And this is good why? When they took the headlight switch off the dash it was a stand-alone part that cost $4 to replace. When it was moved to the steering column it became a flimsy relay system that was easy to break, hard to troubleshoot, and expensive to fix.
Changing a long established layout of a suite of software is an unnecessary expense for the developer and an inconvenience to the user. It’s not a function of adding new features, which could be done with the same layout. This is different than the changes they made to the programming structure of Access. That was a physical change to the architecture of the program for the sake of real improvement.
I complained as much as anyone after first installing Office 2007, because I couldn’t find many of the functions I used to use. Having got used to Office 2007, I much prefer it. There are many things that you can do with one or two clicks that previously were difficult or impossible.
I don’t think Microsoft should avoid improving their products just because there will be some pain in the transition.
When they moved radio and climate controls to the steering wheel, people spend less time bent over trying to find a new station or turn on the heat. It’s much better to have all the controls at your fingertips, where you don’t have to lean over or fumble trying to find a control that isn’t in your line of sight.
If you need more ammo for MS insanity, look no further than their log in keystroke CNTL+ALT+DEL.
“I have an idea, when a user simply wants to log in, lets force them to hold down three keys all in separate areas of the keyboard.”
“Sure, that’s devious, but what three keys shall we choose?”
“Hey, you know that command that’s always been used to reset the whole computer? Let’s make the chumps use that!”
Well. It’s just a smyptom of my own cautiousness. I knew you were being sarcastic. But the fact that you would choose to be sarcastic was quite unbeleivable. I was amazed that someone would actually attempt to defend the shitty reputation of Microsoft.
They could have made changes and still kept the basic structure. The old version was fully customizable with short cut buttons and they could have added more to the right click menus.
“Yes, we blow goats. I sit around thinking up new ways to irritate consumers every day.”
Anyway, which would you rather be an employee of: company A, which makes products which receive widespread critical acclaim and are ignored by 99.999% of users, or company B, which owns the fucking world?
If you stick to standardized buttons then you aren’t fumbling around for anything. My radio, which I purchased separately, is laid out like the old style radios with an actually volume knob on the left and station buttons along the bottom. It has a USB port for a hard drive and all that is controlled by 3 buttons. Putting it in the steering wheel is a repair service nightmare. Same goes for environmental controls. My car has 3 controls, temp, fan, and vent control. They are ergonomically laid out so the driver doesn’t have to learn how to use them or look at them while driving. This is contrast to my sports car which has an automatic climate control system that thinks it knows what I want and is usually wrong. I actually joked with people that it must be a Microsoft product.
I’m just going to assume you weren’t being sarcastic in asking the question and answer that way.
I know, beyond all doubt, that Microsoft does, indeed, do extensive market research. I know this because I used to be the person in charge of programming the survey software, processing the resultant data gathered using the survey I programmed, and then boiling it down into a report which I was then responsible for explaining, in great and tedious detail, to various Microsoft personnel in some of the most irritating meetings it’s ever been my misfortune to attend. Let me just say that marketing people don’t f*ing understand basic mathematics. Or at least that group of MS marketing people didn’t understand basic mathematics.
This was all a goodly number of years ago when I worked my way through my higher educational experience working at a market research place. Just happened that place was the place Microsoft paid to do market research on some of their products. Not just Windows proper, or even Office - some of what they referred to as “enterprise software” back in the 90’s. We did surveys for them (Jesus, did we do surveys for them - I shudder even thinking back on it), we did focus groups - we did all manner of market research for them.
I can personally attest to the fact that all the data we provided for them was accurately and honestly gathered and presented, according to established principles and guidelines which were rigorously enforced. We only guaranteed accuracy up until the point it left our hands, though. Who knows what the marketing department at Microsoft did with it? I’ll repeat - a goodly number of those bastids failed to understand basic mathematics and certainly couldn’t read a damn spreadsheet*.
*Which they demanded we provide to them, as they didn’t like what the actual numbers were telling them. Evidently, they were convinced that the raw data would be more helpful than the nicely translated into helpful bar charts and graphs report we’d provided them. I spent twelve hours explaining that goddamn spreadsheet of raw data. Repeatedly. I was very patient and didn’t once throttle the life out of the idiot in the suit that cost more than I made that year who kept asking me “Yes, but where does that number come from?” even after I’d explained several dozen times “That is the number of people who were asked this question who answered Yes/No/whatever response might be applicable to any given question”. I seriously don’t think he understood how market research worked.
Not once. Not Twice. No. Thats not enough to be sure. Assassin’s Creed asks you 3 times if you want to quit during the process of quitting, because apparently you must be insane if you actually want to quit. Or something.
I just wish there was an option to turn it off in my mother’s computer. She phones me every time a window pops up on its own. Automatic updates, antivirus, or trying to open one of the glurge emails from my aunt and getting the “are you sure you want to download this?”
Some of them I can and have shut off, but seriously, it’s kind’a tiresome to get home and see five missed calls on skype because it’s Windows Update Day.
