Decades ago I worked as an engineer and a saying I often heard was, "If it's broke fix it, if it works break it". Seems I saw that philosophy in a Three Stooges short. As to changes in Gmail, I noticed but it wasn't a big problem. Microsoft does a better job at breaking things. Remember Win8?
I can't agree with what you say. As a programmer I know that software must get improved, but not change it at will. There are thousands upon thousands of changes made to "improve" a software that are not necessary and that it could have been done as an option. Instead, every new boss that comes along within the company, changes things just because they think it is the best thing to do. Oftentimes this is not ok by any measure. One example is the elimination of Wordpad in Windows. Worpad does not need maintenance or to be continuously updated to run without a glitch. A perfectly good program was erased because they said so. No options, no nothing. Another perfectly good program (a simple and helpful tool), MS Photo Editor was obliterated too. There are countless examples of impositions like these. No Leo, forced changes are not always good. Most of the time they are not even helpful but annoying. By the way, thank you for your good work! Keep it up! 😊
Great answer. This happens in the military, too, where every new commander feels the need to change something because they're evaluated on the basis they did something new, not so much on whether they managed the current regime competently. In a perverse way, "change" has become the new inertia.
On the other side, I heard a UA-camr complain that a certain business website for ordering looked "very dated" although admitting it was fully functional. The business supplied things for busineses and tech workers who were concerned with getting their parts and not worrying that the UI wasn't keeping up with the latest trends.
I think it's more often some idiot with their spreadsheet looking for an excuse to justify their existence. Change for the sake of change. It's a sad statement on where we have ended up and/or are headed.
I doubt it's the idea of change that annoys most users. It's having to learn the same software all over again. It takes time to get good at any piece of software. For a lot of users, by the time they learn the software, the company redesigns it, making users start all over again. With that, users have a VERY valid argument.
I used to work in the IT department at Atlantic Records, on 51 street in Manhattan (New York City). In that office, they had a sign: "If it ain't broke, fix it." In case anyone is interested, they ran their operations on two Data General MV series systems. A model MV10, and an MV20, both running the AOS/VS operating system (Advanced Operating System / Virtual Storage). They were very proud of those to systems.
@@SeattleSoulFan "When did you work there? I'm a huge fan of Atlantic Records' output in general. Did you get to meet Ahmet Ertegün?" I never met him. He probably never visited that Manhattan location. Such a visit would have had all of the employees talking. I was there for 3 years. I do not know what went on there before or after. It was a long time ago, starting off in an entry level position in their computer room. There was no studio. But I did get to see the board room. And I got to see which audio manufacturer they used for all of the people that had window offices, as well as in the board room. It was nothing special. They used Yamaha gear, and everyone with an office had a stereo. The board room had huge JBL speakers, and they cut out sections of the walls and inserted the speakers into the walls. Even I knew that that was the worst thing you could do with speakers. I did meet an executive (can't remember her name) that handed out tickets for concerts. I am sure that she had other duties. I just do not remember her role. When Phil Collins was touring, I found out that she was the go-to person to get tickets. When I was in her office, she pulled out a large inter-office envelope that was stuffed with tickets. She told me to help myself. Jackpot! I took 4 tickets. But I had no idea which ones to take. I learned from that experience that the record companies hold back lots of tickets. She probably had 1,000 or so tickets stuffed into that envelope. Also, just about every office and cubical had CDs all over the place. One somewhat large office looked like a storage room for CDs. That should give you an idea of the years that I worked there.
That's basically the reason I have ended up on Linux with an LXDE Desktop. There have been small tweaks and improvements over the years, but the basic workflow of things has never changed over the years. It's basically still a Task Bar / Start Button thing in the style of early Windows 95. The way I see it (to pull out a car analogy...): Incremental change in technology is good, completely changing the traffic rules and traffic signs every few years is not.
