Monday, May 14, 2007

SLOPPY ENGINEERING

Whether you like Microsoft Windows® product line or not, we’re stuck with it.  These products have features that we‘ve become accustomed to, and we now expect things to work in a certain way.  The ability to customize the appearance and functionality of your screen, navigate, resize views, change fonts, cut & paste, etc., all work in a similar fashion.

I’m not talking about copyright infringement, but why can’t other software providers (in particular the accounting software providers) mimic these features?  Why do we always have to learn a new way of doing things?  You say, “What is the benefit of designing software to emulate these features?” Well, training time and cost for the accounting staff could be reduced, as the functionality would already be familiar to them.  More importantly, daily operational mistakes would also be reduced because everything would work in the same intuitive manner.

So what’s the problem?  Why don’t developers do this?  Most accounting packages today were NOT originally designed for a Windows® environment.  They were either ADAPTED from older character-based systems with a GUI interface, or the designers were just too lazy or in too big of a hurry, and didn’t do it right to begin with.

This sloppy engineering is also evident in other areas, such as file structures and processing techniques.  Oh well, Management keeps buying software by name recognition, not by what actually works.