You picked the worst ones by voting in our Annoyances Poll, and you'll see your Top 10 most annoying products flagged with icons. Just for fun, we've added 10 more products that didn't get enough votes from you in our poll but that we found particularly irksome.
It's still possible, though, that a product not listed here or in our reader survey really got under your skin, so please post a comment below. If nothing else, you might feel a little better.
AOL CDs (1993 to 2006)
As our #1 worst product of all time, America Online gave all of us plenty to be irked about over many, many years.
But the carpet bombing of free AOL discs was possibly the most annoying (and environmentally irresponsible) marketing campaign ever waged.
Estimates put the number of discs shipped between July 1993 and July 2006 at over 1 billion; we feel like we received that many ourselves.
The Most Annoying Tech Products, Numbers 2 to 5
Windows Me (2000)
Obviously, you agreed with our take last year when we called Windows Me the "worst version of Windows ever released." It was a mess.
Windows Me
Shortly after its release a tidal wave of bug reports smashed into Redmond. Installation was difficult, hardware driver support was sketchy, and system crashes were routine.
As one PC World columnist said: "If you upgraded to Me from an older version of Windows, you might feel that the term Millennium refers to the length of time it will take to fix the glitches."
Apple iTunes, Microsoft Windows Media Player, Microsoft Zune, Napster (2003 to present)
The media players themselves are mostly fine, but their incompatible digital rights management (DRM) schemes drive us nuts. Despite Apple's recent decision to sell some DRM-free songs, most iTunes tunes still play only on iPods, a couple of Motorola phones, or a computer with iTunes software on it. (And the DRM-free songs cost 30 cents more.)
Microsoft Zune
Windows Media files are worse--now, two different, totally incompatible DRM file formats use the .wma file extension. So if you buy a WMA file from a service that uses Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM (most notably Napster), it won't work with the Zune (which uses Microsoft's Zune DRM). Can't we all just get along?
Microsoft has said it will "soon" sell DRM-free music for the Zune. We'll see.
McAfee Internet Security, Symantec Norton Internet Security (1998 to present)
Security suites are supposed to be like personal bodyguards for your PC, quietly enforcing the rules and keeping you safe without drawing attention to themselves. Not these two.
Click to view full-size image.
Norton and McAfee are constantly prompting us to check our security settings, update our subscriptions, and/or buy more products. Given that most new PCs ship with one of these two packages preinstalled--and their subscriptions typically expire after 90 days--it's almost certain they'll nag you too. We have enough problems with our machines' security without also having to worry about our security software.
Real Networks (Progressive Networks) RealPlayer (1996 to 2004)
The most annoying product on our list is also #2 on our list of the all-time worst products. Why did it leapfrog AOL to become the annoyances champ? Mostly because it had a relentless pushiness about everything it did.
RealPlayer
For example, in 1996 Progressive Networks (now called Real Networks) began offering RealPlayer in a $30 Plus version and a free version, but finding the download link for the free one was like playing "Where's Waldo" on the Real.com site. Once you tracked down and installed the free player, it declared itself your default media player for all file formats and began nagging you to pony up $30 for Plus.
Later versions installed themselves into your Windows system tray and popped up pointless (and annoying) "special offers" from Real advertisers. And, of course, Real's notorious attempts to assign unique ID numbers and track consumer media usage--anonymously or otherwise--did nothing to endear itself to us. Pay $30 for this pioneer of pushiness? Get real.
The Most Annoying Tech Products, Numbers 6 to 10
Bonzi Buddy (1999-2004)
Described as a "helper" application, Bonzi Buddy delivered contextual ads to your PC, basically after collecting information from you. Its passing has not been mourned.
Bonzi Buddy
As reader Randy J put it to us: "I used to do support for one of the big ISPs. Bonzi Buddy was one to remember. I once used a computer with it on there. It kept popping up and obscuring things you needed to see. I had to uninstall it from many, many people's systems."
MySpace (2003 to present)
Gwendolyn would like to be added as one of your friends. Brittany would like to be added as one of your friends. Latisha would like you to view her free adult video, which incidentally will download spyware to your hard drive.
MySpace
Sure, the biggest Web sites always attract scammers (see eBay), but they don't have to make it easy. MySpace's minimal barriers to entry make it a haven for bogus "friends."