There's a difference between change and change. They don't need to force changes on users, instead they can OFFER changes to the users. Even if - and I stress IF - they "must change", they frequently/generally make changes in the most convoluted and complicated ways possible, and new interfaces are often created without sufficient user input. They're not complicated because they're new, they're complicated because they're not set up intuitively.
For an elderly person I think I adapt to program changes fairly well. But, it confounds me when the program takes a step closer to unusable, not considering the great number of folks like me who's eyes are a bit worse for wear. It's almost as if they forget that their loyal users aren't 21 anymore. ....or even 40.
Well said. I'm 71 and agree, change for the sake of change or someone with their spreadsheet trying to justify their existence is a sad state of affairs.
Nope. Improvements are one thing, but complaints tend to result from UX designers chasing fads, or rewrites which break or worsen previous functionality.
Yes, change is inevitable. But that does not mean that we should blindly go along with change, like lemmings. It all depends on the nature and rationale of the change. If you are running a business, you should not change your key people, just to have change, and expect everyone to just accept it. I worked for a company that did just that. I was employed in a Fortune 500 company's IT department. Things were running smoothly. The management personnel were on the ball. They seemed to make the right decisions for virtually everything. Well, after ~10 years, the board of directors decided it was time for a change. So they brought in a new president. Everything went down hill -- or so it looked that way. Perhaps two or so years later, another change at the top. And things got even worse. And with each change, loads of executives were shuffled and dismissed and new executives were hired, with different titles, and departments were merged, and renamed, and on and on and on. Each new executive had to show that they were worth their keep, and so they made changes. No longer could employees focus on their responsibilities, assuming they were even given clear responsibilities. Competent employees found new, greener pastures. Inevitably, customer affecting outages occurred, and we became a CYA culture. The movie "Office Space" touched on this. Every action, no matter how insignificant, had to be approved by multiple teams, most of whom had no clue what that action meant. Red tape, galore. Huge time wasted, for the simplest changes. Virtually no different than huge changes. But even with huge changes, most of the people that had to approve them had no understanding of them. So we went in circles. With the original management, we frequently had changes. And everyone understood the rational for each change. The changes were good. It was also challenging. But it made sense. So the employees were gung ho and very productive. Then, with each new change in management, the employee's focus changed to avoid trouble. Employees became conditioned to figure out how not to be blamed for problems created by those that foisted groundless changes for others to implement. If you want to drag a company into a world of extreme time wasting "process", then implement ITIL. It is a one-size fits all for every IT department, that ensures that no IT department can ever excel and out-perform (in any meaningful way) the competition, when the competition is also using ITIL. Everyone will be wearing the same shackles. But the executives will get lots of spreadsheets to make them think that they know what is going on, right down to how long it took to move a cable. Change should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
I accept change but do wish a helpful but simplified explanation of the changes for the elderly users would be available to help understand them. Also in a font size these poor aging eyes could read. Today a Head Office email was in abt a 6 point size😢 Hard even for younger visually impaired to deal with.
So true. I go thru this with almost every version of Windows! I don't even want to deal with AI but it's coming! But then again, I was happy when things like spell check came along.
In some, and seemingly increasing, areas the fierce competition is apparently not primarily about quality and functionality. Rather more about a perceived to be impressive update cadence and coming up with anything that can be used in PR. Hence for instance why a design language in Windows will never again be fully implemented.
I think all of you in the comment section are missing Leo's simple point: change will happen for whatever reason, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You may not like a change, but oftentimes there is a valid reason for it, even though you may not see it.
Nope! Being complacent is how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising it self as an operating system. Windows 11. I switched to Linux and love it. I use an email client (Thunderbird) so I don't have to deal with the on-line email service interfaces. If I had to deal with that garbage, I'd stop using email all together. I am a computer tech and network specialist (retired now) and it's incredible to me what people put up with. BTW, you don't have to be a tech person to use Linux (Mint for example) so maybe have a look. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years. Regards to all. 😉🇨🇦
@@Starlight-AG Complacent? Microsoft is a private, for-profit company. It can do whatever it wants, obviously. Using Linux is a whole different conversation. And, your mom had you for a tech, so, of course she was happy with it.
