For that matter, Does anything over a few hundred million do much for you?
I'm not speaking out of personal experience here, sadly enough, but I'm sure it does a little something.
I could still eat at all the fancy restaurants on a whim, make all the cool trips I want to etc. But there are charity projects I couldn't afford with "only" a few hundred millions that Mr. gates can, and do, afford.
That said, your first point about $14 billion and not working at MS or $100 billion is a good one. I'd chose Allen's life over Gates' if I could.
MS has one truly outstanding product: Excel. That product is so great that it forces every company on earth (almost) to use it, and thus to stay on the OS. Excel really is that much better than any options, and you certainly can't say that about the other office apps.
This wasn't always the case, and it's interesting to discuss how it came to be that the company with the worst GUI development record 15 years ago (Word 1.x, anyone?) came to be the best today, but that's a different story.
Suggesting that people are stupid/ignorant for not using worse spreadsheets is, IMNSHO quite stupid and ignorant.
just like gravitation is an observed fact, with a corresponding (very successful) theory to explain it.
Not quite true. The effects of gravitation are successfully described, but how gravity works is still largely (almost completely, in fact) unknown.
This is in very sharp contrast to evolution, where we know *everything*: genes, random mutations, DNA etc. Yet I don't hear too many people arguning that we should preach (oh, sorry, that should be "teach") Intelligent Falling in school.
If those names really are the top of the line of Oklahomans, grandparent was completely right. This may have been the lamest defense ever. (Well, second to the Tuttle guy, of course...)
Also, Wikipedia lists Post's birthplace as Van Zandt County, Texas.
I use excel every day and I don't even know what the fuck pivot tables are.
Since when did ignorance become a point of view?
Pivot tables are great, incredibly versatile and tremendously improved from Office 97 to Office 2K3.
As for the rules wizard, not that we're talking about Thunderbird, but it's message filters do the same thing and you only have to go through one page of options to set one up, not 8.
So? I never said Outlook was great or the best e-mail client there is, since it isn't. I was pointing out why the latest release is a lot better than the nine years old one.
Anyways, if MS Office 97 works good for some people, what do you care?
I don't care about that. I just pointed out that the original comment "Microsoft Office was at it's best with Office 97." was silly and flat out wrong.
I now bothered to read the talk page for Improv and at the end there is a very interesting comment from Joel Spolsky.
He mentioned that the reason Excel developed in the direction it did was that they made usability studies, so they knew how their users were actually using their product.
I find this incredibly interesting, becuase it highlights what MS has done right in the last 10-12 years: a very ambitious effort on improving usability. While their products before then were generally bad and often atrocious, since the release of Win'95, there have been incredible imrovements. (Again: in usability. Not so much in security, obviously...)
Basically, good usability isn't hard (but unfortunately expensive). All you need is a good GUI platform, excellent documentation, training and rules for the platform, extensive user tests and the humility to believe that the users are representative and not complete morons.
Anyone who has ever stuck a new user in front of a "great new revolutionary" piece of software and recorded the user interaction on video will be flabbergasted at the incredible rate with shich the user makes "errors", and the surprisning trouble they have finding their way and completing even simple tasks. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do this in the early nineties, and I'm still today grateful for the lesson.
As for the rest, the GUI platform and the documentation was a weak rip-off off MacOS (6?), which in turn was stolen from... We all know that story. Many companies (but not all, and certainly not small ones) had the money to spend on usability testing, but few opted to do so. Oracle actively told developers that they could do whatever they wanted, as long as they *didn't* follow MS guidelines... My point is that since then, MS has executed tremendously well, and execution is what counts.
I sometimes wish for more creativity from software developers. Every once in a while I get it. Unfortunately, 95 times out of a hundred, the result is just plain unusable. It's like concept cars. They often feature great and innovative ideas, but you *really* want to drive a car that has been thoroughly tested...