Given the amount of data in her computer, and given that anything in her computer is duplicated in my brother’s (when not quadruplicated in my brothers’ and mine)… hell yeah, give me a “no autopopups ever and do NOT ask for confirmation when I click on something that causes a popup” option. Aangelica’s post meshes with my own experience and those of many colleagues with regards to “people and statistics.” From using the “normal distribution” as a budgeting tool (it’s normal and it’s a distribution so you can use it to distribute money, right? right?) to applying it on a sample of n=3 to… Many, many companies in many, many sectors are trying to use these and other tools without having the slightest idea of which is the sharp end of them.
Actually, there was a very good reason for that, to prevent someone from creating a program that looked like a login screen but was actually a keylogger to pick up your username and password. Utilizing the CTL-ALT-DEL combo prevented someone from doing so because that would necessarily bring up a system screen and that could allow the user to deduce, “whoa, something isn’t right with that login screen.”
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a good reason behind it.
I think the point is that you can’t hit the C-A-D combo by accident, so if the task manager/logon/shutdown stuff comes up you know it isn’t because you accidentally hit the shortcut for it.
Not only that, but there are an astounding number of people who I’m sure are otherwise very bright who just don’t grasp how market research works.
The core issue for people like the OP and his issues with Microsoft’s apparent lack of market research is as follows:
Your experience is not everyone’s experience. There are things you find maddening that just don’t bother other people - in fact, it’s entirely possible that the thing that drives you buggy is something lots of other people like a whole lot. No accounting for taste.
Say Microsoft decides to do a survey. They elect to poll 10,000* random users of Product X. To that end, they provide a research firm with the list of all people they know of who are using** Product X, with as much contact information as they possess. This list might easily have well over a *million *names on it. How many people do you think use Word, for example? The company I worked for got a list from Microsoft one time with over 7 million names on it.
A random sampling was chosen by feeding the whole list into a computer and asking it to spit out 1,000 or so random names at a time, which we then contacted until that list was exhausted and then another 1,000 names excluding the first bunch was generated, and so on until we had all the surveys we were asked to complete completed. The people contacted were asked to answer a specific series of questions designed to identify what they do and do not like about Product X.
Of those 10,000 people, let’s say 2,500 share the same specific annoyance (the popups that have been mentioned, for example). That means that 7,500 people do not share that annoyance. Or it doesn’t irk them enough to mention it to someone who’s trying their best to get them to complain about things they don’t like about the product. So even a competant marketing person (there have to be some, right?) is going to look at that and think “Well, dayum! Three-quarters of our users just aren’t bugged by this, and since it’s not actually a bug…” And then promptly either move designing a shut-off option or eliminating the feature to the bottom of his or her list of things to do, if not crossing it off entirely.
And, there may well be another 2,500 people who just love that feature. In that case, what the marketing person sees is one-quarter of his user base that loves it, one-quarter that hates it, and half that don’t give a toss. Also probably going to either stop worrying about it entirely, or bump an optional shut-off to the bottom of his or her list.
Very few market research surveys about products do not contain some method for getting at the “What would you like to see change with Product X to make it better suit your needs” kind of question. They’re the bread and butter of this kind of study, frankly. Companies without their heads up their butts almost universally focus on whatever crops up most frequently in this question and then work their way on down the list. Might be your specific bitch only cropped up 30th out of 57 specific bitches. Granted, sometimes certain complaints aren’t addressed essentially for cause - might be too expensive to fix, might be too complicated, might have legal ramificiations. With software in particular, what often happens is that the most obnoxious few issues are repaired with patches and the bulk of the less-popular annoyances on the list are just dealt with in subsequent upgraded versions of the product (or written off as a few stray cranks, particularly with items at the bottom 10% or so of the list).
I can’t count the number of times I saw people launch into a passionate rant about some random thing that just drove them bugnuts and then reviewed the data and found that only 2% (or some other small percentage) of users shared their distaste for a given “feature” and that 35% (or some other non-trivial percentage) actually really liked it and the bulk of users didn’t give a rat’s ass either way. I’m sure that those people who were passionately hating all over it felt like their issue was being ignored, but their experience just wasn’t representative of overall user experience. It happened so often we had a rule about it for data processing purposes. For purposes of coding out responses from any question that did not have a preset menu of choices, we required at least 1% of respondents to agree on a response before creating the code. You would be amazed at the number of really passionate responses failed to reach this minimal threshhold. That data was still presented to clients, of course - but I have a hard time blaming them for not giving it a whole lot of consideration.
*Not an unusual number for MS to poll, incidentally.
**Okay, it’s a list of people who have purchased and registered Product X most likely, rather than a list of people who are actually using it. You can get useful data from the people who bought and didn’t use though. Data like “Why aren’t you using it, then?”
Wasn’t that the rationale for making CAD the hard-restart combination in the first place? That it was a keystroke combination that was difficult to achieve accidentally?
Assuming one quarter of users found Hypothetical Feature X annoying, shouldn’t you follow up with the other 7,500 to see if they like it? It may not bug them, but if they don’t actually want it then you can safely dump it and please 2,500 people without annoying anyone.