@@Starlight-AG Hello. Do you mean that you run your own email server? If so, could you give me a basic explanation if you get the chance? I had multiple email accounts with my ISP for over 20 years, when I was notified that the ISP was discontinuing email service and transferring the responsibility to Yahoo. I haven't taken action as of yet, as I am still able to use my Windows Live Mail client. But I don't want anything to do with Yahoo, webmail, or any other badwill, bad faith organization.
Wise words, Leo. Not only regarding living with computers, but also applicable about local planning, changing face of international commerce, automobiles, and on and on. Thanks! (Deep breathing ... 🤗)
Nope! Complacency is how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising itself as an operating system (Windows 11). Send a message, switch to Linux if you can. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years. Regards to all. 🇨🇦😊
The why is simple: So they can add creepy new features that you don't want or need! How else are they going to increase the ads you see and how much they can snoop on you? That is what makes them money.
Well said. That's how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising itself as an operating system (Windows 11). Send a message, switch to Linux if you can, you won't regret it. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years.
Nope, some change just to change. No real reason, just feel the need to make something look different to make people think it's better. I can understand patches and updates behind the scenes, but just to make a site look different is annoying. Sorry, I just want my appliances to work. No useless frills here.
Change is good, but when this is causing bugs you have to solve them. Like changing "Also apply this template to all subfolders" is broken since the introduction of W11. I reported it ans is still not solved. The introduction of that new W11 Taskbar was also disaster. This was an example that upgrading is often downgrading in fact. I also follow the transition from Control Panel to Settings with Argus eyes. Several things are simply not available in Setiings.
I was very frustrated in the distant past when Google made it more difficult for my old eyes to read the text on their mail. I complained on their forum because the change intentionally removed quite a bit of the contrast making it much harder for me to read and causing me eyestrain. They didn't care. Their excuse was they had limited resources to work on the GUI. I told them in that case please just leave the interface alone instead of intentionally designing features in their UI that are harmful to people who don't have perfect eyesight.
@@nigelogilvie9450 Maybe a bit strong but they intentionally made a change that was harmful to older people and people without perfect eyesight and didn't want to revert the harmful change.
"Intentionally harmful" implies they did is specifically TO make things worse for you. That's not the case at all. They made the change for some other (intentional) reason, and as a SIDE EFFECT it was harmful to you. Important distinction.
The reason they change things that arent broken is to measure/record/observe the reaction or response it elicits from users... Becasue therye interested in manipulating people en mass. That's basically what this is all about [for them].
It is true, that I lambast Linux forking. But 3 tries running in parallel, to find out the most accepted one over time, is not 1'000 parallel tries. (And yes - the Windows 10 user base is still greatly greater, than the Windows 11 user base. And I suspect, it won't change, before the forcing.)
@@askleonotenboom I don't think, a substantial use of Windows 10 will remain, post autumn 2025 -> Windows 10 EOL ( = no more security patches) ... in the enterprise world anyway.
✅ Watch next ▶ Dealing With Inexplicable Change? ▶ ua-cam.com/video/sgitVVBLDQo/v-deo.html
Decades ago I worked as an engineer and a saying I often heard was, "If it's broke fix it, if it works break it". Seems I saw that philosophy in a Three Stooges short.
As to changes in Gmail, I noticed but it wasn't a big problem. Microsoft does a better job at breaking things. Remember Win8?
I can't agree with what you say. As a programmer I know that software must get improved, but not change it at will. There are thousands upon thousands of changes made to "improve" a software that are not necessary and that it could have been done as an option. Instead, every new boss that comes along within the company, changes things just because they think it is the best thing to do. Oftentimes this is not ok by any measure. One example is the elimination of Wordpad in Windows. Worpad does not need maintenance or to be continuously updated to run without a glitch. A perfectly good program was erased because they said so. No options, no nothing.
