Vista? Really?

Users Not Rushing on Vista, Office 2007But IT managers such as Jim Prevo, CIO at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. in Waterbury, Vt., fear that their users will need more training than usual on Office 2007. Prevo said he was initially stumped by the simple task of opening a file when he installed a beta copy of the desktop suite. (Computerworld)

What a scary statement, especially from someone who really grasps the issues involved. When a CIO is saying that more training might be needed and in the past there has been generally little user training provided to most end-users on the interface. A user interface should not require extensive training in general, but it seems that with each new edition of Windows, productivity declines instead of increases while hardware and support requirements increase, with no appreciable benefits. The complexity that is in the software, both the user interface and the office suite far exceeds that required by the vast majority of end users that the hardware sits idle and the bloat of the software takes up more and more space every time it is patched. There is something sad about having a machine, sitting mostly idle for surfing the web, with billions of dollars of development behind them.