[Sigia-l] Nielsen: It's the end! (long)

[Listera]

Bill Killam:

> What about looking at the facts of his claim

Facts? Jakob Nielsen dealing with facts? :-)

Although I admire your valiant effort to wade through his inconsistencies,
etc, if he doesn't get the fundamentals right, there isn't much hope for the
rest of his claims.

He's thoroughly confused about interaction vs. representation. He's
uninformed about the origins of WYSIWYG, which entered into our lexicon when
Macintosh made what one saw on that 9" screen at 72 ppi and what one got out
of a LaserWriter at a higher resolution essentially the same. WYSIWYG was
about one medium (print) being subsumed by another (digital). WYSIWYG was
not about "Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen's visual
objects" at all. There isn't an iota of originality in what the new Office
proposes. Every aspect of it has been done by various apps on multiple
platforms for years. That MSFT attempted to simplify the representation of
choices for Office users by non-textual means but failed to actually simply
the fundamental workflow and architecture is a shame, but given the
albatross of its giant user base sadly understandable.

Anyhow, it's been raining here in NYC for the past 7 days straight and this
whole thing is just depressing.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.