Really? According to my interpretation of the Wikipedia entry the last release came in 1993. Are there still "a lot" of Fortune 500 CFOs still using a 13 year old program?
Not arguing here, just curious about what is out there. Also, my reading of the article may be wrong. And the article itself may be wrong. It says "People were so used to the way spreadsheets worked that no one actually used Improv" which surely is too strong a statement.
Lotus Improv never made it commercially, and I think there is something to be said for that. (The correclation isn't perfect, I know, but it should count for something, IMHO.)
I hadn't heard about Qauntrix but will look it up at home. Thanks for the tip! Seems very interesting.
How convenient that you used "large user base" in your implicit definition of "best".
There was a very specific reason for that. That reason is that a program with a large user base will, almost by definition, have to cater for a very diverse user base, and handling a diverse user base is very difficult. Some users will be pros for whom easy access to very advanced features is all-important. Some users will be rank novices so the UI will have to be intuitive. The feature set will have to be large to cater for everyone, and a large feature set makes it difficult to navigate.
I'm quite sure there are very specific pieces of software for very specific target audineces that are great. Medical applications come to mind as an area where I bet there are some really good programs. But that is *a lot* easier than doing it for "everyone".
As for your specific LaTeX example, I only dabbled in it very little while in school 10+ years ago, so I can't say for sure, but I thought it was way out of the league for low end office workers. I have a hard time seeing my mom use it, for instance.
Thinking about this further, I think that what I'm looking for is software that passes the "mom and me" test, where both of us feel that it is a great software. "My mum" would then be your typical office worker, and "me" would be an average slashdotter.
So you tell us that you never use pivot tables in Excel. You never use the rules wizard in Outlook. You are not a power user. You are not responsible for IT purchases where I work. I'm truly thankfull for that!
Anyhow, the point shouldn't be which one is faster, but the features/price factor. OOo wins big on this one
No, they don't. The key factor here isn't MS price/OOo price, which is infinite, but rather (productivity gains - TCO for MSO) compared to the same for OOo.
In this race, MSO wins hands down. And 100% of that is attributed to Excel. The rest may be replaceable, but Excel is the rock solid foundation that almost all companies I have ever come across run on. ("Rock solid" in the meaning "fundamental to business", not in the meaning "developed spreadsheets are correct, stable, documented and bug free", obviously.)
Excel, as it happens, is the best software ever written for the mass market. Don't belive me? Well, give counterexamples. There is no other software around with a large user base that offers as much functionality and power while still being so easy to use and learn and with so few bugs. (Not zero bugs, so don't bother with silly KB references about those that are there.)
The problem I think with OOo adoption is more that it is competing with Office pirated edition more than it is competing with legal copies of Office.
In a corporate environment in the western world? Nope. Are you suggesting that companies don't actually pay MS? Then what is the fuss all about?
Well, that's the point! There are a million instances where you want to send someone documents that are uneditable. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
And complaining about the fact that PDFs are hard to edit is like complaining about Excel not being a good database. True, but the tool wasn't intended to be used for that. Just because these tools are severely lacking, people use the good tools (Excel, PDF, Google and precious few others) in less than ideal circumstances. Understandable, but not the fault of the good tools.
in a corporate world people use MS Office because its already installed on their workstations and can ask the person sitting next to them how to "bold" a word.
I know this is/., so we should all hate users and consider them to be morons.
However, in the real world, there are millions and millions of users of the Office suite, and a surprisingly large number of them are power users in Excel. This is where MS has a true mind share monopoly. There are so many companies that have invested literally millions of dollars in "development" of Excel models, macros and procedures. Telling those people to switch to an inferior product just because it's a bit cheaper is quite futile. (OOo is much cheaper in percentage terms, of course, but only marginally cheaper in terms of total savings per employee per year.)
Excel is the best software ever written for the mass market, by quite some margin. The rest of the MS Office products are OK with deficits (Outlook) or just plain bad (all the others, except Visio, if one includes that).
