Control Panels, Open Office, etc etc - New comment on Microsoft's 2008 - What's Going Well?.

macbeach has left a new comment on your post "Microsoft's 2008 - What's Going Well?":

Didn't there used to be something in Windows called the "Control Panel"?

Didn't Apple more or less copy the idea from Windows?

You click on an icon and up comes a box full of all things that can be set by the user. Some are easy settings, some get more involved, some are locked unless you have the admin password.

How hard can it be? Someone at Microsoft, for reasons not yet publicly documented decided that the simple Control Panel was "broken" so now they fixed it by hiding parts of it all over the place.

Maybe thats what a bit of transparency would get you. A bit more of a dialog with users might save you a lot of re-do, don't ya think? I've never heard ANYONE complain about the way the Control Panel used to work and finding it (again) is the first thing that gets me cussing when I am called over to someone's house to get them un-stuck.

I make sure that they know before I leave that the problem they were having was not a problem with "the computer" it was a problem with their operating system. To get my help, they have to endure an anti-Microsoft lecture. Maybe I'm not the only one that handles it that way.

What are the people who do design at Microsoft smoking?

PS: I'll be replacing a broken copy of Office with Open Office in the next few days for a poor underpaid minister. He has to read a spreadsheet mailed to him once a month regarding his pension, and using a $400 product that only works when it is in the mood just isn't right.

I may just show him how to load the thing into Google docs while I'm at it. Come to think of it that is probably a better way to go (no telling when his system will become corrupted again).

(Sorry, just veering way too off-topic and into general bashing. Lots of other places for that.)