Microsoft changing things for the sake of changing things.

[Eleven]

Is it me, or does Microsoft routinely mend things that don't need mending and in so doing mess them up?

I've noticed it with their Office applications. Word documents where the date changes each time they're opened, for example. Which genius thought that up?

Today my Nokia Lumia Windows Phone asked me to agree an update, so I did. I wish I hadn't. The calendar now seems to work completely differently, half the apps have "attention required" next to them and the battery is draining at an alarming rate.

Microsoft needs to learn that not all its customers want to learn funky new ways of doing stuff they already know how to do, or spend time making a smart phone work again which was working perfectly well before the "improvements".

[grumbledoak]

Two steps forward. One step back.

But it isn't any different anywhere else. Change is just change. Anyone trying to pass it off as "progress" wants a kick in the pills.


(I'm using my definition of the word 'wants', obviously).

[anonymous-user]

Word 2007 is the absolute paradigm of this. Take a perfectly good product, redesign the UI to show off a ton of features MS thinks are really whizzy but no one uses, and wreck the product in the process.

Best thing I ever did was reinstalling Word 2003. Piece o' ste, that 2007 crap.

[skelters]

Greg66 said:

Word 2007 is the absolute paradigm of this. Take a perfectly good product, redesign the UI to show off a ton of features MS thinks are really whizzy but no one uses, and wreck the product in the process.

Best thing I ever did was reinstalling Word 2003. Piece o' ste, that 2007 crap.

[sarcasm] You're going to love Office 2010 and be blown away with Office 2013! [/sarcasm]

[dododo]

You missed the bit where you want to throw away evolution and stay in dark ages. And you forgot the dollar symbol for the S in Microsoft.

[RobDickinson]

Exactly the same thing with my phone, except it's a Sony Android.

Bugged me to upgrade, for months, i had poor internet for a while so waited.

When I did heaps changed not for the good and battery life was terrible because of a known fault but Sony had kept the update out there..

[All that jazz]

skelters said:

Greg66 said:

Word 2007 is the absolute paradigm of this. Take a perfectly good product, redesign the UI to show off a ton of features MS thinks are really whizzy but no one uses, and wreck the product in the process.

Best thing I ever did was reinstalling Word 2003. Piece o' ste, that 2007 crap.

[sarcasm] You're going to love Office 2010 and be blown away with Office 2013! [/sarcasm]

Oh yes! I recently came from a veryyyyyyyyyyyy long time using XP and upgraded to W7 as it is apparently so much better, even better than W8 according to those in the know. I've had it 3 months now and still absolutely hate it along with Office 2010 which was an upgrade from whatever it was on XP (2006 I think). Everything is just so bloated and unnecessarily complicated.

- W7 default fonts drive me up the wall.
-- desktop button still annoys the hell out of me miles away on opposite side of screen when it was just fine in the quick launch tray with all your other regularly used shizzle.

- Outlook 2010 - just don't get me started. How is it possible to make sending and receiving emails so fking complicated? OE6 (whilst not perfect) did the job without any fuss. Outlook 2010 annoyed me so much that I gave up and now use Thunderbird.

- Access 2010 - just who the hell thought it would be good idea to make selected rows bright yellow with light blue highlighting? The light grey background highlighting for the entire row or bold black edge highlighting for individual cells worked just fine in Access 2006 and was far more easy on the eye. The colours aren't even configurable according to some googling I did.

- Excel 2010 - My 2003(?) Excel was perfectly happy with time format as 4 digits, but not 2010. Oh no. It doesn't recognise that as a time format now and throws up an error for each cell in the entire column saying it's not recognised and I must change them all to a format from their menu.

I'm seriously considering going back to XP as all my stuff works on it and I don't care about "support" ending. I actually enjoyed spending time using the PC with XP but it feels like a chore with W7 and the 2010 Office stuff. I thought I would've gotten used to it by now but it's just not happening.

It's not just Microsoft though, everyone is at it changing stuff just for the sake of changing it. I use Opera browser and have done for a long time but the current version is absolute bks. No toolbars, no favourites, no tabs and basically no nothing. "Ah well that's what our users wanted!". Load of bks. I'm still using an ancient version, 12.14. And then there is the search engine duckduckgo. Was a perfect replacement for Scroogle scraper, lightweight and just did what it said on the tin, but now it's some bloated piece of st with about 3,000,000 different configurations to choose from and none of them work properly.

[Randomthoughts]

Are you 60?

There isn't an educated soul in the world that didn't realise that Office 2003 was as obtuse as it could be.

The result isn't what I'd have done, but I've found far more functionality through the redesign.

[Fishtigua]

I want to type a letter.

Windows answer.



What you really want.



I wish there was some way to put all the excess kack into a box and only go into it if and when you ever need it.

Remember that Maybach had hundreds of buttons and options scattered all over their dashboards, Rolls Royce has about 3. Guess which one is still in business.

Luddite?

Hell yes.

[Randomthoughts]

You want to type a letter.

Others need to create proposal documents, tender responses, mass mailings, contract documents, and even more besides that.

