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I'm skipping a meeting right now, which some of my colleagues were roped into, because I cannot bear to sit through another 1.5 hour tour of a vendor's web-based application. I know how to use a web browser. I even, believe it or not, know how to fill out forms in a web browser and hit "submit". And I'm bothered by the apparent contradiction between "Oh, we'll make it Easy and Intuitive! We'll put it on the Web!" vis-a-vis "Please come to yet another meeting in which one of our salesdroids will show you PowerPoint [HATE] slides of screenshots of our intuitive, easy-to-use web application so you, idiot, will be able to use the damn thing." And the vendor? Sun Microsystems! Sun "why should Unix provide any usability tools at all?" Microsystems! Sun "we'd really like it if everybody had to pass through US$10,000 worth of LCD training classes before laying a finger on any of our products" Microsystems! Sun "all our employees run our main competitor's OS on their laptops because our own OS is just too damn tough to get any real use out of" Microsystems! Sun "we clearly have no idea how anybody manages to make their way around one of our machines without our help" Microsystems! And the application? An abomination which (Sun thinks) is going to sit on all our machines and send them constant updates on their status, like which particular DSIMM is going to go tits up and cause their half-million-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox to do a hard reset next Saturday night. Automagic! Easy to use! Huge time saver! Huge reliability increaser! Yeah. I'd rather spend my time venting at the hates-software list, thanks anyway. I hates software, and I hates the spawning grounds in which it breeds. Colleague, now on his way in to the meeting I'm boycotting: "They must know better by now."
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