I hate sodding Windows XP and I hate PCs
in [UK Mac]
|
From: zoara on 27 May 2010 09:11 Andy Hewitt <thewildrover(a)me.com> wrote: > zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: > >> Bruce Horrocks <07.013(a)scorecrow.com> wrote: >>> On 24/05/2010 11:06, zoara wrote: > >> The only real solution is to start over and heavy-handedly apply the > > 80/20 >> rule; but then you get a new product like Pages. it doesn't have > > nearly as >> many features but it's easier to use. That works on an Apple OS where >> users are less entrenched in Office, but would an "Office Lite" > > succeed on >> Windows? I doubt it. >> >> I'm speaking in generalities as I don't use either Pages or the > > Office >> ribbon. > > It certainly could succeed, why not? I mean for political / business reasons rather than anything else. Word is mainly sold to businesses, and it's cheaper for them to order 500 copies of Word than to spend time analysing people's jobs to work out whether they can make do with 300 copies of Office and 200 copies of Office Lite. It's the problem of "which features do we cut" pushed to the customer; we could give Steve in accounts Office Lite because he never writes Word documents and only ever needs to read them. But wait a minute, he uses Excel like a demon... What about Becky in middle management? Never touches Excel... Oh, wait a minute, she always uses Powerpoint. That's what I mean by not working. > It works well enough for Adobe with > Elements for one. Different purchasing demographic, IMO. > They could then abandon the cut price MS Office stuff, and flog MS > Works for the home user. I think the massive price cuts on Office for the home go to show that the home market is not in the slightest bit important to MS. It's probably more trouble than it's worth, if it wasn't for the fact that people who use Office at home will be "ready trained" to use it at work (it probably reinforces the purchasing cycle of businesses somewhat). It doesn't seem like a market that's big enough (percentage wise) to justify having a second product for; in fact, the huge discounts are probably there to try to kill Works, which is probably a thorn in MS's side. Appealing to the SOHO market works for Apple because it's a far bigger proportion of their revenue for Pages than is the case with MS and Office. And their users / customers haven't been using Pages for a decade or so. -z- -- email: nettid1 at fastmail dot fm
From: Andy Hewitt on 27 May 2010 09:21 zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: > Andy Hewitt <thewildrover(a)me.com> wrote: > > zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: [..] > >> I'm speaking in generalities as I don't use either Pages or the > > > Office > >> ribbon. > > > > It certainly could succeed, why not? > > I mean for political / business reasons rather than anything else. Word > is mainly sold to businesses, and it's cheaper for them to order 500 > copies of Word than to spend time analysing people's jobs to work out > whether they can make do with 300 copies of Office and 200 copies of > Office Lite. It's the problem of "which features do we cut" pushed to > the customer; we could give Steve in accounts Office Lite because he > never writes Word documents and only ever needs to read them. But wait a > minute, he uses Excel like a demon... What about Becky in middle > management? Never touches Excel... Oh, wait a minute, she always uses > Powerpoint. > > That's what I mean by not working. Yeah, understand that. I'm not talking about knocking out complete apps from the package necesarily - but maybe cut down versions of each (but by all means don't include Publisher, please). Feature cut can easily be gauged by looking at alternative office packages, such as Pages, or one of the 'Works apps. > > It works well enough for Adobe with > > Elements for one. > > Different purchasing demographic, IMO. For sure. > > They could then abandon the cut price MS Office stuff, and flog MS > > Works for the home user. > > I think the massive price cuts on Office for the home go to show that > the home market is not in the slightest bit important to MS. It's > probably more trouble than it's worth, if it wasn't for the fact that > people who use Office at home will be "ready trained" to use it at work > (it probably reinforces the purchasing cycle of businesses somewhat). > > It doesn't seem like a market that's big enough (percentage wise) to > justify having a second product for; in fact, the huge discounts are > probably there to try to kill Works, which is probably a thorn in MS's > side. But you usually find MS Works bundled free with most new PCs. If they want to kill it, why not just stop providing it? They still need to cater for the home user though. > Appealing to the SOHO market works for Apple because it's a far bigger > proportion of their revenue for Pages than is the case with MS and > Office. And their users / customers haven't been using Pages for a > decade or so. Not yet, no. -- Andy Hewitt <http://web.me.com/andrewhewitt1/>
From: Woody on 27 May 2010 09:35 zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: > Andy Hewitt <thewildrover(a)me.com> wrote: > > zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: > > > >> Bruce Horrocks <07.013(a)scorecrow.com> wrote: > >>> On 24/05/2010 11:06, zoara wrote: > > > >> The only real solution is to start over and heavy-handedly apply the > > > 80/20 > >> rule; but then you get a new product like Pages. it doesn't have > > > nearly as > >> many features but it's easier to use. That works on an Apple OS where > >> users are less entrenched in Office, but would an "Office Lite" > > > succeed on > >> Windows? I doubt it. > >> > >> I'm speaking in generalities as I don't use either Pages or the > > > Office > >> ribbon. > > > > It certainly could succeed, why not? > > I mean for political / business reasons rather than anything else. Word > is mainly sold to businesses, and it's cheaper for them to order 500 > copies of Word than to spend time analysing people's jobs to work out > whether they can make do with 300 copies of Office and 200 copies of > Office Lite. It's the problem of "which features do we cut" pushed to > the customer; we could give Steve in accounts Office Lite because he > never writes Word documents and only ever needs to read them. But wait a > minute, he uses Excel like a demon... What about Becky in middle > management? Never touches Excel... Oh, wait a minute, she always uses > Powerpoint. In which case, kick her out of the company as she is not doing anything constructive! -- Woody
