Indented gonads.

[Harry George]

The key point is that the various "helpful" agents scattered through
MS products default to on.  It is one thing to allow someone to turn
them on -- they will thus also know how to turn them off.  It is quite
another to turn them on by default.  Frequently I've had to help
casual MS users untangle the effects of those agents -- and had to
work hard to find the off buttons (which sometimes move from release
to release).  That is either bad usability design or a deliberate
mindshare absorption.

Until I see some evidence of MS stupidity, I'll assume they know
exactly what they are doing.  Given the megabucks they spend on
usability testing, I'll assume the decision to turn helper agents on
by default is deliberate mindshare absorption.  By that I mean
roughly:

The MS world is complete enough that many people (esp. upper mgmt) can
do all their work in the MS mental model.  The MS model is so alien to
other computing mental models that straddling two or more models is
difficult.  [Anyone who works in both MS and UNIX knows what I mean.]
Only people who seriously push their pain thresholds can do so -- and
they are by definition nerds/geeks, who can be safely ignored by CIO's
and CTO's.  The harder it is to shift mental contexts in and out of MS
products, the easier it is to lock in the customer base.

Whether or not this is evil, it sure is good customer lockin.


invalid.address at 127.0.0.1 (David) writes:

> On Fri, 26 May 2000 10:54:29 GMT, nospam.mrquiz at free.fr (Dave Simons)
> wrote:
> >No more and no less than those who make the decisions in any of 
> >the other divisions of Redmond Garbage Creations Inc. - try 
> >typing out case-sensitive code in Word, for example (I know you 
> >don't normally write code in a word-processor, but you might 
> >want to write *about* code in a word-processor).
> 
> Uh-huh.  Evile Microsoft is out to screw you by having its autocorrect
> feature work as it should, eh?
> 
> Come on, man.  I'm  no lover of Microsoft, but you can hardly grouse about
> Word doing things Word is designed to do, and that can be disabled by any
> reasonably intelligent person.
> 
> It's called "Autocorrect as you Type" and it's toggle-able.  If you don't
> like it, turn it off.
> 
> Sheesh.
> 
> RTFM.
> 

-- 
Harry George
hgg9140 at seanet.com