Am I Luddite?

[Ludwik]

Last two versions of MSWORD (with document extension docx), are very different from earlier versions (with document extension doc). One of the changes is the new interface. I would vote against the new interface, if we had a referendum about it.

 

I would argue that the 2003 version was already a very good tool; we became very familiar with it. Learning the new interface, as in the 2010 version, is a burden not worth accepting. What is gained by a typical user is negligible in comparison with what was lost. How would you vote, and why?

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[Cap'n Refsmmat]

My mom's a professional translator who works with Word every day. This previous summer, I upgraded her computer from an old one running Windows XP and Office 2003 to a new computer with Office 2010.

 

Understandably, she was not happy with the new interface. She's been using Word since the 90s, and the sudden change meant she had to re-learn the locations of all of the old menu items. For a few weeks I had to help out occasionally when she couldn't figure out how to do something she used to do in Word 2003.

 

Now, six months or so later, she's just fine with Office 2010. I think she may even be faster at finding settings and tools.

 

Microsoft's stated goal with the "ribbon" interface was to make it easier for new and inexperienced users to find the features they need, and in that extent I believe they were successful; when there's something you've never used before, it's easier to find it in the Ribbon. But it does take a while to get used to if you were used to Office 2003.

 

Perhaps they miscalculated. After all, they have such a large market penetration that nearly everyone's used older versions of Office and gotten used to them. Redesigning the entire interface and forcing those users to re-learn isn't so good when you're doing it for the benefit of the ten people who've never used Office before...

[Ophiolite]

I switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007. I find the ribbon format superior to the older version. It took me about one week to get comfortable with the new arrangement. Very occassionally I take a few moments to locate a rarely used feature, but this is more than offset by the reduction in keystrokes I need to get to what I do use. The same applies to Excel, though with pivot tables I opt for the older format.

[swansont]

I vote for not a Luddite. Companies make the default format incompatible to try and force everyone to upgrade, and feel the need to make changes in software to justify that the new version is different enough to charge for it.

[Mr Skeptic]

The only reason I upgraded was due to format incompatibility. I liked the older versions much better, that focused on more important things than making the color of every damn thing easy to change at the expense of more interesting things. There's also a training issue, in that it takes some time invested into a program to learn to use it well, and you might not want to have to spend that time learning a slightly different version, but this applies more if you spent a lot of time with the earlier version.

[michel123456]

I have a bad experience with some other professional program, very expensive (about 4000$ from scratch), which provide a new version each year, with a new interface each 3 or 4 years. It is like those gentlemen don't count at all the time & effort for adaptation, which is real hard money in real life, without any sustantial difference in the result.

Edited December 21, 2010 by michel123456

[Xittenn]

I believe Microsofts move to the ribbon was well thought out and well documented as a technology and is not only benefiting the Office set of applications but a number of other time tried apps as well. Personally I do not recall the prior format as I don't tend to notice these things having now been through twenty five years of environments and packages. I must say however that with Autodesks AutoCAD the change to ribbon was incredibly beneficial. I believe we will be seeing much use of the ribbon as a consequence of Microsofts .NET solution to GUI WPF. I haven't used the library myself but will soon be developing a widgets library of my own and it will undoubtedly include a ribbon!

Edited December 22, 2010 by Xittenn

[michel123456]

Each program has a purpose. The purpose of MSWORd is to write text. Text could be written with the old version of MSWORD, the only difference now is that almost each user must spend a non negligeable amount of time for training, in order to do exactly the same job. If you put a price to each hour of learning (lets say 10$) of each user in difficulty (several millions of them), that makes several millions of dollars simply wasted. You only can substract from this amount the profit made by Microsoft selling the new version. as posted by Swansont.

 

The other company I will not expose here (its name begins with auto and ends with desk) is using the same technique. I can show you architectural plans made in 1992 that look incredibly the same as plans made today, after having used versions n. 8,10,12,14,2000,2004,2007,2008 (bypassing the intermediate versions). In the meanwhile, improvements were made on about 4 or 5 commands, making our work a little bit easier.

 

I have the strong feeling that there are people in Microsoft & others that make a living into changing things, exactly as you may see a contractor making a new road were the old one was perfect.

Edited December 22, 2010 by michel123456

[Marat]

The basic paradox of capitalism is that its goal is to generate excess capital as a return on investments, but for this return then to find profitable sources of investment, the size of the potential investment opportunities has to grow continuously, which it does not naturally do. Capitalism responds by artificially expanding the market by creating unnatural consumer demand for trivially 'new' versions of products which already exist and have already completely flooded the market and satisfied the natural demand. This is what happened with devices to play music: first the market was flooded with vinyl records, then these all had to be replaced by tapes, and then these in turn all had to be replaced by casettes, so essentialy the same product is sold three times over to create an artificial expansion of investment opportunities for surplus investment capital.

