Misfeatures, and Enhanced User Experience

At first I'd hear stories of how things constantly get worse, and figured it was old techies doing a geek style version of "get off my lawn". Or figured, like Scott Adams, that life is getting complex enough that even smart people are getting relatively stupid.

I'm not sure if the recent news to hit the MSM that IQ is indeed dropping (I wonder why? What's changed, demographically?) is relevant, or how, but I've come around to the view that things are indeed going to shit.

Apple no longer has the design lead on high build quality, thin, hi rez laptops, yet they insist on stupid shit like a worse than useless touchbar. Nevermind the brilliant idea of putting a charging point for a mouse on the bottom instead of at the edge.

A major antivirus vendor decided to remove the ability for the end user, even if the central console granted the right to choose network profiles, to choose if a network connection was public or private. This means that laptops used at someone's home get locked down to a "private" profile unless the settings are reverted to the "old" method or all of the relevant "friendly" home networks have to be entered into the console. This also means that built in Windows-10 style miracast/screen casting breaks because it usually uses an ad-hoc network which, of course, fairly sensibly, is designated as "public" and insecure - and the end user cannot change that.

I was actually told this was an improved feature.

I've got a client's printer that three out of four print jobs insists on posting to the main control display to wait, it's correcting. Depending on the knowledge base article it's supposedly perfectly normal but phrased in a way that makes people think something is off. And of course not something you ahve to flash in front of people to confuse them.

The same printer had a previous issue that turned out was the updated print driver suddenly being concerned about the paper weight/type - but the error code just told you to "load paper" without clarifying where the mismatch was.

Speaking of tech support, I almost never have a pleasant experience with first rank tech support. They don't all operate off a strict script but even those who don't are usually not knowledgeable enough to help. Worse, they don't listen. I've literally had people tell me to take steps I just told them I took, which did not fix the issue.

And needless to say, all too many software updates, especially operating system updates, are released with major, showstopping bugs, and the pace is, from what I can tell, picking up.  This may be utterly subjective.

From a post more than five years old, a litany of complaints about "improvements" that make life more difficult or no-one factored in the actual mechanics and workflow of updating products. I personally can speak to the fact that while OUtlook still being stuck running in the background when "closed out" and the applciation no longer shows up in the task manager (until you look at processes) is rarer than it used to be, it is still sadly common.

And Intuit, of all people, 20 years on, still cannot figure out how to install the desktop version of Quickbooks without requiring de facto admin rights of the end user just to run the program. Yes, this includes the "enterprise" version used by small companies of 100+ people.