On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 20:50:10 +0200, devis said: > Do the interface of OpenOffice and MS Office looks THAT different to you To a programmer who's abstracted stuff to fairly high levels, they look pretty much the same. However... > ? Hell no. These secretaries are formed to work on an interface, and > changing a few things in that same interface will not as you think, Ahem. Actually, it WILL bring things to a crawl. If you're steering your usage via "muscle memory" (OK.. third menu from left, 4 items down, then right click - no conscious idea what you're doing), it hurts a *LOT*. You don't believe me - program your system to swap mouse buttons 1-3 randomly each time you logon, or switch the order of the menus around, or change the keyboard mapping from qwerty to something almost-but-not-quite Dvorak (or back to something not-quite-querty) once in a while, and see how long it takes you to get annoyed. That's what upgrades feel like to a user. > bring the business word to a crawl. To the reverse, it will make them > more proefficient at computer usage, as any human does become better > when having to deal with different interfaces / systems. It will make > them curious about the new software, capabilities and changes. It voids > the 'One way of thinking' that vendors try to impose. Has it ever occurred to you that said secretary isn't *paid* to be curious, and has *no interest* in being curious? (Hint - why are they secretaries and not looking to move into the programming staff?) That "new" software that does things differently gets them mad, because they knew *perfectly well* how to get task XYZ done with the *old* system, and the time it takes them to find out how to do XYZ under the *new* system is time that (in their opinion) probably got wasted because if they hadn't been migrated, they'd not have had to re-learn it. (Not to knock the secretaries - although none of the ones I work with are blessed with loads of curiosity, they've bailed me out of a number of messes caused by my doing paperwork "the way it should be" rather than "the way it is". If the senior secretary says "I don't understand why, and I don't *want* to understand what political issue in another department makes it this way, but you have to do it this way", you *do* it that way.. ;)
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