It's only just started, but might this survey be fun to watch. This was the first time I could actually answer with honesty, as I've now officially used both Outlook & Notes at work.

Interesting that in the admittedly small sample so far more people hate Outlook, and more people "madly and deeply" love Notes than Outlook - could the Domino blogsphere community already be skewing the results! Anyway - keep it up...

via Richard Schwartz

OK, this is my first official Outlook rant. There will be a more rational exploration of the pro's & con's of Outlook/Exchange in the next couple of weeks once the migration project has finished and things return to normal. But today, I just reached the end of my tether and had to let fly....

[RANT]
One of the things I hate is when software tries to guess what I want to do, not because I've selected it as a preference, or because I repeat the same action all the time, but just because it's what the software thinks you would want. Microsoft is often guilty of in many of it's applications, and I'm sure many people love some of these features, but they just drive me nuts. You know - like when you open Windows Explorer and it decides that of course, you must want to go to the "My Documents" folder, so it opens with that directory tree expanded, and everything else pushed down the screen. If you're like me and don't really use My Documents (because much of my work isn't in "documents" and I'll file things how I damn well please) then the first thing you have to do EVERY TIME is close that folder and then go to where you really want to go.

Outlook, however, has an infinitely more frustrating feature - it tries to "help" your editing by adding in spaces when you go back to make a correction within a previously entered word.

For example if I type this stence and then noticed my error, and wanted to go back and change it, I would put my cursor after the "s" and start typing "en". Instead of getting "sentence" I would get "s en tence" which I then have to go back and fix. Now I'm a rapid type-while-thinking person, so I make lots of mistakes and continually want to go back and edit things - so you can imagine how frustrating this gets after a couple of times.

I'm guessing this doesn't happen for people using Word as an Editor, but that has it's own problems (which I'll rant about later), but right now, I'm almost resorting to typing up my longer emails in Notes first, then pasting into Outlook just to avoid it's pathetic formatting and it's "help"!

Please Microsoft, just STOP TRYING TO HELP - you only make me want to throw the computer out the window in frustration.
[/RANT]

I'm sure there are many more examples of when software (even non-MS) tries to help too much - does anyone else have any favourites?

So I was reading an article today about the success of i-Tunes for moving people from illegal downloading to purchasing music when two quotes from ARIA chief executive Stephen Peach, stood out as a perfect example of why non-technologists have no business making technology decisions:

"In the thousands of years of commerce there's never been a business model that gives away things for free."
...
Illegal services, he says, come bundled with spyware, pop-ups and "a lot of things that consumers don't know about or don't want attached to their computer".

Ummm...even heard of the opensource community - Mozilla, Linux etc have entire business models around giving "things away for free". And as for the second quote, wasn't it i-Tunes which was recently spanked for sending data back to Apple without user's knowledge - otherwise known as spyware?

The rest of the article offered some interesting observations, but nothing earth-shattering or new.

On a slightly related note, while buying a gift for a friends one-year-old I came across the Fisher Price "MP123" toy mp3 player - very iPod with it's spinning wheel. Never mind that many other mp3 players use something completely different, it's always good to get them young! PS - sorry for the link, it's the only one I could find...

Far be it from me to promote something cool from Microsoft, but I saw this demo, called "Live Clipboard" via Ray Ozzie's blog. I'm not sure about everything behind it, but it just seems cool.

Oh to have a brother with gun team of developers, and a few spare weeks (read thousands of dollars!) to spend on creating some cool new thing I thought of.... ah, well, back to the grind....