[crististm]

Not when you need to replace an X with four clicks...

You probably know the story with the high-tech tracking systems for planes on carriers - it was so good and easy to use they had to replace it with toy planes on a table - true story...

[vacri]

I'm not talking about this specific incident, I'm talking about the slogan. Pointing at a couple of bad examples doesn't mean that sometimes businesses do have to change their processes to fit software that is better for them. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is: business and software should change together to answer what's best for the business.

Where I currently work has shitty inventory control - salesforce for sales and device tracking, and an Access database for unit consumption.

This is absolutely woeful and has a number of problems to people who know anything about inventory. Want to know where widget #234 is? Well... I hope someone entered it against the sale in Salesforce. Cool, they did. Now, can we make sure that that serial is unique? No. Which batch of components was it made from? No idea. The sale was accepted on this date, but it wasn't installed until two months later... when was that? Is the item still in warranty? We sent device #234 to a demo site, and then it got moved on, and then it came back and then it was sent to another demo site, we can tell that right, because an issue has cropped up where we need to know where it's been? No, there is no history tracking.

Trying to track inventory in salesforce is a fool's errand because they have no concept that an item is unique and can have history - anything resembling a serial number is just a user-enterable text field, no protection against duplicates, no protection against assigning it against sale 2 because it's already on sale 1.

These are the current business practises where I work, and we've shaped our processes around them. But we're about to start being more hard-lined about warranty terms (until know we've been giving free terms as we've been largely on the VC teat)...

The business needs software that is going to be harder and more complex to use than "yeah, fill in this free text field with whatever you feel like, if you feel like it. So yes, sometimes software needs may look to the casual observer like "this is so arcane and complex", but that doesn't mean that they're automatically bad - the slogan above is trite and the real problem is that it implies business shouldn't ever need to change their processes to suit software. I mean, there is a point to the slogan, but it should be rephrased to something more suitable.

[crististm]

We have similar experiences with software. I think the problem comes from "I'm smart - you're dumb". The software should help me not the other way around.

Consider my brand new Samsung TV set: I could not believe that program numbers are not unique! You can have two stations registered with the same program number!!! Do I have to adapt my business because TVs are suddenly smarter than me?

If I'm too arrogant to realize that a domain problem has a very simple solution then I will reinvent the wheel and make it square.

(Indeed, slogans loose their power through overuse - that does not make them untrue though)

[nknight]

> Consider my brand new Samsung TV set: I could not believe that program numbers are not unique! You can have two stations registered with the same program number!!!

As someone who has spent his career in DVRs and smart TV stuff, I have no idea what you're talking about. What is a "program number" in this context? Are you confusing "program" with "channel"?

[crististm]

I call a "channel" the frequency of a station; "program number" is what the TV gives me on the remote control to go to a station - the number on the screen.

In that framework, the TV has two frequencies (or channels) associated to the same "program number". I can switch between the two by entering from the remote the same "program number" twice or more times...