Comment by xg15
1 year ago
> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it.
Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were faced with the choice of doing it all again or sticking with the defaults. But I'd chalk this up to Windows not treating the customization data as important enough to provide backup/export functionality, not that people didn't want to customize)
The features increasingly went away in later Windows and Office versions, but I assumed it was some corporate decision. Was there ever actual backlash from users against those features?
Tech-oriented people love software malleability and also can handle the responsibility - e.g. understanding something that's broken + customized by you could have been broken by you.
Non tech-oriented people, the masses, absolutely love customizability and malleability--but aren't willing to handle the responsibility. They will reach out to tech support who can't possibly know every customization option of every application and its effects, and complain when they tell them to reset/reinstall.
And in a corporate environment where the company provides the PC, the company would rather not deal with it. Office dominates at the workplace, is mostly making money from corporate users, and users want it to behave the same way it does in the workplace. So any backlash by users is simply not going to matter unless it might cause companies to not renew their licenses.
A company I work for is moving to Office-on-the-web for PCs that are used by people who don't really use Office that much except possibly to read Word docs, in order to save on licensing costs I presume. It's even less customizable than any desktop version. So the trend is going to continue.
You're talking about a world in which costs are centralized. A central entity handles all R&D costs and all customer support costs for one product.
If you split the support costs between many members of a community though, you don't need to fear customization. Then, ideally, the users who are most alike will support each other, the same way you can get a degree of support for some particular flavor of Linux by seeking out other people who use that flavor (or another one that's enough like it)
Backlash will be in the form of working, competing software maintained by communities, precisely because this is the only form of backlash that might cause companies not to renew their licenses.
What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
Well, there's a (modest) learning curve involved in customizing color schemes and of course more complex tasks that are still in the domain of user's options.
Users can be fearful of "messing it up" if they change defaults. Making changes necessarily confers responsibility to follow instructions, learn how to alter settings and know the set of options that are appropriate to change and which are not.
Not setting the text color the same as the background color and making everything unreadable, including the UI to change the color back?
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The old lady who calls tech support saying "half my screen is grey!" and it turns out she accidentally resized her taskbar to the maximum size.
Remembering where the setting is so if you want to update it again you do it on your own instead of calling tech support.