Getting people to move away from Word is probably quite possible. Likewise with PowerPoint, I'd guess. Getting people away from Outlook is obviously possible, considering that people actually use Lotus Notes (Ugh! I get a pain in my stomach just writing that...) No one uses the MS Office Suite becuase of Access. And no one uses MSO for any other of the programs.
Excel, people, Excel. Give us a superior spreadsheet and you will see it catch on like wild fire. Unfortunately, anyone trying will find that making a better spreadsheet is pretty darn hard...
The other game we play together is Dance Dance Revolution. That's not so cooperative, but we're both at similar skill levels, so it's fun for all concerned.
Seconded. DDR is extremely fun, and I say this despite the fact that I suck at it and also generally hate dancing. I was quite sure I wouldn't like it before I tried but it was really addictive.
Also, I think it's fun even if you are not on the exact same skilllevels. I'm way worse than my wife and generally quite competetive, but have not trouble with her being better than me in DDR. Thankfully I'm still better than the kids!:)
Your sweatshop is another man's way to a better life.
The worst factories are obviously horrible and should not be allowed anywhere, much as child abuse should not be allowed anywhere ever. That said, a regular chinese factory offers better opportunities *for those choosing to work there* (not for you and me, obviously) than what is otherwise available.
The option really is tending pigs for zero an hour. That may or may not make the person happier, but it definitely makes him poorer.
Of course it doesn't. But you seem to imply that this also applies to Gates' donations. That is flat out wrong. Every credible soure I have read have praised the thoughts behind his donations, and I can't recall even once reading something negative about the scope and implementation of his vaccination schemes.
This is of course in rather sharp contrast to most everything else written about him, his company and his company's products. (Some of that is obviously well deserved, I'm just pointing out that despite being critisized a lot, no one blames his donations.)
There is a better than average chance that, ten years from now, Mr. Gates will have done more to help poor people in poor countries than anyone in history, ever. And you tell him to put up or shut up? Sheeesh...
15% is very conservative, it's actually about 33%.
I suppose a fair amount of that is trailers for upcoming shows, which isn't "pure" advertising, and which is something that is to be expected even in otherwise commercial free channels.
That said, those trailers are of course almost as annoying...
Finally, most regular half hour shows have a running time between 22 and 23 minutes, suggesting that the actual amount of "non-programming" is 23%-27%.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not speaking out of personal experience here, sadly enough, but I'm sure it does a little something.
I could still eat at all the fancy restaurants on a whim, make all the cool trips I want to etc. But there are charity projects I couldn't afford with "only" a few hundred millions that Mr. gates can, and do, afford.
That said, your first point about $14 billion and not working at MS or $100 billion is a good one. I'd chose Allen's life over Gates' if I could.
MS has one truly outstanding product: Excel. That product is so great that it forces every company on earth (almost) to use it, and thus to stay on the OS. Excel really is that much better than any options, and you certainly can't say that about the other office apps.
This wasn't always the case, and it's interesting to discuss how it came to be that the company with the worst GUI development record 15 years ago (Word 1.x, anyone?) came to be the best today, but that's a different story.
Suggesting that people are stupid/ignorant for not using worse spreadsheets is, IMNSHO quite stupid and ignorant.
Not quite true. The effects of gravitation are successfully described, but how gravity works is still largely (almost completely, in fact) unknown.
This is in very sharp contrast to evolution, where we know *everything*: genes, random mutations, DNA etc. Yet I don't hear too many people arguning that we should preach (oh, sorry, that should be "teach") Intelligent Falling in school.
Thie means we know the guy is six years old or less, so no particular need to pay any attention to him.
If those names really are the top of the line of Oklahomans, grandparent was completely right. This may have been the lamest defense ever. (Well, second to the Tuttle guy, of course...)
Also, Wikipedia lists Post's birthplace as Van Zandt County, Texas.
I call foolishness, not bravery, on GP.
Since when did ignorance become a point of view?