From: Elliott Roper on 27 May 2010 09:40 In article <1445764554296657021.930937me18-privacy.net(a)news.individual.net>, zoara <me18(a)privacy.net> wrote: <snip> > > I mean for political / business reasons rather than anything else. Word > is mainly sold to businesses, and it's cheaper for them to order 500 > copies of Word than to spend time analysing people's jobs to work out > whether they can make do with 300 copies of Office and 200 copies of > Office Lite. It's the problem of "which features do we cut" pushed to > the customer; we could give Steve in accounts Office Lite because he > never writes Word documents and only ever needs to read them. But wait a > minute, he uses Excel like a demon... What about Becky in middle > management? Never touches Excel... Oh, wait a minute, she always uses > Powerpoint. > > That's what I mean by not working. <snip> > I think the massive price cuts on Office for the home go to show that > the home market is not in the slightest bit important to MS. It's > probably more trouble than it's worth, if it wasn't for the fact that > people who use Office at home will be "ready trained" to use it at work > (it probably reinforces the purchasing cycle of businesses somewhat). > > It doesn't seem like a market that's big enough (percentage wise) to > justify having a second product for; in fact, the huge discounts are > probably there to try to kill Works, which is probably a thorn in MS's > side. > > Appealing to the SOHO market works for Apple because it's a far bigger > proportion of their revenue for Pages than is the case with MS and > Office. And their users / customers haven't been using Pages for a > decade or so. That's a good analysis of the business of Office. They have dug themselves into a hole by adding features when they should have been fixing bugs. Now they are stuck with an un-maintainable mess and dare not remove a single 'feature'. The ribbon was a brave attempt to make it manageable. I thought it was a complete failure, but when I was using Word and Excel for a living, I did everything I could from the keyboard without a toolbar or scrollbar in sight. Well, I did have a one pixel formatting palette to work around a bug in the keyboard abbreviations for selecting styles. <g> So even if my screen was tidy, you should have seen the mess inside the bit of my head where I kept track of the macro shortcuts! Needless to say I binned Office 2008. It was untrainable. I'm using Emacs to write this. If I want pretty, I paste into Pages or InDesign. This will get pasted into Thoth. -- To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$ PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248
From: T i m on 27 May 2010 10:13
On Thu, 27 May 2010 09:29:19 +0100, Jim <jim(a)magrathea.plus.com> wrote: >> I also provided the first network in the building with the Amstrad >> network starter kit. 3 x 8bit Corvus network cards and drop boxes. > >Oh Christ, I used that as well. Wasn't it awful? Erm ... for me 'awful' would have to mean 'unreliable' (rather than feature rich or automatic etc) and I can't remember it being so. But then I had little other experience of networking at the time. > We then 'upgraded' to a >proper Novell server (no complaints there) That was another few days of confusion and frustration, building the server was easy enough but installing Netware 3.11 wasn't 'straightforward' to someone more used to clicking on 'Setup'. And I hadn't come from a Unix background either where 'mounting' and 'volumes' were standard talk. Funny to think that some years later I was wearing a CNI badge and talking others though how to do it. ;-) > but stayed with the dreaded coax, >so everytime a drop lead went bad (which was far, far too often) the entire >network crashed and I had to spend time finding it, then about 2hrs >re-indexing dBASE tables that had become corrupt as a result. No fun. As I said, 'our' network was extremely reliable (even though it was cheapernet) and the only times it went down was typically when someone thought they wanted to do stuff themselves (moving their desk, unplugging the cables and taking that segment down) or damaging the cable by standing a filing cabinet on it (those were about the only two actual incidents over about 5 years). Part of the resilience was the use of a Multi-port repeater. The building was basically an 'L' shape over two floors so each 'arm' was on it's own segment. My office / server room was also on it's own segment, as were the print servers out in the main office and the Fax server and other gateway PCs. If a segment was in trouble the repeater would drop it offline, protecting all the other users (and provide a visual indicator for me where the trouble was likely to be). ;-) Making up and running all the cables myself allowed me to ensure they weren't run where they could come into close proximity to any interference and again, made it easier to fault find and work on / extend when required. At the end it was still using NetBIOS but alongside IPX/SPX and TCP/IP. There were some handy things on the D-Link LAN software ... like the ability to re-direct a serial port over the LAN (via a suitable gateway PC) so any network user could access one of our X.25 PADS and make diagnostic calls to customer equipment elsewhere in the world. That was especially handy for me when working on a user PC and getting a field support call I could generally complete the call from any seat in the building. I was very lucky in that they basically gave me free rein to introduce any kit or technology I felt would be of benefit to the company. This also exposed me to lots of new kit and whilst I wasn't also sent on a matching course (I probably could have done had I asked) it was probably better to learn it 'the hard way' (not that it felt like it at the time). We ended up being the (International) mail hub for the corporation as all the remote offices followed us with Microsoft Mail. It started on dial up and the little US Robotics modem was chirruping away all day. Then we managed to get some of it going over the Internet (when a 64K ISDN line was a fortune) and it was during that phase I ended up talking to the developers at MS to get some issues resolved (and about the only time I've spoken to MS in over 25 years). Funny how things work out though. I put a Lotus CC: Mail Gateway in place so some of our suppliers could communicate with us directly then sever years later nearly found myself a 'IBM Support Professional when they took over (?) Lotus. I was ok on the systems / comms side but never been good at 'Apps Dev'. ;-( Happy days .... T i m |