Comment by preg_match
11 hours ago
Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software.
Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software from 25 years ago could be navigated at light speed.
That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned. Excel is from the old age of software, and that means that users can input and navigate at light speed. All these fancy tools claim to dethrone Excel, but when you actually use them you realize it's a goo goo ga ga Fisher Price level UI. Extreme amounts of whitespace, buttons hidden behind submenus of submenus (which you have to navigate by eye, by the way!), features stripped, UI constantly shuffling around between updates.
Look, that works fine for a website on the open web where you assume your users have never touched a computer before. That does not work for commercial software.
I think you vaaastly overestimate how excel is used by most users
if anything, excel exceeds in being MOUSE-driven - it's intuitive in what you press and what you drag
and that's kinda my problem with the TFA - author is not representative of typical user. Mouse interaction is the king
Screwing with a keyboard combo in Excel... like Shift-Space to highlight a row... is like an IDE deciding to swap the key-bindings for '{' and '['. You'd have entire accounting and marketing departments in rebellion.
Devs consistently underestimate how many power users of Excel there are, and often don't understand how they operate.
I got my wife a new MacBook Air, and figured there's no point in paying for MS Office, iWork is fine for the household stuff she needs it for.
She loved Pages, being able to put images anywhere without stuff moving around behind her back.
She hated Numbers, since there were no cut/copy/paste/undo buttons on the toolbar. This is someone who has been using Excel at work for decades at this point. Definitely had a sudden insight as to how differently many users work.
Maybe by most users, but not by most users who use it for many hours daily for professional tasks (i.e. not just as a kind of tabular list editor).
Basically everyone in a white collar job who is NOT a developer is using Excel. I'm a developer, even I have to use Excel at work.
that's exactly what I'm saying
basically everyone uses Excel. And basically everyone is a MOUSE-first user (or, even further along the chain: TOUCHSCREEN-first)
keyboard-based menu navigation is not intuitive. it can be "poweruser" oriented, but it's not for most of the userbase
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"Most users" are not who choose business software.
> UI constantly shuffling around between updates.
and then 365 came along ... an option to pull stock market data here, a LinkedIn connection there, oh look a wild copilot button appeared.