• P (unregistered)

    That's a... very mediocre WTF. I expect better WTFs in Featured Articles.

  • Little Bobby Tables (unregistered)

    This is one of the reasons why it is a good idea for people who work on resolving other people's computer problems to practise buddhism.

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    better practice internet explorer to distinguish its version by icon

  • Mr Bits (unregistered)

    Despite Jacob's bluster, his complaints are mostly valid. Change simply for the sake of change does nobody any good except the person or persons tasked with making the change. For everyone else it causes confusion and lost productivity, and produces in them this well-known animosity towards computers.

    Change simply for the sake of change appears to be one of Microsoft's core competencies.

  • Sole Purpose of VIsit (unregistered) in reply to Little Bobby Tables

    I think kendo would be more the thing here. Zen buddhism ... with a big stick.

  • Hasseman (unregistered) in reply to Sole Purpose of VIsit

    ... and motorcycle maintenance...

  • The Dave G (unregistered)

    Seriously? Jacob thought IE was broken because the icon was different? That is by far the least of the changes between XP and Win 7. The RWTF is that this article didn't go on forever listing all the things Jacob thought were broken. And that the rest of the week was spent showing him how to use it.

    Even better, skip forward to the upgrade to Windows 8 or 10. Or the Office Ribbon (now that's an example of change for the sake of change that was a real WTF!)

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    I wonder if the mispelled helpdesk in "...to be the day Ian was on helldesk duty. " was intentional ^_^

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    Wait, so each person in IT was dedicated to someone else's support needs? There was no cycling around to someone else? Couldn't this have been escalated so the head of IT was Jacob's personal support contact?

  • doubting_poster (unregistered) in reply to The Dave G

    I disagree, it sounds realistic. I would imagine Jacob only used his computer to open the company email website and nothing else (It's stated he hates computers). His only interaction with his computer would be the desktop, and the webbrowser (the website itself looks the same as long as the company keeps it that way). As long as those look close enough to what he was used to, he wouldn't ever notice the rest of the differences.

  • Scott (unregistered)

    "...someones workflow"?

    Jacob is right to be upset when a web page doesn't display properly. Shitty developers create shitty applications which work shittily, of course users are upset by this.

    I imagine it's a bit of license with the icon, but is TRWTF the fact that Ian couldn't explain that, with the upgrade, the icon for IE changed rather than swapping the icon?

    Maybe it's not too much license, though. Earlier this year, I created a new search function which was orders of magnitude more efficient. For a while, we had two links: "search" and "search (new)" while we were beta-testing.

    Once new was approved and had run successfully for a month, we removed the old crap code. In the process of doing so, we removed the "search" link, and re-named the "search (new)" to "search".

    I got second-hand reports that users were freaked out that the better search had disappeared. You know, without even clicking the link to see that the only thing now available was the improved search function.

    I guess a WTF on me for not being totally explicit.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Scott

    users were freaked out that the better search had disappeared

    No good deed goes unpunished.

  • chris (unregistered)

    I sort of side with Jacob here. Pisses me the hell off every time there's some forced-upon-me-update on an Android phone and the genius people have decided to change and icon for an existing program. What the hell for?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr Bits

    Change simply for the sake of SALES appears to be one of Microsoft's core competencies.

  • Roby McAndrew (unregistered) in reply to Scott

    You missed the stage of changing the labels to "Search (old)" and "Search". This extends the beta testing to those that just click the same button they always did, with a fall-back if it fails

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    I wonder if the mispelled helpdesk in "...to be the day Ian was on helldesk duty. " was intentional ^_^

    Yes, "helldesk" is the commonly-accepted term for these kinds of jobs.

  • Raj (unregistered) in reply to Mr Bits

    Microsoft is currently the company with the largest market cap, ahead of Apple, Amazon and Google. They have turned a profit every year since before Jacob started his job at the bank. They must be doing at least one or two things right.

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Nutster

    I guess you'd prefer the Windows still looked like it did in version 2.0 - with red scrollbars, yellow menu bars, and blue title bars (on a cyan background with chunky back and white icons).

  • (nodebb)

    It's ok to be conservative in the sense of preserving stuff that is timeless and correct and effective, like regular organizational hierarchy. You want to be progressive in things like technology and processes, trying new things, obviously Windows XP can't be used forever. Having said that, Microsoft is being very stupid (as they're known to do throughout their existence). Vista, then 8, then to a lesser extent 10, bring lots of pain and little gain. Obviously they fix many bugs and support a bunch of new hardware and it's good, but the dual desktop is stupid.

  • TruePony (unregistered) in reply to The Dave G

    My reading of the article is that Jacob was a jerk who liked to berate others for the sake of it, and he made this unmistakably clear by choosing the little icon change as his chief complaint with the upgrade.

