OpenEuphoria

Re: [OT] How far have we come?

• Posted by Ray Smith <smithr at ix.net.au> May 08, 2001
• 531 views

Hi,

> Anyone except an 'expert' would know that if your job is to type in
> three four-digit numbers hour after hour, it's going to be faster to hit
the
> keypad and the adjacent enter key than to navigate with a mouse and
> then move your hand from the mouse to the keyboard so you can type
> in each number. Unless you're tridextrous ( the third hand is needed
> for juggling papers )
>
> I write software for businesses that deal primarily in numbers, not word
> processing documents or graphic arts. So I try to make life as easy as
> possible for the people who will have to use my program.

Because we are programmers and understand (hopefully) the low level
details of applications and the underlying OS we have a different
perspective
to end users and their managers.

Efficiency, size, speed aren't the only attributes that decision makers look
at
when buying new software.

I agree with everything mentioned in this thread.  I beleive 90% of
everything
everyone does on a PC today could be done 10 years ago on at old XT or AT
with 2 or 4 mb of Ram and 120MB HDD ... probably faster and with less
crashes.

Windows and MS software does have many many problems some of which I
beleive are highly problematic.  Windows and all MS software does have many
great attributes that very few developers can compete with.  For any MS OS
or
application written there are probably 1, 2 or 3 other packages better than
MS's
offering but putting them all together with hugh amounts of PR has won time
and again.

The proof is shown eveytime you walk into a prospective customer and say you
have a DOS based application, or use ISAM indexed files or use a telnet to a
Unix box.  As good, solid, cheap and well designed, efficeint and fast as
all these
run you won't get a sale.  So what do you do ... use MS's technology, get
the
sales and live with the consiquences.

As mush as I don't like MS software ... if you don't know how to use it, or
develop
for it, then forget about winning contracts or developing your IT career.
There are obviously a small percentage of people who don't use MS software
and for those people ... well done!

Ray Smith.