Category: Windows 7
A funny thing happened…
A funny thing happened to us on the way to making things easier – we forgot what a file was.
I’ve blogged before about a curious phenomenon that I’ve seen, where the current crop of incoming designers, don’t seem to understand the file-application model of computing that more seasoned designers seem to grasp.
There’s plenty of evidence online and I’ve seen a lot of evidence in my work, usually when some sort of file manipulation needs to occur (open a file in another application), or as part of a task, exactly knowing where a file is in your file system.
I’m met with clueless expressions:
“Move a file – to the desktop? What do you mean?”
“Right click and ‘Open with’ – sorry what?”
“Drag ‘a file’ on to an app – sorry?”
“Place and link a file, on the page?”
I’ve wondered why this is.
I certainly picked up the concept of files and folders straight away when I first started using a Mac.
You had to learn the Finder before learning any application.
Because of the way the Mac was designed, the skills you gained by learning the Finder could be used in the apps because Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines enforced them to operate the same.
A tiny, black and white 9” screen, showed me in clear terms what a file system was.
Double-clicking, click and holding and moving into a folder that you created, were tasks that you executed hundreds of times a day, no matter what you were doing or what applications you were using.
You always went back to the Finder, it was your starting point.
It was the equivalent of your home button on an iPhone.
No matter what you did, the Finder was always there in the background, the apps simply sat on top of it.
It was a file launcher as well as an app launcher.
The Finder (and what a wonderful application it is) it’s what makes a Mac – a Mac.
It’s a desktop, a ground where apps are launched from, a place where you files live.
It’s your starting point, a smiling, friendly face that reassures you that this isn’t complicated.
It doesn’t seem be that way on Windows.
Windows (as you know) has a File Explorer.
This differs from the Finder, because it’s just a Window (well it is called ‘Windows’) into your computer.
But what I’ve found is that not many users use it, or know what it is.
They launch the app they want to use from the Taskbar.
That’s their starting point.
Then, the app launches and their files are just ‘there’.
Or not in most cases.
So they ‘open’ them from within the app.
Then poke around in a confusing, meandering path.
Sometimes using the awful, bespoke and ‘unique to to that app’s’ ‘recent’ UI.
Eventually they find their files in a sea of icons.
So why do they do this?
Why not start with your files, arrange them how you need in the way that makes sense to you and launch them from there?
I once knew a work colleague that worked in Finance and he worked solely using email.
I mean – he launched files from his emails.
He had a collection of email drafts with attachments and he would edit and update them.
When he needed a new file he would launch the app, select new, and then ‘send to email’, save it as a draft in a series of complicated folders in the email program.
The email program was his file system.
Quite a novel approach and it certainly made sense to him.
To me? I just kept thinking ‘why?’
Why not use the file manager?
So why do people use the application centric models rather than the file centric model?
I think it’s mainly due to app makers trying to gain leverage on your computer, keeping you in their app.
It encourages you to stay within the app and as most users only really use one main app, be it Excel or Word, this approach tends to work.
Open the app, see your files.
I also think it’s one specific way that Windows works that encourages this behaviour.
When you save a file in any app in Windows, the save dialog will only show you that apps files by default. It doesn’t show you every (i.e. the file system) file like the Mac does.
This is significant because it keeps your mind in the application model.
You’re not seeing your files you’re seeing their app’s view of their files.
It panicked me the first time this happened because I thought all my other files had been deleted!
Keeping you in the app model is what the app maker wants.
They don’t want to be ‘just another app you use’ they want to be the ‘only’ app you use.
So much so, most app try to take over the open and save dialogs with their own UI, (which also defaults to their cloud storage, naturally).
In my experience even Adobe is guilty of this, here’s their awful file browser that’s shown as you launch every app.
This demotes the file system to the detriment of the user experience and locks you in even more into their app.
All of this seems like I’m just arguing over nothing, but the file centric model, where apps were secondary to your files, helped the user become more efficient.
You now have to learn their view of the file system through their app, as every one of those UI’s are different from one another.