Pivot tables are great, incredibly versatile and tremendously improved from Office 97 to Office 2K3.
As for the rules wizard, not that we're talking about Thunderbird, but it's message filters do the same thing and you only have to go through one page of options to set one up, not 8.
So? I never said Outlook was great or the best e-mail client there is, since it isn't. I was pointing out why the latest release is a lot better than the nine years old one.
Anyways, if MS Office 97 works good for some people, what do you care?
I don't care about that. I just pointed out that the original comment "Microsoft Office was at it's best with Office 97." was silly and flat out wrong.
He mentioned that the reason Excel developed in the direction it did was that they made usability studies, so they knew how their users were actually using their product.
I find this incredibly interesting, becuase it highlights what MS has done right in the last 10-12 years: a very ambitious effort on improving usability. While their products before then were generally bad and often atrocious, since the release of Win'95, there have been incredible imrovements. (Again: in usability. Not so much in security, obviously...)
Basically, good usability isn't hard (but unfortunately expensive). All you need is a good GUI platform, excellent documentation, training and rules for the platform, extensive user tests and the humility to believe that the users are representative and not complete morons.
Anyone who has ever stuck a new user in front of a "great new revolutionary" piece of software and recorded the user interaction on video will be flabbergasted at the incredible rate with shich the user makes "errors", and the surprisning trouble they have finding their way and completing even simple tasks. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do this in the early nineties, and I'm still today grateful for the lesson.
As for the rest, the GUI platform and the documentation was a weak rip-off off MacOS (6?), which in turn was stolen from... We all know that story. Many companies (but not all, and certainly not small ones) had the money to spend on usability testing, but few opted to do so. Oracle actively told developers that they could do whatever they wanted, as long as they *didn't* follow MS guidelines... My point is that since then, MS has executed tremendously well, and execution is what counts.
I sometimes wish for more creativity from software developers. Every once in a while I get it. Unfortunately, 95 times out of a hundred, the result is just plain unusable. It's like concept cars. They often feature great and innovative ideas, but you *really* want to drive a car that has been thoroughly tested...
Not arguing here, just curious about what is out there. Also, my reading of the article may be wrong. And the article itself may be wrong. It says "People were so used to the way spreadsheets worked that no one actually used Improv" which surely is too strong a statement.
True, no doubt. But learning HTML well is really quite hard. As proof I give you 1 billion crappy and non-standards compliant web sites.
I hadn't heard about Qauntrix but will look it up at home. Thanks for the tip! Seems very interesting.
There was a very specific reason for that. That reason is that a program with a large user base will, almost by definition, have to cater for a very diverse user base, and handling a diverse user base is very difficult. Some users will be pros for whom easy access to very advanced features is all-important. Some users will be rank novices so the UI will have to be intuitive. The feature set will have to be large to cater for everyone, and a large feature set makes it difficult to navigate.
I'm quite sure there are very specific pieces of software for very specific target audineces that are great. Medical applications come to mind as an area where I bet there are some really good programs. But that is *a lot* easier than doing it for "everyone".
As for your specific LaTeX example, I only dabbled in it very little while in school 10+ years ago, so I can't say for sure, but I thought it was way out of the league for low end office workers. I have a hard time seeing my mom use it, for instance.
Thinking about this further, I think that what I'm looking for is software that passes the "mom and me" test, where both of us feel that it is a great software. "My mum" would then be your typical office worker, and "me" would be an average slashdotter.
In Excel:
So you tell us that you never use pivot tables in Excel. You never use the rules wizard in Outlook. You are not a power user. You are not responsible for IT purchases where I work. I'm truly thankfull for that!
The new menu replacements are called ribbons, and the background coloring is a part of the conditional formatting. The latter seems very usable!
No, they don't. The key factor here isn't MS price/OOo price, which is infinite, but rather (productivity gains - TCO for MSO) compared to the same for OOo.
