What is it that keeps people using the same software even if they know it is a pile of manure? Laziness? Familiarity? Unwilling to change?

Today, my partner was asked to make a design in Powerpoint to ensure the final presentation was in house style. Being no Powerpoint expert my partner struggled to achieve quite simple things which had they been done in another package, would have taken moments. What matters if the presentation is made from Adobe Acrobat rather than Powerpoint? Especially when the resulting file from Powerpoint measured 8.5MB while the same as a PDF would be a miserly few tens of kilobytes. But no, the client insisted they had to use Powerpoint so the work of a few moments actually took hours to achieve and looked nowhere near as good. In any case, don’t most people turn off after the first Powerpoint slide. They certainly seem to from the glazed expressions and stifled yawns I’ve seen through my own heavy-lidded eyes.

The same is with Word which for some reason completely beyond my understanding has been adopted around the world as a default. Back in the 1980’s Microsoft produced a neat word processor called Write which blossomed into Word 5 on the Mac at a time when Windows 3 was still waiting to be stolen… er…styled on OS2. Both editors were fast and lean with all the features current text editing requires and more beside. Plus both were relatively intuitive to use.

Why has Microsoft continued to ruin a perfectly good product so we end up with the pile of pooh they call Word? It is unwieldy, unintuitive, prone to failures and from what I see from files I receive, hardly anybody needs any of the features it has, let alone use them with any skill. Text is tabbed about, with long runs of spaces to get lines to turn over and repeated paragraph returns to make text move to the next page. Doesn’t anyone in the UK know how to switch on English spelling and DIN page sizes? And don’t get me started on Word tables and stylesheets.

It’s not just Microsoft who are guilty but if they haven’t been able to write a decent word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package after all these years, I dread to think what mess underpins Vista. Adobe, another monolithic publisher, are just as bad with Illustrator. As the inventors of Postscript you would think they would make the best Postscript drawing package but sadly not. Printing problems caused by Illustrator files are still a regular feature. For years rival Freehand gave Illustrator a run for the money, arguably winning time after time. At the last version Freehand offered features Illustrator still hasn’t matched and had moved into challenging page make-up applications as well.

Eventually Adobe bought Macromedia, Freehand’s then publisher, burying their main rival (although they say they will continue to develop it based upon customers needs), to get their hands on Dreamweaver and Flash, which like Freehand, were better than Adobe’s offerings. This is the second time Adobe have owned Freehand, previously acquired with their purchase of Aldus when Adobe were forced by the US FTC to return Freehand to its creator Altsys.

Quark Inc. for a decade had the publishing world dangling from their strings. There were rivals but nothing Quark couldn’t better. Customer service became arrogant, the product, QuarkXPress, grew long in the tooth as Quark took their eyes off the ball. Adobe took up the challenge and created inDesign. It’s not great and certainly not bug free but the design world took to it in droves meaning Quark have lost what they thought was their monopoly. They have recently improved their product and now bundle a flash-like animation editor but it all seems a bit pedestrian when compared with the real thing. Plus, Quark’s loyal desktop publishing customers don’t really need the whistles and bells that have been bolted on. After all, who in their right mind would make a web site in QuarkXPress unless forced to? Come to that, who in their right mind would use QuarkXPress to create books, magazines and graphic designs unless they were forced to?

Bah! Humbug!

It comes as some relief to find there are still a few years left before I become a typical Apple customer. According to MetaFacts 2006 Home PC Brand Profile Report just about half of Apple’s base users are aged 55 and over, almost double the proportion of older users with Windows-based computers.

While these two statistics are hardly life-changing, certainly for some of us more mature computer users, our choice of platform has been or can still be a major influence in our lives. As a devout trend bucker, not being in the age profile of Apple’s users is even better news – bucking the trend of the trend buckers.

Many older users have chosen Apple because they have been advised it’s the easier of the various operating systems to get to grips with, without letting spyware and the like getting grips on their computers. Others have undoubtedly stayed the course since using Mac OS in the last century when their industry standardised on it – printing and publishing for example. But lately there has been a new trend, Metafacts also found Apple has a higher than average share among the “young technoliterati”.

In a study of 1,000 teens by equities firm Piper Jaffray, they queried music buying patterns and discovered 91% buy from Apple’s iTunes and 76% own an iPod. Senior analyst Gene Munster said: “We believe that winning over the teen demographic is critical to continued long-term growth and Apple is clearly in the lead in this market segment,”.

