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Why Users Hate IT Products and Developers
bfwebster writes "The Washington Post has a commentary by one of its regular columnists, Marc Fisher, on why computer users hate what he terms 'our techie masters.' One of his more pungent and, I suspect, on-the-money comments: 'Computer training has become the living hell of the American workplace...each new system is more confounding than the last, and each new product strips away many of the advantages of the previous system.' Not a Luddite screed; more an angry outburst asking why commercial software systems are often so wretched. Worth reading and pondering."
If it weren't for the poor-quality, buggy, and insecure software that microsoft puts out then the situation would be different
Message to computer users and the non-techies: We the techies are smarter than you, and we like to prove it. If you don't understand my new program, it's obviously because you're stupid. Move along now.
[i]"Joan Mann of Old Dominion in Norfolk, has devoted years of study to dysfunctional relations between the Techie and the Clueless, or, in industry jargon, the "IT person" ("information technology") and the "end-user."[/i]
It should read "Guru" and "Luser".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
..idea, version change wizards. Say ya got "work from the office" version some number, the software company "upgrades" it. When you boot up, there's an obvious button that will walk the luser through what it USED to look like and what it did back then, THEN it goes on to the "new and improved" version. At least that would give the luser a point of familiar reference for each feature change that occurred.
As opposed to open source software where the wheel is reinvented again and again just for the hell of it? Where perfectly useable commercial products are cloned feature-by-feature and even screen-by-screen because it's an offense against nature to just pay for and use the existing product. Where the spit and polish of a commercial product is deemed unnecessary since you can just "look at the code" if you don't understand it. Where the most common response to a user feature request is "it's open source, so you can add it yourself".
I don't want to sound too negative, since open source has been irrefutably proven to work for the difficult and technical: protocol stacks, OS kernels, web servers, compilers, etc. Commercial software, however, still has the edge in creating attractive and useable human computer interfaces. Why? Because it's not about "learning" and "sharing" and "culture" - it's about grabbing people by the balls and making them want to use the product.
This is true of nearly every product in our wonderfully chaotic system of global capitalism. Why should software be any different?