"[...] Vista and PowerPoint and Microsoft's other core non-game products are largely devoid of personality and are optimized to be sold to organizations that prefer it that way. Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money."
In this case doing better than the competition doesn't mean doing well. It doesn't even mean acceptable.
I don't use any apple products and I don't really care either way, but saying that they're better than the competition doesn't mean anything.
Let's say company A sells laptops such that 1 out of 1,000 of them blow up due to a defective battery. Company B sells laptops such that 1 out of 100 blow up.
You can say that company A's product is 10x better. But, it doesn't mean that company A's product is good. It just isn't the worst.
"She gets me going on purpose just so she can see my arms waving and the vein pop out of my head while I'm trying to describe this stuff. I don't think she really pays all that much attention to what I'm actually saying."
My friends do this to me all the time. I know they don't really care but they keep asking questions until I can't resist explaining stuff to them.
I agree. In a lot of cases it's a mistake to cater to inexperienced users by making your GUI 'intuitive'. The bulk of your users are intermediates and power users. A user interface should cater to those people and gently nudge beginners in the same direction.
The old word interface (not the ribbon) actually did a pretty good job in this. Beginners used the menubar to do things. The options where accompanied by icons ("ooh, that's the same as the one on the iconbar.") and keyboard shortcuts ("What happens if I press Ctrl - S?"). The user interface doesn't get in the way of power users and teaches beginners and intermediate users.
Yeah, this is certainly an interesting topic in UI design. When Microsoft had the problem of people not knowing what to do when their computer started up, they relabeled "system" to "start" counterintuitively rather than building a progressive disclosure system into Windows. It may have been better to put a little hovering popup bubble that pointed towards the system icon and said "Click here to start" the first few times you started up (or until user testing showed people had learned what to do).
In later versions of windows, they had a whole window with tons of options pop up at every single startup. In Vista, the window has useless computer information, like how much RAM you have. They not only confuse beginners, but they punish intermediate and advanced users until they find the little checkbox that says not to start it every time.
I guess it's because almost every windows user is familiar with the button in the lower left corner nowadays. It's been that way for almost 13 years now.
"[...] Vista and PowerPoint and Microsoft's other core non-game products are largely devoid of personality and are optimized to be sold to organizations that prefer it that way. Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money."
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/what-adverti...