pushing the marketing envelope
Yesterday I ran across a hilarious article (If you love Windows XP, you’ll hate Windows 7) about some alleged objections to the next version of Windows, Windows 7. The article explained that disliking the new version is just a matter of an unwillingness to learn new, allegedly better, work habits. I used to hear the exact same kind of discussion about why MS Office 2007 was better and why people who didn’t like it (which seems to have been a majority of users, though I don’t have actual figures on that) were wrong. “Once you get used to it, it’s much better.”
One of the things they wanted me to get used to was that the options I wanted were hard to find, so that I kept clicking on things I didn’t want that were in completely irrational (but easy to find) places. I suppose with enough effort I really could get used to it. But I didn’t see the point. Putting things in different places does not, in my book, constitute an “upgrade.” At least not one worth spending money on.
Maybe I really am a childish throwback old-fashioned unadaptable idiot. Maybe I’m unworthy to use all those fine new MS products (That’s okay with me. I prefer Linux anyway). But I still think, “Your habits suck” is a poor marketing slogan.
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The QWERTY keyboard was designed to be hard to use, so people would type slow and not jam the early mechanical designs
Also, I believe the ability to type TYPEWRITER using just the top row of QWERTY was done deliberately so sales people could easily type that out in demos. Possibly apocryphal story.
Once people started using that intentionally goofy key layout, how easy was it to get them to change? There have been allegedly better keyboard layouts for decades but do people use them?
In the referenced article, there’s one point where the author says that GUI experts assured him that the new way was much better and easier for the users and he believed them. Therefore, he discounted the opinion of an actual user.
Maybe they need to take a lesson from the typewriter keyboard and let users do things the supposedly harder way. Or maybe that was just a straw man, to make people feel stupid about not changing when commanded to do so.