Microsoft’s are amongst the worst – see Outlook:
The little text I’ve highlighted is how you get to the proper file system – i.e. your files.
The application centric model is just a way of locking you into a supplier, stopping you from trying other apps as it becomes too much of a learning curve to learn ‘their way’.
This has led, in the end, to users not understanding what ‘files’ are – they now just think of ‘apps‘, with big colourful buttons to press.
At least the Finder is still there, bruised and forgotten but holding on the best it can, I hope that one day people understand how much more efficient they can be by understanding (and only having to understand ‘once’) a file-based model.
More fun with Gates & Ballmer…
The Zeus Trojan – the God of botnets.
NetWitness found a botnet with control of 74,126 Windows systems spread around 196 countries. These systems are found at medical companies, insurance companies, educational institutions, energy firms, financial companies, Internet providers, and government agencies.
And here:
Prevx came upon a cache with logon credentials for 74,000 FTP accounts. These accounts were for companies such as NASA, Cisco, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Amazon, Bank of America, Oracle, ABC, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, Disney, Monster, and the Queensland government.
You know, you start to become jaded concerning the security of the most popular OS on planet Earth.
The OS that 90% of the people viewing this blog use.
The OS that your company runs on.
The OS that your government runs on.
The OS your school, college or university runs on.
The OS that your bank probably uses.
The OS that despite being quite clearly not fit for use, somehow continues to be used, because so many people’s lives dependent on it.
What people? Well you, me, the IT department that won’t even let you change your desktop pattern wallpaper at work, your parents, your friends, the guy you overheard talking in the bus queue this morning about how his computer has become unusable again, or the other guy he was talking to who said that all he had to do was:
a) pay for more security software
b) visit this site that tells you how to solve your latest Windows problem in 38 easy steps
c) buy a new computer
d) don’t do anything on your computer to do with online banking or payments of any kind.
And, yes that last group of people who benefit from the crap that Gates & Ballmer peddle every day – the criminals and ne’r-do-wells that use the money they generate from hacking your computer to buy & supply drugs to your kids, fund terrorism, and various other nasties.
Lots of fun for all concerned.
Thank you Mr Gates and Mr Ballmer for all this, and thank you Apple for allowing me to write this blog on a computer that is not affected by any of this.
Sorry for being so jaded, but I don’t see anyone, anytime soon kicking Windows technology out of the door.
More innovation from Microsoft…
Amongst Microsoft’s many, many accomplishments, is this lovely little gem:
There are bugs that Microsoft patch pretty quickly, there are bugs that take a little more testing and take longer, there are bugs that they take ages to patch for some reason.
And now, from your trustworthy business OS supplier comes a first in long history of innovation – a bug that cannot be patched.
At all.
It can’t be fixed.
Why this isn’t more widely reported is beyond me. Microsoft’s solution is to run IE8 in a restricted mode which seems a band-aid solution to me.
Sure, Vista solves this little hiccup, but just about every Windows box that I can see from my happy little Mac studio, is still running XP.
What galls me the most is that this little feature has been present in every version of Windows up until Vista, they’ve only just discovered it as far as I can tell.
A few years from now, will there be another ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Vista, Windows 7, 8, 9 etc that they discover?
Why do people not question them? Why do they just accept this? Why is the news full of Apple releasing another device that everyone fails to understand, because it just happens to do something different, and not full of Microsoft’s unbelievable, amateurish and downright dangerous coding?
No other web browser on the Windows platform is affected. Does that not say something about this company?
Microsoft’s subtle trick…
I remember a Christian once saying to me that the best day’s work that the Devil ever did, was to convince everyone that he didn’t exist.
A similar analogy, is that the socialists have convinced everyone that George Orwell’s book ‘1984’ was about fascism, when actually it’s about the dangers of unrestricted socialism (IngSoc, stands for Engligh Socialism).
These thoughts were piqued when I read a newspaper article in the UK’s DailyMail newspaper, outlining the experience the reporter had when they accidentally clicked on a spammer’s email.
