Upgrade Rant

I'm not writing anything about Valentine's Day for several good reasons: by the time I get this posted, the day/night will almost be over; people WITH a Valentine have better things to do than read this; people WITHOUT a Valentine do not want to hear another single mention of the day. Instead, I will rant about upgrades, specifically software upgrades.

I'm not going even to pick on some small independent operation, or someone coding by themselves. You could see how they might have to make a change with an upgrade to better fit a new version of the operating system or even just a mistake. Bigger shit can happen in a smaller company. But how the hell does Microsoft and Facebook fuck up things when they upgrade? Because they can.

It really is the same theory as the banks getting to big to fail. Microsoft and Facebook have become so ingrained in our computer lives, it is too much of a hassle to switch to other alternatives.

My frustration with Facebook was exasperated today when I was accessing my friends list. In previous versions, the friends list was alphabetized. Now, the put all the names in a bucket and pull them out one at a time and make a list. Seriously, there is no identifiable method to

explain how they organize it; number of comments made? vowels in names? sexual partners? (Everything else is on the internet, they probably have an algorithm for that, too.)

Microsoft is infamous for doing the same thing. Several years ago, they did a major "upgrade" in Word and Excel and changed the basic tabs were functions are found. A function found in "File" might now be found in "Insert." For those of us who became users under the old format, this changed the familiar to the foreign.

Also, Windows 8.

This really is nothing but the electronic version of planned obsolescence. These companies have a problem when they create a program that fills a particular human need; the program must help the human in 95% of the time or more to be successful, but then there aren't enough people who help for the other 5% for it to be profitable. So they mess with the program that works.

The vast number of people who use a word processing program probably haven't even touched the functions that have been added in the last ten years. Cut, paste, save, spell chek, open, close, just the basics, ma'am.

Well that's enough of my rant. I might change the font and size, maybe even the color and spacing now. What do you think about a right justified circular table with alternating border thickness?