Microsoft Windows Vista (2007)
It's one of the unwritten laws of computing: All versions of Windows are annoying. Vista wins a prize in part because of its overzealous "Cancel or Continue?" confirmation windows so brilliantly lampooned by Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials.
But that's only the tip of the Vista annoyance iceberg. Installing Vista onto an older system? There's a good chance that your graphics card, sound card, and some of your older software won't work properly. And even if you have a new system with either the Premium or Ultimate version installed, Vista won't display its nifty 3D Aero interface if your PC lacks the graphics horsepower for it. No warning screens, no error messages, no explanations--Aero simply doesn't work. That's annoying.
Microsoft Windows Update (1998 to present)
Yes, we know, our computers would be even more vulnerable if we didn't use Update to plug Windows' seemingly endless security holes. But using it to distribute Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage tattleware puts Update firmly in the annoyance column (not to mention the way it autorestarts your system after it's done installing).
Click to view full-size image.
Delivered as a "critical" update last spring, WGA installed itself with minimal notice, secretly phoned home with information about users' systems, and wrongly identified possibly millions of legitimate copies of Windows XP as pirated.
Apple QuickTime for Windows (2001 to present)
What is it about media players that makes them think they own your PC? Install QuickTime, and it immediately sets up camp in your Windows system tray, drops icons on your desktop, and loads the qttask.exe applet every time you power up--no questions asked.
Apple QuickTime
You can kick it out of the tray, but the next time you upgrade or reinstall the program, it sneaks back in. Worse, if you want to use iTunes, you have to take QuickTime along with it. Plenty of programs are looking for a home in your system tray, but most of them ask politely first.
The Also-Rans
None of the following products and services quite got enough votes to make your Top 10 list of the most annoying products, but we found them irritating enough to merit inclusion. Here they are, in no particular order--other than how often they tried our editors' patience.
Microsoft Office 97 (1997)
Clippy
When Microsoft Bob (#7 on our list of the all-time worst products) went to the great software boneyard in the sky, it left a little gift behind: Clippy, an oh-so-irritating animated paper clip that popped up on screen and offered inane advice for using the different Office applications. Clippy finally got clipped in 2001.
Even more annoying, though, was Office 97's lack of backward compatibility. For example, you couldn't open a Word 97 document in Word 95. After corporate users balked at Microsoft's bald-faced attempt to force them to upgrade, the company released an Office 97 service pack that allowed users to open files in either version of Word.
Adobe (Macromedia) Flash (1996 to present)
Click to view full-size image.
Adobe's animation tool, introduced by Macromedia in 1996, has arguably done more than any other product to liven up our Web browsers. But it's also the dominant technology behind those running, jumping, spinning, swirling, flashing, dancing, popping, peeling, and just generally irritating rich-media Web ads. We like Flash, but we wish Web designers would use its power for good and not evil.
AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger (1997 to present)
So you invite a friend to stay over at your place for a while, and before you know it he has invited his half-wit cousins to camp out in your living room. That's what these chat clients are like. To get a simple program for IM-ing your friends, you also have to put up with their Webby companions (such as AIM Today and Inside Yahoo) that load at startup. They also install browser toolbars, change your home page, and toss ads in your face. With chat buddies like these, who needs enemies?
Sony PlayStation 3 (2006)
More eagerly awaited than Vista and almost as disappointing, Sony's PlayStation 3 is full of minor annoyances--from buggy wireless to slow and cumbersome firmware updates (requiring a USB cable). Owners of HDTVs who expected the PS3 to enhance the look of their DVDs got a rude shock: Unlike many DVD players equipped with HDMI outputs, the PS3 doesn't upscale the disc's native 480p resolution to high-definition. And the PS3 still has the distinction of being the only Blu-ray player that does not output movies at 720p. Instead, movies must be scaled (with varying results) to the fixed-pixel-unfriendly 1080i. Worse, problems with high-definition copy protection (HDCP) caused some PS3 titles to blink on and off on some TV sets. The most annoying thing about the PS3? Its $599 list price.
Even More Annoyances
eBay (1995 to present)
The world's biggest auction site has many problems, but its seemingly random approach to policy enforcement is what gets our hackles up. Do something wrong when you post an item--like charge too much for shipping--and the auction police delete your item without any warning, forcing you to redo the listing from scratch. We wouldn't have an issue with this if eBay were better at policing actual scams, such as bogus listings, rampant phishing schemes, and bidding circles in which scammers artificially pump up each other's ratings. Yet by all measures, auction fraud remains Netizens' single biggest complaint. Irritating? You bet.
