OMT Countdown to Glory: 46 days until Bush is gone
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One of the things we loathe about the Internet is the frequency of site redesign. Now, here at OMT, we’ve gone through several design changes until we finally found something that worked for us, as the current design does quite nicely. Since we adopted it last summer, we haven’t even looked at the “Appearance” page that our blog host provides us with, which allows you to tinker with other designs. It may take us a while to find what we like, but once we have, we’ll stick with it as long as we can.
We seem to be in the minority.
I defy you to name an Internet site that you regularly visit which hasn’t been completely overhauled in the past 12 months.
Not only is this unnerving, especially if it’s a site at which you conduct business, but it’s also annoying because now you have to essentially re-learn how to use the site, where to find its essential features, and most off-pissing of all, new, largely unnecessary, and poorly-chosen terminology that oftentimes only hints at its true meaning. The geeks and morons who do things like site design are notoriously inarticulate, and it seems we have to pay the price.
The reason we’re bitching about this particular topic today is because our blog hosts have completely redesigned the blog management side of the site. What used to be a fairly sleek and efficient “dashboard” (that nauseating buzz word in IT circles) has been transformed into a hideously overcrowded, completely re-shuffled mishmash of features, both useful and useless. Some of our most essential features are nowhere to be found, and others have different names. Prominently displayed are some new features which, try as we might, we cannot figure out why anyone would want to use, and one particularly useful feature, the “visit site” button, which allows you to bring up your site as your readers see it, has vanished.
And we should also point out that this was done without any warning whatsoever. As most of our readers know, we’re here at work very early in the morning (we usually have our latest post published before 5:30 in the morning), and to be unceremoniously greeted by something like this so early in the morning is enough to make us consider leaving our blog host for another, except that we would likely be subject to the same ill-treatment no matter where we go.
We’ve been in the Information Technology field for nearly 40 years now, and certainly we understand how things are in this business, at least since the academics and the nerdy, snot-nosed, masturbating geek types took over the field and removed from it all sense of dignity, professionalism and common sense. And we also understand that once a site is designed, once a program is written, once a system is deployed, that for the most part, companies that design, write and deploy these things suddenly realize that they have a staff of usually highly paid people who now have time on their hands. And those people need something to do. So they tell them, “Hey, let’s redesign it, and let’s really get creative this time. Utility be damned, let’s make it cool“.
We work in an entirely different kind of Information Technology industry, where the systems that we deploy are not only infinitely more sophisticated and complicated than what typically passes for an application in the Microsoft world, but they are also in a constant state of flux; we’re subject to government regulations which are always changing. Still, when we issue a new release, no one has to re-learn how to do a job that they’ve been performing for the past 10 years. They find things they’ve always used right were they left them. In our business, we have to worry about the maximum efficiency of the customers who use our products, and if your entire billing staff has to re-learn how to use the software that generates the bills to the patients and the claims to Medicare and private insurance companies every time a new major release comes down the pike, it’s going to slow down the customer’s revenue stream. And software vendors who do that to their customers, especially customers as large as ours, are not going to be in business very much longer.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about such things. Every time a there is a new release of Windows, not only does it not work as well as the previous version, at least until one or two “service packs” are applied, but your entire IT staff has to re-learn how to use the product. Everything usually changes, not only in what it’s called, but where you find it, and how it works, if it’s still there at all.
On other operating systems, like Unix, Linux and OpenVMS, there have been tremendous new features and capabilities added over the years, but if you still want to do something the way you’ve always done it, there remains the sophisticated command line interface. And you will always find everything exactly where it’s always been, with the same name. We’ve got nearly 30 years of OpenVMS experience, and while the operating system is virtually unrecognizable from what it was when we first encountered it, if we choose not to use the graphical interface, we don’t have to; when we have to add a new user account, we can still do it the same way we did it in 1982.
We reel when we consider how much time, efficiency and money have been lost to American businesses since they collectively allowed Microsoft to dominate the market with a decidedly inferior suite of products.
But we digress …
We don’t have a problem with change. We like change. When it’s good, when it’s useful, and when it has a purpose.
We’re just sick of things changing because they haven’t changed in a while.
