On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:25:45 +0100, Gilles Tran wrote:

> "Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> a écrit dans le message de news:
> 47d4bd0f@news.povray.org...
> 
>> It's not a question of "so many features *I* don't need to use", but
>> "so many features that *most* users don't need to use".
> 
> But this is where the fallacy is! Unless you know "most people" your
> knowledge of what they use is limited to your acquaintances, which may
> or may not be representative. 

But yours is?  You can't use the same logic to disprove my point and 
prove yours at the same time. ;-)

> Obviously noone uses every available
> feature, but the point is that given the sheer number of Excel users,
> all the features end up being used by a significant number of people who
> are dependent of them for their work. Possibly, only a limited
> percentage of Excel users use the solver or VBA for instance, but those
> who do *** really *** use them, because they're fundamental business
> tools.

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.

>> I don't know that 1-2-3 would be completely useless by modern standards
>> - I think a lot of tasks that people use Excel for these days aren't
>> much beyond what 1-2-3 was capable of.
> 
> And 1-2-3, in spite of having a large user base and being a fantatisc
> product in its own right, was killed by Excel. People switched in
> droves, for very good reasons. After Excel came, we looked at our crummy
> 1-2-3 graphs and reports, at our painfully obfuscated 1-2-3 macros, and
> switched. Overnight.

Most of the reason for 1-2-3's demise was similar to the reason 
WordPerfect was killed off - Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive 
practices when it came to releasing API information for creating 
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.

> You're vastly underestimating users and what regular people - and
> particularly business users - are able to do with office software and
> what they expect from their spreadsheets, word processors, databases
> etc. I understand that there's this curious myth about business users
> being clueless drones who just write a letter once in a while and
> occasionally use a spreadsheet to make an addition and then put the
> result in Powerpoint using Comic Sans, but that's just that, a myth.

I have spent a fair amount of time over the years working with the 
business end of businesses.  My first job out of college was with a 
company where the MIS department was still part of the Finance 
department.  I've seen accounting spreadsheets that would make most 
people's heads hurt for days on end.

Jim

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