Just because you should have just stuck with Wordpad because you don't do anything of any interest, doesn't mean that those of us who do something more involving should have to work in the stone ages.

[Eleven]

Randomthoughts said:

You want to type a letter.

Others need to create proposal documents, tender responses, mass mailings, contract documents, and even more besides that.

Just because you should have just stuck with Wordpad because you don't do anything of any interest, doesn't mean that those of us who do something more involving should have to work in the stone ages.

Speaking personally, I have no problem whatsoever with progress and embracing new technology. I was one of the early adopters of Windows Phone and it has revolutionised the way I work.

What I DO have a problem with is when a manufacturer releases updates and improvements that don't work, cause damage or change things for the sake of changing them.

The WP update I refer to above is one such example. It immediately started draining the battery and there were error messages all over my phone. How is that helpful?

[Eleven]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Except they didn't! Microsoft sets it up that way by default. It is possible to change it, but when we first upgraded it took our IT chap a few minutes to actually make it happen.

Why not have manual date entry as the default and automatic an option to be selected?

[dododo]

Poor skills with the software and an obsession to not change do not equate to poor software. Go learn how to use the improvements in the software or do us a favour and trade in your computer for a typewriter.

[Eleven]

dododo said:

Poor skills with the software and an obsession to not change do not equate to poor software. Go learn how to use the improvements in the software or do us a favour and trade in your computer for a typewriter.

So you think software updates that stop a device working correctly equate to "poor skills" on the part of the user?

Poor skills on the part of the software writers I'd have said.

[dododo]

Not working or user not understanding? After you did your phone update you saw the message about the apps unavailable. Then within 5 minutes the phone finished updating and went off to the marketplace to download the apps that needed updating. Works a treat, as designed.

[Eleven]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

It was Word 2010. Clearly someone realised that they'd messed it up by the time 2013 came out.

[Eleven]

dododo said:

Not working or user not understanding? After you did your phone update you saw the message about the apps unavailable. Then within 5 minutes the phone finished updating and went off to the marketplace to download the apps that needed updating. Works a treat, as designed.

Not working.

Immediately after the update I had no mobile data, I had to manually reinstall apps that I already had on the phone and the battery level indicator was falling rapidly.

I am not sure how you think that equates to poor software skills.

[Dr Jekyll]

dododo said:

Poor skills with the software and an obsession to not change do not equate to poor software. Go learn how to use the improvements in the software or do us a favour and trade in your computer for a typewriter.

Why the hell should I have to spend my time learning a new way of doing things just because Microsoft want to change things for the sake of it.

I'm not obsessed with not changing and I'm not against improvement. But I do know the difference between improvement and complication, while Microsoft obviously doesn't.

It's like a car manufacturer deciding to reverse the position of the accelerator and brake for no good reason, and add a ludicrously complicated process for turning the lights on. Then when customers pointed out that this wasn't an improvement it actually made it worse and the original one was preferable, responding 'how dare you object to improvement?'.

[dododo]

Dr Jekyll said:

dododo said:

Poor skills with the software and an obsession to not change do not equate to poor software. Go learn how to use the improvements in the software or do us a favour and trade in your computer for a typewriter.

Why the hell should I have to spend my time learning a new way of doing things just because Microsoft want to change things for the sake of it.

I'm not obsessed with not changing and I'm not against improvement. But I do know the difference between improvement and complication, while Microsoft obviously doesn't.

It's like a car manufacturer deciding to reverse the position of the accelerator and brake for no good reason, and add a ludicrously complicated process for turning the lights on. Then when customers pointed out that this wasn't an improvement it actually made it worse and the original one was preferable, responding 'how dare you object to improvement?'.

Rubbish.

They spend absolute millions on design reviews and usability studies. They only make changes if the result of these studies say that it is beneficial to the majority if users - just because you aren't happy doesn't make it a poor product. Office makes billions for Microsoft so they aren't going to change it on a whim or to annoy people, so your comments are retarded.

[bitchstewie]

dododo said:

Rubbish.

They spend absolute millions on design reviews and usability studies. They only make changes if the result of these studies say that it is beneficial to the majority if users - just because you aren't happy doesn't make it a poor product. Office makes billions for Microsoft so they aren't going to change it on a whim or to annoy people, so your comments are retarded.

Of course there's a lot of truth in that, but equally they make billions by people buying their products and that soon dries up if they decide that actually a free service pack would fix the issues people have reported, or enough people decide that Office 2010 is plenty good enough so don't upgrade.

You can see this in the way they're trying to shift people to the subscription model - there just aren't enough good reasons to go out and spend a few hundred quid every time a new version of Windows or Office is released.

Part of it is also, IMO, clever naming of the products - we use Exchange 2010 so soon the perception is that we'll be running a 5 year old email system so we're clearly out of date.

Many of our VM's are Windows 2008 R2 - that'll be 7 years old soon we must be missing out by not keeping up to date.

Compare that to products that might go from 6.x to 7.x over the course of a few years - suddenly you don't feel quite so cheap and scummy (unless it's an iPhone ).