On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:46:41 -0500, Byron A Jeff wrote:

> Over the last 25 years of personal computing, users all over the world had
> to, and in some ways still have to, jump in, over, and around a ton of
> hoops. Truthfully I feel it has the vast majority of users so beaten down
> that they think that computers issues are 1) the norm, and 2) somehow their
> fault.

BAJ, you've summed it up beautifully.  When I started in the computer business people had the attitude that computers were there to help them do 
their job, and that they shouldn't have to change the way they worked to suit the computer, and every system I designed was based around that 
idea.  But then Windows came along, and gradually people got used to the idea that things went wrong as a normal part of everyday computing, and 
that you just had to put up with it.

This is far and away the biggest criticism I have of Microsoft - not that they made huge fortunes, or forced other decent software off the market, or 
even that they treat their customers as a potential threat to their profits, but that they have made people lower their expectations of how computers 
should work, and other software writers have fallen in line with this.  The average quality of software these days is nowhere near as good as it was 
ten years ago, and that's MS's doing.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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