alt Hacker NewsIt's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
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The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
100%. Most people are not programmers. Most people do not see software as something interesting to figure out. It's just a tool for them to do their job.
To get the average office worker to want to switch, you not only have to provide a finished product that works smoothly, but also one that feels familiar. Most office workers grind through their day doing repetitive tasks in familiar software they have been using for a decade. When the top of the food chain says they are overhauling the entire software suite that people have been grown accustomed to for their entire career, the new software better have real benefits that incentivise employees to actually engage with learning it. Otherwise productivity will simply crater.
Most office workers do not care to learn new software. They just want to get on with their job. For better or for worse. But if you can demonstrate a switch will make their lives easier and the UI UX of the new software is very familiar and intuitive (and it actually works) you may be able to pull off a clean switch and keep your employees happy.
An MVP is fine but I think it's crucial that the UI UX is very similar to the software that it is replacing because it means people don't have to relearn whatever habits they have developed over the years in the old stack. I think that's what creates the most resistance to change.