Another perfectly good program (a simple and helpful tool), MS Photo Editor was obliterated too. There are countless examples of impositions like these. No Leo, forced changes are not always good. Most of the time they are not even helpful but annoying.
By the way, thank you for your good work! Keep it up! 😊
Great answer. This happens in the military, too, where every new commander feels the need to change something because they're evaluated on the basis they did something new, not so much on whether they managed the current regime competently. In a perverse way, "change" has become the new inertia.
On the other side, I heard a UA-camr complain that a certain business website for ordering looked "very dated" although admitting it was fully functional. The business supplied things for busineses and tech workers who were concerned with getting their parts and not worrying that the UI wasn't keeping up with the latest trends.
I think it's more often some idiot with their spreadsheet looking for an excuse to justify their existence. Change for the sake of change. It's a sad statement on where we have ended up and/or are headed.
I doubt it's the idea of change that annoys most users. It's having to learn the same software all over again. It takes time to get good at any piece of software. For a lot of users, by the time they learn the software, the company redesigns it, making users start all over again. With that, users have a VERY valid argument.
I used to work in the IT department at Atlantic Records, on 51 street in Manhattan (New York City).
In that office, they had a sign:
"If it ain't broke, fix it."
In case anyone is interested, they ran their operations on two Data General MV series systems. A model MV10, and an MV20, both running the AOS/VS operating system (Advanced Operating System / Virtual Storage). They were very proud of those to systems.
When did you work there? I'm a huge fan of Atlantic Records' output in general. Did you get to meet Ahmet Ertegün?
@@SeattleSoulFan "When did you work there? I'm a huge fan of Atlantic Records' output in general. Did you get to meet Ahmet Ertegün?"
I never met him. He probably never visited that Manhattan location. Such a visit would have had all of the employees talking. I was there for 3 years. I do not know what went on there before or after.
It was a long time ago, starting off in an entry level position in their computer room. There was no studio. But I did get to see the board room. And I got to see which audio manufacturer they used for all of the people that had window offices, as well as in the board room. It was nothing special. They used Yamaha gear, and everyone with an office had a stereo. The board room had huge JBL speakers, and they cut out sections of the walls and inserted the speakers into the walls. Even I knew that that was the worst thing you could do with speakers.
I did meet an executive (can't remember her name) that handed out tickets for concerts. I am sure that she had other duties. I just do not remember her role.
When Phil Collins was touring, I found out that she was the go-to person to get tickets. When I was in her office, she pulled out a large inter-office envelope that was stuffed with tickets. She told me to help myself. Jackpot!
I took 4 tickets. But I had no idea which ones to take.
I learned from that experience that the record companies hold back lots of tickets. She probably had 1,000 or so tickets stuffed into that envelope.
Also, just about every office and cubical had CDs all over the place. One somewhat large office looked like a storage room for CDs. That should give you an idea of the years that I worked there.
That's basically the reason I have ended up on Linux with an LXDE Desktop. There have been small tweaks and improvements over the years, but the basic workflow of things has never changed over the years. It's basically still a Task Bar / Start Button thing in the style of early Windows 95. The way I see it (to pull out a car analogy...): Incremental change in technology is good, completely changing the traffic rules and traffic signs every few years is not.
There's a difference between change and change. They don't need to force changes on users, instead they can OFFER changes to the users.
Even if - and I stress IF - they "must change", they frequently/generally make changes in the most convoluted and complicated ways possible, and new interfaces are often created without sufficient user input. They're not complicated because they're new, they're complicated because they're not set up intuitively.
For an elderly person I think I adapt to program changes fairly well. But, it confounds me when the program takes a step closer to unusable, not considering the great number of folks like me who's eyes are a bit worse for wear. It's almost as if they forget that their loyal users aren't 21 anymore. ....or even 40.
Well said. I'm 71 and agree, change for the sake of change or someone with their spreadsheet trying to justify their existence is a sad state of affairs.
