[AmericanChopper]

I think the product designers have the right approach here. Having worked in a lot of large corporates, you find a lot of people who are just experts in using some over complicated piece of garbage software. If I have to attend a 3 day training seminar just to figure out the basic functionality of your app, then I think you’ve done it wrong.

Software should make it as easy as possible for people to immediately start doing something useful with it. Make advanced features available via the API, and make sure logs and APM are easy to ingest. Advanced users likely won’t have any interest in your web interface anyhow.

[swiley]

I’d disagree. Some things are hard and the ergonomics makes it worth a little confusion. CAD software like xcircuit is a good example of this (although they definitely could stand to make the save dialog a little more intuitive.)

[AmericanChopper]

Becoming an advanced photoshop user is difficult too. But I can still fire it up and doing basic image editing with about 2 minutes worth of figuring-out. Excel is almost a full RDBMS, but the basics don’t really need any training.

[swiley]

I don’t think excel can do joins which is a big part of the “R” in RDBMS but I don’t use excel often so I could be wrong.

[LyndsySimon]

I'm fairly sure it can. It's been years - almost a decade, now! - since I've had to use Excel for anything productive, but I vividly recall using VLOOKUP to create what were effectively views from a SQL perspective.

[AmericanChopper]

Excel merge supports joins, and you can do ordinary SQL joins using Power Query. I don't know if it full complies with all of Codd's 12 rules, I suspect it probably doesn't fully meet the schema definition or non-subversion bits, but I haven't looked into it closely enough, the Excel Data Model functionality looks like it might actually do that.

[js8]

Just to clarify, I don't think that they have to be mutually exclusive. But focusing only on new users is wrong, IMHO.

But when I hear your justification, maybe the blame should fall on managers. They should be the ones to understand that expertise increases productivity and therefore can be useful.

[AmericanChopper]

The let the advanced users find the advanced functionality. Don't predicate operating your product on knowing every subtle in and out of it.

> But when I hear your justification, maybe the blame should fall on managers.

I'm really just describing the kind of software that I personally hate to use. But in any case, any time my manager asks me whether I can do something or how long it'll take, I just give him an honest estimate. If it's going to take me 3 weeks to even figure out a basic understanding of some new thing, I just tell him. If I just told him "yeah, I'll have that done in a day" every time, who exactly would be failing to communicate in that situation?