Infobright Blog

Some time ago, I got totally frustrated with MS Word that I gave up using it for even the simplest thing, like a letter. Why? Well I was working on a proposal for a client and I wanted to indent and number the sections and sub-sections. Makes it easier for reference when you are discussing issues etc., but I’m sure you know that.

At any rate, I managed to number most of the sub-sections but for some reason, try as I might, I couldn’t number the sub-sections that were 3 levels deep. Second level and 4th level, no problem but could I get it to properly number level 3. Not a chance. I even tried switching to older versions and such. No luck.

As a technologist, graduate of computer science from a good university; I have to ask why something so simple could be so elusive. I have delivered many systems on Microsoft technology; so please don’t view me as some sort of bigot; cause that I’m not.

But I think what happened to MS Word, was in the quest to find new features to sell more upgrades, they basically lost sight of basic features of the product. I joke with my Dad about the fact that he still uses WordPerfect but hey how can I blame him. He is having more success than I am with new versions of Word.

Here’s another case. Years ago I was working in a fixed price project which included an Oracle database. I’m more of a data modeler than a DBA. At any rate, we ran into performance troubles and we spent the last of our profit to hire an Oracle DBA. This was not a small amount of money by any stretch. The fellow knew his stuff; solved our performance problems in about 15 minutes (changed about 3 configuration parameters).  No kidding. There are something like 100 different configuration parameters (don’t quote me on this). To this day, I think only 5 do anything!

Is this not just another form of bloat? I say, lets put software on a diet. Give me controls that do something and can’t be programatically determined. And forget about the features that less than 1 in 100 will actually use.