A Rant Against Tech Insanity

Annamaria on Monday

A message to tech people:

IF IT'S NOT BROKE, DON'T FIX IT.

At the beginning of the tech revolution, we had simple straight forward products that would serve the needs of lots of people.  But you have screwed it up by over complicating the technology in ways that make it difficult for your customers to do simple straight forward things. 

 

For instance: a small business owners--of which there are MANY--need an easy way to create spreadsheets. They will need to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.  Just arithmetic.

For a wile, that's whaat we got.  But then you screwed it up.

Just because you can add more and more advanced capabilities,  doesn't mean that you should automatically foist them on everyone.  There may be people somewhere in a far away galaxy who want a spreadsheet that will calculate the square root of the national debt of the United States, calculated in real time.  But ...

Why do you do that?  Maybe you just like to show off how clever of you with your complications.  All you really are doing is making your products clunky and annoying for your customers.  

STOP WITH THE CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE

You may get a kick out of showing off how clever you can be.  There may even be a person here or there who will look at your latest "upgrade" and say, "Oh Wow!"  But the response of most of your customers will be, "Oh Shit!"

CASE IN POINT

This post is illustrated with a series of screen shots taken when all I wanted to do was log into the Blogger so I could write about something other than this.  I had a couple of hours on a nice sunny Sunday afternoon to do so. I wasted most of the day just trying to log in.

I know.  You say that making it difficult for me to log in ensures that my private and security on the internet are protected.  

 BALONEY

We all know that there is no such thing as privacy and security on the Internet.  All those passwords and passcodes are just meant to create the illusion of privacy and security.

Regarding the pictures:

I took them as screenshots as I went along.  If you see duplicates, it's because I dealt with them many times. But could not upload the screenshot.  Nor could I save them as .jpeg files.  I had to open them on the computer, take a picture of them with my phone, then upload them to Photos before I had them in a format that Blogger would accept.

BTW: I began this effort at 11:17.  I am finishing stat 5PM.  I ate my lunch at my desk.

I had my first tech job as a technical writer at the Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1964 (very likely before your mother was born), on the first realtime computer system outside the Pentagon. 

On a positive note:  There is a market for simple straight forward apps that do things at the level we had ten, fifteen years ago.  If you are really smart, you will create them.  Call the company STRAIGHT FORWARD TECH.  There is big market for it.