Are we there yet?
Comments(0) How does this make any sense? I just read an infoworld article on Office 12. Within the first hundred or so words, I encounter this:
“This time around, you’ll need to be worried about more than managing an orderly software rollout. You’ll need to match that rollout to user-training sessions. Whatever you do, don’t deploy this puppy on the desks of untrained users.
Power users can probably worm their way through, though there are enough advanced features that they’ll almost certainly screw something up without proper documentation. But average users will be lost if confronted with these screens out of the blue, and you’ll wind up with a help desk nightmare. Moreover, it’s easy to see that this version is going to impact even network and desktop administrators in a big way.”
How in world does this make any sense? With the plumeting cost of infrastructure and the availability of “good enough” open source solutions, people costs are easily the biggest line item of most IT organizations today. I can’t imagine what CIO in their right mind would encourage their organizations to adopt something this disruptive and costly without a rock-solid, quantifiable return. Not only does this product interfere with the daily lives of “normal” users, it swallows the power user, the IT appliations staff, the IT network staff and the help desk.
I have to admit ignorance on the full super-dee-duper feature set of Office 12 but ‘cmon, it’s a suite of tools where 99% of the use-cases haven’t changed in 20 years. It’s maddening that successive releases of software products continue to display such lack of sophistication in usability; we should spend more of the obscene amounts of cpu/disk/memory/network that we have on making software easier to use and less costly to own and maintain.
And, no, I do not want Clippy with natural speech recognition…