In this race, MSO wins hands down. And 100% of that is attributed to Excel. The rest may be replaceable, but Excel is the rock solid foundation that almost all companies I have ever come across run on. ("Rock solid" in the meaning "fundamental to business", not in the meaning "developed spreadsheets are correct, stable, documented and bug free", obviously.)
Excel, as it happens, is the best software ever written for the mass market. Don't belive me? Well, give counterexamples. There is no other software around with a large user base that offers as much functionality and power while still being so easy to use and learn and with so few bugs. (Not zero bugs, so don't bother with silly KB references about those that are there.)
The problem I think with OOo adoption is more that it is competing with Office pirated edition more than it is competing with legal copies of Office.
In a corporate environment in the western world? Nope. Are you suggesting that companies don't actually pay MS? Then what is the fuss all about?
Well, that's the point! There are a million instances where you want to send someone documents that are uneditable. Ignoring that is ignoring reality.
And complaining about the fact that PDFs are hard to edit is like complaining about Excel not being a good database. True, but the tool wasn't intended to be used for that. Just because these tools are severely lacking, people use the good tools (Excel, PDF, Google and precious few others) in less than ideal circumstances. Understandable, but not the fault of the good tools.
Parent is modded "funny", but in fact it's insightful. Sad, really...
I know this is /., so we should all hate users and consider them to be morons.
However, in the real world, there are millions and millions of users of the Office suite, and a surprisingly large number of them are power users in Excel. This is where MS has a true mind share monopoly. There are so many companies that have invested literally millions of dollars in "development" of Excel models, macros and procedures. Telling those people to switch to an inferior product just because it's a bit cheaper is quite futile. (OOo is much cheaper in percentage terms, of course, but only marginally cheaper in terms of total savings per employee per year.)
Excel is the best software ever written for the mass market, by quite some margin. The rest of the MS Office products are OK with deficits (Outlook) or just plain bad (all the others, except Visio, if one includes that).
Getting people to move away from Word is probably quite possible. Likewise with PowerPoint, I'd guess. Getting people away from Outlook is obviously possible, considering that people actually use Lotus Notes (Ugh! I get a pain in my stomach just writing that...) No one uses the MS Office Suite becuase of Access. And no one uses MSO for any other of the programs.
Excel, people, Excel. Give us a superior spreadsheet and you will see it catch on like wild fire. Unfortunately, anyone trying will find that making a better spreadsheet is pretty darn hard...
Seconded. DDR is extremely fun, and I say this despite the fact that I suck at it and also generally hate dancing. I was quite sure I wouldn't like it before I tried but it was really addictive.
Also, I think it's fun even if you are not on the exact same skilllevels. I'm way worse than my wife and generally quite competetive, but have not trouble with her being better than me in DDR. Thankfully I'm still better than the kids! :)
The worst factories are obviously horrible and should not be allowed anywhere, much as child abuse should not be allowed anywhere ever. That said, a regular chinese factory offers better opportunities *for those choosing to work there* (not for you and me, obviously) than what is otherwise available.
The option really is tending pigs for zero an hour. That may or may not make the person happier, but it definitely makes him poorer.
This is of course in rather sharp contrast to most everything else written about him, his company and his company's products. (Some of that is obviously well deserved, I'm just pointing out that despite being critisized a lot, no one blames his donations.)
Isn't that kinda hard, given that the thing doesn't exist?
He did buy several boat loads of medicine. You know, stuff that both exists and actually help poor people.
There is a better than average chance that, ten years from now, Mr. Gates will have done more to help poor people in poor countries than anyone in history, ever. And you tell him to put up or shut up? Sheeesh...
I suppose a fair amount of that is trailers for upcoming shows, which isn't "pure" advertising, and which is something that is to be expected even in otherwise commercial free channels.
That said, those trailers are of course almost as annoying...
Finally, most regular half hour shows have a running time between 22 and 23 minutes, suggesting that the actual amount of "non-programming" is 23%-27%.