"Wanting the bone"
Okay, let me describe this a bit more. Having used computers of some sort throughout my university and working career I am accustomed to learning new programs, applications, etc. At times I have relished it.
When personal computers came out I jumped in with enthusiasm. I bought a lot of my own software in order to learn on my own. Also additional programming languages in addition to the fortran I'd used in university. Most of this resulted in improved personal productivity after steep learning curves.
What I found after some time was that the commercial programs would change over time, every couple years. Sometimes drastically. Sometimes they would be discontinued. Sometimes a favorite program (eg: Autosketch) would no longer work on newer versions of Windows. And often the newer version of said program would seem like a downgrade to me... less flexibility, less transparency, more needless clutter and chaff, etc. It became really disappointing and disillusioning.
Now for the last 20 years of my working career I worked for...a small software company that published software for use by mechanical engineers (as am I). The company is small but the program is used by major petrochemical companies around the world. The program originally ran under DOS but a Windows version was released a year or so after I was hired. The nice thing about the Windows version was that the menus and user operations were consistent with the DOS version. The Windows program was entirely rewritten for the new platform but the user experience was consistent with the old program. Those old dogs who had been using the software for years did not have much of a learning curve at all to the new version. Over the years I was there the software was continuously developed with an incredible amount of power and sophistication built into it. But the user interface was kept pretty much consistent over time, with new features being transparent and mostly self-explanatory, and nothing removed (the few times some useless "feature" was removed we certainly heard about it from the small handful of users who did use those features).
So that last paragraph presented my "bona fides" (or is that "bone fides"?) on the issue of software change for change sake. Our customers at my employer certainly did not want change for no reason, that was inefficient, a waste of their time, they didn't want to have to re-gear from the ground up just to be able to continue doing the work they'd been doing for many years. And that's how I've felt about a number of commercial programs, including Microsoft Office.
Now on the one hand I admire that Office is greatly backwards-compatible. Files I created 25+ years ago are still able to function in Excel, etc. I've always been surprised (astonished) that Excel provides compatibility features for Lotus 1-2-3 and Word provides compatibility features for WordPerfect. But on the other hand I am disappointed that a lot of useful "user interface" features/functions have been dropped, made more complicated, etc. I just want to work on my many spreadsheets (financial and other), not spend so much time learning/relearning how to use my tools. I used to describe it like being a mechanic....the mechanic knows where all their tools are in the toolbox. They would be really perturbed if every month they came in and their tools were entirely reorganized (scattered) and they couldn't find anything...very inefficient...when all you want is the bone, not different ways of fetching.
Younger people might think I'm just another old guy whinging. But I would wager that after going through a few such cycles of their tools being rearranged they will feel the same way.