 

New computer software represents the same foolishness, in that the cost of the new product in terms of its expense and the energy investment required to learn how to use it far exceeds the additional value it provides over the previous product. The tragedy is that while capitalism ties up so many productive resources in making these useless things to sell and re-sell essentially the same products to those who can afford them, it never devotes the necessary resources to answering true human needs among those who cannot reward capital with sufficient profits, like people starving in Africa, Third World residents who can't afford vital medicines, etc.

[Ophiolite]

Each program has a purpose. The purpose of MSWORd is to write text.

It may be your purpose for using MSWord, but mine is certainly more complex. I wish to write lengthy complex documents in which I can readily incorporate tables and illustrations, appendices, tables of contents and figures, etc, with document segmentation clarified through formatting, structure easily discerned, and boiler-plate text readily accessed. 2007 is more effective at this than 2003.

[Xittenn]

 

The other company I will not expose here (its name begins with auto and ends with desk) is using the same technique. I can show you architectural plans made in 1992 that look incredibly the same as plans made today, after having used versions n. 8,10,12,14,2000,2004,2007,2008 (bypassing the intermediate versions). In the meanwhile, improvements were made on about 4 or 5 commands, making our work a little bit easier.

 

 

 

I can make plans in both 2002 and 2010 and 2010 takes me almost half of the time it takes me to do the equivalent in 2002. This is also not to mention all of the features that have been added over the years like native to application auto-motion and poly tools and all the little ones that you never think of.

 

I like the ribbon because it presents tools in a much more up front manner and makes finding things faster and more visually appealing. Word 2010 also made significant improvements on equations editing!

[michel123456]

The basic paradox of capitalism is that its goal is to generate excess capital as a return on investments, but for this return then to find profitable sources of investment, the size of the potential investment opportunities has to grow continuously, which it does not naturally do. Capitalism responds by artificially expanding the market by creating unnatural consumer demand for trivially 'new' versions of products which already exist and have already completely flooded the market and satisfied the natural demand. This is what happened with devices to play music: first the market was flooded with vinyl records, then these all had to be replaced by tapes, and then these in turn all had to be replaced by casettes, so essentialy the same product is sold three times over to create an artificial expansion of investment opportunities for surplus investment capital.

 

New computer software represents the same foolishness, in that the cost of the new product in terms of its expense and the energy investment required to learn how to use it far exceeds the additional value it provides over the previous product. The tragedy is that while capitalism ties up so many productive resources in making these useless things to sell and re-sell essentially the same products to those who can afford them, it never devotes the necessary resources to answering true human needs among those who cannot reward capital with sufficient profits, like people starving in Africa, Third World residents who can't afford vital medicines, etc.

True.

The reverse side of the coin is technological progress.

What I don't like in the abundance of new software is new versions of the same program. I prefer when new software involves new concepts (like the transmission of ideas & texts without paper, it has been done, and without text*, soon available or maybe not).

 

*I mean making a search on Google not with text, but with image or sound. IIRC the software for sound research already exists.

Edited December 23, 2010 by michel123456

[liars_paradox]

My mom's a professional translator who works with Word every day. This previous summer, I upgraded her computer from an old one running Windows XP and Office 2003 to a new computer with Office 2010.

 

Understandably, she was not happy with the new interface. She's been using Word since the 90s, and the sudden change meant she had to re-learn the locations of all of the old menu items. For a few weeks I had to help out occasionally when she couldn't figure out how to do something she used to do in Word 2003.

 

Now, six months or so later, she's just fine with Office 2010. I think she may even be faster at finding settings and tools.

 

Microsoft's stated goal with the "ribbon" interface was to make it easier for new and inexperienced users to find the features they need, and in that extent I believe they were successful; when there's something you've never used before, it's easier to find it in the Ribbon. But it does take a while to get used to if you were used to Office 2003.

 

Perhaps they miscalculated. After all, they have such a large market penetration that nearly everyone's used older versions of Office and gotten used to them. Redesigning the entire interface and forcing those users to re-learn isn't so good when you're doing it for the benefit of the ten people who've never used Office before...

 

But, with the market saturation in mind, then how are they ever going to make any money if almost everyone already has a copy of the older version? Of course, they're going to make a newer version of their software, even if the old one was just fine, because that's how they're going to make more money.

 

 

 

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

They also get to pull tricks like putting trial versions on new PCs sold by OEMs, so consumers are encouraged to buy the new version to go on their new computer.