You get what you pay for.
Nope. Improvements are one thing, but complaints tend to result from UX designers chasing fads, or rewrites which break or worsen previous functionality.
Yes, change is inevitable. But that does not mean that we should blindly go along with change, like lemmings. It all depends on the nature and rationale of the change.
If you are running a business, you should not change your key people, just to have change, and expect everyone to just accept it. I worked for a company that did just that.
I was employed in a Fortune 500 company's IT department. Things were running smoothly. The management personnel were on the ball. They seemed to make the right decisions for virtually everything.
Well, after ~10 years, the board of directors decided it was time for a change. So they brought in a new president. Everything went down hill -- or so it looked that way.
Perhaps two or so years later, another change at the top. And things got even worse.
And with each change, loads of executives were shuffled and dismissed and new executives were hired, with different titles, and departments were merged, and renamed, and on and on and on. Each new executive had to show that they were worth their keep, and so they made changes. No longer could employees focus on their responsibilities, assuming they were even given clear responsibilities.
Competent employees found new, greener pastures.
Inevitably, customer affecting outages occurred, and we became a CYA culture. The movie "Office Space" touched on this.
Every action, no matter how insignificant, had to be approved by multiple teams, most of whom had no clue what that action meant. Red tape, galore. Huge time wasted, for the simplest changes. Virtually no different than huge changes. But even with huge changes, most of the people that had to approve them had no understanding of them. So we went in circles.
With the original management, we frequently had changes. And everyone understood the rational for each change. The changes were good. It was also challenging. But it made sense. So the employees were gung ho and very productive. Then, with each new change in management, the employee's focus changed to avoid trouble. Employees became conditioned to figure out how not to be blamed for problems created by those that foisted groundless changes for others to implement.
If you want to drag a company into a world of extreme time wasting "process", then implement ITIL. It is a one-size fits all for every IT department, that ensures that no IT department can ever excel and out-perform (in any meaningful way) the competition, when the competition is also using ITIL. Everyone will be wearing the same shackles. But the executives will get lots of spreadsheets to make them think that they know what is going on, right down to how long it took to move a cable.
Change should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
I accept change but do wish a helpful but simplified explanation of the changes for the elderly users would be available to help understand them. Also in a font size these poor aging eyes could read. Today a Head Office email was in abt a 6 point size😢 Hard even for younger visually impaired to deal with.
Depending on how you read your email there are solutions in your control. Try CTRL + the + key to make things bigger. Works in most.
So true. I go thru this with almost every version of Windows! I don't even want to deal with AI but it's coming! But then again, I was happy when things like spell check came along.
In some, and seemingly increasing, areas the fierce competition is apparently not primarily about quality and functionality. Rather more about a perceived to be impressive update cadence and coming up with anything that can be used in PR. Hence for instance why a design language in Windows will never again be fully implemented.
I think all of you in the comment section are missing Leo's simple point: change will happen for whatever reason, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You may not like a change, but oftentimes there is a valid reason for it, even though you may not see it.
@platterjockey I agree with you: the point is to adapt, overcome and change service providers when totally frustrated. Thank you.
*"...change will happen for whatever reason, and there's nothing you can do to stop it."*
That is demonstrably false.
Nope! Being complacent is how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising it self as an operating system. Windows 11. I switched to Linux and love it. I use an email client (Thunderbird) so I don't have to deal with the on-line email service interfaces. If I had to deal with that garbage, I'd stop using email all together. I am a computer tech and network specialist (retired now) and it's incredible to me what people put up with. BTW, you don't have to be a tech person to use Linux (Mint for example) so maybe have a look. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years. Regards to all. 😉🇨🇦
@@Starlight-AG Complacent? Microsoft is a private, for-profit company. It can do whatever it wants, obviously.
Using Linux is a whole different conversation. And, your mom had you for a tech, so, of course she was happy with it.
