Skip to main content

Whaddya Hate?

The Software Management Bible, Peopleware, has a parable buried within it somewhere that goes something like: (I'm paraphrasing, because someone nicked my copy, and I haven't read it for years)
People hate Change.
They really hate change,
They really, truly hate change,
Oh yes they do.
With software - the path of least change is always the path to greatest acceptance. But then, without changing anything, the software doesn't get better. Sometimes you have to just give up and force people to make a change, in order to make the world better in the long run. Check out the new Office 12 Interface. I automatically hate it a little bit, because it's different. But I know what's going on under there. Microsoft are bridging the gap to Vista (which has a radically different look and feel) with the big product that most people use. They're forcing us to change. And most people will absolutely hate it.

I'm not sure exactly why, but today has just reminded me of that fact. Examples include:

  • Stilly's apprehension about taking a brilliant job in another country;
  • Listening to my wife complain about Firefly, because she expected it to be as cool as Buffy (I think it's way cooler)
  • Listening to me complain about how all new music sucks, and back in my day, there were Real Musicians...
I'm not exactly the most conservative person I know, but on some level, it seems that the older I get, the more my default reaction is to be perhaps a little defensive when confronted with anything new.

Kids are so great at accepting new things. Older folk these days are watching the teenagers with their iPods and their SMS and their X-Boxes, and scratching their heads because they don't get it.

The next time you find yourself objecting to something new, maybe you should check yourself to see if you're just auto-responding.

UPDATE: The office 12 interface is actually really, really well designed. Check out this channel 9 video for proof.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide) TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it. In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on. ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernat...
2 comments
Read more

Considerably smaller than Texas...

Well, after jonron 's nagging, I figured I better post something! It's weird - being so far away from home and in such a strange foreign place - you'd think that I'd have all kinds of things to say, but in truth most of the time I'm either so busy with work that I don't have time to post, or so lonely that I don't want to burden you all with my misery... (sob!) Anyway - I'm currently posting from the Best Western Hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas . (We have a TRIM Customer here who needs some help with configuring their records management system, so Simon and I have been helping out. ) I'm not sure that I'd ever want to stay at the Worst Western. Or even the Average Western, but no matter... Texas has been a pretty entertaining place to visit. Our efforts at finding a place to park ended in a church parking lot where the sign said "Clergy Only - Sinners Will be Prosecuted (and towed)" When we finally found the office, there was another gi...
1 comment
Read more

The height of Retro cool?

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...
2 comments
Read more