Apple certainly agree by making its products as user-friendly and flexible as possible, with marketing aimed directly at kids. The results speak for themselves as market share grows. Then there is the recent move to Intel chips and virtualisation making it possible to run just about any operating system on a Mac at the same time. Although, strangely, not the legacy Apple Systems 6/7/8/9 unless they run under emulators in Unix. Apple has, single-handedly, made Windows-only PCs seem almost obsolete at the same time as making operating system choice a matter of visual taste as data can be passed back and forth between them.

Of course, there is also the possibility that teenage rebellion plays a part of this. Mum and Dad buy the kids a PC to help with school work (as if) so it’s natural for them to want something else. Who do they turn to but grand ma and pa where they see something completely different from the PC they have at home. Plus it’s made by their favourite MP3 company and looks funky. As games consoles have been made to look like dinosaurs as soon as Wii hit town (even my wife wants one), could Microsoft’s decision to not allow home versions of Vista to run virtual machines go down as the wrong choice at the wrong time?

In the days when computer users were really hard and computed without any namby-pamby GUI rodents, their finger tips developed calluses. The hardened skin made scratchy taping noises against the key caps which were the cause of the corns growing in the first place.

This was especially on the fingers that hit the tab key because without a pointing device to move round the screen, menu-based operating systems had to be accessed via tabbing across and arrow keys up and down. Modern TV remote controllers are pretty similar today in that they control the various functions of the set via its built-in menus. Then along came the people at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center who ruined it all for us.

They invented computer icons, devised to make computing interfaces easier for novices to get to grips with. In those days it was probably true because they had only a limited range for users to see. A little icon representing a calculator or a waste bin are pretty easy to understand, especially if it says the name underneath as well. But what about icons to show the address book or application manager? There is no common feature that one immediately associates with them and so there are a zillion icons all trying to make it easy to know what clicking on it will do.

When it comes to more esoteric actions the icons themselves move into a fantasy world. Take screen savers for example. BeOs used a little image of a monitor half covered over and with Zzzz’s floating from it which like BeOs, seems pretty well thought out. Gnome has gone for a rectangle with a little padlock on it, whereas Apple, the first major user of icons, hasn’t tried to represent such an off-beat concept with an icon.

From a users point of view, how is it easier to learn what all the various tiny pictures really mean? Man invented the alphabet and joined letters together to describe anything in the universe, known or unknown, in an easy to learn and use method called writing. Apart from some languages in the Far East the rest of the world abandoned communicating with icons centuries ago because they were too unwieldy and limited to use. What, for example, does the icon I see of a little plastic duck or a child’s toy dog mean to most people? How did they come to represent ftp applications Cyberduck and Fetch? Or why is Adobe Photoshop (currently) a feather, inDesign a Butterfly and Illustrator a flower?

When I go to the applications I look for the name not the icon, in the same way I look for files called “Accounts 2005-2006″ rather than a little icon that looks a little like a half opened folder with an arrow circling it. How on earth are we meant to navigate through our computer’s filing systems with the windows opened to icon-view? A screen full of little pictures is not easier to use when compared with a list of names. Have an icon next to the name by all means, to give an easy-to-hit target for the mouse pointer to click on.

Apparently I’m not the only computer user who feels this way. Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen then of Sun Microsystems explored the Anti-Mac Interface back in 1996 and proposed a hypothetical user interface that is not tied to the conventions of GUI and suggesting a return command line interface that can understand simple instructions. In 1996 the desktop computer had the brains of a microbe compared with today’s but even now we are still stuck with WIMPs. While at Sun, Bruce Tognazzini, the Apple employee number 66 and Sun interface expert made a film in 1994 called Starfire. It was his attempt to show how a high-end workstation might look in the year 2004. According to Wiki, his system understands objects well enough to integrate them seamlessly (it can construct a 3D texture map of a person from a 2D video image); the screen is very large, with fairly expressive interface elements; the computer has some independent initiative (when the heroine searches for an article reprint, the agent automatically decides to search further and display subsequent articles with links to the original article); and the computer monitors the user (it does not attempt speech recognition while she is talking with a colleague).

Yeah, wrap it up, I’ll take it.