@@Starlight-AG Hello. Do you mean that you run your own email server? If so, could you give me a basic explanation if you get the chance?
I had multiple email accounts with my ISP for over 20 years, when I was notified that the ISP was discontinuing email service and transferring the responsibility to Yahoo. I haven't taken action as of yet, as I am still able to use my Windows Live Mail client. But I don't want anything to do with Yahoo, webmail, or any other badwill, bad faith organization.
Wise words, Leo. Not only regarding living with computers, but also applicable about local planning, changing face of international commerce, automobiles, and on and on. Thanks! (Deep breathing ... 🤗)
Nope! Complacency is how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising itself as an operating system (Windows 11). Send a message, switch to Linux if you can. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years. Regards to all. 🇨🇦😊
Thank you!
The why is simple: So they can add creepy new features that you don't want or need! How else are they going to increase the ads you see and how much they can snoop on you? That is what makes them money.
Well said. That's how we ended up with an advertising and data mining platform disguising itself as an operating system (Windows 11). Send a message, switch to Linux if you can, you won't regret it. My 87 year old Mom used it happily for years.
Nope, some change just to change. No real reason, just feel the need to make something look different to make people think it's better. I can understand patches and updates behind the scenes, but just to make a site look different is annoying. Sorry, I just want my appliances to work. No useless frills here.
One problem with adding features is increased security risk.
But why did the windows volume control change from vertical (logical) to horizontal (wrong?) Windows 10. WHY ?
Good one. Answer ... because they can.
They are rewiring your brain. The changes that keep being made are insane.
Change is good, but when this is causing bugs you have to solve them. Like changing "Also apply this template to all subfolders" is broken since the introduction of W11. I reported it ans is still not solved. The introduction of that new W11 Taskbar was also disaster. This was an example that upgrading is often downgrading in fact. I also follow the transition from Control Panel to Settings with Argus eyes. Several things are simply not available in Setiings.
I was very frustrated in the distant past when Google made it more difficult for my old eyes to read the text on their mail. I complained on their forum because the change intentionally removed quite a bit of the contrast making it much harder for me to read and causing me eyestrain. They didn't care. Their excuse was they had limited resources to work on the GUI. I told them in that case please just leave the interface alone instead of intentionally designing features in their UI that are harmful to people who don't have perfect eyesight.
Intentionally harming people?
@@nigelogilvie9450 Maybe a bit strong but they intentionally made a change that was harmful to older people and people without perfect eyesight and didn't want to revert the harmful change.
"Intentionally harmful" implies they did is specifically TO make things worse for you. That's not the case at all. They made the change for some other (intentional) reason, and as a SIDE EFFECT it was harmful to you. Important distinction.
@@askleonotenboom I tried to reply to the other comment on this yesterday but for some reason it didn't go through.
The reason they change things that arent broken is to measure/record/observe the reaction or response it elicits from users... Becasue therye interested in manipulating people en mass. That's basically what this is all about [for them].
Have you seen that tv series Westworld? Well, it's like that.
Thanks Leo
just use an email client like thunder bird within windows/Linux.
Bring back the telegraph! 😅
It is true, that I lambast Linux forking. But 3 tries running in parallel, to find out the most accepted one over time, is not 1'000 parallel tries.
(And yes - the Windows 10 user base is still greatly greater, than the Windows 11 user base. And I suspect, it won't change, before the forcing.)
There's no forcing. Not any time soon, anyway.
@@askleonotenboom I don't think, a substantial use of Windows 10 will remain, post autumn 2025 -> Windows 10 EOL ( = no more security patches) ... in the enterprise world anyway.
You know
One word Money
Job security..
Exactly.
Um.... no.
@@askleonotenboom If they stop making changes, they'll eventually be out of a job, one way or the other.
Never in my life have I thought about this
This is a surprisingly disgusting string of straw man explanations. This man speaks precisely as I would expect an industry PR man to speak.
Apparently I have a new job then. Yay?
@@askleonotenboom I hope not!