[OT] "They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know."

[Lynn Fredricks]

 > New thinking is good.  It may not always work (witness 
> Apple's decision to use documents within folders as iconic 
> folder representations in Leopard) but it needs to happen.  
> With new thinking, we get things like GLX2, a new way of 
> editing projects in Rev.  So while new, and maybe a bit 
> confusing at first, the ribbon thing may turn out to be a 
> good thing and worth the cost to learn.

I agree it is good to think about new things, but not that because something
is new, it is good :-)

Microsoft doesn't usually make decisions that affect its big two of
Office/Windows without having reasons to do it - Im sure there was loads of
research done. I actually participated in some of that in the Windows 2000
era (and got to fill my office with MS products for free as a result). It is
very likely that changes went well beyond just usability planning. For
example, during the revving of Vista/2007, there was an internal mandate at
MS to trim $1 billion out of operating costs.

While ultimately, the new design may do away with having to navigate through
so many modal dialogs, and provide better, faster access to new features
(included and to come) - does that serve the short term needs of the
customer, to get up and running with no down time? And then there's the need
of the company to maximize sales to satisfy its stockholders, by delaying
corporate decisions to adopt? Neither one was satisfied here. But perhaps
they anticipated this transition period, at least somewhat, by tightening
the belt while adoption can take place.

I see a big difference between this and GLX2. With something like GLX2,
Jerry isn't asking millions of office drones to jump through flaming hoops.
With each subsequent release that Jerry has put out, he's refined the timing
between beginning work and arriving at joy, and communicated that the joy is
worth achieving in the time it takes to learn the new process. Plus, his
target audience is more inclined towards early adopter thinking anyway.

I love the new stuff - just being a me-too in a maturing market is suicide.
My case in point is what differentiates Valentina from other databases -
db's being a very, very mature market. But at the end of the day, we still
have to support SQL, ODBC and the like in a fairly uniform way. The steps
for Valentina between the old-and-known to new-and-optimized can be taken as
you like, and it fits the sort of transition that our customers will accept.
We don't have a $1 billion to trim out of our budget :-)

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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