Software Drives Me Nuts

I’m sure it’s not only me, but for the record I just hate software.

In many ways it gets more complex when it should logically get simpler.

My first experience with the damned stuff was back in 1983 with an operating system called CPM,  a document product called Wordstar and a spreadsheet called Supercalc.

The computer had two 64kb floppy drives – 1 for the program and the other for the files. Anything to do with using the machine and software was driven by command line stuff like >A DIR, which gave us a list of the files on that particular disk.

You’d think that now we have phones with more power than 1960s mainframes that life would get easier, but it doesn’t seem to.

The start of the complexity, I guess, was Microsoft Office which they crammed with features I would never use.  To make matters worse, different teams in MS used different conventions so what worked in Word didn’t in Oulook (they’re finally getting around to addressing that, when the world has already moved on to HTML).

Life got even worse when they brought out Front Page.  I’ve always thought Outlook was the biggest piece of crap ever written, but Front Page made it look as easy as Twitter does now.

As a reaction to M/S complexity the world has moved on, with ease of use being the point of competition.

Unfortunately, some of the developers/designers creating the new “easy to use” software take for granted that users know as much as they do.

I’m happy to admit I don’t know as much as they do.  I simply want to do “what I want to do” and I don’t want to spend all day trying to find out how to do it.  Worse still I don’t want to bitch about it on Twitter, which I inevitably do.

For the record, the ones who’ve wasted my time this week are Screencast, Sliderocket, and Facebook.

In contrast the ones who’ve taken the trouble to figure out what I might need to know and put it where I expect to find it are WuFoo, Tweetdeck and Nambu.

Above all the business that makes life using software really simple is Google.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Front Office Box.

But I need to finish up by saying we understand the very worst thing about software is wasting time figuring out what we want to do.

That has been the over-riding principle of every decision we make.  At every point we ask ourselves “what is the user thinking at this point” and try to put what he/she is looking for right there.

Not perfect of course, but a lot better than not giving a crap.

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Tagged as: Facebook, Google, HTML, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Office suite, TweetDeck, Wordstar