Comments on: Listen to a 9 year old explain Office 2007, Microsoft Australia donates $1 to charity.

By: wellslogan

wellslogan — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:49:58 +0000

I think that was a great idea on Microsoft’s part, although I think MS should make silverlight available in all browsers like adobe flash is. Oh, yes, and Ethans explanation of Microsoft was rather interesting indeed.

By: James

James — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:17:09 +0000

@Chustar
Indeed I did. However, I was feeling particularly argumentative at the time, so it provided a simple bit of relief – saves taking it out on people I care about.

By: Chustar

Chustar — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:26:50 +0000

@James:
Oi! Didn’t you read the signs? Do not feed the trolls! They’ll just follow you home.

By: James

James — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:30:59 +0000

@Tom
I was using Windows XP, with Firefox – and I did realise it was about charity. If you care to notice the final sentence of my initial post. And if you’re going to attempt to pull people up for diverging from the course of discussion, then going off into calling me a waste of space, and asking if I cry myself to sleep is significantly more of a ‘crime’ than my own observations about the technology being used to display Office/charity information.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:30:55 +0000

@James
I feel the necessity to waste your time further and so I’ll enquire, do you cry about living in an imperfect world before going to sleep each night often?

Curious, do you operate on a Unix-based system and did you happen to realise that this a post on Office, Microsoft and charity? If so, why complain about Silverlight here. *rhetorical*

By: James

James — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:49:47 +0000

@Tom
Pardon me, but I think you’ll find it’s called “usability” and if you care to go and read up on some texts by someone like Jacob Nielsen or Dix, then you’ll find that it’s actually a core part of Human-Computer Interaction. In a well-designed system, I shouldn’t have to venture *from* the norm, to achieve a normal task. After all, one of the staples of HCI is that designers should not attempt to change the user’s behaviour, but rather design for that behaviour.

If the majority of other applications can easily upgrade and/or remove older versions prior to installation, then there is no reason for other applications not to exhibit the same behaviour. From my background as a developer, upgrading between minor versions is an extremely simple task and would probably have taken someone at Microsoft no more than half an hour to implement. Instead, they spent what was probably hours on developing a video and not even bothering to put any textual instructions on their website.

By: Leftos

Leftos — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:44:04 +0000

I got donation No. 900! And they gave me free jelly beans! …nah, they didn’t.

But seriously, now THERE’S a way of advertising a company and a charity that can work. If it makes you smile, it just works.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 17 May 2008 09:01:18 +0000

@James
Let us all rejoice for James has recognized that software does not think like a human and that it needs to be used with intelligence! Splendid work with the waste-of-space-blog-post James.

By: James

James — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:15:09 +0000

Call me stubborn, but I flat out refuse to use Silverlight if it won’t work properly in my Firefox installation (see http://tinyurl.com/5jphw6 if you’re at all interested). I love the concept of Silverlight, and what I’ve seen of it implemented, I do like it’s implementation – even more than Flash. But the usability of the install process, and the compatibility of the browser plug in is just somewhat shoddy at the moment.

However, for this cause (i.e. for the sake of an Aussie dollar), I’ve opened the page in IE :p

By: Yert

Yert — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:22:19 +0000

Nice use of Silverlight.