The chaos that ensued, highlighted the dangers of clicking on these sorts of emails, and the article well worth a skim:
Courtesy of the UK’s DailyMail newspaper:
I always like to read articles like this because they show the computer experiences of your average Windows user; and I mean the really average Windows user.
The average Windows user makes up the majority of Microsoft customer base, and this article perfectly illustrates the clever trick that Microsoft has played upon them.
The article in question is basically about someone who received an email that asked for all sorts of personal information. This email was a spam email, but the user dumbly accepted it as legitimate, and duly got conned – malware was installed and all sorts of chaos ensued.
Now you can comment on the ineptness of the user, but this article isn’t about their stupidity, it’s about the person that they ultimately blamed.
It’s a big, long article that goes into great detail about what happened to them, but nowhere and I mean nowhere in the article is the word ‘Windows’ or the word ‘Microsoft’ mentioned. Not once.
Ultimately the person who they blamed was – Yahoo. They blamed the email service for failing to filter out the email.
Not themselves for being so inept, not Microsoft for selling them an OS with security holes, but Yahoo. Poor Yahoo.
From the article:
Finally on Monday, three days later, smooth-sounding Jessica from ‘the Yahoo concierge service’ called to help me get back into my account and reassure me that Yahoo took such violations very seriously.She would not be drawn on who might be responsible at Yahoo for stopping hackers. I wanted to know why Yahoo’s own filter system hadn’t spotted a bogus email sent in their name and taken it out before I opened it.
- You for not constantly being on your guard to make up for the fact that an email link can allow remote software to be installed.
- The ‘bad guys’ who send out these emails and take advantage of the security holes in Microsoft software
- The email provider for not filtering out the ‘bad guy’s’ emails.
Microsoft, please carry on…
Courtesy of Rixstep:
Spontaneous Shoplifting @ MSFT Store
Words don’t often fail me, but the sight of a dozen minor-geeks, awkwardly clapping and trying to dance, under the guise of spontaneity… well I don’t know what to say or where to begin.
Microsoft, you’re making a complete fool of yourself. You really don’t know what (hopefully) irreparable damage you are doing to your brand (such that it is) and your public image.
Years from now, when Microsoft are long, long gone, people will look back at the YouTube video and say that this was one of the 10 or so key moments where severe blows were dealt that added to this company’s downfall.
The reason why Microsoft have survived and prospered this far, is because of the army of Windows IT Professionals that have propped up this loose assortment of sloppy hacks and ass-backwards ‘me-too’ and ‘just good enough’ coding.
They have survived because of the mass-ignorance of your average PC-buyer, who needed their hand held whilst buying their computer.
But now things have changed. Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and dozens of others have caught up whilst Microsoft were sleeping, and Microsoft’s customer has changed – they are armed with geek-knowledge and they know how to use it.
Ballmer, like the captain on the Titanic, tried to ignore it, but now, with market-share and mind-share slipping he has to do something.
He calls on his troops, but more and more of these troops are bringing in laptops with Apple logos on them. They have iPods, and iPhones, they use Google instead of Bing, and Office is the last thing on their mind with free alternatives readily available.
So he does something – Vista. A total failure that would have finished most companies – but Microsoft isn’t ‘most’ companies.
He tries ‘new’ and ‘different’ advertising campaigns. They are met with derision, confusion and worst of all – laughter, the ‘at’ kind, not the ‘with’ kind.
Plan B. If you can’t beat them – join them. Or copy them. Copy them in exactly the same way you’ve copied them before, back when that ‘computer for the rest of us’ was first released.
Copy it backwards and upside down. In such a way that although all the pieces are there, they just don’t quite fit together.
What you are seeing in this poor, poor, sad video above, is Microsoft in the raw. When the support from all the IT professionals has gone.
They have to compete. On their own. This is who they really are.
I’ve often thought Microsoft were indestructible and I would be writing this blog to the end of my days with them always there, always copying, always getting it totally wrong.
You know I’m beginning to see, at last, the end of this once never great company.
The Mac at work . . . 