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> 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 optio

by xg15 1y 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?

RiverCrochet 1y ago
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.
- xg15 1y ago
  What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
  - Bjartr 1y ago
    Not setting the text color the same as the background color and making everything unreadable, including the UI to change the color back?
    - Jtsummers 1y ago
      That takes a pretty basic safety mechanism to address, require confirmation after the change. Windows has (had?) that, after 15 or 30 seconds or whatever from a change (like to resolution or something) it reverts back without confirmation. This makes changes of all sorts easy and cheap to perform. The worst case is you idle for 30 seconds waiting for it to go back to a legible form.
      - Bjartr 1y ago
        And when they click through the confirmation without reading it like the vast majority of users?
        Jtsummers 1y ago
        If you can't see it because you borked up the colors badly enough, why would you be clicking on it?
        Bjartr 1y ago
        Didn't say the buttons were invisible, just text. Even if this specific example is flawed, non-technical users can and do end up in similar non-sensical situations that require a call to support to sort out. The more customization that's possible, the more complicated those calls can get. (Think of the support guy that has to figure out that Grandma's Windows Home setup has custom group policy settings that her well-meaning grandson setup to make things simpler for her by hiding this or that, and now she can't follow the tech's instructions that work for 99.9% of users) Not only that, but they do so enough that the added cost to field those support calls is enough for companies to change their products to reduce their likelihood. Almost no-one on this forum falls into the category of user I'm describing. And this kind of user is one of the most common for general consumer software. There is a real cost burden to supporting software with configurability. And when this kind of thing gets messed up, do users go "Oops! My bad!"? No, they go "This software sucks, I'm going to use <competitor> instead where this kind of thing never happens!"
- conartist6 1y ago
  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.

by xg15 1y ago

RiverCrochet 1y ago

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.

xg15 1y ago
What is the "responsibility" of customizing the color scheme of your own PC?
- Bjartr 1y ago
  Not setting the text color the same as the background color and making everything unreadable, including the UI to change the color back?
  - Jtsummers 1y ago
    That takes a pretty basic safety mechanism to address, require confirmation after the change. Windows has (had?) that, after 15 or 30 seconds or whatever from a change (like to resolution or something) it reverts back without confirmation. This makes changes of all sorts easy and cheap to perform. The worst case is you idle for 30 seconds waiting for it to go back to a legible form.
    - Bjartr 1y ago
      And when they click through the confirmation without reading it like the vast majority of users?
      - Jtsummers 1y ago
        If you can't see it because you borked up the colors badly enough, why would you be clicking on it?
        Bjartr 1y ago
        Didn't say the buttons were invisible, just text. Even if this specific example is flawed, non-technical users can and do end up in similar non-sensical situations that require a call to support to sort out. The more customization that's possible, the more complicated those calls can get. (Think of the support guy that has to figure out that Grandma's Windows Home setup has custom group policy settings that her well-meaning grandson setup to make things simpler for her by hiding this or that, and now she can't follow the tech's instructions that work for 99.9% of users) Not only that, but they do so enough that the added cost to field those support calls is enough for companies to change their products to reduce their likelihood. Almost no-one on this forum falls into the category of user I'm describing. And this kind of user is one of the most common for general consumer software. There is a real cost burden to supporting software with configurability. And when this kind of thing gets messed up, do users go "Oops! My bad!"? No, they go "This software sucks, I'm going to use <competitor> instead where this kind of thing never happens!"
conartist6 1y ago
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.