On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:03:03 +0100, Gilles Tran wrote:

> "Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> a écrit dans le message de news:
> 47d56173$1@news.povray.org...
>> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:25:45 +0100, Gilles Tran wrote:
> 
>> Well, not for me they're not.  Not for most of the people I work with -
>> and I work in an office that consists of both technical and
>> non-technical people.  Most of my closest coworkers are not technical,
>> but quite a few are.  It used to be the other way around - I almost
>> never dealt with the non-technical people, being an IT person myself.
> 
> Well I'm in the feed industry, not an IT person and not knowing IT
> people (except to hire them...). I guess that folks who feed cows and
> pigs are special then ;) Not really kidding: it's an industry based on
> operational research, so crunching numbers is a normal way of life. Lots
> of these people actually live within Excel. Right now, we got a bunch of
> them downstairs being lectured about the joys of linear programming (and
> linear programming modelisation) and exporting data to and from MS
> Office and automating the whole processes. And they sure do know what
> they need.

My first job out of college was in the manufacturing industry (as one of 
the IT guys) - lots of engineering work, lots of finance/inventory 
control work.  Different needs for different folks.

>> applications for the first Windows platform.  Everyone "had to have"
>> the Windows environment for some reason, and WordPerfect and Lotus were
>> late to the game *because* Microsoft didn't release the APIs externally
>> (and changed some of them between beta and RTM, just to *really*
>> fsck-up their competition).
>> This is not conjecture on my part - this is well-documented fact.
> 
> And it doesn't change the fact that Lotus had become obsolete and that
> Excel was a superior product with features that people had been
> expecting (and not getting) from Lotus for a while. Here, Excel was the
> reason we switched gradually to Windows, not the other way round. It's
> not like Windows was actually useful for anything else back then. (I did
> play tic-tac-toe with Windows 1 though).

Maybe for you, but I am fairly certain that it met the needs for a 
significant portion of the user base.  But it wasn't "new", it wasn't 
"shiny", and it didn't run on Windows.  And then when it did, it sucked 
because the UI didn't work right (ie, consistently with other Windows 
programs).

If the developers at Lotus hadn't had to screw around with broken/
incomplete API documentation and try to get the UI working properly, they 
might've been able to add a few new features that were being requested.  
But from having sold Lotus 1-2-3 (and books on it) as well as the 
Microsoft products (also used to work in software sales once upon a 
time), I do know what people were generally buying in the late 80's and 
the reasons they were buying it.  It was kinda my job. ;-)

>> department.  I've seen accounting spreadsheets that would make most
>> people's heads hurt for days on end.
> 
> Oh I've seen that too, no arguing necessary. And the Comic Sans
> presentations too.

Yeah.  The latter drive me nuts.  Those types of presentations also tend 
to be fairly "busy" - too much going on on the screen - "hey look, I can 
do stupid animations on the screen!" ;-)

Jim

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