Re: [MLUG] Linux *really* hits the big-time (poison)

["Igor Izyumin Jr." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> Causes normal people to waste their time & money and be grateful for the
> experience eh? I never understood why people defend Microsoft
> products. Obviously I've used the same products and was unimpressed. Do
> they just have low expectations or does the M$ drug really work that
> well? :)
Well, I'd say M$ puts in a GREAT DEAL of marketing to keep the products 
viable and actually make people think that they need the extra functionality. 
 I see nothing in Word that I cannot do with a text editor like Pico or VI or 
Emacs or whatever.  There's absolutely no point in making the text be all 
kinds of weird fonts, colors, farting noises, animations and other funkified 
things.  There's no point in having a word processor.  You have two things: 
content and presentation.  You are the one writing content.  A good 
word-processor should take care of the presentation itself, using a 
predefined set of templates/whatever.  You should not be the one managing the 
layout if all you're doing is writing a report or something.  The program 
should do it by itself.  Microsoft does it exactly the opposite way, by 
pushing the burden of creating the layout on to the end user.  And they 
actually advertise this as being good, while it only
wastes employees' time.  This also doubly applies to PowerPoint.  People 
waste time creating powerpoint presentations when they would not have created 
if they actually had to put some effort and money into it (like creating it 
on actual slides).  This only decreases productivity, instead of increasing 
it.  There is no point in creating powerpoint presentations - it's just a way 
to impress someone's boss.  However, lots of employee time is WASTED on 
creating those.  I'm not even going to talk about putting more useless 
features into Word and other programs.  Anyone who actually USES grammar 
check, readability check, the spellchecker (for more than catching typos), 
and whatever else they've put in there probably doesn't deserve to have a job 
related to writing documents, because it means they don't know how to write.  
The same applies to PP's "features."  The purpose of business is not to 
impress managers, it is to make money.  Business only loses money on 
powerpoint presentations.  Just think about it: a research department has two 
goals (actually research stuff/make a report/whatever and make an impressive 
presentation) instead of just the first one and a fixed amount of time and 
money to spend on both tasks, they will spend time on creating the 
presentation but not on research.  Therefore, money is wasted.  It only takes 
some common sense to understand that office programs with lots of features 
will NOT improve productivity.  If I were a manager (not that I would ever be 
one :), I would specify the font sizes, typefaces, letterheads, whatever, 
that the employees must use, so they don't waste time on layout.  I would 
also ban all use of powerpoint and similar stuff within the company.  That 
way, I won't be paying for employees wasting time picking fonts or clipart or 
whatever.
-- 
-- Igor
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