News Group Posts

Microsoft windows ease of use decreases

productivity

From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
Subject: Re: Is it possible
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 14:52:41 -0500


Tony Lawrence wrote:

> (PLEASE: for the morons who reply without reading the entire
> post: please read at least TWO of the paragraphs that follow
> before you waste everyone's time with a stupid post)
> 
> Let's take a real life example:  I have a list of folks who
> want to receive email when new pages are added to my web
> site.  Naturally I use Majordomo for the list, and naturally
> I have a script that generates the text- it figures out what
> I've added recently, creates the text, decides whether it is
> enough to send out a mailing,  and sends it to Majordomo if
> it is.  In other words, the entire thing happens without
> intervention or conscious effort on my part.  I gurantee
> that 99% of MSOFT shops faced with the same need would do it
> by hand BECAUSE THEY CAN AND BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW ANY
> OTHER WAY.
> 
> And of course this same thing CAN BE DONE on Windows-
> understand that I am not saying you NEED Unix to do this-
> just that the "ease of use" and obscurity of Windows
> scripting causes this inefficiency.


I just thought of another example- something I see
CONSTANTLY:

Company XYZ has a web page.  Regularly, certain pages need
to be updated with new information and old data needs to be
taken down.  Any half-assed web master, using Windows or
otherwise, would do this with a database that produces the
current page either statically or on the fly.  It doesn't
have to be fancy or even a real database; I often do it with
simple HTML forms that report the new data..

But your typical little MSOFT shop doesn't.  They COULD, but
all they know is FrontPage or something like it, so somebody
hand edits every week or even every day and posts it. 
Manually.  Because they can, and because the very idea of
scripting never occurs to them.

The hand work takes time, and worse, it often introduces
errors of content or formatting or both.  When more than one
person is involved, you get inconsistent pages, duplication,
etc.

Again:  YOU CAN DO THIS AUTOMAGICALLY WITH MICROSOFT OS'ES. 
But people don't, because most of them aren't even aware
that they CAN do anything but point and click, and because
it is usually not as direct and easy as it is with Unix.  

Ease of use has produced legions of folks who really are
computer illiterate but don't know it.  They think they are
"using" their computers, but they really aren't.  They are
popping TV dinners in the microwave think they are cooking-
and worse, not knowing that there is any other way, and
never realizing that while that may be a great way to make a
quick lunch, it's a very dumb way to make dinner for twenty.

But that's what happens every day in the MSOFT world: dinner
for twenty prepared in a microwave.  Slowly.  Painfully. 
Nobody gets fed on time, and the food isn't very good, but
nobody complains because TV dinners in the microwave is so
much easier than peeling veggies and boiling water and using
that darn stove that nobody understands..

Again, MSOFT OSes have a "stove".  They hide it, they make
it even harder to use than any Unix stove ever was, but it
is there and it would cook a perfectly good dinner.  

Maybe not as fast as the Unix stove though :-)

-- 
Tony Lawrence (tony@aplawrence.com)
SCO/Linux articles, help, book reviews, tests, 
job listings and more : 

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