  • Karl Bielefeldt (github)

    When we first switched to Linux at home, my wife's only ask was to put the ie icon on the firefox launcher. She completely understood it was a different program and wasn't "broken." That small bit of continuity just made the switch more palatable.

  • (nodebb) in reply to The Dave G

    I hated the ribbon originally, because at first the switch from traditional menu bars was jarring. The ribbon took up too much vertical space at a time when monitors where losing vertical space and the software didn't support "side by side" views well yet to utilize the increasing horizontal space.

    With time I came to love it though. My original primary complain, the degratation of keyboard hotkey support, was actually improved and provided a way to train the Alt+letters sequences from the GUI. And if the space is an issue on a small screen, the ribbon can be hidden by default. It became part of what made me love mspaint for quick editing and annotating of screenshots. Want to paste an image such that the "canvas" fits it size? Alt+H,R,E<tab>1<enter><ctrl+v>. Doesn't sound intuitive, but it is about muscle memory for recurring tasks and about having guidance by the GUI, not about being able to guess right. Plus, the ribbon resolved the locaization issues, where "Alt+letters" may suddenly not work anymore, because there is both "File → Save As" and "File → Export As PDF", since it is no longer becessary for the accelerator key to appear in the word.

    Then came along Paint3D with its reinterpretation of the ribbon, where that whole Alt+letters concept is removed. Sure, you can show the canvas menu with "Alt+C", but to actually DO anything, I need to use the mouse. Or worse, scrounge the internet for whether there is a hotkey for it.

    I know, that Paint is a bit of a weird example, but the same tendendies occur across many programs. But in terms of "learning hotkeys from the GUI", we are moving backwards. It is anyones guess what hotkeys Evernote Web supports, and I've seen several programs that don't follow the "Alt+Letters" convention at all.

  • sizer99 (google) in reply to The Dave G

    IE was the only thing he used on the computer, so that's all he'd notice. He probably even used web email, or maybe the icon for Outlook didn't change. This is all pre-Win8-'let's just poop on everything'.

  • JP (unregistered)

    What we fail to ignore is the cost of Jacob and all those like him who waste resources on petty nonsense that he simply couldn't be bothered to spend 2 brain cells to get past himself. His ilk is one of the reasons IT is so expensive, it takes multiple Ian's to baby him through what a simple grad school logic should be able to accomplish. It is a wonder the guy has any qualifications at all.

    That said, at least it's good for job creation.

  • Fizzlecist (unregistered)

    Really? That's your brilliant response to someone's personal opinion?

  • Antoine (unregistered)

    Somehow, that reminded me of Fight Club: "Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?" And this is a typical example of resistance to change... Not the first time, not the last!

  • a person (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    At least it only took them (approximately) 8 major updates to fix the "default input method override not doing anything" bug they introduced with one of the first Windows 10 versions, which annoyed me to no end (I'm using a japanese keyboard for special character placement, but can't read japanese).

  • whizzdome (unregistered) in reply to Roby McAndrew

    ... or call the new one "Find" to live beside "Search", then when Search disappears and you are left with Find all will be well.

  • Ann on a Mouse (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    That’s because Microsoft, as throughout the entire lifespan of Windows, is merely copying features from the Mac without necessarily understanding how those features work or why they were used. Mind you, the situation isn’t much better on the Mac, but it’s really blatantly obvious that Windows changes are driven entirely by GUI design theft.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Ann on a Mouse

    They do but not always. Aforementioned ribbon, for example, is Microsoft's invention and I got used to it quickly, it made sense because it combined menu and toolbars into one. Also Windows is better than MacOS in many small ways. (It's also worse in many big and small ways!) And Apple stole plenty from Microsoft. Microsoft made mobile devices before Apple. Sure Apple greatly improved on Microsoft's early designs, but that's the name of the game. Steal the good, add your own improvements, and don't make too much noise when others do the same.

  • jgh (unregistered)

    "based out of London"

    So, Guildford? Luton? Manchester? Newcastle? Or even further out of London? Auckland?

  • hwertz (unregistered) in reply to Mr Bits

    I agree about "change for change's sake". But, complaining because an "E" is replaced with a slightly different "E"? Even well-known companies slightly update their logo every now and then. That really is a WTF to me.

  • I can be a robot if you want me to be (unregistered)

    WTF is upgrading an OS without telling the users what the changes are.

  • (nodebb) in reply to I can be a robot if you want me to be

    To be fair, though, if you were preparing a change doc for the XP to 7 transition, would YOU have included "the icon for Internet Explorer has changed slightly" as an item, or would you have expected people to take that in their stride?

    And if you did include changes at that level of detai, how many people would have bothered to read the whole document?

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