Apple Pro Mouse (2000)
In 1981, Xerox released the Star workstation, featuring a graphical interface and a two-button mouse. But Apple didn't get around to adding a second mouse button until August 2005, despite the fact that it had supported contextual menus in the Mac OS for years. This was especially infuriating when Apple released its sleek Pro Mouse in 2000: Instead of right-clicking to access contextual menus, Mac mousers had to hold down the Control key while clicking. Was this Apple's way of guaranteeing a steady stream of customers for multibutton mouse vendors like Logitech, Kensington, and Microsoft, or was it mere stubbornness? We're betting on the latter. In either case, it was annoying.
Plaxo (2002 to 2006)
Change the tiniest detail in your Plaxo contact profile, and everybody in your address book would receive a "Hi. I'm updating my address book. Please take a moment to update your latest contact information" e-mail--a not-so-subtle nudge to get them to sign up for Plaxo themselves so that it would update such info without bugging anyone. Plaxo finally abandoned the practice in March 2006, saying it had accumulated enough members that spamming the world was no longer necessary. We had reached the same conclusion years earlier.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 (2003)
What do you call an e-mail client that can't handle e-mail? Outlook 2003. Microsoft's premier e-mail program stored all messages in a single, ever-growing data file. The more mail you got, the slower Outlook ran--until it stopped running entirely. Microsoft's solution? Autoarchive your messages, making them nearly impossible to find later or prompting annoying 'Would you like to archive your old messages now?' dialog boxes. No thanks, I'll just switch to Mozilla's free Thunderbird instead.
Apple Power Mac G4 Cube (2000)
Sure, the Borg-like design looked pretty darned cool. But the fanless 8-inch Cube was anything but cool in a literal sense. Put a pile of papers down on its top external vents, and the Cube would overheat and shut down. Worse, some Cubes shut down, hibernated, and restarted at random--over and over and over--due to loose DC-to-DC converter cards and finicky power buttons. That was most definitely uncool.
Harmonium (1998)
You've probably never heard of Harmonium, but you've certainly heard it at work--dozens of times a day. This software, developed by Finnish programmer Vesa-Matti "Vesku" Paananen in 1998 and distributed for free over the Net, allows cell phones to produce distinctive (one might also say cheesy) polyphonic ringtones. (Following them were master tones, which are snippets from actual songs.) The world has been a much noisier place ever since. Thanks for nothing, Vesku.
Intuit Quicken 2005 (2005)
Companies have two ways to guarantee a software revenue stream: Come up with compelling new features that entice users to upgrade each year, or take features away if they don't. Intuit chose the latter path with Quicken 2005, forcing users of older versions to pony up if they wanted to continue downloading data from their financial institutions over the Internet. Intuit QuickBooks 2007 earns a dishonorable mention as well, for forcing users to upgrade if they want to run Windows Vista.
Logitech Harmony 550 (2006)
For most people, programming a universal remote is something they do once or twice every few years. But Logitech apparently believes it's a daily activity, because the Harmony 550 software loads at startup (sucking down over 10MB of system memory), phones home periodically, and nags you with pointless messages. Thanks, I'll just get up and change the channel myself.
14 Surefire Ways to Annoy Users
So you're designing a new product and you want to make sure you infuriate as many customers as possible. Be sure to do at least a few of the following things:
1. Force us to reboot our systems any time we install or uninstall your product.
2. Automatically install into the Windows system tray and launch at startup.
3. Force us to read the manual just to figure out how to turn on the damned thing.
4. Pop up little reminders for things we don't want to do.
5. Make tech-support contact information nearly impossible to find--or, better yet, don't include any.
6. Install a bunch of extra software nobody asked for or wants.
7. Automatically sign us up for e-mail newsletters and other announcements.
8. Charge us $35 per call to speak to "Bob" in Bangalore when we have problems.
9. Force us to upgrade products to get the same functionality we already had in the old version.
10. Make us enter the same information (like e-mail addresses) multiple times.
11. Require us to retype squiggly letters that are virtually impossible for humans to decipher when signing up for new accounts. (Note to Microsoft: This means you.)
12. Force us to register products and/or nag us until we capitulate.
13. Promise to remember our log-ins and password, yet still make us enter them every time.
14. Insist on updating the product when all we want to do is quit it and go home.
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