If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Stop Changing My Software!!!

You’ve all been here. You’ve ALL been here.
You have a particular piece of software that you LIKE, that does the job that you need it to do, that functions perfectly, that you are used to, that you can actually be productive with because you know where the toggles are where the shortcuts are how do accomplish a thing with a minimum of effort and drama.
And then they ‘IMPROVE’ it.
They simply seem to change things for the sake of changing them. Because it, oh, I don’t know, LOOKS better (to whom? And what does it matter what it LOOKS like if you’ve suddenly taken its basic usefulness away?) They rename it for no good reason except to “update” it.
Then all of a sudden all of these changes that you didn’t ask for and didn’t want and are mightily put out by… mean that you now have a “new” piece of software, that support for the version you own and paid for is now terminated. To keep using it, you have to purchase it again.
Or worse – the new THING with software – you can’t buy it any more. You have to SUBSCRIBE now. You can’t just plonk down the benjamins, load it onto your hard drive, and use it for as long as your computer and your hard drive hold out. No, now you have to cough up a monthly amount, and if you don’t they can probably brick it for you.
My husband used to have an ancient copy of PageMaker – but of course that’s history – now it’s called something else entirely (“InDesign”) and it’s part of an Adobe subscription package. My artist friend used to own her copy of Photoshop before they told her that, no she didn’t anymore and if she wanted to keep using the tool of her trade, she would now have to pay ransom for it monthly.
Man. Like a creative life isn’t hard enough as it is without everybody competing to put a spoke in your wheel.

Change for the sake of change

I still have a version of MS Word that I like and know and understand. They’ve “changed” it for the newer versions and nothing is in the same place anymore. I hate having to fumble in a piece of software that I have used to write literally millions of words by now. I don’t want it to sit up and juggle flaming torches for me, I just want it to be the Word that I am used to and in which I am agile, knowledgeable, and productive. They have changed idiotic things, made it clunkier, less intuitive, less useful – why, Microsoft? WHY?
Why does Firefox unilaterally choose to disable useful extensions because they no longer “support” them? My husband has wept over losing his beloved Liquid Words which doesn’t work with the new versions of his Firefox browser. He’d have been quite happy using the ‘unsupported’ version of Liquid Words but he was never given a chance. It was simply removed as an option.
And why won’t my Skype stay functional for longer than a couple of weeks before I get a snotty message that the version I have “is no longer supported” and I have to download it all over again? And why does Twitter change its interface to something that its entire use group roars in outrage against because “they listened” when their people said they wanted changes – but what those people wanted was an option to edit a tweet without having to delete it and start again from scratch, an actually USEFUL improvement, not the eyesore of a redesign that they got and that nobody wanted and nobody asked for.
Look, I know that people who employ programmers and software designers have to do something with them to justify paying their salaries. But do the end users have to pay the price for that? Really? What happened to “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”? Why can’t we have an option to stay on a “legacy” piece of software if we want to or need to?
Why don’t they stop wrecking things in the name of “improvement” and call it progress?
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Photo by Sebastian Herrmann,  Unsplash
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Original at Book View Cafe HERE