Presuming this isn't a joke, I'll get on my soapbox. The real beef that I have had with all Microsoft products is the disconnect between the software designers and the user experience. You guys really just don't get it. Even the few really good products that Microsoft produces have some really glaring problems in their usability that could probably have been nipped in the bud if the testers actually tried to get some work done with the product. Examples: - Why does every product in the Office suite assume that I'm an idiot and refuse to let me select part of a word with the mouse when I want to? If I'm doing proofread and edit work, I commonly want to do this, but I end up having to do my text selection with the keyboard. That's fine for continuous text but if I am trying to do something to non-continuous text strings, it's only possible with the mouse. - MapPoint is great. It's one of the best programs of its kind I have ever used. Why can't it do something simple like update through a proxy server? Every other Office product can, and the data in MapPoint changes far more frequently than anything else in the Office suite. - Open Active directory users and computers and try to search for a user. Why doesn't the cursor automatically go to the "search for" blank like it does with every other search tool out there? - I never use Windows Explorer anymore. I hate it. It's clunky and slow. To see how it should be, spend a couple of days working inside the utilitarian elegance of Christian Ghisler's Total Commander. It's a fast, intuitive, configurable file management tool, and it fits on a floppy. It has little tools that should already have been there, like a mass file rename tool, a text file viewer, two completely independent panes, and a user-configurable toolbar. Onto a different, related topic. The big thing with Linux is that initially people wrote the tools to get work done the way they wanted to do it. If there were problems, they rewrote and fixed them. If later, other people find problems, they can get the author to help them fix them, or they can do it themselves. Things get fixed and improved through iterative processes that provide for steady improvements in quality and improved user interface. Microsoft doesn't seem to improve anything through iterative processes. They try to do everything at once all of the time, and they often end up causing problems as they go. For example, try writing a macro sometime to update a pivot table in Excel using data from a SQL database. I guarantee you that the programmers that wrote the macro-writing features never once asked for input from users that have never written macros before. Unless you have some VB experience and a lot of patience, it's just awful. If Microsoft is ever going to revise the macro-writing process, it will be through a brand new Office release with a whole slew of new, difficult to comprehend features designed to increase the commercial success of their products and convince companies that they need to spend millions of dollars to upgrade. That's where Linux is fundamentally different from Microsoft products, in my opinion. It's completely conceivable that a group of Linux programmers would do a quick little minor version upgrade of their spreadsheet product to do something like making the macro-writing experience easier to understand (an iterative improvement), and they would probably do it for free. Microsoft on the other hand would never release a minor patch to Excel to make the macro-writing easier to use, and if they did, it sure as hell wouldn't be quick, little, or free. It would be some $149 "Advanced Office User Interface Pack" with a bloated installation that chewed up another 135MB of hard drive space and required upgrades to IE and your MDAC to run properly, and it would also conveniently make all of your old macros instantly obsolete. It would be lauded in the press, it would fix a few security holes, create a few new ones, and would still basically suck for the average user because the programmers would still have never asked an average user what they wanted. In conclusion, I would like to thank Microsoft for being so set in their ways and continuing to make products with features that confound the average user. Every time something new comes out of Redmond, it has new layers of intricate interdependency that require higher and higher levels of skill and effort to support. I've said it before and I'll say it again. If everyone used Macs, I'd be out of a job. - Kevin PS- These are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer, etc. "Michael Surkan" To Sent by: owner-kclug@marau cc der.illiana.net Subject What makes Linux great? 12/19/2003 04:02 PM I am a program manager at Microsoft doing some research around how we can improve our operating systems. My goal is to help us identify capabilities, improvements, and features that Microsoft should be focusing on to help our customers over the next 5 years or so. I am particularly interested in hearing from Linux users, and get their input about what they feel should be the priorities. In particular, I would like to better understand what it is that makes Linux and Open Source solutions so useful for you. If you would be willing to take a survey I have put together, please write me at lnq@microsoft.com. Thanks, Michael Surkan P.S. I did confirm with Jason Clinton that it was ok to post this note.